Chapter 4: Heaven and whatnot Continuing his exploration of “natural law”, Feser “reminds” us that First of all, since knowing God is our highest end, our moral duties include, first and foremost, religious duties: duties to pursue knowledge of God, to honor Him as our Creator and the giver of the moral law, to teach… Continue reading The Last Superstition: Pie in the Sky When You Die
Chapter 4: Natural law We now get to the section on “natural law” morality, which Feser begins by telling us that New Atheists and secularists hate “traditional morality”, by which he means homophobia, and insinuates that Richard Dawkins is, if not a pedophile, then at least an apologist for pedophilia. He starts by going back… Continue reading The Last Superstition: No Kinky Sex!
Chapter 4: Reference: My ass, personal communication For the most part, Feser’s opinions are private, harmless affairs: whether he thinks that all things have final causes, or only some; or whether he thinks things have “essences” “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg”, as a famous person once said. But then he uses these opinions… Continue reading The Last Superstition: Black and White Morality
Chapter 4: Minds Are Not Material In order to prove that human souls are immortal, Feser has to prove that there’s some part of a person that survives death, and the destruction of the body. If there’s a part of a human left behind when you remove the matter, that part must presumably be immaterial,… Continue reading The Last Superstition: Software Is Immaterial
Chapter 4: Scholastic Aptitude Having introduced his main themes in chapters 1-3, Feser now elaborates upon them, starting with The Soul a soul is just the form or essence of a living thing. [p. 121] And the form or essence, you’ll recall, is the whatever-it-is that makes a thing the sort of thing that it… Continue reading The Last Superstition: Animal Souls
Chapter 3: The First Cause If you thought Feser’s “Unmoved mover” argument was just mental masturbation, the sort of sophistry that gives philosophy a bad reputation and evokes the image of a tweed-wearing ivory tower professor using five-dollar words to ask meaningless questions, then you can skip his First Cause section, because it’s more of… Continue reading The Last Superstition: The First Cause
Chapter 3: The Existence of God: The Unmoved Mover First of all, “movement” in this context really means change of any kind, not necessarily motion through space. Yes, I know this is annoying and confusing. Feser introduces two kinds of causes: accidentally ordered and essentially ordered. (Here, “accidentally” doesn’t mean “by misfortune”, and “essentially” doesn’t… Continue reading The Last Superstition: The Unmoved Mover
Chapter 3: The Existence of God So when people say “God”, what sort of entity are they talking about? Many secularists seem hell-bent (if you’ll pardon the expression) on pretending that religious people in general believe in a God so anthropomorphic that only a child or the most ignorant peasant could take the question of… Continue reading The Last Superstition: Who Is This God Person, Anyway?
Chapter 3: Aquinas’s logical reasoning Eventually, Feser settles down to tell us a bit about Aquinas. In particular, his method of reasoning: What Aquinas is doing can be understood by comparison with the sort of reasoning familiar from geometry and mathematics in general. Take the Pythagorean theorem, for example. Once you understand the axiomatic method,… Continue reading The Last Superstition: Reasoning With Aquinas
Chapter 3: Getting Medieval Having laid the groundwork in Chapter 2, Feser now moves on to the star of the show, Thomas Aquinas. He opens the chapter with a story of Aquinas overlooking a woman’s achievements, and instead interrupting her with a comment about her body: he once came upon “a holy nun who used… Continue reading The Last Superstition: Let’s Meet Aquinas
