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Church and Culture radio interview
Last week I was interviewed by Deal Hudson for his show Church and Culture on Ave Maria Radio. The interview lasts an hour and ranges over my work in general. You can listen to it here.You can find...
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Links for Thanksgiving
What the hell happened to the Drudge Report? The Tablet investigates.The rediscovery of hell. At First Things, Cardinal Pell abandons Balthasarian wishful thinking.Never mind 2020. David Oderberg...
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Augustine on divine illumination
Plato held that the Form of the Good makes other Forms intelligible to us in a way comparable to how the sun makes physical objects visible to us. He also took our knowledge of the Forms to be...
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What was the Holy Roman Empire?
According to Aristotelian-Thomistic political philosophy, the state is a natural institution. It has as its natural end the provision of goods that are necessary for our well-being as rational social...
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District Attorney Michel Foucault
In the diabolical new disorder of things metastasizing around us, churchmen subvert doctrine rather than teaching it, and public authorities subvert law and order rather than maintaining it. To be...
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The access problem for mathematical Platonism
Mathematical Platonism takes numbers and other mathematical objects to exist in a third realm distinct from the material and mental worlds, after the fashion of the Forms of Plato’s famous theory. A...
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Year-end open thread
Let’s bring this annus horribilis to an end with an open thread. That annoyingly off-topic comment of yours I keep deleting? It’s now on-topic, so bring it. From Richard Rorty to Get Shorty, from...
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Lawlessness begets lawlessness
As someone who is on record condemning lawlessnessand sedition, I am appalled and horrified by what happened today in Washington, D.C. It is indefensible and inexcusable, and the rioters and vandals...
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The Gnostic heresy’s political successors
The Western world is the creation of the Church, and the crisis of the West is always at bottom the crisis of the Church. This is especially so where the Church has receded into the background of the...
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McGinn on the question of being
Colin McGinn is a philosopher whose work I always find interesting even when I disagree with it, which is often. His book Philosophical Provocations: 55 Short Essays is made to be dipped into when one...
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Narrative thinking and conspiracy theories
“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you” is one of the most famous lines from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. I propose a corollary: Just because they’re after you doesn’t mean...
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Koons on time and relative actuality
Rob Koons has reactivated his Analytic Thomist blog, which you must check out if you are interested in metaphysics done in a way that brings analytic philosophy and Thomism into conversation. Rob was...
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Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia on soul-body interaction
The letters exchanged between Descartes and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia – especially their 1643 exchange on the interaction problem – are among the best-known correspondences in the history of...
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What is religion?
The question is notoriously controversial. Consider a definition like the following, from Bernard Wuellner’s Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy:religion, n. 1. the sum of truths and duties binding...
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Can a Thomist reason to God a priori?
A priori knowledge, as modern philosophers use the term, is knowledge that can be gained independently of sensory experience. Knowledge of mathematical and logical truths – 2 + 2 = 4, ~ (p• ~ p), etc....
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Tales from the links
An interview with philosopher William Simpson about Aristotle and quantum mechanics, at the Wolfson College Cambridge website.Fr. John Naugle’s censored interview on the grave injustice of lockdowns....
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Smith and divine eternity
Quentin Smith, one of the most formidable of contemporary atheist philosophers, died late last year. One of the reasons he was formidable is that he actually knew what he was talking about. Most of...
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Preventive war and quarantining the healthy
A “preventive war” is a war undertaken proactively against a merely potential enemy, who has neither initiated hostilities nor shown any sign of intending imminently to do so. The Japanese attack on...
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Aquinas on video
Many readers will be familiar already with the Thomistic Institute’s outstanding Aquinas 101 series of videos, which provide brief introductions to a wide variety of topics from Aquinas’s thought. The...
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Lacordaire on the existence of God
Preaching on theological topics is a tricky business. The more substantive and rigorous a sermon, the greater the danger of its being inaccessible to the average listener. But the more accessible it...
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