#edward feser

[eternal-echoes]

Link

[apesoformythoughts]

«An implicature is a communicative act which, by virtue of its context or manner, relays a meaning that goes beyond the literal meaning of the actual words that may be used. To take an example I’ve used before, suppose you go out on a blind date and a friend asks you how it went. You pause and then answer flatly, with a slight smirk: “Well, I liked the restaurant.” There is nothing in the literal meaning of this sentence, considered all by itself, that states or implies anything negative about the person you went out with, or indeed anything at all about the person. Still, given the context, you’ve said something insulting. You’ve “sent the message” that you liked the restaurant but not the person […]

Now, here is the context relevant to Fiducia Supplicans: The secular world hates the Church’s teaching on sexual morality perhaps more than any other of her doctrines. It constantly urges her to abandon it, many supposing that it is simply a matter of time until she does abandon it. Most churchmen rarely discuss it, and on the occasions when they do, the tendency is to give a vague and perfunctory acknowledgement following by an impassioned plea for acceptance of those who do not obey it. The current pope tends to favor and promote churchmen who deemphasize traditional teaching on the subject, and strongly to disfavor churchmen who happen to have a reputation for upholding it. He is also widely perceived as being inclined to soften Church teaching in other areas. Those who have most loudly favored the blessing of same-sex and other “irregular” couples are precisely those who reject the Church’s traditional teaching on sexual morality, whereas those who have most loudly opposed such blessings are those most keen to uphold that teaching.

Meanwhile, no one could fail to realize in advance of issuing a document like Fiducia Supplicans that the qualifications it makes would be known to few who would hear about it and understood by fewer – that, to most laymen who would learn of these qualifications, they would sound confusing and legalistic and make far less of an impression than the new policy itself.

It cannot reasonably be denied that, given all of this context, the Declaration has the implicature that the Church is now at least in part conceding the criticisms of those who reject her teaching, and that she now in some way approves of certain same-sex and other “irregular” arrangements (such as those involving fornication and invalid marriages). It cannot fail to send that message whether or not it was the message intended. And it does so regardless of all the silly wrangling over the meaning of “couple,” and whether or not one could somehow cobble together a strained reading that reconciles the new document with the 2021 document. Even if the Declaration is not strictly heretical, it is manifestly “prone to cause scandal,” “badly expressed,” and “ambiguous.”»

— Edward Feser: “The scandal of Fiducia Supplicans”

[ilghila]

"Intelligenza" Artificiale: primi passi per un approfondimento in fieri

Prendo spunto dall’ottimo articolo di Simon intitolato “Checos’èità” dedicato all’intelligenza artificiale, per tentare di avviare un vero e proprio approfondimento della materia secondo le prerogative che ci sono proprie (e quindi sono proprie del blog): con curiosità, indagare sotto uno sguardo tomista e con il pensiero al Magistero Cattolico. Per farlo ho cercato nel blog del filosofo Feser…

[eldritchanchovy]

[ID: The Nicki Minaj “So There’s This Guy” meme (which is a photo of her smiling and looking downwards) modified to say “So There’s This Wavelength Of Light”]

OH IT’S TIME TO SHOUT IN ALL CAPS ABOUT PHILOSOPHY, IS IT?

WELL

THE MARY’S ROOM THOUGHT EXPERIMENT AS A SUPPOSED ARGUMENT IN FAVOR OF DUALISM IS UTTER HORSESHIT

“OH, WE CAN’T AGREE ON HOW TO BUCKET THESE ASPECTS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE INTO NICE NEAT CATEGORIES, I GUESS THAT MEANS THE SUPERNATURAL MUST LITERALLY EXIST”

THAT’S LIKE SAYING “THE EARTH CAN’T BE PERFECTLY ROUND BECAUSE THERE ARE MOUNTAINS &C, SO WE MUST LIVE ON A FLAT EARTH ON THE BACK OF A GIANT TURTLE”

The concept of a “favorite color” is so funny

[thebardostate]

Readings in Consciousness

Here's some reading material for those interested in a deeper dive into the study of consciousness.

The Introducing series are graphic-novel treatments of serious academic topics. I recommend starting with them because they are introductory surveys you can read in the course of an afternoon. The most relevant ones here are Introducing Consciousness, Introducing Time (which is unexpectedly relevant to the philosophy of mind), Introducing Mind and Brain, and Introducing Evolutionary Psychology.

Taking things up a notch from there, there are a number of introductory treatments for the Philosophy of Mind. Edward Feser's Philosophy of Mind: A Short Introduction is quite good. Max Velman's Understanding Consciousness is another good introductory level treatment.

I would wait until later to take on detailed treatments like Searle's The Mystery of Consciousness, Chalmers' The Conscious Mind, Damasio's Descartes' Error, Nagel's Mind and Cosmos, Solms' The Hidden Spring, etc. Figure out where your interests lie before committing yourself to tomes like these.

