Hot damn! It’s been way too long, brothers and sisters, but I finally kept my promise. I’m back in the philosophy groove, following up on the last philosophy piece I wrote a while ago—Aristotle’s Curse, which was a critique of Edward Feser’s The Last Superstition. That essay had a lot of history-related analysis mixed in with it, but this one will be more focused on ‘pure’ philosophy. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t consider myself a professional philosopher, or even as good a logician as I am a historian, but I think I’ve gotten enough experience to boost me up from “complete greenhorn” to at least “improving beginner” in this field.

Suitable for an improving beginner would seem to be Edward Feser’s Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide, which I will review today. Don’t expect it to be the only book I cite, though! I’ll be talking a lot about The Last Superstition and one of Feser’s esays, “The Perverted Faculty Argument Defended,” as well. Why? Because, frankly, reasonably large chunks of Aquinas, especially near the beginning, are more or less taken right from TLS, and Feser’s essay takes from both books too. I’m not saying that to be insulting (though I will comment on it in my review), just stating a fact. And I hope it will excuse me if I re-copy a lot of direct quotes from Aristotle’s Curse. If Feser was allowed to crib from his previous work, I don’t see why I can’t either.

But, of course, I won’t only be relying solely on what I’ve already done, and there’ll be a lot of new material here too. In fact, a few other writers besides Feser will make an appearance! His friend David S. Oderberg has written a book which expands on many of his points, and many of his blog commenters have extended and refined some of his arguments. Thus, I figured it would be wise to address those as well. I want to fight the strongest opponent possible—there’d be no pleasure in victory otherwise, eh? And to be a bit more specific about what I’m fighting, I’ll concentrate primarily on metaphysics—Aristotle’s views (which were also those of Aquinas) on “essence,” potentiality and actuality, etc. Then I will attack Aquinas’s views on God (what he took to be God’s nature and characteristics), and then, lastly, “natural law” ethics (what people like Feser and his friends say is right or wrong).

On that note, I have to admit that, alas, I won’t cite as many academic sources aside from Feser and Oderberg. I’m well aware that other Thomists like Brian Davies have also written thorough defenses of “Natural Law.” However, those folks seem to write for academics and professional philosophers, and I’m still not quite up to that level yet. Since Feser generally writes for laymen and beginners, I’d be best served to focus on him, and since he’s such a fervent defender of Aquinas, I could also be assured I’d be taking on the strongest natural law arguments there are, rather than strawmen or nobodies. In Oderberg’s case, his book Real Essentialism is often used as a college text, from what I’ve heard, so I figured it would be more accessible than, say, particular philosophy papers. TL;DR: Feser (and to a lesser extent Oderberg) offers both intellectual rigor and readability, which is why I found it wise to frame this whole essay around his work.

With that introduction out of the way, let me begin.

Part 1.1: Metaphysical Meanderings: Puzzling Potencies

The first pages of Aquinas briefly describe the philosopher’s importance to philosophy and his personal background. On page two Feser claims that Aquinas’s work should be read “as a challenge to us today, and a challenge, as we shall see, not merely to our conclusions but to many of our premises too.” Suffice it to say this review will hopefully prove that challenge is not insurmountable.

According to Aquinas, at least in Feser’s account, “science is an organized body of knowledge of both the facts about some area of study and of their causes and explanations; and while this includes the field typically regarded today as paradigmatically scientific–physics, biology, and so forth–it also includes metaphysics and even theology. Furthermore, these latter sciences are as rational as the ones we are familiar with today. To be sure, a part of theology (what is generally called revealed theology) is based on what Aquinas regards as truths that have been revealed to us by God. To that extent theology is based on faith. But faith for Aquinas does not mean an irrational will to believe something for which there is no evidence. It is rather a matter of believing something on the basis of divine authority… In any case there is another part of theology (known as natural theology) that does not depend on faith but rather concerns truths about God that can be known by reason alone. It is these purely philosophical arguments of natural theology with which we should be concerned in this book, along with Aquinas’s views on metaphysics, ethics, and psychology.”[1]

A couple of thoughts on this:

For folks who might not know, metaphysics is broadly speaking, the study of what is, or the nature of reality. This seems like the sort of work science does, but there is a subtle difference. The various branches of science deal with very specific parts of reality. For instance, physics deals with the laws of nature, chemistry deals with the interactions of atoms, and biology deals with how about the laws of nature and the interactions of atoms, influence living creatures. Metaphysics, on the other hand, is much more general and deals with reality as a whole.

And while the sciences rely on empirical observation, metaphysics relies on purely logical argument. This does not necessarily mean that metaphysics is any less capable of discerning the truth then empiricism. For instance, if I tell you that my friend John is a bachelor, you immediately know that John is unmarried. You haven’t discerned this through empirical observation, such as actually meeting John and talking to him, or observing that he has no wife. You know it instead through logical inference–the definition of bachelor is an unmarried man, so by logical necessity John must be unmarried if he is a bachelor, and this seems reasonable.

For that reason, I’ll be trying to fight Aquinas, and Aristotle, and Professor Feser and his allies, on their own terms. I will attempt to describe how many of their conclusions do not follow from their premises, or are internally inconsistent, unlike how the conclusion John is unmarried necessarily follows from the premise that John is a bachelor. Don’t worry, though, when Aquinas, Feser, or other Natural Law types get something empirically wrong I’ll be sure to point it out.

With that out of the way, we return to the introduction of Aquinas. There’s little else to be said about this part, as the rest of it is just a brief outline of Aquinas’s life, for historical interest. Yet this little aside also illustrates a strength and a weakness of Feser’s book. On the one hand, the prose is lucid and clear, unlike many philosophers (including Aquinas himself, IMO), which is a hallmark of Feser’s writing in general. On the other hand, a good portion of it is taken right from The Last Superstition. Feser’s retelling of how Aquinas chased a prostitute out of his room is almost exactly the same between the two books:

Beginner’s Guide, page 3-4: “he [Aquinas] chased her away with a flaming stick pulled from the fireplace, which he used afterwards to make the sign of the cross on the wall. As the story has it, he then kneeled before the cross and prayed for the gift of perpetual chastity, which he received at the hands of two angels who girded his loins with a miraculous cord.”

The Last Superstition, page 74: “he famously chased her away with a flaming brand snatched from the fireplace and then used it to draw a cross on the wall, before which he prayed for, and received, the gift of lifelong chastity.”

As you can see, aside from the bit in the first quote about the angels, it’s essentially the same passage. I’ll admit a good deal of the biography in the Beginner’s Guide isn’t present in the briefer one from The Last Superstition; the former also mentions Aquinas’s differences with the Muslim philosopher Averroes (who believed in a collective rather than individual human intellect) and his introduction to Aristotle under Albert the Great. But other passages, such as the amusing anecdote about Aquinas teaching a levitating nun a gentle lesson and the mystical experience he had at the end of his life, are also from The Last Superstition. This pattern is repeated throughout the rest of the Beginner’s Guide; many large passages ranging from the examples used to demonstrate “Forms” and “Essences” to the discussion of the immateriality of the intellect are taken almost verbatim from TLS. Once again, I imply nothing malicious about this. There’s nothing wrong with “borrowing” from your own work as there’s no point in writing the same thing twice, after all (when it comes to other people, Feser is scrupulous about crediting them in his notes). And there’s enough original content in both to make them worth reading. But…just keep in mind that if you plan on buying both, to some extent you’ll be paying twice for about a third of both books.

When it comes to material that hasn’t been repeated, once again, A Beginner’s Guide has much to both recommend it and not. Aside from the clarity of his writing, Feser is also much more generous and much less polemic than he was in The Last Superstition. He’s even kind to his atheist arch-enemy, Richard Dawkins! Additionally, Feser concentrates almost entirely on philosophical argumentation rather than (much) social or political pontification, which means we are spared his dreadfully facile analyses of Nazism and Communism in relation to Aristotle (I describe this much more elaborately in Aristotle’s Curse).

