There has been a serious debate raging (or just “occurring” — “raging” might be too strong) over a critique of natural law theory authored by David Bentley Hart in the March issue of First Things. Edward Feser’s replies (all conveniently linked to here) in defense of classical (as opposed to “new”) natural law theory are worth reading. Actually, Feser not only defends classical natural law theory, he also points out just how confused Hart’s critique is.
David Bourget and David J. Chalmers have a noteworthy paper forthcoming in Philosophical Studies in which they report their findings from a study they recently conducted about the “philosophical views of contemporary professional philosophers.”
I’ve been a Tigers fan all my life. I was very excited last year when we acquired Prince Fielder. The price was steep but so far I think he has produced (— we won’t talk about the World Series).
Thanks to the folks at docteurangelique.free.fr Aquinas’s opera omnia (or should I say oeuvre complète?) is now available in French. And it is all conveniently available, for free, in one place. As far as I can tell, they just finished the project last year with the translation of the Sentencia super Meteora (one of many French translations only available at the Docteur Angelique site).
According to an interesting article at The Spectator, the New Atheist movement (Dawkins, Hitchens, & Co.) is dead, or on its last legs. Taking its place is a more sophisticated and respectable atheism.
Benedetto Zorcolo’s 1965 bibliography of his fellow Dominican Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange is available online at the Internet Archive. The bibliography, which runs 72 pages, was originally published in vol. 42 of the Angelicum. I am unaware of a more up-to-date or more complete bibliography but I would be glad to hear from readers who are.
Thoughts on a recent proposal by George Weigel at Thomistica.net.
Roy Fraser Holland is often associated with the so-called “Swansea Wittgensteinians” (also known as the “Swansea School”), a group that also includes Rush Rhees and D.Z. Phillips, among others. Holland began his career as a lecturer at University College of Swansea in 1950. There is an obituary on the University of Leeds website. Holland died on March 5, so this notice is a little late.
Writing at NRO, Samuel Gregg suggests that Pope Francis, given the remarks he made to the Vatican diplomatic corps on Friday, might become an important force in the Catholic natural law revival.
Gregg believes that Francis’s words signal that “there’s going to be no let-up in the orthodox Catholic critique of what passes for Western culture these days which Benedict XVI made so central to his pontificate.”
I’ve been reading The God Delusion, in preparation for a debate later today where I take the role, against Waldstein, of a “New Atheist.”
Oh God! Those New Atheists are so much more tedious, so much less brilliant, than those Old Atheists I studied so thoroughly at university. (But, hey, it’s Friday, and I’m a Catholic; so I’ll suffer it.)
They’re fairly unscholarly too. Here’s a good example. On page 64 of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins memes a commonly made claim and attributes to Thomas Jefferson the quotation given in the title, arguing that it indicates that Jefferson was a Deist rather than a Theist:
Remarks of Jefferson’s such as ‘Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man’ are compatible with deism but also with atheism.
Well, no. The quotation comes from a letter of Jefferson to the scientist and philosopher, Joseph Priestly. I’ll quote it in context:
The barbarians really flattered themselves they should be able to bring back the times of Vandalism, when ignorance put everything into the hands of power & priestcraft. All advances in science were proscribed as innovations. They pretended to praise and encourage education, but it was to be the education of our ancestors. We were to look backwards, not forwards, for improvement; the President himself declaring, in one of his answers to addresses, that we were never to expect to go beyond them in real science. This was the real ground of all the attacks on you. Those who live by mystery & charlatanerie, fearing you would render them useless by simplifying the Christian philosophy,—the most sublime & benevolent, but most perverted system that ever shone on man,—endeavored to crush your well-earnt & well-deserved fame. But it was the Lilliputians upon Gulliver.
Now you well might wonder how Jefferson could in one breath refer to Christianity as “the most sublime & benevolent system”, and in the next call it the “most perverted” system. You would wonder that if you were unfamiliar with 18th c. English. What in the context the phrase “most perverted” means is “most frequently perverted,” that is, by those practitioners of “priesthood” who “live by mystery & charlantarie” — sentiments which are all fairly typical of 17th and 18th c. Deism.
You never would guess from that undeluded man, Dawkins, that Jefferson was referring to Christianity, in its pure form (as Jefferson saw it), as sublime and benevolent.
