Edward Feser Quotes
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These were the Sophists, and their interest was in teaching the use of argumentative skills of the sort previous philosophers had exhibited, but as a means of attaining worldly success, for instance in politics. Unfortunately, they gained a reputation for being rather cynical and unscrupulous in their argumentative standards: any old argument would do as long as it persuaded one’s listener, even if it was totally fallacious; what mattered was winning the debate, not arriving at the truth, and the line between logic and rhetoric was thus blurred.
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Compared to the way in which final causality has – in actual practice, if not in theory and rhetoric – maintained its grip on biological thinking, the Darwinian “revolution” is a trivial blip on the continued silent and unacknowledged hegemony of Aristotle.
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The skin cells on your nose might well be “potential human beings,” in the loose sense in which a rubber ball is a “potential eraser.” But a zygote is not a “potential human being” or a “potentially rational animal.” Rather, it is an actual human being and thus an actual rational animal, just one that hasn’t yet fully realized its inherent potentials. Harris and his ilk might want to ignore the importance of this distinction, but that it is a genuine distinction cannot rationally be denied.
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These books are all refreshingly clear-headed and unfashionable, free of cant and free of Kant;
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How significant is Aristotle? Well, I wouldn’t want to exaggerate, so let me put it this way: Abandoning Aristotelianism, as the founders of modern philosophy did, was the single greatest mistake ever made in the entire history of Western thought.
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Suppose you try to convince someone, even if only yourself, that change is an illusion. You work your way through each step until you or your listener is convinced. Yet that your mind entertains one premise after the other and finally reaches the conclusion is itself an instance o f the change the argument denies.
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Without God we are left with a choice of succumbing to megalomania or erotomania.
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For faith, properly understood, does not contradict reason in the least; indeed...it is nothing less than the will to keep one's mind fixed precisely on what reason has discovered to it.
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The typical analytic complaint about continental philosophy is that it is unrigorous, muddleheaded, subjectivist, inattentive to science, and written in impenetrable prose. The typical continental complaint about analytic philosophy is that it is superficial, reductionistic, anal retentive, inattentive to human concerns, and boring.
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The moral views now associated in the secularist mind with superstition and ignorance in fact follow inexorably from a consistent application of the metaphysical ideas we’ve traced back through Aquinas and the other Scholastic thinkers to Plato and Aristotle, the very greatest of the Greek founders of the Western intellectual tradition.
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For the uninitiated, “ectoplasm” is a ghostly kind of stuff that writers like Dennett are constantly accusing critics of materialism of believing in. It plays the same sort of straw-man role in his writings on the mind that Paley does in Dawkins’s writings on religion.
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Atheists tend to read only each other’s books and not the work of the religious thinkers they are supposedly refuting.
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Even those modern secularists and liberals who hate the metaphysics illustrated by Plato’s allegory of the cave thrill to the idea that the common man is in the grip of illusion and ought to be ruled by philosopher-kings, even if their idea of a philosopher-king would have filled Plato with abject horror.
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The fact is that secularists are “for” reason and science only to the extent that they don’t lead to religious conclusions; they celebrate free choice only insofar as one chooses against traditional or religiously oriented morality; and they are for democracy and toleration only to the extent that these might lead to a less religiously oriented social and political order. Again, the animus against religion is not merely a feature of the secularist mindset; it is the only feature.
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The opinion of the majority was in his view not what mattered; rather, it was the opinion of the wise, those guided by reason, that counted. When put on trial by a jury of 500 of his fellow citizens for purportedly denying the gods of the city and replacing them with new ones, and in general corrupting the youth – the real motive may have been his associations with certain anti-democratic political figures of the day – he defended himself, Plato tells us, by claiming that he was divinely called to lead others to the improvement of their souls. Naturally, this democratic assembly had him executed.