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Try a damn link
An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics, James Franklin’s recent book, is reviewed at The New Criterion.Mike in/on motion: Michael Flynn is working through the Aristotelian argument from...
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The straw man that will not die
What’s more tiresome than reading yet another brain-dead atheist attack on the “Everything has a cause” straw man? Having to write up a response to yet another brain-dead atheist attack on the...
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Q.E.D.?
The Catholic Church makes some bold claims about what can be known about God via unaided reason. The First Vatican Council teaches:The same Holy mother Church holds and teaches that God, the source...
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Review of Jaworski
My review of William Jaworski’s Philosophy of Mind: A Comprehensive Introduction appears in the latest issue (Vol. 88, No. 3) of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. You can find a preview...
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DSPT Symposium
God, Reason and Reality is a new anthology edited by Anselm Ramelow. In addition to Fr. Ramelow, the contributors include Robert Sokolowski, Robert Spaemann, Thomas Joseph White, Lawrence Dewan,...
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Thomas Aquinas, Henry Adams, Steve Martin
In his conceptual travelogue Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres -- first distributed privately in 1904, then published in 1913 -- historian Henry Adams devoted a chapter to Thomas Aquinas. There are...
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Meta-comedy
While we’re on the subject of Steve Martin, consider the following passage from his memoir Born Standing Up. Martin recounts the insight that played a key role in his novel approach to doing stand-up...
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Science dorks
Suppose you’re trying to teach basic arithmetic to someone who has gotten it into his head that the whole subject is “unscientific,” on the grounds that it is non-empirical. With apologies to the...
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Della Rocca on PSR
The principle of sufficient reason (PSR), in a typical Neo-Scholastic formulation, states that “there is a sufficient reason or adequate necessary objective explanation for the being of whatever is and...
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Could a theist deny PSR?
We’ve been talking about the principle of sufficient reason (PSR). It plays a key role in some arguments for the existence of God, which naturally gives the atheist a motivation to deny it. But there...
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Nudge nudge, wink wink
Suppose you go out on a blind date and a friend asks you how it went. You pause and then answer flatly, with a slight smirk: “Well, I liked the restaurant.” There is nothing in the literal meaning of...
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Voluntarism and PSR
Aquinas holds that “will follows upon intellect” (Summa Theologiae I.19.1). He means in part that anything with an intellect has a will as well, but also that intellect is metaphysically prior to...
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Walking the web
Bishop Athanasius Schneider is interviewed about the recent Synod on the Family. On the now notorious interim report: “This document will remain for the future generations and for the historians a...
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DSPT interviews
Back from another very pleasant and profitable visit to the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley. Many thanks to my hosts and to everyone who attended the symposium. The DSPT has...
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DSPT symposium papers online (Updated)
Last week’s symposium at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley was on Fr. Anselm Ramelow’s anthology God, Reason and Reality. Some of the papers from the symposium are now...
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Augustine on the immateriality of the mind
In Book 10, Chapter 10 of On the Trinity, St. Augustine argues for the immateriality of the mind. You can find an older translation of the work online, but I’ll quote the passages I want to discuss...
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Interview with the metaphysician
Recently I was interviewed by two different websites about Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction. Both interviews have now been posted. The first interview is at Thomistica.net, where...
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Progressive dematerialization
In the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) tradition, it is the intellect, rather than sentience, that marks the divide between the corporeal and the incorporeal. Hence A-T arguments against materialist...
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Working the net
The Daily Beastnominates Aristotle for a posthumous Nobel prize. (Even Aristotle’s mistakes are interesting: Next time you see a European bison, you might not want to stand behind it. Just in...
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Causality and radioactive decay
At the Catholic blog Vox Nova, mathematics professor David Cruz-Uribe writes:I… am currently working through the metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas as part of his proofs of the existence of God… [S]ome...
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