Unfortunately, this academic maturity, dispassionate tone and more focused approach also make for fairly boring reading. I said Feser’s writing was clear and understandable, I never said it was entertaining. Unlike The Last Superstition, where jokes at Dawkins’s expense or jaunty asides kept the reader engaged, A Beginner’s Guide is much more staid, occasionally even soporific. I suppose it couldn’t be avoided, though I will say I’ve tried my best to keep this essay, at least, a bit humorous and light-hearted without being mean-spirited (I’ve had problems with that before, as I’ve admitted). But if Feser couldn’t manage it, perhaps I can’t either. We’ll see.

And that does it for the intro—on to chapter 2, metaphysics!

Feser’s overview of Aquinas’s and Aristotle’s metaphysics is important enough to his succeeding arguments that they deserve to be quoted in full—and I beg your forebearance, as I’ll be doing this a lot, as I did for The Last Superstition. Even if it makes for a much lengthier read, at least my audience will see I’m dealing with my opponent fairly, exhaustively, and without cherrypicking his arguments. So let’s turn to page 9, where Feser says:

“[T]he Greek philosopher Parmenides notoriously held that change is impossible. For a being could change only if caused to do so by something other than it. But the only thing other than being is not being, and non-being, since it is just nothing, cannot cause anything. Hence, though the senses and common sense tell us that change occurs all the time, the intellect, in Parmenides’s view, reveals to us that they are flatly mistaken…. Aristotle’s specific reply to Parmenides appealed to the distinction between act and potency. Parmenides assumed that the only possible candidate for a source of change in a being is not being or nothing, which of course is no source at all. Aristotle’s reply was that this assumption is simply false. Take any object of our experience: a red rubber ball, for example. Among its features are the way it actually is: solid, round, red, and a bouncy. These are different aspects of its being there are also the ways it is not; for example, it is not a dog, or a car, or a computer. The ball’s “dogginess” and so on, since they don’t exist, are different kinds of non-being. But in addition to these features, we can distinguish the various ways to fall potentially is: blue if you painted it, soft and gooey if you melted it, and so forth. So, being and non-being are not the only relevant factors here: there are also a thing’ potentialities…

“Here lies the key to understanding how change as possible. If the ball is to become soft and gooey, it can’t be the gooeyness itself that causes this, since it doesn’t yet exist. But that the gooeyness is non-existent is not as Parmenides assumed the end of the story, for a potential or potency for gooeyness does exist in the ball, and this, together with some external influences such as heat that actualizrs that potential… suffices to show how the change can occur…

“So far this may sound fairly straightforward, but there is more to the distinction between act and potency than meets the eye. First of all, some contemporary analytic philosophers like object that a thing as potentially almost anything, so that Aristotle’s distinction is uninteresting. For example, it might be said by such philosophers that we can conceive of a possible world where rubber balls can bounce from here to the moon, or where they move by themselves and follow people around them in the same way. But the potentialities Aristotle and Aquinas have in mind are ones rooted in a thing’s nature as it actually exists, and does not include just anything that might possibly do in some expanded sense involving our powers of conception. Hence, why a rubber ball has the potential to be melted, it does not, in the Aristotelian sense, have the potential to bounce to the moon or to follow someone around all by itself.”[2]

Since this is essentially the same explanation is on pages 53-54 of The Last Superstition, I think I’ll start off with the same retort I used last time:

“[I]f one thinks about it a little further—yes, perhaps even with some more thought experiments, even silly ones—one might find that the analytical philosophers might not be as far out as Feser implies—and that it should give moral realists a bit of pause, for reasons I’ll expound on later. The examples of potentialities the smug philosophers gave are indeed rooted in the thing’s nature—they weren’t being as silly as Feser implies. If you were to attach a strong magnet to the rubber ball, it would follow you around if you were wearing metal (and if you say that’s not a “potentiality” of the ball itself because you had to add something to it, the ball isn’t “potentially” blue either, because you have to add blue paint to it). It’s convenient for Feser to act as if a thing’s potentialities are easy to discern, but if we’re being rigorous, we find the task might be harder than we expect. I’m not denying that potentialities exist, and that objects have a limited set of them, but the fact that we can make *errors* in discerning them—for instance, denying them where they actually do exist, as I pointed out above—means they are not a perfect way of understanding the world, and that will be important later on (I think Aaron Boyden was exactly right to raise this point, think he was a little harsh on Feser as a whole).”[3]

That argument was written a couple of months ago, and while I think it’s on the right track, I no longer agree entirely with it.

I think it doesn’t go far enough.

I’ve come to the conclusion that Aristotle’s reply to Parmenides, while having some merit, ultimately takes the wrong approach. The actual reality, however difficult it may be to comprehend and however much it may seem to fly in the face of common sense, is that anything that exists can potentially be nearly anything else. That is to say, at this point I’ve come around to denying that objects have a limited set of potentialities: I now believe they have an unlimited amount, or at least so many it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to grasp them all.

A rubber ball could indeed bounce to the moon if you slammed it into the ground with sufficient force for it to break out of the pull of gravity; indeed, on Mars or Mercury this would be very easy to do. It could indeed follow someone around by itself if you attached a magnet to it, or magnetized it. It is also potentially gas as well as gooey—if applying a certain degree of heat turns it to goo, applying even more would turn it to vapor entirely. It is potentially a weapon, if I throw it at someone hard enough to hurt them; it is potentially a murder weapon, if I stuff it down someone’s throat and suffocate them. It is potentially at least a figurine of a dog, if a skilled craftsman takes a knife to it and makes a little rubber sculpture of a doggie out of it. The list goes on—most things have so many potentialities that trying to categorize them based on potentials, or gauge which potentials belong to which actual objects, seems to me a futile and unhelpful endeavor.

Feser mentions in The Last Superstition an even more specific sense of potentiality “in the sense of a capacity that an entity already has within it by virtue of its nature or essence, as a rubber ball qua rubber ball has the potential to roll down a hill even when it is locked in a cabinet somewhere.”[4] But this does not strike me as a particularly impressive refinement. A rubber ball just as a rubber ball, without being heated or attached to magnets or anything, and just being locked inside a cabinet, still has the “potential” to be a murder weapon without any changes made to it whatsoever, simply because if someone took it out and stuffed it down someone else’s throat it would suffocate them the same way it would if taken out and rolled down a hill. It is “potentially” a means of communication, if you bounce it on the floor so that the person below you hears thumps in Morse code. And so on. Even in the most limited sense of potentiality, there sure are plenty of ways most objects could “potentially” be.

So, if I’m not happy with Aristotle’s response, do I have a better one? I’d say I do. I’ll admit I haven’t read what Parmenides actually said, so I can only go off of Feser’s summary of it, which I hope is accurate. Assuming Feser was being scrupulous and honest, though, my approach would be this:

Parmenides had framed his query the wrong way. Yes, “Being” as a whole—that is to say, the category consisting of everything that exists—can’t change on account of non-being. But if Parmenides was grouping all of reality into just those two categories, it seems to me the categories he chose to focus on were particularly unhelpful. Within the large category of “Being” there naturally exist very many sub-categories: Namely, of course, individual beings, or individual things that exist, such as trees, people, forces of nature, and so. And those can clearly affect each other with no contradiction or issue. Or, to use a couple of pictures:

And this might be how Aristotle would respond:

(I know we haven’t gotten to Aristotle’s God yet, but we will in a second).

But this would be my argument:

Perhaps you can criticize the schematic I’ve given above—which, by the way, would be my own metaphysical (metaphysics is the study of being) and ontological (ontology is the study of how to categorize things/being/what is) theory—but at the very least, I’ve provided an alternative to Aristotle’s. It doesn’t strike me as immediately incoherent or self-contradictory, which should provide me a bit of cover as I continue to critique “Natural Law” metaphysics, based largely as they are on Aristotle’s actuality/potentiality distinction.

