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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... |