Clik here to view.
Mired in the roiling tar pits of lust
As I note in my essay on the perverted faculty argument, not all deliberate frustrations of a natural faculty are gravely immoral. For example, lying involves the frustration of a natural faculty and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How to be a pervert
We’ve been talking of late about “perverted faculty arguments,” which deploy the concept of perversion in a specific, technical sense. The perversion of a human faculty essentially involves both using...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Supervenience on the hands of an angry God
In his book Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, Jaegwon Kim puts forward the following characterization of the materialist supervenience thesis:I take supervenience as an ontological thesis...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Get linked
At The New York Review of Books, Thomas Nagel reviews Daniel Dennett’s new bookFrom Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.Charles Murray versus the campus brownshirts: His personal account...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Meta-bigotry
Sophistry is the attempt to persuade someone of some proposition or policy by the use of fallacious arguments. What I have called meta-sophistry involves accusing others of fallacies or of sophistry...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A low down dirty Shea
Not too long ago, Catholic writer Mark Shea and I had an exchange on the subject of capital punishment. See this post, this one, and this one for my side of the exchange and for links to Shea’s side...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Mark Shea’s misrepresentation of Catholic teaching on capital punishment
Among the outrageous calumnies that Mark Shea has flung at my co-author Joe Bessette and I is the accusation that we are “dissenters” from binding Catholic doctrine, on all fours with Catholics who...
View ArticleShea apologizes
In some recent posts, I have beenobjectingto some things Mark Shea has been saying when commenting on the forthcoming book on capital punishment I co-authored with Joe Bessette. In an email and in a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Inaugural open thread
Threadjacking is, of course, a sin, a mortal sin, a nigh unforgivable sin. And yet, dear reader, perhaps I have enabled it by neglecting to provide a venue in which all the various topics which come...
View ArticleClik here to view.
David Braine (1940 – 2017)
Philosopher David Braine has died. A very moving obituary by Alan Fimister has appeared at the Catholic Herald. Braine was a longtime contributor to the analytical Thomist movement, and the author of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Goldman on Dreher’s The Benedict Option
People have been asking me to comment on David Goldman’s review of Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option. The reason is that among Goldman’s criticisms of Dreher (some of which I agree with) are a set of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The problem of Hume’s problem of induction
In the context of discussion of Hume’s famous “problem of induction,” induction is typically characterized as reasoning from what we have observed to what we have not observed. For example, we reason...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Empirical science and the transcendentals
As James Ladyman notes in Understanding Philosophy of Science, “many scientists intuitively regard simple and unifying theories as, all other things being equal, more likely to be true than messy and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Five Proofs preview
By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed will be out from Ignatius Press next month. Later in the year, and also from Ignatius, comes my book Five Proofs of the Existence of God. Having told you, dear reader,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Caught in the web
The Dictionary of Christianity and Sciencehas just been published by Zondervan. I contributed an essay to the volume.Philosopher and AI critic Hubert Dreyfus has died. John Schwenkler on Dreyfus at...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Davies on evil suffered
In The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil, Brian Davies draws a distinction between “evil suffered” and “evil done.” Evil suffered is badness that happens to or afflicts someone or something....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Wrath and its daughters
We’ve examined lust and its daughters. Turning to another of the seven deadly sins, let’s consider wrath. Like lust, wrath is the distortion of a passion that is in itself good. Like lust, it can...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Peters on By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed
By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment, which I co-authored with political scientist Joseph Bessette, is now available. Edward Peters, Professor of Canon Law at...
View ArticleClik here to view.
When is a university not a university?
Some readers may by now have heard about what is happening at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, where the university president’s actions have put the philosophy faculty in fear for their jobs...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Catholic Herald on capital punishment
The latest issue of the Catholic Herald features an article by Dan Hitchens on Catholicism and the death penalty which discusses By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital...
View Article