-About The Author
- Author's Blog
- Short review in St. Augustine's Press
- Short review from With Both Hands
- Radio interview with Author (James Allen Show)
-Article by Edward Feser in The American; "The New Philistinism"
"...as John Searle ( who, as we have seen, is no religious believer) has argued, every form of materialism implicitly denies the existence of the mind, whether or not it intends to (John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind , 1992). Thus, every form of materialism really entails eliminative materialism, and is thus as absurd, incoherent, and false as eliminative materialism is. We have already seen in the previous chapter the deep reason why this is so. The conception of matter that modern materialism inherited from the Mechanical Philosophy, since it strips of matter anything that might smack of Aristotelian formal and final causes, necessarily strips from it also anything like qualia and intentionality, and thus anything that could possibly count as mental. Scientific materialism "explains everything" in non-Aristotelian terms only by sweeping what doesn't fit the mechanistic model under the rug of the mind. And thus the only way to deal with the lump that remains, short of Descarte's dualism, is to throw out the rug, lump and all. Hence, to say that matter, understood in mechanistic terms, is all that exists, is implicitly but necessarily to deny that the mind exists. Conversely, to acknowledge that both matter and mind exist is implicitly but necessarily to affirm either that something like Descarte's dualism is correct, or (if one wants to avoid the paradoxes inherent in Descarte's position) that something like Aristole's view really is right after all, and that the moderns were wrong to abandon it in favor of mechanism.
And this brings us to a rich irony of historical proportions, yet one which goes almost entirely unnoticed. As I have said, most materialists would like to avoid eliminative materialism if they could. They have no problem, then, acknowledging the existence of reason, truth, beliefs, desires, or the mind and intentionality in general. At the same time, they are desperate to avoid anything that smacks of Descartes's dualism; and since, in the modern period, the mechanical conception of the natural world has unreflectively come to be taken for granted, so that Descartes's position has come to seem the only realistic alternative to materialism, these materialists tend to assume that if they can formulate and defend their position in a way that avoids dualism, they have thereby vindicated materialism. What they do not realize, however, is that many of their arguments can make sense only if interpreted in Aristotelian terms, and in particular in terms of final causes. Their arguments are ambiguous between a mechanistic reading and an Aristotelian one, and it is this ambiguity that gives them whatever plausibility they have. Yet they fail to see this ambiguity because of their general ignorance of the history of their subject, and in particular their ignorance of what thinkers in the Aristotelian tradition have actually believed. While they dutifully parrot the general line that Aristotle and his Scholastic followers were all wrong and no longer worth taking seriously, they often inadvertently appeal to concepts that can make sense only if interpreted in a broadly Aristotelian way." (236-37)
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