Edward Feser

As faculty, including even philosophy professors, aid and abet student bad behavior on campus, it is worth considering what the most serious thinkers of the Western tradition would have thought ...

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/04/plato-and-aristotle-on-youth-and.html

Prominent philosopher of mind, apostle of Darwinism, and New Atheist writer Daniel Dennett has died .  I have been very critical of Dennett over the years, but he had two great strengths.  Fir...

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/04/daniel-dennett-1942-2024.html

My review of Guy Mansini’s excellent new book The Development of Dogma: A Systematic Account  appears in the May 2024 issue of First Things .

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/04/mansini-on-development-of-doctrine.html

This week the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) published the Declaration Dignitas Infinita , on the topic of human dignity.  I am as weary as anyone of the circumstance that it has...

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/04/two-problems-with-dignitas-infinita.html

Liberalism is to the social order what AIDS is to the body.  By relegating the truths of natural law and divine revelation to the private sphere, it destroys the immune system of the body polit...

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/04/western-civilizations-immunodeficiency.html

This week, cartoonist Ed Piskor committed suicide in the wake of the relentless online pillorying and overnight destruction of his career that followed upon allegations of sexual misconduct, of ...

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/04/ed-piskor-1982-2024.html

My essay “The Illusion of Artificial Intelligence” appears in the latest issue of the Word on Fire Institute’s journal Evangelization & Culture.

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-illusion-of-ai.html

In a recent article at Catholic Answers titled “Hope for Judas?” Jimmy Akin tells us that though he used to find convincing the traditional view that Judas is damned, it now seems to him th...

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/03/wishful-thinking-for-judas.html

Did Spanish Scholastic thinkers influence British liberalism? You can now access my Religion and Liberty review of Projections of Spanish Jesuit Scholasticism on British Thought: New Horizons i...

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/03/jesuit-britain.html

Continuing our look at Jacques Maritain’s Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau, let’s consider some arresting passages on the conception of human nature the modern world has inherit...

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/03/mind-matter-and-malleability.html

Modern moral discourse often refers to “persons” and to “individuals” as if the notions were more or less interchangeable.  But that is not the case.  In his book Three Reformers: Luth...

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-metaphysics-of-individualism.html

Consider four groups that, one might think, couldn’t be more different: Pope Francis’s most zealous defenders; sedevacantists; Protestants; and Catholics who have recently left the Church (f...

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/03/when-do-popes-speak-ex-cathedra.html

Popes speak infallibly when they either proclaim some doctrine ex cathedra, or reiterate some doctrine that has already been taught infallibly by virtue of being a consistent teaching of the ord...

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/02/what-counts-as-magisterial-teaching.html

Dear reader, if it seems your comment has not been approved, sometimes it actually has been approved even if you don’t see it.  The reason is that once a combox reaches 200 comments, the Bl...

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/02/a-comment-on-comments.html

Avicenna, Aquinas, and Leibniz all present versions of what would today be called the argument from contingency for the existence of a divine necessary being.  Their versions are interestingly ...

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/02/avicenna-aquinas-and-leibniz-on.html

In a new article at Postliberal Order , I discuss the disturbing parallels between the woke phenomenon and the medieval Catharist or Albigensian heresy, a movement so fanatical and virulent that...

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-heresy-with-thousand-faces.html

Had a great time visiting the United States Military Academy at West Point this week for a Thomistic Institute talk on the theme “Do You Have an Immortal Soul?” Thank you TI and cadets!

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/01/immortal-souls-at-west-point.html

The reputation of 1993’s The Vanishing has suffered because critics judge it inferior to the 1988 Dutch movie of which it was a remake.  But considered on its own terms, it is a solid enough...

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/01/voluntarism-in-vanishing.html

Peter Adamson’s new book Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna): A Very Short Introduction is an excellent primer on the great medieval Islamic philosopher.  After a biographical chapter, it treats Avicenna�...

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/01/avicennas-flying-man.html

My friends, it exists. More news later.

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/01/progress-report.html

My review of the anthology Projections of Spanish Jesuit Scholasticism on British Thought: New Horizons in Politics, Law, and Rights , edited by Leopoldo Prieto López and José Luis Cendejas Bu...

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/01/jesuit-britain.html

Let’s open the New Year with an open thread.  Now’s the time at last to bring up that otherwise off-topic comment that keeps getting deleted, or anything else you like.  From Art Nouveau t...

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/01/new-years-open-thread.html

In my recent article on the controversy over Fiducia Supplicans , I noted three problems with the document’s qualified permission of blessings for “couples” of a same-sex or other “irre...

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2023/12/what-is-couple.html

By now many readers of this blog will likely have heard about Fiducia Supplicans and the worldwide controversy it has generated, which may end up being even more bitter and momentous than the m...

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-scandal-of-fiducia-supplicans.html

Some time back, Alex O’Connor and I recorded a discussion of the Aristotelian argument from motion for the existence of God, for his Within Reason podcast.  The episode is now available on Yo...

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-aristotelian-proof-on-within-reason.html