I just finished reading Edward Feser's The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, and while I found myself disagreeing with a good portion of it, it was still an interesting and thought-provoking read. In what follows, I want to briefly summarize my impressions of the book and discuss some of the arguments given in it.
The introduction to the book sets out Feser's agenda, and makes his philosophical (and political) opinions clear. Feser is a follower of the classical metaphysical project set out by Plato and carried forward by Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, and as a result he has quite a bit to say about modern society. As he makes clear throughout the book, his strong opinion is that abandoning Aristotelianism was the worst mistake made in the history of Western thought, and that we have been on a downward spiral ever since. He thinks that modern society is intellectually bankrupt and morally depraved, the most obvious examples of which are modern problems in philosophy and the widespread acceptance of "immoral" acts such as abortion, euthanasia, and sodomy. He clearly thinks secularism is a cultural abomination, and wants nothing less than a return to Aristotelianism and to the deeply religious and conservative lifestyle entailed by it that we had during the Middle Ages.
This is some pretty radical stuff, so one would hope Feser has some good arguments to support it. Whether or not these arguments are any good is what I will tackle in the rest of this series. In this post, I simply want to give a brief summary of the book and its overall logical structure.
Chapter 2
In this chapter, Feser gives a history lesson in ancient Greek philosophy. Starting with the pre-Socratics, he explains what the fundamental issues were for the Greek philosophers, and ultimately works his way up to Plato. He explains Plato's theory of Forms - the idea that universals like triangularity, redness, and humanness (his examples) are abstract objects existing in a third realm beyond time and space. Feser explains the difference between realism (the view that universals, numbers, and propositions are real and mind-independent), nominalism (the view that they are not real), and conceptualism (the view that they are mind-dependent), and gives 9 arguments for why realism must be true: 5 of which are direct arguments for realism, 2 of which are arguments against nominalism, and 2 of which are arguments against conceptualism.
Feser then moves on to Aristotle's metaphysics. First, he explains Aristotle's theory of actuality and potentiality. Parmenides, one of the pre-Socratics, claimed that change was impossible because something can't come from nothing. Aristotle rebutted Parmenides by saying that besides the way something actually is, there are ways it could potentially be, so that change comes from potentiality rather than nothing. Next, Feser explains Aristotle's distinction between form and matter. A blue rubber ball, for example, is a composite of matter (the rubber it is made of) and form (the form of a blue, round, bouncy object). A form, as in Plato's view, is a universal, albeit not one that exists in a "third realm" (Aristotle thought universals only existed in the objects that instantiated them).
Finally, Feser explains Aristotle's doctrine of the four causes: the material cause, formal cause, efficient cause, and final cause. The material and formal causes of an object are its matter and form, the efficient cause is that which brought it into existence, and the final cause is the goal toward which it is directed. For most objects, the final cause is completely unconscious; for example, a heart's final cause is to pump blood, even though it does not consciously seek to do so.
Chapter 3
With Aristotle's metaphysics out of the way, Feser moves on to the logical implications of these metaphysics. In Chapter 3, he focuses primarily on the existence of God, giving three arguments for why God has to exist given Aristotle's metaphysical system.
The first argument, called "The Unmoved Mover", goes (very roughly) as follows. If, for example, a stick is pushing a rock, there must be something pushing the stick as well; namely, a hand. But the hand is being pushed by the arm, and the arm is being pushed by muscles, and the muscles are being pushed by electrical impulses, and so on. Each member of the chain is actualizing the potential for change of the member after it. But that means that there must be a first member of the chain somewhere - something that can actualize a potential without itself needing to be actualized. This entails the existence of an Unmoved Mover: a being who is purely actual with no untapped potentials for change. From this, all the classical divine attributes (omniscience, omnipotence, etc.) fall out as a result.
The second argument, called "The First Cause", goes (again, very roughly) as follows. Everything in the physical universe, it seems, is only contingently existent; it may not have ever existed, or it may conceivably go out of existence at any point. This applies to everything in the universe as well as to the universe itself. Just because you know the essence of something, does not mean that that thing exists; you could know the essence of what a unicorn is, but no actual unicorns exist. So why do things exist, and what keeps them in existence from moment to moment? Something has to put essence and existence together. But then that thing's essence and existence need to be joined by something else, and so on to infinity. There must be a first member of the chain - something whose essence and existence are the same. Again, all the classical divine attributes fall out as a result.
The final argument, "The Supreme Intelligence", goes very roughly as follows. Everything in nature has a final cause, a goal toward which it is directed. The final cause of an acorn is a grown tree, for example - the goal of being a grown tree is what causes the acorn to grow into a tree. But if that tree does not yet exist in nature, how can it cause the acorn to grow? The answer is that the tree - the final cause of the acorn - must exist as a goal in someone's mind. And so it is with everything else in the universe. There must be a Supreme Intellect outside the universe that directs everything in the universe toward its final cause - and again, all the divine attributes fall out as a result.
Chapter 4
In this chapter, Feser focuses his attention on two other issues related to Aristotle's metaphysics: the soul and natural law.
According to Feser (and Aristotle and Aquinas), the soul is the form of a living thing. There are three gradations in souls. The vegetative soul, which all living things have, simply allows the organism to perform the bare minimum of what living things can do (like reproduce, metabolize, etc.). The sensitive soul, which only animals and humans have, allows the organism to have sensations and to move itself in response to these sensations. And the rational soul, which only humans have, allows us to grasp abstract concepts and reason on the basis of them.
