At The University Bookman, Ryan Shinkel reviews my book Neo-Scholastic Essays. Titling his review “Last Scholastic Standing,” Shinkel writes:
Early modern philosophers such as René Descartes and Francis Bacon rejected… the teleology of the Scholastics…
Against this degeneration stands the Thomist philosopher Edward Feser… He has taken a route in metaphysics (the study of ultimate causes) similar to that of MacIntyre in moral philosophy…
[Feser’s] method… works well in a wide range of areas including cosmological arguments for the existence of God, the hard problem of consciousness, and property rights… [The book is] recommended [as an] introduction to Feser’s larger [body of] work… [and] would particularly benefit graduate philosophy students who aspire to the older framework of Aristotle and Aquinas.
End quote. Shinkel also raises an objection to what I have to say in the book about questions of ethics. Appealing to the Aristotelian distinction between theoretical and practical reasoning, Shinkel notes that while an Aristotelian approach to ethics does indeed make use of theoretical knowledge about human nature, it also holds that practical reasoning is of a different kind than theoretical reasoning. Hence (to use Shinkel’s example), while theoretical reasoning might ask “What is justice?”, practical reasoning asks “What is the just action for this situation?” Accordingly, Shinkel says, “theoretical reasoning is necessary but not sufficient: insights from human experience also prove necessary.” However, he also suggests, “[Feser] suppos[es that] Thomist metaphysics are exclusively sufficient” for ethics, so that I do not (he thinks) provide an adequate account of the Aristotelian approach to ethics.
But Shinkel has here confused a difference in emphasiswith a difference in principle. It is true that in the articles in the book that are concerned with moral questions (about property rights and sexual morality, for example) I have a lot to say about general principles and about the relevant theoretical considerations concerning human nature, but less to say about how contingent circumstances determine how to apply the general principles to particular cases. But that is only because (a) these are essays rather than book-length treatments of their subject matters, and (b) it is the general principles and background metaphysical considerations about human nature that are the most widely misunderstood today, and thus in most immediate need of discussion and defense. I nowhere claim to be answering every question that might arise about these subjects, and I certainly never say (and never would say) that every such question can be answered by way of a priori deduction from general theoretical principles.