Feser goes on to say “though a thing’s potencies are the key to understanding how it is possible for it to change, they are merely a necessary and not a sufficient condition for the actual occurrence of change. An additional, external factor is also required. Potential gooeyness (for example), precisely because it is merely potential, cannot actualize itself; only something else that is already actual (like heat) could do the job. Consider also that if a mere potency could make itself actual, there would be no way to explain why it does so at one time rather than another. The ball melts and becomes gooey when you heat it. Why did this potential gooeyness become actual at precisely that point? The obvious answer is that the heat was needed to actualize it. If the potency for gooeyness could have actualized itself, it would have happened already, since the potential was there already. So, as Aquinas says, ‘potency does not raise itself to act; it must be raised to act by something that is in act’ (SCG I.16.3). This is the foundation of the famous Aristotelian-Thomistic principle that ‘whatever is moved is moved by another.’”[5]

This is the “Principle of Causality,” which lead Feser and Aquinas, along with their predecessors, the Classical Theists of Greece such as Aristotle, to postulate the existence of a single monotheistic God (though Aristotle obviously wasn’t Christian). It is a very important principle, and we’ll return to this in much more depth later, I assure you, but a brief preview of their argument: Every potential needs to be actualized by something else that is already actual. For a solid ball to actualize its potential of gooeyness (that is to say, move from being hypothetically gooey to gooey in reality) it needs actual heat, that is to say, a fire that exists in reality.

But this chain of causation goes backwards a very long time. The actual fire (you use to heat the ball) itself had to be actualized by either another fire or something that’s not on fire but has the power to create fire, like a lighter, and that lighter had to be actualized (created) by someone else, like a worker in a factory who turns potential lighters into actual ones, and that worker had to have been actualized by his creators (his parents, who turned him from a potential worker into an actual one by conceiving, birthing, and raising him), who in turn had to be actualized by their parents, and their parents before them, all the way back to the primordial ooze, which had to be actualized into life via a lightning bolt (I guess, I dunno), which had to be actualized by primordial Earth’s atmosphere, which had to be actualized by atoms of rock, air, etc. forming a planet, and that was actualized by the laws of physics (or the universe itself), which were actualized by…well, God. At least as Aquinas/Aristotle would have it—even if they didn’t know about evolution, Feser thinks they’d say exactly this if they did. God necessarily exists because something of “pure act” (again, we’ll get to this in section 2.1) must be around to start the chain of actualization, which was already very long, judging by the beginning of this paragraph, from otherwise just going back eternally.

I don’t think I buy this, both because, as my picture above demonstrates, actuality/potentiality is not the only way to explain change, and also because I’m not sure the Principle of Causality would hold for all things besides God. But we’ll get back to that in Part 2 of this essay. For now, let’s move on to the next important part of this metaphysical framework: The definition of Forms, substance and accidents, and a funny word called hylemorphism.

According to Feser, what Aristotle and Aquinas meant by hylemorphism was that

“the ordinary objects of our experience are composites of form and matter. For instance, the rubber ball of our example is composed of a certain kind of matter, namely rubber, and a certain kind of form, namely the form of a red round bumps the object the matter by itself isn’t the ball, for the rubber could take on the form of a doorstop, and a razor, or any number of other things. The form by itself isn’t the ball either, or you can’t bounce redness, roundness, or even bounciness down the hallway, those being mere abstractions. It is only the form and matter together that constitute the ball. Anything compounded of form and matter is also compounded of act and potency, but there are compounds of act and potency that have no matter namely angels, as we shall see later on… being compounds, a form of matter is the specific way in which the things of our everyday experience are capable of undergoing change.

“Sometimes this change concerns some non-essential feature, as when a red ball is painted blue but remains a ball nonetheless. Sometimes it involves something essential, as when the ball is melted into a puddle of goo and thus no longer counts as a ball at all. Aquinas refers to the former sort of change as a change in accidents, and to the latter as a change in substance, and corresponding to each is a distinct kind of form: “What makes something exist substantially is called substantial form, and what makes something exist accidentally is called accidental form” (DPN 1.3). For a ball merely to change its color is for its matter to lose one accidental form and take on another, while retaining the substantial form of a ball and thus remaining the same substance, namely a ball. For a ball to be melted into goo is for its matter to lose one substantial form and take on another, thus becoming a different kind of substance altogether, namely a puddle of goo. Now the goo itself might be broken down into more basic chemical components. But what that would involve is the matter underlying the goo taking on yet different substantial forms. To be sure, Aquinas tells us that “what is in potency to exist substantially is called prime matter” (DPN 1.2), or in other words that we can distinguish between matter having no form whatsoever (“prime matter”) and the various substantial forms that it has the potential to take on. But this distinction is for him a purely conceptual one. In reality, however matter may be transformed, it will always have some substantial form or other, and thus count as a substance of some kind or other; strictly speaking, “since all cognition and every definition are through form, it follows that prime matter can be known or defined, not of itself, but through the composite” (DPN 2.14). The notion of prime matter is just the notion of something in pure potentiality with respect to having any kind of form, and thus with respect to being any kind of thing at all. And as noted above, what is purely potential has no actuality at all, and thus does not exist at all.”[6]

Some of you might still be a little confused at this point, as Feser hasn’t clearly defined form or its related concept, essence yet. He’ll do so in a dozen pages, after describing efficient and final causes. If you wish he’d done that sooner, I do sympathize with your feelings. That’s actually another critique I have of Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide, namely that it seems to be somewhat strangely organized. If I were Feser, I’d have defined form and matter, as well as provided the historical background of these concepts (Plato first came up with the idea of “Forms”) before discussing hylemorphism. In fact, The Last Superstition analyzes Aristotle’s theories of forms and its historical context in much greater detail, describing how he differed not just from Plato and Parmenides but also Heraclitus and other Greek thinkers as well. That context is more or less absent from The Beginner’s Guide, though to Feser’s credit he addresses contemporary work on metaphysics (like Gyuma Klima and Saul Kripke, among others) in a more elaborate manner than in TLS. Still, I’d say the historical background TLS provides make its ideas more accessible for beginners, ironically enough, and it’s an approach I wish Feser had taken in his later work. Also, there are several philosophical terms, such as species and genus, which are used differently in philosophy than they are in biology. For total beginners, small explanations of those would have been useful.

Equally useful for beginners, IMO, would have been an explanation of realism and its advantages compared to competing theories of knowledge, such as nominalism and conceptualism. That specific term doesn’t come up in A Beginner’s Guide, but it’s very important in understanding why Aristotle and Aquinas’s ideas have (in Feser’s view) any convincing force as either metaphysics or ethics. And once again, TLS contains such a section. I’d say it’s even more of a shame those parts didn’t make it into the Beginner’s Guide, since Feser’s defense of Aquinas would be more convincing if he showed how “realism’ paved the way for the old Saint to solve contemporary problems. Feser does address how things like final causality can help and are even necessary for modern science, which is muchly appreciated, but he doesn’t do the same for philosophical realism, which is a tad disappointing. Fortunately for all of you, I’ll quote TLS extensively in the next section, along with David Oderberg’s Real Essentialism, which, as you can imagine, explores essences in even greater depth than Feser does. So, without further ado…

Part 1.2: Metaphysical Meanderings: Eliminating Essences (Again):

According to Feser, “[t]he essence of a thing is just that which makes it the sort of thing it is, [As Aquinas said,] ‘that through which something is a certain kind of being’ (DEE 1). It is also that through which a thing is intelligible or capable of being grasped intellectually. Hence to grasp humanity is to grasp that the essence of human beings – that which makes them human – and thus to understand what a human being is; to grasp triangularity is to grasp the essence of triangles – that which makes them triangles – and thus to understand what a triangle is; and so forth. A thing’s essence is also called its nature, quiddity, or form (though as we shall see, form sometimes has a narrow sense in which it refers to only a part of a thing’s Essence). The doctrine that (at least some) things have real (as opposed to merely conventional) essences is called essentialism. It is part of the essence of a triangle that have three straight sides, but not part of the essence that it be drawn with blue, red, or any other particular color of ink. That is why a triangle remains a triangle whatever color it is, but cannot continue to exist if it loses one of its sides.”[7]

A succinct and eminently comprehensible summary—Feser at his best, I’d say. Indeed, this is one instance where he surpasses The Last Superstition. Here he makes clear something I was confused about when I first read the earlier work. I wasn’t sure what the difference was, exactly, between Forms and Essences, but thankfully I now have the answer: Forms are pretty much how we define purely abstract concepts like triangles or mathematical theorems or other things like that, or what the physical shape of a given thing might be. Essences are broader and incorporate more characteristics besides the physical, like behavioral (in the case of living things), though I notice the two terms are still often used more or less interchangeably in Feser’s work.

