Archive
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Articles
The Common Sense of John Searle
The twentieth-century philosopher Wilfrid Sellars drew an influential distinction between “the manifest image,” which is the way the world is presented to us in everyday experience and common sense,...
Boundaries of Belief
The Development of Dogma: A Systematic Account by guy mansini, o.s.b. catholic university of america, 192 pages, $29.95 The development of doctrine is a notion more frequently invoked than...
Thomists in the Wilderness
The Thomistic Response to the Nouvelle Théologie edited by jon kirwan and translated by matthew k. minerd the catholic university of america, 406 pages, $34.95 Exactly a century ago,...
Great Scot
Ordered by Love: An Introduction to John Duns Scotus by thomas m. ward angelico, 174 pages, $26 Rodney Dangerfield famously claimed to get no respect, but in fact he...
Doubting Thomas
The Failure of Natural Theology:A Critical Appraisal of the Philosophical Theology of Thomas Aquinasby Jeffrey D. JohnsonFree Grace, 247 pages, $40 H. L. Mencken famously defined Puritanism as “the...
Keep It Simple
God Over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonismby william lane craigoxford, 280 pages, $88 Mathematics appears to describe a realm of entities with quasi-divine attributes. The series...
Soul Proprietor
Are We Bodies or Souls?by richard swinburne oxford, 208 pages, $19.95 In the history of Western thought, two conceptions of the soul have competed for dominance, one associated with...
Pope Francis and Capital Punishment
In a move that should surprise no one, Pope Francis has once again appeared to contradict two millennia of clear and consistent scriptural and Catholic teaching. The Vatican has...
Taking Aquinas Seriously
Edward Feser is associate professor of philosophy at Pasadena City College, where he writes and teaches on contemporary analytic philosophy from a Thomistic perspective. He recently spoke with first...
Omnibus of Fallacies
Faith versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible by jerry a. coyne viking, 336 pages, $28.95 F aith versus Fact is some kind of achievement. Biologist Jerry Coyne...
Why Is There Anything At All? It’s Simple
I thank John Leslie and Robert Lawrence Kuhn for their gracious and substantive response to my recent comments on their fine anthology The Mystery of Existence: Why Is There...
Fifty Shades of Nothing
Nothing is all the rage of late. Physicists Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss have devoted pop science bestsellers to trying to show how quantum mechanics explains how the universe...
Kurzweil’s Phantasms
How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil Viking, 352 pages, $27.95 What goes into making a human mind? Two key elements, distinguished...
A Christian Hart, a Humean Head
In a piece in the March issue of First Things , David Bentley Hart suggests that the arguments of natural law theorists are bound to be ineffectual in the...
Conflict Resolution
Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism by Alvin Plantinga Oxford, 376 pages, $27.95 “Naturalism” is a slippery term. In one common usage, it is the methodological...
