This from the back cover:
Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (editiones scholasticae, vol. 39, Transaction Books, 2014) provides an overview of Scholastic approaches to causation, substance, essence, modality, identity, persistence, teleology, and other issues in fundamental metaphysics. The book interacts heavily with the literature on these issues in contemporary analytic metaphysics, so as to facilitate the analytic reader’s understanding of Scholastic ideas and the Scholastic reader’s understanding of contemporary analytic philosophy. The Aristotelian theory of actuality and potentiality provides the organizing theme, and the crucial dependence of Scholastic metaphysics on this theory is demonstrated. The book is written from a Thomistic point of view, but Scotist and Suarezian positions are treated as well where they diverge from the Thomistic position.
I thank Professor Feser for sending me a complimentary copy which arrived a couple of hours ago. So far, I have read the Prolegomenon (pp. 6-30) which is mainly a critique of scientism together with a rejection of the view of philosophy as mere 'conceptual analysis.'
Scientism is the doctrine that "science alone plausibly gives us objective knowledge, and that any metaphysics worthy of consideration can only be that which is implicit in science." (10) That is exactly what it is in contemporary discussions, although, for the sake of clarity, I would have added 'natural' before both occurrences of 'science.' Also worth noting is that scientism is to naturalism as epistemology to ontology: scientism is the epistemology of the ontological view according to which (concrete) reality is exhausted by the space-time manifold and its contents as understood by physics and the natural sciences built upon it such as chemistry and biology.
I won't repeat Feser's arguments, but they are pellucid and to my mind conclusive. The usual suspects, Lawrence 'Bait and Switch' Krauss and Alexander Rosenberg, come in for a well-deserved drubbing. Ed's prose in this book is characteristically muscular, but he keeps his penchant for polemic in check.
By the way, if you want to read a truly moronic article on scientism, I recommend (if that's the word) Sean Carroll, Let's Stop Using the Word "Scientism. Carroll thinks that the word is "unhelpful because it’s ill-defined, and acts as a license for lazy thinking." Nonsense. He should read Feser or indeed any competent philosopher's discussion of the topic.
Some of my take on these matters is to be found in Rosenberg's Definition of Scientism and the Problem of Defining 'Scientism.'
Some hold that philosophy, because it is not science, can only be conceptual analysis. Ed makes a forking good point when he observes that this view is a variation on Hume's Fork:
The claim that "all the objects of human reason or enquiry" [Hume] are or ought to be either matters of "conceptual analysis" matters of natural science is itself neither a conceptual truth nor a proposition for which you will find, or could find, the slightest evidence in natural science. It is a proposition as metaphysical as any a Scholastic would assert, differing from the latter only in being self-refuting." (26)
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