But I think I have some questions about it, and I suspect a few of you, dear readers, feel the same. Why should we assume anything has a real (as opposed to conventional) essence? Is Feser certain that triangles “really” have three sides, or is it merely one of our conventions?

He apparently is. In The Last Superstition, he writes, “[t]he view that universals, numbers, and/or propositions exist objectively, apart from the human mind and distinct from any material or physical features of the world, is called realism…let us briefly consider some of the reasons why realism, in some for or other, has seemed inescapable even to thinkers viscerally inclined to reject it; and why the escapes attempted by other philosophers- namely nominalism [there are no universals, numbers, or propositions, only general words we apply to many things, i.e there’s no such thing as “redness” but many similar things we call red], and conceptualism [which states that things like ‘redness’ are real but exist only in the human mind] have seemed ultimately indefensible.”[8]

To save a bit of time, let me very briefly summarize a few advantages of realism Feser gives on the next pages: Individual triangles and red things could pass out of existence entirely, but could exist again afterwards, indicating triangularity and redness exist outside of human minds, mathematic truths like 2+2 = 4 are necessarily true and would continue to be true even if the universe were entirely destroyed, nominalists can’t claim a red thing resembles another red thing without appealing to a universal “redness” that exists outside of either thing and thus exists objectively outside of human minds, and when two people think of the color red, or a dog, they’re thinking of the same concept (even if not necessarily the same specific shade of red or type of dog), indicating again that concepts exist objectively outside of individual human minds.[9] That’s not all of them, but it is most, and should give you a decent idea of why Feser thinks metaphysical realism is unavoidable.

To me—with the expectation and hope that those smarter than I would disagree—there’s little to contest here. It does seem there is an objective reality outside our minds, otherwise we would all act as if everyone and everything we saw and interacted with was just a figment of our imaginations. That doesn’t mean essentialism is necessarily true—another reviewer has pointed out there are alternatives to it, such as trope theory, which Feser doesn’t address in TLS.[10] But I can’t deny, or at least don’t yet have the philosophical chops to deny, realism entirely.

Even so, I think Aristotle—and therefore, Aquinas, Feser, and “natural law” theorists in general—took and continue to take this idea too far. It’s one thing to say that mathematic axioms, universal concepts like colors, and scientific truths (like water having the chemical composition of H2O and freezing and boiling at specific temperature/pressure combinations) have objective reality. It’s quite another to say, as Aristotle, Aquinas, and Feser all did and do, that pretty much everything has an essence—human beings, squirrels, and even abstract concepts like justice, virtue, and love. Aristotle might have believed essences could not be considered entirely apart from the things which exemplified them, and did not believe (as Plato did) that they existed in some mystical “third realm,”[11] but he did think the essences of most things in our experience were discovered rather than invented, and matters of objective fact rather than convenience or convention. And it seems to me this theory runs into some severe practical problems.

Epistemology—that is to say, the study of how we acquire knowledge—ought to give Aristotelians more than a bit of pause. It’s easy to see how we come to grasp mathematical truths, and as a result, easy to see why mathematical truths are more or less indisputable. We can prove, through logic, and without any doubt, that the essence of a right triangle is to have 3 straight sides, one 90 degree angle, and that the square of its longest side equals the sum of the squares of its other sides (the Pythagorean Theorem). That is, in Feser’s words, what makes a right triangle a right triangle, what defines it and differentiates it from, say, squares or isosceles triangles. But how, precisely, can we discern the “essence” of squirrels, dogs, humans, or other living things? There is no mathematic or logical equation which objectively states a squirrel or dog is specifically something or another, which would seem to indicate those things don’t have essences the way geometric shapes do.

It’s equally difficult to separate “essential” or “substantial” qualities from “accidental” ones, which Feser mentioned earlier—“For a ball nearly to change its color is for its matter to lose one accidental form and take out another, while retaining the substantial form of a ball and those remaining the same substance, namely a ball. For a ball to be melted into goo as for its matter to lose one substantial form and take on another, just becoming a different kind of substance altogether, mainly a puddle of goo.” Doesn’t a thing’s “substantial” qualities depend on your frame of reference? For instance, if you think of a red ball as a spherical red object instead, its shape would be its accidental property, not its color—melting it would turn it into a gooey red object rather than a spherical one. But if you painted it blue, it would be a substantial change from red thing to a differently colored thing. This is even more confusing when you think of animals, as I mention at length in Aristotle’s Curse:

“Aristotelianism runs into severe epistemological problems (how we know what we know). Essences (and by the same reasoning, Final Causes) are too difficult to discern to be of much use in moral reasoning, which means it runs into as many problems as consequentialism and utilitarianism do. Particularly difficult is separating accidental properties from essential ones (As an aside, I’m indebted to Aaron Boyden for much of this).

It seems to me that it’s easy enough to discern the forms of some things, along with their accidental and essential characteristics—triangles, for instance, axiomatically need three sides, while their color is irrelevant—but the business is much, much harder when it comes to living things. Once again, let us come to the squirrel. Feser tells us “a squirrel who likes to scamper up trees and gather nuts for the winter” is a more perfect instantiation of the Form of Squirrel than one who doesn’t. So it seems he considers the Form to refer to both physical attributes (two eyes, grey fur, bushy tail, mammal) and behavioral attributes (living in trees, eating nuts, burying acorns).

But how does he know this? Why should this be the case?

Feser would almost certainly admit that it’s possible to be wrong about what the Form of something is. If I were to say, “No, Dr. Feser, the Form of the Squirrel is to eat toothpaste or live on freeways, and a squirrel that does is a Good Squirrel!” or “Triangles *must* be black, any that aren’t are Bad Triangles!” he would obviously tell me I was incorrect.

But on what basis? It’s never made particularly clear in *The Last Superstition.* Again, it’s easy enough for triangles, nothing in their axiomatic definition says anything about color. But squirrels? It may be easy enough to determine their essential physical attributes by looking at them, but how’d Feser figure out their essential behavioral attributes? And how did he decide those attributes were essential rather than accidental?

Feser might say these are silly questions, but not so fast—we need to consider these epistemological issues because they seem to highlight some conceptual problems with Aristotelian morality. Plato tells us (according to Feser), a thing’s Form or Essence “defines it and distinguishes it” from everything else. They “are the standards by reference to which particular things in the world of our experience count as being the kinds of things they are.”But if these “standards” define a creature, who “defines” these standards? Why should we listen to Feser when he tells us eating nuts is part of what defines a squirrel (i.e its Form/Essence)? The dictionary certainly doesn’t agree:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/squirrel

It says a squirrel is “a small animal with a long tail and soft fur that lives in trees.” You’ll notice it says nothing about diet (or even number of legs, etc. but let’s leave that for now). Going by that definition—those “objective standards,” which supposedly thus determine the “Form of Squirrel” and therefore what is “Objectively Good or Bad” for it—its diet is an accidental, not essential characteristic. A squirrel that ate toothpaste would Instantiate the Form of Squirrel just as well as one that ate nuts as long as it had a long bushy tail, fur, and lived in trees, for the same reason a green triangle instantiates the Form of Triangle as well as a black one.

