[pcwalton]

To provide some context: It's important to keep in mind that Edward Feser is an extremely traditionalist Catholic, and neo-Aristotelian, philosopher. His writings frequently assume that the reader has a background in this niche subject area, which most users here (including me) don't. If you aren't really familiar with the contents of the Summa Theologica, you probably won't get much out of Feser's essays.

[lo_zamoyski]

> It's important to keep in mind that Edward Feser is an extremely traditionalist Catholic, and neo-Aristotelian, philosopher.

This hints of bigotry and poisoning the well. Focus on his arguments.

(Also, what does "extremely traditionalist Catholic" mean? He certainly doesn't meet that description as I understand it. He has been critical of both laxity and rigorism, for example.)

> His writings frequently assume that the reader has a background in this niche subject area

His academic background was originally in the tradition of analytical philosophy. The man was an atheist. It was only after he began teaching and rehashing tired caricatures of Aquinas's arguments that he took notice and began to find the real McCoy convincing. So, he is very familiar with what else is on offer and skillfully deals with those topics. Many of his writings, including blog posts, take these other views on their own terms, often to show where their weaknesses and errors lie.

I presume that by calling his views "niche", you mean "views held by a minority of philosophers today", or perhaps "fringe" in some pejorative, dismissive sense? Because the subject matter isn't niche at all. It's a full-blooded view of expansive scope (hello, metaphysics anyone?), and frankly, IMO, the most well-defended and defensible. .

Truth is not decided by majority vote.

> If you aren't really familiar with the contents of the Summa Theologica, you probably won't get much out of Feser's essays.

Again, not true. He writes in an eminently accessible manner. His book "The Last Superstition" is 101 material. Having some familiarity with basic Aristotelian notions can sometimes expedite understanding, perhaps, but you don't need to be a scholar to grasp much of what he writes. And often, he doesn't even make any explicit use of technical language from the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions, only arguments using common language.

Of course, I am not averse to straining to learn something new. I have heard one philosopher say that he only began to grasp metaphysics in his 50s. Anyone looking for a royal road is perhaps ill-suited for philosophy, or any serious field of study.

[lambdaphagy]

I find it odd how often people feel obliged to make these kinds of disclaimers about Catholic philosophers (one can find more downthread), as though we ought to handle their work with mental ice tongs or something.

When I first studied philosophy, I expected that there would be sober, serious, fat-free answers to philosophical questions, all of which would be clearly distinguished from mystical woo. Having studied philosophy, I now can’t help but notice:

- Philosophy doesn’t solve philosophical problems (even as judged by the very lenient criterion of whether a majority of philosophers even agree that the problem has been solved!)

- In many cases, including some very simple ones like “what is knowledge?” the closest thing to a respectable consensus view requires an appeal to counterfactuals, which are way spookier / mystical / wooey than the things they’re invoked to explain. The most worked out systematic account of counterfactuals—- by David Lewis, one of the most cited Anglophone philosophers of 20C so hardly a cherry-picked example—- is so infamously out there that his colleagues refused to believe that he actually believed it.

- The above point is quite generic: systematic commitment to essentially any philosophical position will eventually require you to bite some bullet that will make you sound completely insane. Lewis thought that all possible worlds were real, Fodor thought the mind had 50k innate concepts and no more, the Churchlands thought consciousness is an illusion. As far as I could tell, that is just the way it is.

By contrast, much of Thomistic philosophy is a lot more reasonable than might be supposed. Take his doctrine of the soul, for example.

Modern people tend to think souls are nonsense because they’re thinking, consciously or not, of a more or less Cartesian doctrine of the soul, a spooky mental substance somehow connected to the body, perhaps through the pineal gland. But for Aquinas, the soul is just the pattern of the body, the information required to arrange matter into a particular organism rather than pink mist.

So far so naturalistic, but what’s with the immortality of the soul? This is just Aquinas’s solution to the problem of universals: if human beings can have knowledge of a priori truths like math, then that can only be because a part of the soul is already there in a realm of perfect unchanging necessary truths, hence immortal.

Now you can take this argument or leave it, but I can assure you that by prevailing standards in philosophy of math it’s actually quite tame, because there are no non-spooky options in that field.

[lo_zamoyski]

There is certainly a lack of self-criticism and a lot of prejudice, to be sure, where modern philosophy and the like are concerned. The prejudice toward Thomism comes from at least three sources: 1) ignorance of what it actually claims and argues, 2) the tradition of teaching to students caricatures of what it claims and argues, 3) a prejudicial aversion to anything that is perceived to smell of incense.

Feser himself was guilty of these prejudices, some of which he describes here[0]. So he has the perspective of being on the "other side", if I may allow myself an oversimplification (he doesn't deny that there are insights to be found in other views, something consistent with the spirit of "logos spermatikoi").

As far as wacky trends in philosophy today are concerned, I will say that if you don't think eliminativism is bunk, then you probably have not understood what it claims.

W.r.t. the soul, to make things more precise for those interested, I would not say so much "pattern" as "form", which is to say the organizing cause of a thing. For example, the "sphericity" of a ball of bronze is its form or formal cause; it is that which is essential to the kind of thing it is, what makes it the kind of thing it is. Patterns are an effect of the form. Souls are just the forms of animals, and the human soul is immaterial because of the intellect's capacity for the abstraction of universals from particulars, to name one cause. Its immorality is the result of its immateriality, as mortality is corruption or destruction, i.e., change moving away from what something is by virtue of its form toward some other form, and that is change that only matter can undergo.

[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/07/road-from-atheism.h...

[Vecr]

Could an AI be programmed to use its intellect to make anything (logically possible) immortal via abstraction of universals from particulars? Either the argument proves too much, or the soul has no causal effect/only does to the extent it is a useful fiction.