Edward Feser’s Aristotle’s Revenge is presented as a philosophical defence of Aristotelianism in its robust scholastic form, as exemplified by the work of Thomas Aquinas. This broadly Thomist Aristotelianism, Feser argues, far from being a block to the study of nature, provides a metaphysics that is the necessary foundation for any science of nature, from physics to psychology. The “revenge” lies in this fact, and most especially in the indispensability of Aristotelian doctrine to the very understanding of science and scientific investigation itself…
Aristotle’s Revenge defends ideas in metaphysics and philosophy of science that are very much live within contemporary philosophy, whose support goes well beyond those willing to identify themselves as supporters of scholasticism…
[The book] provides a rich and suggestive survey of a venerable and still very significant programme in the metaphysics of nature.
End quote. Pink raises the important question of how the Aristotelian conception of natural teleology or finality I defend in the book relates to goodness as a natural property. As he notes, the Scholastics saw these notions as inherently linked, and it was an aspect of their position that early modern thinkers like Hobbes attacked.
Though it is an issue I have addressed elsewhere, I avoided doing so in the book for two reasons. First, I think that at least a rudimentary kind of teleology can be defended without making reference to the notion of the good, by way of the sorts of arguments I present in the book. Indeed, I think that defense of this rudimentary notion is a prerequisite to defending the thesis that goodness is a natural property of things (rather than something that would presuppose that thesis).
Second, as Pink notes, the book is already very long as it is, and addressing the issue of goodness as a natural property would require a book of its own. (As it happens, David Oderberg has recently published such a book.)