Again, Professor Feser might say I’m still being silly. “Of course we know that eating nuts rather than toothpaste is an Essential Characteristic, not an accidental one!” And once again, I would ask how. I have support from the dictionary, and where else are we supposed to go for definitions but a dictionary? Is it a question of logic? I would be very interested to see him axiomatically demonstrate though pure logic and/or mathematics that eating nuts is an essential, defining characteristic of a squirrel, in the same way that the Pythagorean Theorem can be demonstrated through a logical syllogism or geometric proof. This, by the way, should be casting a few more aspersions on Aristotelianism right now—it seems to rely on taking a methodology useful in some fields (formal logic, geometry, mathematics) and inserting them in very different ones (biology, human affairs); a sort of category error, if you will.

But in any case, perhaps Feser would say, “stop being obtuse! Sure, sure, we can’t determine what a biological creature’s form is through formal logic, but we have Empirical Observation and Common Sense!”

Well, the problem is, Feser’s own reasoning doesn’t make it clear that he or Aristotle or Aquinas would accept defining Forms based on empirical observation. Sure, I’ll admit Feser’s probably not wrong in his assessment of Mr. Squirrel. Our ‘empirical observations’ of squirrels everywhere are probably on point, the critters generally don’t eat toothpaste. But should that matter? If triangles were more often one color in our observed experience, would that mean color is an “essential” characteristic of triangularity? Feser could also argue that toothpaste is poisonous to squirrels, as can be demonstrated by digestive biology. But in that case, he would be deriving its form (an acorn rather than toothpaste-eating creature) from what was good (healthy) for it, rather than the other way around, as he says we should.

Second, both common sense and empirical observation can be and often are pretty badly wrong. ‘Common sense’ once told us that the sun orbited the earth, but as we all know that’s not true. ‘Empirical observation’ once told us the orbits of the planets were circular rather than elliptical, but that changed with Kepler. And even if our empirical observations aren’t outrightly false (again, though they often are), they can often be incomplete too. The squirrel proves this once again—Feser’s description of its Form, even if we were to accept it as broadly true, is actually not 100% true or complete either. As it happens, it’s not enough to say squirrels “bury acorns.” The interesting truth is, they only bury certain species of acorn, and are much more likely to eat other kinds immediately:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/11/981126102802.htm

So Feser’s summation of the Squirrel’s Form is incorrect, or at least incomplete—and I’m very certain he didn’t know this until now. It’s not entirely correct to say the Form of a Squirrel is to live in trees and bury acorns, or that its Final Cause is to just bury acorns, it’s to “live in trees, eat white acorns (specifically) more often, and bury red ones (specifically) more often.”

I know what you’re saying. “Nitpicking about squirrels and acorns? That doesn’t actually refute Aristotelianism, does it?” Maybe not, but it should raise some pretty significant doubts about the system. At the very least, I have proven it is possible to be wrong about Essences and Final Causes when you have to rely on means other than formal or mathematical logic to discern them. And if Feser was wrong, *even slightly,* about squirrels and acorns, if his assessment of their Form and/or Final Cause was even slightly incorrect, what else might he (and by extension, Aristotle and Aquinas) be wrong about? Again, this is not just snide nitpicking. It’s merely funny if someone’s wrong about, or has misperceived, the true Form/Essence or Final Causes of a squirrel, but things can get very serious if we misinterpret, say, the Form of Human Beings or the Final Cause of our sexual faculties, even if we only get them slightly wrong, as that would have huge consequences for what we consider to be moral and how we organize society.”[12]

The above passage refers more to ethics, which I’ll address in more depth later, but it should suffice to demonstrate the epistemological problems with essentialism. Even more troubling is the fact that living organisms change over time, in accordance with the reality of evolution. Dogs, for instance, started out as wolves, but over the course of thousands of years, they separated themselves from their “parent” species to become something different. When, specifically, did this happen? To quote Aristotle’s Curse again:

“I’m sure Feser would agree that part of the Form or Essence of a wolf is to prey on animals like sheep, while the Form or Essence of a good shepherd’s dog is to protect sheep and other farm animals. Yet the sheepdog evolved from the wolf, and the way humans domesticated it (well, dogs in general) was by selecting wolves with un-wolflike qualities (that is to say, “bad” ones from an Aristotelian perspective) and breeding them for those qualities over time. So at what generation did these creatures stop being “bad” wolves, imperfectly instantiating the Form of the Wolf, and become “good” sheepdogs, perfectly instantiating the Form of the Sheepdog? Indeed, an Aristotelian might argue it was somehow unethical to domesticate dogs because we humans were selecting “imperfect” specimens to breed. Of course, most sensible people, concerned with actual consequences rather than conformity to abstract notions of Forms or Essences, would simply point out that dogs, regardless of how much they may be “imperfect wolves” have proven themselves very useful, and there’s no point caring about when, exactly, Fido became a “fairly perfect dog” rather than a ‘very imperfect wolf.’”[13]

I’d say those are some meaningful objections, but apparently, there’s one essentialist who anticipated them. Not Feser himself, but Dr. David Oderberg, responds to some of these critiques in Real Essentialism. Let me address them now, so my dismantling of ‘Natural Law’ is as comprehensive as possible (or at least as much as my time, interest, and expertise allow). Oderberg states,

“It might be thought that there is some sort of circularity lurking within the epistemology of essence that I have outlined. I have said that everything has an essence. This implies that all we need to do in order to know whether we are confronted with an essence (though we might not know what that essence is) is to identify something. But then how do we identify a thing without first knowing that it has an essence? Aren’t we caught in a circle?

The charge is specious. This can be seen most strikingly in the case of mathematics, where things have essences and we know they do. The first person to identify the essence of a circle presumably had identified circles before he did so, and was able to distinguish them from squares and triangles. This is of course more striking in the case of complex geometrical shapes, where identifying them prior to identifying their essence is quite plausible. Once the point is established in such cases, it is made in principle for the knowability of essence.

The sceptic might reply that there are important differences between mathematical and material objects, and she would be right to do so. None of the differences, however, supports the sceptic’s case. The most significant disanalogy seems to be that mathematical objects are typically identified by part of their essence, and then the rest of their essence is analysed and explicated. In the standard case, when a mathematician identifies a kind of geometrical figure, or a function, or an arithmetical operation, he thereby identifies something that belongs to its essence – having three sides, being discontinuous, being transitive, and so on. Often, however, when material objects are identified this is done by fixing on some accidental quality – being of a certain size, or colour, or shape, none of which might be essential to what is identified.

Note first, however, that, if genuine, the disanalogy only involves standard cases of identification at most. For some mathematical objects might be, and presumably have been, identified by wholly accidental qualities that the object might lack without ceasing to be what it is essentially. No one knows who identified the first triangles, but it is not wholly implausible that this person came across, or perhaps imagined or constructed, triangles that were isosceles, right-angled, or scalene before realizing (and eventually demonstrating) that none of these qualities was essential to triangles qua triangles (even if they are essential to the three species of triangles, which is another matter). It is not important whether this is how anyone actually came to know about triangles; that it could have happened that way is all that matters.”[14]

It seems to me there are a few flaws in Oderberg’s reasoning here. First, he seems to gloss over how we actually extrapolate the essences of mathematical concepts (circles, triangles, etc.) from their physical instantiations. The way we do so—our methodology—is quite different when we look at non-mathematical things such as animals.

Let us go back to his example of the first Egyptian or Babylonian or caveman or whoever who discovered the first triangle. There may have been an element of empirical observation in our brave proto-geometrist’s case, but we can very safely assume it was quite minimal. It is not particularly likely that the triangle discoverer proclaimed that the essence of triangles was to have 3 sides after examining hundreds of triangular things like leaves or arrowheads or whatnot. It is more likely that he picked up a couple arrowheads and said, “Hmm, there’s something that these pointy things, despite being made of iron or bronze and being different sizes, have in common. They’re all closed, have three straight sides, and their angles add up to 180 degrees (even if not perfectly so). Therefore, I can logically deduce, with 100% confidence, that there’s a geometric concept called “triangularity” that I can apply to all other pointy things with three straight sides.”

