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What “the science” is saying this week (Updated)
Andrew Sullivan calls our attention to epidemiologist Tara C. Smith, who moves with that curious herd of “experts” suddenly not terribly concerned about social distancing when the protesters filling...
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Pod people
With woke fanaticssuddenly overrunning The New York Times, the public health profession, peaceful protests, and even the knitting community (!), life in these United States is starting to look a little...
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Theology and the analytic a posteriori
Philosophers traditionally distinguish between analyticand synthetic propositions. An analytic proposition is one that is true or false by virtue of the relations between its constituent concepts. A...
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Great minds on wokeness
If you want to understand woke totalitarianism, I recommend reading Plato on democracy, Aristotle and Aquinas on envy, and Nietzsche on ressentiment. Or you could just watch a few minutes of John...
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Locke’s “transubstantiation” of the self
Locke’s agnosticism about substance led him to treat the self as essentially a bundle of attributes. Given his empiricism, he takes it that the most we can say of a substance – whether material or...
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Apt pupil
Justice Neil Gorsuch was a student of John Finnis, foremost proponent of the “New Natural Law Theory” (NNLT). Is that relevant to understanding the Bostock decision? It might seem not, given that...
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Envy cancels justice
Envy is often mistaken for anger at injustice, because both can issue in hatred. But the hatred that issues from a desire for justice is righteous, whereas the hatred that issues from envy is wicked....
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ACPQ symposium on Aristotle’s Revenge
The American Catholic Philosophical Association meeting in Minneapolis last November hosted an Author Meets Critics session on my book Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and...
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The popes against the revolution
The Church has consistently condemned doctrinaire laissez-faireforms of capitalism and insisted on just wages, moderate state intervention in the economy, and the grave duty of the rich to assist the...
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The virtue of patriotism
Patriotism involves a special love for and reverence toward one’s own country. These days it is often dismissed as sentimental, unsophisticated, or even bigoted. In fact it is a moral virtue and its...
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Other minds and modern philosophy
The “problem of other minds” goes like this. I have direct access to my own thoughts and experiences, but not to yours. I can perceive only your body and behavior. So how do I know you really have...
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Review of Hart
My review of David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation appears in the latest issue of Catholic Herald. You can read it online here. (It’s behind a paywall,...
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Plato predicted woke tyranny
What we are seeing around us today may well turn out to be a transition from decadent democratic egalitarianism to tyranny, as Plato described the process in The Republic. I spell it out in a new...
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Computer campus
As you know, academic life has largely gone online this year. My own classes at Pasadena City College this fall will be entirely online.The Thomistic Institute has also adapted to the circumstances...
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The experts have no one to blame but themselves
The Week’s Damon Linker frets aboutthe state of the “American character,” citing an emergency physician’s wife he knows whose friends ignore her frantic pleas on Facebook to take COVID-19 more...
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Hart, hell, and heresy
Well, yikes, as the kids say. Hell hath no fury like David Bentley Hart with his pride hurt. At Eclectic Orthodoxy, he creates quite the rhetorical spectacle replying to my review of his book That...
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No urgency without hell
A common argument in defense of the eternity of hell is that without it, there would be no urgency to repent or to convince others to repent. Call this the “argument from urgency.” One objection to...
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Scripture and the Fathers contra universalism
A rhetorical game that universalists like to play is to suggest that in the early Church there was from the beginning a robust universalist tradition running alongside the standard teaching that some...
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A statement from David Bentley Hart
NOTE: David Bentley Hart and I have had some very heated exchanges over the years, but I have always found him to be at bottom a decent fellow. That remains true. During our recent dispute over his...
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Popes, creeds, councils, and catechisms contra universalism
One more post on the topic of universalism before we give it a rest for a while. Whatever other Christians might think, for the Catholic Church the matter is settled. That it is possible that some...
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