While the vegetative and sensitive souls depend on matter for their operations, the rational soul carries out operations that cannot possibly depend on any bodily organ. In grasping abstract concepts, the intellect temporarily contains a form, which (if the intellect were a bodily organ) would turn the intellect into the object whose form it contained. So the intellect, unlike the senses, does not depend on matter, and thus the human soul can continue to operate while separated from the matter of the body. And since the intellect is immaterial, it must have had an immaterial origin - namely, God. Although Feser does not use this term in the book, this view of the soul is commonly known in the philosophy of mind as hylomorphic dualism.
The section on natural law is perhaps the most radical part of the book. Natural law, as developed by Aristotle, Aquinas, and the rest of the Scholastics, is a moral theory based on formal and final causes. Under Aristotelianism, since everything has a nature or essence (form) that is an instantiation of a universal, each object can exemplify this universal to a different degree. The better something exemplifies its universal, the "better" that thing is (objectively). And since each thing's nature or essence entails certain goals (final causes) toward which it is directed, there are certain behaviors that are objectively "good" or "bad" depending on how well they conform to that thing's nature. Since humans have intellect and will, we are morally obligated to act in accordance with our nature, hence the term "natural law".
This moral theory has extremely radical consequences, at least relative to our moral intuitions today. For example, it entails that, since the final cause of our sexual organs is procreation, any act (such as sodomy, masturbation, or contraception) that actively goes against the goal of procreation is objectively immoral, and people (such as homosexuals) who have urges to engage in these immoral acts are objectively disordered. In fact, according to natural law, humans are directed toward not just procreation, but procreation in large numbers - that is, having quite more than just a few children - and toward marriage in order to keep stable families. Since sex is intended only to happen when procreation will (likely) occur, and procreation is intended to happen within marriage so that a stable family will result, it follows that sex outside of marriage is immoral under natural law.
Natural law also entails that being irreligious is a serious moral vice. Since the intellect was created specially by God and is oriented toward knowing God, living a life in service to God and teaching your children to know and love God is morally obligatory. Hence, the kind of secular culture we have in the West these days is, under natural law, morally depraved. Again, these are very radical conclusions, and if we are to accept them, we had better make sure they are built on indestructable foundations. Feser spends the rest of the chapter discussing the definition of faith - which, in the traditional Christian tradition, has meant holding on to the deliverances of reason in spite of emotional challenges - and the problem of evil, which Feser claims is solved by the prospect of enjoying the presence of God in the afterlife.
Chapter 5
In this chapter, Feser traces the descent of the modernists. The history of modern thought traces back to John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, who argued against the mainstream Thomistic wisdom on the grounds that God should be able to act outside of what is intelligible by us, and thus rejected the essentialism and realism about universals that Thomas Aquinas and his peers accepted. The early modern philosophers, then, rejected a version of Aristotelianism that had been corrupted by Scotus and Ockham, and not the "real thing".
Additionally, Feser claims that the moderns' rejection of Aristotelianism was politically-motivated rather than motivated by actual arguments. Motivated by the this-worldliness of the Renaissance and wanting to decrease the Catholic Church's influence on everyday life, the early modern philosophers sophistically rejected Aristotelianism with bad arguments and arbitrary stipulations (such that formal and final causes were to be ignored), and the result was (according to Feser) a slow descent into intellectual and moral bankruptcy.
Feser claims that all of the "traditional" problems of philosophy (such as the mind-body problem, the problem of induction, the problem of free will, etc.) are the result of the abandonment of Aristotelianism, and that the only solution to them is a return to it. For example, since modern philosophy mathematized nature and removed things like sensory qualities, consciousness, purposes, etc. from it, it necessarily made the mind in its entirety immaterial, but without the conception of the soul as the form of the body, the interaction between mind and body necessarily became one of efficient causation rather than formal causation, resulting in the infamous interaction problem. And according to Feser, abandoning Aristotelianism destroyed the possibility of any rational foundation for morality, resulting in the anarchy and madness we (supposedly) have today.
Chapter 6
In the final chapter of the book, Feser talks about eliminative materialism - the belief that the human mind does not exist - and argues that it is the inevitable result of the abandonment of Aristotelianism. He criticizes materialist explanations for the mind in terms of "computation" or "algorithms", showing that they all implicitly presuppose the existence of Aristotelian formal and final causes. He says that, if you believe the human mind exists, you have to either accept Cartesian dualism (along with the interaction problem) or admit that Aristotle was right all along.
Feser argues that final causes are ubiquitous throughout nature, and are presupposed by science in nearly every area. In biology, researchers help themselves to teleological language all the time, and all of the attempts made to reduce teleological language to talk about efficient causation has failed. In lower-level science, certain chains of causation (such as the rock cycle) are said to have a certain significance, which can only be made sense of in terms of final causality. And at the lowest level, the laws of nature themselves are intelligible only when interpreted in terms of final causes.
Feser ends the book by saying that, even if the reader doesn't think Aristotelianism is rationally unavoidable, he or she must admit that it is at the very least just as defensible today as it ever was. He gives a few reasons why this has not been recognized; one of them is simply ignorance about what the Scholastics actually said. But the main reason, according to Feser, is that Aristotelianism entails a worldview diametrically opposed to modern secularism, and that secularists simply cannot bring themselves to entertain that worldview as a possibility.
I have (very, very briefly) summarized the main, general points in this book. This post is no substitute for reading the book itself; the arguments as I have presented them are extremely abridged and nowhere near as powerful as in the book itself. I urge readers to go read this book before reading my next post, so that you can more fully appreciate what I'll be commenting on. In my next post, I will be giving my evaluation of the arguments in the book, and what I ultimately think about the strength of the book's position.
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