The bolded part is very important. It doesn’t matter whether or not the First Geometer saw one arrow or a hundred of them. His conclusions logically followed deductively from his observations and held for literally everything else in the universe, regardless of whether or not he was aware of them.

Unfortunately for Dr. Oderberg, we cannot do the same for animals, among other things. If the first caveman who discovered, say, Feser’s squirrels was to come across a three-legged one (it was wounded or defective), or even a bunch of three-legged ones, he could not conclude with 100% certainty that squirrels in general have three legs. Even if his observation was correct, if he noticed that his squirrel or bunch of squirrels had four legs or were furry, he wouldn’t be able to generalize that observation to squirrels in general, much less everything in the universe. In short, our proto-biologist’s methodology would be inductive, in that his observations provide support for his general concept of a squirrel (or other living thing under observation), but do not logically entail it, and cannot be generalized further.

The distinction between ‘deductive’ and ‘inductive’ is an important one, indicating that there’s a difference between mathematical things and other types of things that is qualitative, not just quantitative—that is to say, a difference in kind, not just degree. And this important difference is something Oderberg papers over. He writes,

“Secondly, if the disanalogy is genuine there is a good reason for it – namely that mathematical objects have far more essential properties than they do accidental ones. More precisely, they have far more that is true of them either as part of their essence or as flowing from their essence than they do qualities that are wholly extraneous to their essence and so contingent on the kind of object under consideration. It might be accidental to circles as a species that they have any particular radius, and accidental to a particular circle that it has a given colour or that it is shaded, and so on. But when anyone identifies a circle, they are far more likely to do so via one of its essential properties, such as shape or having a radius equidistant from all points on the circumference. The reverse might seem to be true for material objects such as trees and tables, which tend to be picked out very often by wholly accidental characteristics. Now, if this is so, it is no aid to the sceptic’s case. All it shows is that since mathematicals have more essential than non-essential features, they are more likely to be identified by the former than is the case for material objects. It does not show we cannot know the essences of material objects – only that we have to work harder.”[15]

But, of course, as I just said, it’s not a matter of “working harder,” it’s working in a completely different mode of thought—deductive versus inductive. The truths we discover about mathematics are both universal and divorced from the necessity of empirical verification. Even if we only see one triangle, if we disregard its accidents (color, isosceles vs, equilateral, etc.) we can reasonably apply its “essential” characteristics to all triangles everywhere—three straight sides and whatnot. This obviously does not apply to living things. If you see one tree, or even a forest of them, with green leaves, you cannot say that all trees everywhere have green leaves (especially not in autumn). If you see one table with four legs, you cannot say that all tables everywhere necessarily have four legs. It’s therefore a riskier business to claim these material things have essences based on a method that works in geometry.

Oderberg seems doggedly determined to deny these differences. He soldiers on:

“Thirdly, all the hedging and qualification above are because it is not clear that there is a disanalogy at all. For we do not merely identify material objects by their accidents, even if they have far more of them than mathematicals do. In the standard case we identify things also as living or non-living, animal or plant, rational or non-rational, body or non-body, substance or non-substance, spatial or temporal or both – and so on. Unless a person is a metaphysician he will not know the exact definition of substance, or of rationality, for instance. Unless he has some biological knowledge he will not have much technical grasp of the distinction between life and non-life. But, as has already been stressed, it is no part of essentialism that a person who knows the essence of something must know all of its essence or know its essence in precise detail. If I identify a human as an animal and a scarecrow as inanimate, I have identified part of the essence of each. It is at least arguable that in most cases of material object identification, just as in mathematical, we identify objects by parts of their essence, even if in the material case we also rely heavily on accidental characteristics. If, then, there is no disanalogy, the case against the sceptic is even stronger. We can know the essences of mathematicals. We identify them most often by their essential features. Since identifying them involves coming to know their essences, there is no circularity, contrary to the initial worry. The process is not crucially different for material objects, even though we rely more heavily on accidents when identifying them. Hence there is no circularity here either.”[16]

But once again, the problem isn’t circular reasoning but epistemology and methodology. If you only saw one human or one scarecrow, on what basis could you claim that all humans are animals or all scarecrows are inanimate? Nothing about those facts (true or not) is necessarily universal and necessarily entailed by their definitions, which they would have to be if they had ‘essences’ like triangles or circles do. A triangle by definition is a closed figure with three straight sides and angles equaling 180 degrees—that is to say, everything about “the essence of triangularity” is contained within that definition. We cannot say the same for scarecrows or men. If the “essence of a scarecrow” is just “something intended to scare off crows,” then a kid clanging pots and pans to scare them off would count. If you were to say its essence was “an inanimate object designed to scare off crows,” we would then ask how you could be so sure—it’s easy to imagine a living scarecrow, like the one from The Wizard of Oz, while it’s impossible to even conceive of a square triangle or triangular circle. All this, of course, applies to the definition of man as a “rational animal.”

In short, there does not seem to be the same logical necessity in calling man a rational animal (as opposed to a hairless biped) or scarecrows inanimate as there is in calling triangles 3-sided. And since essences in geometry seem to rely on being based in logical necessity, it is not unreasonable to say they might not exist in things which are not logically necessary—that is to say, material things.

Oderberg ends this section of his book (chapter 3.4) with these ringing words:

“In general, it is true to say that we mostly identify and come to know the essences of material objects indirectly via their properties and accidents, whereas this is not the case for mathematical objects. Indirect knowledge, however, is still knowledge, just as indirect observation is still observation, as was pointed out in Chapter 2. The medieval Scholastics used to say that the human mind hunts after the essences of things, by which they meant that we do not have an intellectual intuition of essence or a faculty other than the general rational one for finding out what things are. Objects present themselves to our understanding with varying degrees of immediacy, mathematicals doing so more immediately and directly than material things. In most cases, however, when an object presents itself for inspection, as it were – even in the case of simple geometrical figures – we have to delve into its nature by finding out how it behaves, operates, functions, changes (if at all), what powers it has, what similarities or dissimilarities it bears to other things, and so on. By all of these means we are able to identify things and suppose them to fall under some genus or other, with some specific difference or other, yet without knowing what these might be (except perhaps at a very abstract level: for example, the thing concerned is physical, or mental, a quality, or a substance with some sort of independent existence, extended or unextended, and so on). All we need to do is to grasp the fact that there is some portion of reality before us, some kind of being or other. We never apprehend being in general, or being as such, even though this is the formal object of all metaphysical study. All we ever apprehend is being in its various manifestations, and since we do this we are already in a position to affirm that things have essences, that everything is something or other.”[17]

And yet, for a third time, Oderberg glides over the different types of knowledge—not “direct” versus “indirect,” but deductive versus inductive. Mathematicals do not “present themselves to our understanding” more immediately or directly than material things, they are apprehended through the means of deductive logic, which relies on no empirical evidence (even if its elements are first made known to us through material objects, like rocks or arrowheads). We simply cannot reason ourselves to the characteristics of most material things the same way, no matter “how hard” we work, which ought to make us very skeptical of any possibility of reasoning ourselves to their “true essences.” Indeed, that’s cause for doubting the idea that material things even have “essences” at all, at least in the way Oderberg, Feser, Aquinas, and Aristotle would have it.

