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Meta-abstraction in the physical and social sciences
One of the themes of Aristotle’s Revenge is the centrality of mathematical abstraction to modern scientific method, and the ways that it both affords modern physics tremendous predictive power but...
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Tennant on Aquinas’s Second Way
Every now and then I point out examples of professional academic philosophers badly misinterpreting some traditional argument for God’s existence, or mind-body dualism, or a natural law conclusion in...
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Frege on objectivity
It can be an interesting exercise every now and then to reread something that had a profound effect on you earlier in life. In my case, Gottlob Frege’s grand 1918 essay “The Thought” is a piece that I...
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What is mathematics about?
I commend to you James Franklin’s latest article “Mathematics as a Science of Non‑abstract Reality: Aristotelian Realist Philosophies of Mathematics.” It’s a helpful brief survey of different ways...
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Aquinas and the problem of evil
My article “The Thomistic Dissolution of the Logical Problem of Evil” has just been published in the journal Religions, and is available online. (Follow the links to opt for either the HTML format or...
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Voila! An open thread! (Updated)
UPDATE 4/20: Lately the comments sections have been filling up quickly. Some readers seem unaware that after the count reaches 200 comments, you have to click the "Load more..." prompt that appears in...
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Corporate persons
A neglected insight of Scholastic political philosophy and traditional conservatism is that institutions can have a personalnature. The Church, a government, a business firm, a university, a club, and...
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Social media’s fifth circle
Marshall McLuhan’s famous remark that “the medium is the message” was never more true than in the case of Twitter. And the message is malign. I would not go so far as to claim that the platform is a...
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The idols of the mind
Thomas Harper is one of the great forgotten Neo-Scholastic writers of the nineteenth century. I discussed his wonderful little book The Immaculate Conception in a blog post many years ago. He is...
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Grisez on balancing health against other considerations
Now that millions have been vaccinated, bogeyman Donald Trump has departed, and life is starting to get back to normal, some people are getting some critical distance on the health crisis of the last...
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Intellectuals in hell
It is by virtue of our rational or intellectualpowers that we are made in God’s image and have a dignity nothing else in the material world possesses. As Aquinas writes:Augustine says (Gen. ad lit....
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The trouble with capitalism
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. (Matthew 19:24)For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own...
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Do not abandon your Mother
In Catholic theology, the Church is not to be identified with a mere aggregate of her members, not even those members who happen to hold ecclesiastical office at any particular moment. She is an...
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A reply to Dreher
Rod Dreher has responded to my recent post about him and Steve Skojec. What follows is a reply. Let me start by saying that I appreciate the good sportsmanship evident in his response. Dreher has...
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Dave’s armstronging again
Longtime readers might recall Dave Armstrong, a Catholic apologist who, to put it gently, has a tendency to stretch the truth in bizarre ways. His odd behavior has even inspired a...
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Aquinas and Hayek on abstraction
Common sense and Aristotelian philosophy alike take it that we first know particular individual things (this triangle, that dog, etc.) and only afterward arrive at abstract ideas (triangularity,...
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An exegetical principle from Fortescue
In his book The Early Papacy: To the Synod of Chalcedon in 451, Fr. Adrian Fortescue argues that the essential Catholic claims about the authority of the pope can all be found in patristic texts from...
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Five Proofs in Spanish
My book Five Proofs of the Existence of God is now available in a Spanish translation. It has for some time been available also in German.For anyone interested in other translations of my books: The...
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Indeterminacy and the comics
When I was seventeen, I wanted to be Al Williamson, the legendary science-fiction and adventure strip comic book artist. Williamson is best known for his work on titles like Weird Science and Weird...
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Curiosity damned the cat
Aquinas tells us that curiosity is a vice. Before you clutch your pearls, dear village atheist reader, know that Aquinas was notcondemning the pursuit of knowledge as such. On the contrary, he refers...
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