Review of TLS -- Descent of the Aristotelian

This is the ninth part of my review of Dr. Edward Feser's The Last Superstition. You can find parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven , and eight at those links. I'm discussing chapter 5, which is titled Descent of the Modernists and is the longest and philosophically densest part of the book, over the next three parts.

Dr. Feser talks about the history of the modern rejection of Aristotle's formal and final causes, and describes what he sees as reasons for judging it to be inferior. From here on out the book's positions and claims get more incoherent and self-contradictory, from what I can tell. Below the fold, I'll start his notion of who started us down the path away from Aristotle, and why his claims don't match even his own presentation of the history.

Dr. Feser starts by discussing religious men like Scotus and William of Ockham, who rejected the schools of thought of Aquinas, et. al., because they made God too predictable or rational to humans, while Scotus and Ockham thought that the likes of God was so far above us that we could not reliably interpret this world to understand God's character. In Scotus and Ockham we see the beginnings of both fideism (faith alone leads to God) and Mechanism (the material universe is just a bunch of billiard balls knocking against each other, while God is an outside spectator instead of the First Cause). Ockham in particular is identified as a conceptualist. Dr. Feser takes the time to remark that he wonders if other skeptics think as highly of the creation of fideism as Christopher Hitchens does (at least, according to Dr. Feser). So, to be clear: I agree that the creation of fideism is a great advance in thinking, especially compared to the muddle-headed proofs Dr. Feser has presented in previous chapters and I have responded to in previous parts.

Dr. Feser next claims that the very process of doing science requires the acceptance of final causes, otherwise causes and effects become "loose and separate", and a match is a likely to produce a baby bunny as to strike a fire. This theme is the focus of Chapter 6, so I'll respond in more detail there. Here, I'll just note the equivocation; the final causes he says are needed for science are much weaker ontological propositions than the ones he put forth in his defense of God/the soul/natural law.

In addition to Scotus and Ockham, Dr. Feser identifies Henry VIII, Luther, and Calvin as people who were subverting Aristotelian forms before any of the moderns. In so doing, he undermines one of the central ideas of his book: secular thinkers reject Aristotelian forms entirely for religious reasons. There were clearly many people who rejected Aristotelian forms that were religious. I don't know the litany of reasons provided for the rejection of Aristotelian forms, but I do know Dr. Feser's own historical synopsis doesn't match his claim and I know he has no trouble with equivocations, so I have no confidence he is telling me the whole story or anything close to it. His position comes across as arbitrary, not rational or thought out. Meanwhile, he takes the time to snicker at how modern secular thinkers don't fuss over logic like Aristotelians do. You can't make this stuff up.

A little side note on Galileo's troubles with the church authorities: it was really his fault. After all, he had the audacity to proclaim heliocentricity as proven before it really had been; there were even errors in his calculations. Sure, some of the churchmen over-reacted a little, but Galileo should have been much more modest. This analysis by Dr. Feser does not inspire confidence in me regard the morality of Aristotelians or their ability to govern wisely, to say the least.

There is also some dialogue on how modern science has not refuted Aristotelian forms. Metaphysical notions like actuality and potentiality are still valid in science today. Aristotle’s physics have been refuted, but not his metaphysics (Can any metaphysics be refuted by science? I don't see how.). Meanwhile, the modern understanding of science offers no reason to prefer Mechanism over Aristotelian forms because (1) the use of Aristotelian forms is not aimed at the technical mastery which is the goal of the Mechanistic view, (2) just because the Mechanistic view has worked to achieve technical mastery doesn’t mean there is nothing more, (3) the Scholastics (that is, the believers in Aristotelian forms as interpreted by Aquinas) were starting to do these same things anyhow, and (4) modern science is completely compatible with Aristotelian forms. Frankly, reasons 1-3 read like sour grapes to me. I have no reason to doubt that they are true, but they seem like more like schoolyard complaints that reasoned positions. Reason 4 is also correct, from what I can tell, but doesn't seem very meaningful. We've already had one example in this series (in part 8) where two different, plausible determinations of the final cause of reproduction lead to two different conclusions about the legitimacy of homosexual marriage. If final causes are so arbitrarily chosen and lead to such conflicting results, I don't foresee much benefit to using them in science.