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Mind and Cosmos roundup
My series of posts on the critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos has gotten a fair amount of attention. Andrew Ferguson’s cover story on Nagel in The Weekly Standard, published when I was six posts...
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Geach on worshipping the right God
In his essay “On Worshipping the Right God” (available in his collection God and the Soul), Catholic philosopher Peter Geach argues that:[W]e dare not be complacent about confused and erroneous...
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Extraordinarily ordinary
There are no such things as tables, only “particles arranged tablewise.” Or so say certain contemporary metaphysicians, who in the name of science deny the existence of the ordinary objects of our...
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Cash for Cajuns
You might recall that Our Lady of Wisdom Church and Catholic Student Center in Lafayette, Louisiana kindly hosted me for a lecture back in March. The amount of good work these folks do under the...
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He refutes you thus
In the photo at left, Justice Anthony Kennedy presents his considered response to Plato’s Laws, Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles, Kant’s Lectures on Ethics, and his own Catholic faith. Asked to develop...
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Avicenna’s argument from contingency, Part II
In a previous post we looked at an outline of Avicenna’s argument from contingency for a Necessary Existent. Suppose the argument does indeed establish that much. Is there any good reason to identify...
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Maudlin on time and the fundamentality of physics
Philosopher of physics Tim Maudlin is interviewed at 3:AM Magazine. (I commented on an earlier interview with Maudlin in a previous post.) The whole thing is worth reading, but several passages call...
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NNLT in NCBQ
The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, published by the National Catholic Bioethics Center, has just put out a special issue on the theme “Critiques of the New Natural Law Theory.” You can find...
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Hart stopping
In the August/September issue of First Things, David Bentley Hart gives us what he promises is his last word on the controversy generated by his article on natural law in the March issue. I responded...
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Review of George
My review of Robert P. George’s recent book Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism appears in the August 5 issueof National Review.
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Fifty shades of nothing
Note: The following article is cross-posted over at First Things.Nothing is all the rage of late. Physicists Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss have devoted pop science bestsellers to trying to show...
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Links not to miss
I’ve been out of town for most of a week. Regular blogging will resume shortly. Until then, some reading material from around the web.At the Telegraph, historian Tim Stanley has some advice for...
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Eliminativism without truth, Part I
Suppose you hold that a good scientific explanation should make no reference to teleology, final causality, purpose, directedness-toward-an-end, or the like as an inherent and irreducible feature of...
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Eliminativism without truth, Part II
We’re looking at Alex Rosenberg’s attempt to defend eliminative materialism from the charge of incoherence in his paper “Eliminativism without Tears.” Having set out some background ideas in an...
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NOW AVAILABLE: Aristotle on Method and Metaphysics
Aristotle on Method and Metaphysics, an anthology I've edited for Palgrave Macmillan’s Philosophers in Depth series, is now available. The book is a collection of new and cutting-edge essays by...
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Eliminativism without truth, Part III
Now comes the main event. Having first set out some background ideas, and then looked at his positive arguments for eliminativism about intentionality, we turn at last to Alex Rosenberg’s attempt to...
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The director as demiurge
I’ve been reading Ian Nathan’s book Alien Vault, an agreeable account of the making of Ridley Scott’s Alien. “Making of” books and documentaries make it clear just how many hands go into putting a...
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Mad dogs and eliminativists
As an epilogue to my critique of Alex Rosenberg’s paper “Eliminativism without Tears,” let’s take a brief look at Rosenberg’s recent interview at 3:AM Magazine. The interviewer styles Rosenberg “the...
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Out on the links
I called attention recently to the special issue of the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly devoted to the theme “Critiques of the New Natural Law Theory.” The issue is now available for free...
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Hitting Bottum
By now you may have heard that Joseph Bottum, reputedly conservative Catholic and former editor of First Things, has assimilated to the hive mind. People have been asking me for a while now to write...
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