The problem of Free Will is closely adjacent to the Philosophy of Mind. If your interests tug you this direction I recommend Kane's A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will.

Edge cases like Near-Death Experiences, Terminal Lucidity and related phenomena are important to advancing our understanding of consciousness. Two good works in this area are Greyson's After and Barušs' Death as an Altered State of Consciousness.

[shadowwingtronix]

BW's Saturday Article Link> Movie Peter Parker & Fathers

When asked if we wanted to see Spider-Man changing diapers, my answer was yes. Responsibility is (allegedly) one of the themes of Peter Parker’s life, and fatherhood holds the greatest responsibility. Writer Edward Feser wrote about how Peter in the pre-MCU Spider-Man movies paid proper tribute to good fathers and showed examples of bad fathers and father figures. It’s an article from 2014 so I…

[anticattocomunismo]

Tutti i problemi della Dignitas Infinita

È verissimo che la dichiarazione Dignitis infinita ribadisce il magistero bioetico, ma questo non significa che non ponga grossi problemi dottrinali per i motivi che Edward Feser, filosofo cattolico americano, spiega nella seguente intervista. Continue reading Tutti i problemi della Dignitas Infinita

[meltorights]

edward feser LOVES examining a few objections to an argument and then going "all the objections to this argument fail" and ignoring the big one

[christophe76460]

La vertu du patriotisme — Edward Feser – Par la foi

[korrektheiten]

Edward Feser, katholische Kritik an Rassismus und „Anti-Rassismus“

katholisches.info: Von Wolfram Schrems* Der überaus produktive philosophische Verlag Editiones scholasticae brachte im vergangenen Jahr die Übersetzung eines rezenten Traktates des bedeutenden zeitgenössischen US-Thomisten Edward Feser heraus. Auch wenn man das Wort „Rassismus“ ob seines inflationären Gebrauchs nicht mehr hören kann, ist eine Konsultation des profunden und ausgewogenen Werkes absolut lohnend. Denn Professor Feser stellt die ... http://dlvr.it/Snsy79

[eternal-echoes]

[sakrumverum]

Rassist soll sein, auch wer es nicht sein will

Der katholische Philosoph Edward Feser legt den Irrsinn der „Kritischen Rassentheorie“ offen. https://www.die-tagespost.de/kultur/literatur/rassist-soll-sein-auch-wer-es-nicht-sein-will-art-234652

[ilghila]

"Checos'èità", chatGPT e Intelligenza Artificiale

A volte mi capita di partecipare nel blog di Edward Feser [qui] in quanto vi sono spesso presentati soggetti che mi interessano. Quel che a volte è un poco sorprendente è vedervi utenti che non hanno assolutamente nessuna idea circa la nozione di forma, di atto e di potenza (o di meccanica quantistica), ma che insistono con commenti fuori luogo piuttosto imbarazzanti per i loro autori. Tra questi…

[thebardostate]

The debate over materialism has arguably never been more than tangentially concerned with how best to explain physical phenomena - the motions of the planets, the nature of chemical reactions, or even the origins of life. That is to say, straightforwardly scientific issues never seem to have been the crucial ones. Rather, the debate has, for two and a half millenia, focused primarily on three fundamental metaphysical issues: the nature of mind and its relation to the body, the ontological and epistemological status of mathematical and other apparently abstract objects, and the question of the existence of God. For materialism now genuinely to have the upper hand would require that materialist arguments have been victorious, or at least been shown to be considerably more plausible, in each of these subject domains. Has this happened? No one familiar with the recent history of philosophy can honestly think so.

Edward Feser, Philosophy of Mind: A Short Introduction

[thelionessandmedusa]

“The skin cells on your nose might well be “potential human beings,” in the loose sense in which a rubber ball is a “potential eraser.” But a zygote is not a “potential human being” or a “potentially rational animal.” Rather, it is an actual human being and thus an actual rational animal, just one that hasn’t yet fully realized its inherent potentials. Harris and his ilk might want to ignore the importance of this distinction, but that it is a genuine distinction cannot rationally be denied.”

Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

[apesoformythoughts]

«[Brian] Greene’s fallacy is like that of someone who says that, since a map is enormously useful for getting around a certain bit of terrain, predicting what you’ll see when you reach this or that part of it, etc., it follows that there is nothing more to the terrain that what is captured by the map. As Alfred Korzybski once said, “the map is not the territory.” If only more physicists were capable of seeing what a crackpot linguist could!

Anyway, whether you agree with me or with Greene, here’s the thing: The dispute is not a scientific one but a philosophical one. As I have argued at length in Aristotle’s Revenge and elsewhere, the compelling arguments are all on the anti-reductionist side. But even if we anti-reductionists were wrong about that, Greene has said nothing to show that we are. Greene thinks he has solidly established a metaphysical result by drawing it out of physics, but all he has actually done is to read a dubious and unsupported metaphysical claim into physics.» 

— Edward Feser: “The particle collection that fancied itself a physicist”