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Naturalism versus Katz’s Platonism
Naturalism holds that there is nothing more to reality than the world of concrete entities causally related to one another within space and time. Since this is the realm studied by the natural...
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This month at First Things
My review of Thomas Ward’s superb new book Ordered by Love: An Introduction to John Duns Scotusappears in the current issue of First Things. I was recently interviewed by Mark Bauerlein for the First...
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How to define “wokeness”
A common talking point among the woke is the claim that “woke” is just a term of abuse that has no clear meaning. Whether many of them really believe this or are just obfuscating is not clear, but in...
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Putnam on reason, reductionism, and relativism
Naturalism holds that what is real is what can be accounted for in terms acceptable to science. More or less the orthodoxy in contemporary intellectual life, naturalism is a purportedly less crude...
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The philosophy of capital punishment
My essay “The Justice of Capital Punishment” appears in The Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Punishment, edited by Matthew C. Altman. You can view the anthology’s table of contents and other...
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McCaig and Reilly on All One in Christ
At Twitter, Bishop Scott McCaig kindly recommends my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory. He writes:A devastating critique of CRT and a clear Catholic...
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All One in Christ on Bookmark Brief
Recently I recorded interviews about my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory for the television programs EWTN Live and EWTN Bookmark. They will be aired in...
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Strawson on free will and interpersonal relationships
In his classic paper “Freedom and Resentment,” P. F. Strawson addresses the question of what difference the widespread acceptance of determinism would make to our everyday ways of dealing with each...
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Talking philosophy and natural theology
Recently, on the Thomistic Institute’s Off-Campus Conversations program, Fr. Gregory Pine and I had a discussion about Aquinas’s Five Ways, their metaphysical presuppositions, and the moral and...
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All One in Christ on EWTN Live
Recently I recorded an interview about my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory for the television program EWTN Live with Fr. Mitch Pacwa. The show airs today...
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What is a Law of Nature?
Some time back I gave a lecture at Fermilab on the topic “What is a Law of Nature?” I’ve posted the text of the lecture at my main website. You can watch the video of the lecture either at the...
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Hazony and Gottfried on wokeism and Marxism
Right-wingers often characterize wokeism as a kind of Marxism, and left-wingers routinely dismiss the characterization as a cheap smear that reflects ignorance of Marxist theory. Who is right? In his...
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The Catechism and Capital Punishment: A Reply to Annett
Some years back, in my article “Three questions for Catholic opponents of capital punishment,” I argued that Pope Francis’s statements on the death penalty cannot plausibly be read in a way that would...
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A Festschrift for Gyula Klima
My essay “Truth as a Transcendental” appears in the Festschrift Metaphysics Through Semantics: The Philosophical Recovery of the Medieval Mind: Essays in Honor of Gyula Klima, edited by Joshua P....
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Substance, teleology, and intentionality
There is an illuminating parallel between the traditional Aristotelian distinction between substances, artifacts, and aggregates, and the distinction John Searle draws between intrinsic intentionality,...
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Capital punishment and the law of nations
What is the nature of Pope Francis’s 2018 change to the Catechism’s teaching on capital punishment? Does it amount to a reversal of traditional teaching? A development of doctrine that is consistent...
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Hell and conditional prophecy
In a recent talk at the Angelicum (which can be viewed at YouTube), Fr. Simon Gaine addresses the question of whether scripture teaches that some will in fact be damned. He notes that certain...
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Reconsidering corporal punishment
Debates about crime and punishment today typically concern disagreements about the death penalty, or about the length, and in some cases the appropriateness, of prison sentences. Largely neglected is...
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The associationist mindset
When Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophers say that human beings are by nature rational animals, they don’t mean that human beings always reason logically (which, of course, is obviously not the case)....
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In defense of culture war
From Marxists on the left to former House Speaker Paul Ryan on the right, many voices in the political discussion assure us that the “culture war” is a distraction and that what matter most are...
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