What applies to material things generally applies to living things particularly—recall the difficulties posed to essentialism by my example of wolves turning into dogs above. Oderberg, again, thinks he has addressed that in chapter 8. As he says,

“Biological evolution also involves an individual of one kind giving rise to an individual of a distinct kind – not through substantial change but through reproductive activity. The processes are different, but the outcome is the same. And neither refutes the thesis that each kind is a distinct essence. Moreover, neither essentialism nor evolution holds that transmutation between species involves one kind changing into another kind where the kind is understood as an abstract entity…The essentialist does not need to be a Platonist to hold that species do not turn into distinct species in any sense beyond the causation of individuals of one species to come into existence by individuals belonging to a different species.”[18]

Essentially, Oderberg is saying that one day, two individuals with the “essence” of the wolf conceived an individual with the “essence” of being a little more dog-like, and this individual continued to mate with others like it, with each succeeding generation having its essence be more dog-like until finally some creatures are born that have the essence of “dog” rather than wolf. This is made clearer with his example of Archaeopteryx:

“To explain, consider the famous case of Archaeopteryx, generally held to be a transitional species in between reptiles and birds. The general consensus is that it is something in between a reptile and a bird…Now if we plausibly take Archaeopteryx as a typical case of indeterminacy as between reptiles and birds, the method of partition recommends placing it into a different species – neither reptile nor bird. Ontological vagueness is ruled out for the reasons I have given: Archeopteryx has some nature of other, some unified principle of structure, function, and behaviour. But to say that it is a reptile-bird in the sense of being both a reptile and a bird is metaphysically repugnant: these are two distinct forms, two distinct modes of being for the organisms belonging to these categories…[rather, it] is the possessor of a unique form similar to both in properties.”[19]

It seems to me this approach creates as many problems as it solves. To say Archaeopteryx possesses its own “unique form” that’s merely similar to its antecedents and descendants is to gloss over the fact that it connects both. It is not the case that the ‘reptile-bird’ just happens to have the traits it does; any reasonable assessment of its “essence” would have to mention the fact that it was born from the former and eventually gave birth to the latter. It is, therefore, only a half-truth to say the creature was “unique.” If Archaeopteryx was just put together artificially with dashes of lizard and dashes of bird, yes, then you could say it was “unique.” But both we and Oderberg know that it was born from reptiles, meaning reptiles gave some of themselves to it, and it gave birth to birds, which meant it had some “bird-ness” to give. It was thus not “unique” but a true connector between birds and reptiles.

Even beyond that, Oderberg’s approach also makes a complete mockery of Aquinas’s ethics. Remember, Aquinas defines ‘good’ as ‘adhering to a paradigmatic standard defined by an object or creature’s Form.’ But as Oderberg has demonstrated, we can just make Forms up for living things if we desire—oops, wait, I mean, we just happen to discover that transitional species have their own special-snowflake forms, since it’s necessary to salvage essentialism. Archeopteryx has its own unique form! It’s neither a reptile with avian features (an imperfect reptile) nor an underdeveloped avian (an imperfect bird). It’s its own thing, a Fairly Perfect Instantiation of a reptile-bird (that’s not actually a combination of the two, it just happens to share properties from both). The same would assumedly apply to dogs and wolves—no need to worry about instantiating the Form of either, we just have a Wolf-Dog that perfectly instantiates its own form. Hooray!

That sounds great until you wonder why this wouldn’t apply to non-living things, and after that, to intelligent things like man. A kid draws a shaky triangle on the back of a bus seat? Feser would say he drew a “bad triangle,” compared to one drawn on paper with a straightedge, but Oderberg would promptly come to the rescue! It’s not that Junior drew a “imperfect/bad triangle,” it’s that he drew a good/perfect Bus Triangle, which happens to share elements of regular triangles (having three sides) but whose paradigmatic form is to be shaky, clumsily drawn, and instantiated on bus seats. A squirrel with no tail perfectly instantiates its own “unique form” of a tailless squirrel, or a squirrel that doesn’t bury nuts perfectly instantiates the “unique form” of a, uh, nut-hating squirrel! Will wonders never cease?

And what of human beings? Sure, our paradigmatic form we have to live up to is that of a Rational Animal, but if we can’t, no problem! We just instantiate slightly different forms unique to us! So, for instance, a gay guy might be acting “irrationally” in Feser’s view, but he possesses his own unique form only similar to that of a regular human being. He perfectly instantiates the Form of a Gay Guy! And since he’s perfectly instantiating that Form—even if he fails to instantiate the ‘rational animal’ Form—he’s technically “good” if we take Good to mean—as Aquinas does—conforming to Forms.

All in all, so far it seems essentialism is ridden with problems. Oderberg claims,“[t]he short answer to the question ‘Why real essentialism?’ is that it is the metaphysical system that captures the reality of things.”[20]

Is that so? Well, judging by both Oderberg’s book, even if essentialism “captures the reality of things,” it doesn’t help us make sense of them or tell us anything useful about them—at all. I’d say we’d be well-served to discard that garbage.

Or…perhaps not. Perhaps you disagree. Perhaps you might say my grasp of philosophy is still a beginner’s, not yet strong enough to compete with Oderberg. But even if you believe that, I can think of two people more qualified than I to demolish essentialism—Thomas Aquinas and Edward Feser.

Weren’t expecting that, huh? Well, it just so happens that a certain doctrine Aquinas came up with has implications which seem quite fatal to essentialism. Even if you think I failed to topple Oderberg’s arguments, it’s safe to say the Saint succeeded.

This doctrine is on page 29 of the Beginner’s Guide, and I’m skipping over his discussion of final causality, which he mentioned after hylemorphism. I’ll eventually address that too, though again, I wish Feser had kept everything referring to essence in one section. But there’s nothing to be done about that, so let’s see what this mighty doctrine is:

“Here we come at last to Aquinas’s famous doctrine of the distinction between Essence and existence. To return again to our example of humanity, ‘it is… evident that the nature of man considered absolutely abstracts from every act of existing, but in such a way, however, that no act of existing is excluded by way of precision’ (DEE 3). That is to say, there is nothing in our grasp of the essence humanity as such that could tell us whether or not any human beings actually exist, if we didn’t already know they did… The phoenix example is perhaps more instructive than the humanity one: someone unaware that the phoenix is entirely mythical might know that its essence is to be a bird that burns itself into ashes out of which a new phoenix arises, without knowing whether there really is such a creature… or in other words, if it is possible to understand the essence of a thing without knowing whether it exists, its act of existing, if it has one, must be distinct from its essence, as a metaphysically separate component of the thing.”[21]

At first glance, this may seem innocuous, perhaps even reasonable. But pay close attention to the stuff about the Phoenix—that’s where the real trouble comes in. In fact, if you think a little harder about it, you can’t take Oderberg’s “real essentialism” very seriously, and that means you we have less than absolute metaphysical certainty of many of Feser’s claims.

This sort of absolutism about essentialism is not an unfair exaggeration of Feser’s position. In The Last Superstition, he declared, “the essence of triangularity [is not] something that is purely mental, a subjective ‘idea.’ Nor is this essence a mere cultural artifact or convention of language. For what we know about triangles are objective facts, things we have discovered rather than invented. It is not up to us to decide that the angles of a triangle should add up to 38 degrees instead of 180, or that the Pythagorean theorem should be true of circles rather than right triangles.”[22]

Uh-huh. But even if this is true of triangles, it is not true of phoenixes. Would Feser argue we “discovered” facts about those mythical birds? I should assume not. We, or at least the people who came up with the myth, simply made them up. Yet Aquinas seemed (and Feser apparently agrees) to treat them as if they actually did have essences. An even better example would be the Orcs from Lord of the Rings. It is, as I’m sure everyone would agree, the “essence” of an Orc to be green, ugly, barbaric, and so on. However, Tolkien did not “discover” these facts, he simply made them up. It was entirely “up to him” to decide that Orcs looked and behaved as they did, he could have easily given them wings or kindly dispositions or whatever if he so desired, and nobody would have had any right to tell him he couldn’t—they were his creatures and his universe. Yet it is also the case that Orcs have a fairly well defined essence—whenever someone thinks of an orc, they typically think of a big green monster that serves an evil overlord, though they may think of tusks and horns and other minor physical changes. So it seems reasonable to say that Orcs do have an essence, but it was entirely made up by Tolkien, and perhaps refined by other fantasy authors—even though such an essence has no basis in reality, just like the phoenix, however well-defined it may have been in myth, did not at all exist in reality.

