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Review of a new volume on Neo-Scholasticism
My review of Rajesh Heynickx and Stéphane Symons’ anthology So What's New About Scholasticism? How Neo-Thomism Helped Shape the Twentieth Centuryappears at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Links to...
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Vallicella on the truthmaker objection against presentism
Among the many ideas defended in Aristotle’s Revenge is the A-theory of time, and presentism in particular. Relativity, time travel, the experience of time, and other issues in the philosophy of time...
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Vallicella on existence-entailing relations and presentism
Bill Vallicella continues his critical response to my defense of presentism in Aristotle’s Revenge. In the first part of his critique (to which I responded in an earlier post), Bill raised the...
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Aristotelians ought to be presentists
Presentism holds that within the temporal domain, only the present exists and the past and future do not. Alex Pruss thinks that Aristotelians shouldn’t be presentists. That would be news to...
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Open the thread!
It’s your opportunity lawfully to indulge your impulse to make those off-topic comments I’m constantly having to delete. Do so in good conscience, because nothing is really off-topic in this, the...
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Review of Brague
My review of Rémi Brague’s new book Curing Mad Truths: Medieval Wisdom for the Modern Age appears at Catholic Herald. Links to other book reviews can be found at my main website.
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Some comments on the open letter
What should we think of the recent open letter accusing Pope Francis of heresy, signed by Fr. Aidan Nichols, Prof. John Rist, and other priests and academics (and for which Prof. Josef Seifert has now...
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More on presentism and truthmakers
The esteemed Bill Vallicella continues to press the truthmaker objection against presentism. I remain unimpressed by it. Can we break this impasse? Let me try by, first, proposing a diagnosis of the...
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Hayek’s Tragic Capitalism
My essay “Hayek’s Tragic Capitalism” appears in the Spring 2019 issue of the Claremont Review of Books. (It’s behind a paywall at the moment.) From the article:Nor will one find in [Hayek’s] work the...
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Popes, heresy, and papal heresy
In an interview at National Catholic Register, philosopher John Rist defends his decision to sign the open letter accusing Pope Francis of heresy (on which I commented in an earlier post). At Catholic...
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Rist slapped
LifeSite reports that Prof. John Rist, one of the signatories of the recent open letter accusing Pope Francis of heresy, has abruptly been banned from all pontifical universities – which he learned one...
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Continetti on post-liberal conservatism
At the Washington Free Beacon, Matthew Continetti proposes a taxonomy of contemporary American conservatism. Among the groups he identifies are the “post-liberals.” What he means by liberalism is not...
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A clarification on integralism
Talk of integralism is all the rage in recent weeks, given the dispute between David French and Sohrab Ahmari and Matthew Continetti’s analysis of the state of contemporary conservatism, on which I...
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Augustine on capital punishment
In his book On Augustine: The Two Cities, Alan Ryan says that Augustine’s “understanding of the purpose of punishment made the death penalty simply wrong” (p. 82). That is a bit of an overstatement....
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The bishops and capital punishment
A group of five prelates comprising Cardinal Raymond Burke, Bishop Athanasius Schneider, Cardinal Janis Pujats, Archbishop Tomash Peta, and Archbishop Jan Pawel Lenga this week issued a “Declaration of...
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Links for thinkers
David Oderberg’s article “Death, Unity, and the Brain” appears in Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics.Nicholas Maxwell at Aeoncalls for a revival natural philosophy. Gee, maybe someone ought to write a...
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Just say the damn sentence already
Suppose you are a Catholic who thinks the death penalty ought never to be applied in practice under modern circumstances. Fine. You’re within your rights. Whatever one thinks of the arguments for...
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Frege on what mathematics isn’t
Mathematics is an iceberg on which the Titanic of modern empiricism founders. It is good now and then to remind ourselves why, and Gottlob Frege’s famous critique of John Stuart Mill in The...
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Norman Geisler (1932 – 2019)
I am sorry to report that philosopher and theologian Norman Geisler has died. Geisler stood out as a Protestant who took a broadly Thomist approach to philosophy and theology, and as an evangelical...
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Speaking (what you take to be) hard truths ≠ hatred
Suppose I was driving past you and you stopped me to warn that a bridge was out up ahead and that I was risking my life by continuing in that direction. Suppose I reacted indignantly, accusing you of...
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