In brief the difference is: their Aristotelianism is one affirming a doctrine of realism in the theory of universals, the theory that there exist universals, such as the one humanness or human nature which all and only humans are humans are purported to have and, it is further purported, because of which all and only humans are humans the neo-Aristotelianism motivating After Aristotle is one denying that doctrine, asserting rather that such universals do not exist.
The comparison and contrast of Feser’s understanding of faith with that of Aquinas turns out to be challenging, however, and, though it will remain the next one in that series, that second post will be some time in the coming.īut the spelling out of and justification for another difference is also called for, the difference between the neo-Aristotelianism motivating After Aristotle and the Aristotelianism of Aristotle himself, of Aquinas, and Feser. As I noted in the immediately previous post, the “ Feser on Faith in The Last Superstition 1: Pure Reason and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ” of January 16, 2015, I foresee that the second post in the series I am devoting to the Edward Feser’s understanding of faith in his The Last Superstitution* will be one comparing and contrasting his understanding of faith with that of Thomas Aquinas doing so will enable me to set forth and justify a primary difference between the neo-Aristotelianism motivating After Aristotle and the traditional Aristotelianism of Thomism. For even if, per impossibile, their atheism turned out to be correct, they would not have arrived at it by rational means, shamelessly caricaturing as they do the best arguments for the other side, when they are not ignoring them altogether.1. That alone suffices to show that the arguments of Dawkins and his gang are worthless. Whatever one’s ultimate appraisal of these arguments, the New Atheist’s pretense that a religious view of the world can only ever be the result of wishful thinking rather than objective rational argumentation is thereby exposed as a falsehood, the product, if not of willful deception, at least of inexcusable ignorance of the views of the most significant religious thinkers. There is no appeal to “faith,” or to parapsychology, ghost stories, near-death experiences, or any other evidence of the sort materialists routinely dismiss as scientifically dubious. “Notice in any event that at every point in Aquinas’s account of the soul, as at every point in his arguments for God’s existence, the appeal is to what follows rationally from such Aristotelian metaphysical notions as the formal and final causes of a thing.
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