Thus, it seems we cannot escape the conclusion that at least some essences are indeed a matter of convention or opinion rather than objective reality, that it is indeed “up to us” to define at least some of them, and that at least some of them do not exist outside of human minds—if we all went out of existence, it’s unlikely the concepts of “Orcs” or “phoenixes” would ever be thought of by any other sentient being that would evolve after we did.

And with this, the intellectual edifice Aristotle, Aquinas, Feser, and Oderberg have tried so hard to build comes tumbling down. Feser never admits this, of course, but it seems obvious to any perceptive reader. If human beings just “made up” the “essences” of Orcs and Phoenixes, as we obviously did, how can anyone be sure we didn’t just make up the “essences” of, say, “goodness” or “nobility” or “justice?” Since the whole point of “Natural Law” is to tell us what’s objectively good, it runs into a bit of a problem if goodness is as make-believe as Orc-ness or Phoenix-ness, and since “Natural Law” theorists hold God to be the ultimate of goodness and nobility (I’ll expand on what I said about goodness earlier in my discussion of transcendentals) if those things are a matter of human convention rather than indisputable, objective facts, it might cast doubt on God’s nature, if not His existence. The only way Feser can get around this is by claiming “good” is more like a geometric property, such as those belonging to triangles (which I did admit probably have real “essences).

While I’m not entirely certain, I suspect this is the approach Feser might try. As he says in his essay “In Defense of the Perverted Faculty Argument” (which we’ll examine in MUCH more depth later on), it is “natural substances” specifically which possess inherent Essences or Final Causes.[23] What, precisely, is a natural substance? Feser explains it in the Beginner’s Guide chapter on Aquinas’s psychology. A natural substance is essentially anything that occurs “naturally” in nature and has its own “immanent causation,” in the case of living things this “begins and remains within the agent or cause (though it may also and at the same time have some external effects); and typically it in some way involves the fulfillment or perfection of the cause. Transeunt causation, by contrast, is directed entirely outwardly, from the cause to an external effect. An animal’s digestion of a meal would be an example of immanent causation, since the process begins and remains within the animal and serves to fulfill or perfect it by allowing it to stay alive and grow.” Artifacts, on the other hand, are human made objects, like computers or coffee machines, that have functions (to make coffee or run programs, obviously), but “have no inherent tendency to come together…[they] have to be arranged by us to do so.”[24]

So that’s one way to avoid the problem: Just claim phoenixes are “artifacts” in a sense, and therefore have no inherent “essences” or “final causes” aside from those humans give them, just like computers and coffee machines don’t really have any inherent, or naturally arising “essences” or “final causes,” since they have to be built by humans and wouldn’t exist without us. Meanwhile, things like triangles do exist without us and therefore do have objective existence.

But, yet again, it’s not very convincing. Remember Oderberg’s example above of the Archaeopteryx—that was clearly a “natural substance,” not something created by humans, yet Oderberg just gave it his own idiosyncratic “reptile bird that’s not really a reptile or a bird but just happens to have elements of both” definition, that is to say, “Essence.” So again, what’s keeping us from doing the same with other “natural substances?” A gay guy is a living thing (that makes him a “natural substance,” not an artifact) with an essence different from straight guys, a tailless squirrel (or an urban squirrel) is another “natural substance,” with an essence different from regular squirrels, and so on, and so forth.

In fact, it’s now just occurred to me that we can see the crippling problems with essentialism: Even in naturally occurring substances that objectively exist (unlike phoenixes, which don’t exist at all, or computers, which are built by humans), there are some which don’t seem to have essences. Don’t believe me? Well then, you must have never heard of Griangles!

Wait, what? What the hell is a Griangle? Let me explain. Let’s first imagine an equilateral triangle. In addition to the normal 2 sides, 180 degrees, etc. of a triangle, its sides are all exactly equal, so each of its angles is 60. We can write out like this:

Equilateral triangles have,

1: 3 sides

2: straight sides

3: sides of the same length

4: So that each of its angles are 60 (which adds up to 180).

Make sense? I’m sure Feser would argue that equilateral triangles exist, they have an Essence which I’ve defined above, and that it would be foolish to deny these Objective Facts. I’m also sure he would say things are either good or bad Equilateral Triangles—there are some triangles whose sides are equal but jagged or unstraight, some triangle whose sides are almost equal but off by just a bit, and so on. Well, all of that can be said of Griangles too. What are those? Like equilateral triangles, they’re a type of triangle as well. Here is their essence:

1: 3 sides

2: straight sides

3: All sides are the color green (a perfect griangle would have an RGB value of 0-255-0)

4: So that each of its internal angles adds up to 180.

Isn’t that nice? It seems as if I’ve discovered a new type of triangle, one that’s every bit as real as an equilateral triangle, and one that has its own Essence. Feser must concede to the reality of Griangles existing, and ought to go around telling people things like “this triangle is not 100% green, which makes it a Bad Griangle” and that anyone who denies that is undermining the very foundations of reason itself.

Now, I’m again sure that Feser would call me a big ol’ silly-billy. “Griangles don’t exist! They’re an ‘artifact!’ You just made them up out of whole cloth, like Tolkien did for Orcs!” Yet I would ask what, precisely, makes him so sure? After all, there clearly exist green triangles in real life, which arise out of natural processes just as equilateral triangles sometimes do. And in any case, there’s no reason the Griangle should be any less real in a logical sense than any other geometric figure—sure, geometry deals in a logical sense with lines and angles rather than color, but color does objectively exist and there’s no necessary reason it can’t be used as part of the “Essence” of something.

After all, if “Griangles,” as things with a coherent and meaningful objective essence, are nothing but the product of my imagination, that would seem to have dire implications for essentialism generally. Perhaps Oderberg’s postulation of that idiosyncratic “reptile-bird” is as stupid, baseless, and unreflective of reality as me just making up “griangles” on a whim. Perhaps it really is the case that some “Essences” are completely made up, even when they refer to “real substances whose essences are conjoined to existence,” like green triangles. And if all that is so, maybe—just maybe—we might have made up “essences” for other things too, ranging from living things even up to humans ourselves.

If Feser wants to say that’s an impossibility, and persist in claiming that all “natural” substances have Essences we really can Grasp, then he’ll have to explain why equilateral triangles exist and can be grasped by reason, while Griangles do not.

Really, if you’re having a tough time following me, the point I’m making is that to a great extent, what Feser and Oderberg and I assume the “New Aristotelians” generally call “essences” are really contrivances of human convenience that don’t necessarily have any objective meaning, we simply hew to them because it’s easy for us to do so. Feser can claim all he wants that it’s an Objective Fact that equilateral triangles have 3 straight sides of equal length and 3 60 degree angles, but I can just as easily claim it’s an Objective Fact that Griangles have three straight sides that are colored green and 3 angles that add up to 180. Both equilateral triangles and my Griangles have well-defined characteristics (I won’t say ‘properties’ as that means something else in Aristotelian thought) with objective reality outside of human minds. The only reason we say the former is “real” while the latter is something I made up is because equilateral triangles can be utilized productively in architecture and geometry, while the concept of colored triangles has no particular use.

To break it down even further: it may be, and apparently is, the case that many things we see around us (“natural substances”) have characteristics (straightness, angularity, number of sides, color) that exist outside of our minds. But the way we organize them into “essences” in which these characteristics are enveloped into a set of standards to define objects which have them (the “essence” of triangles is to have those three characteristics; straightness, 180-degree angularity, and 3 sides) seems to be dependent on human interests rather than any objective reason those characteristics should “go together,” so to speak. Thus, it seems that Oderberg and Feser’s “Real Essentialism” is not really coherent, even if we accept the distinction between “natural substances” and things like computers or phoenixes. It runs into even more problems when it’s mixed in with theology, but we’ll see why when I address the topic of Transcendentals a little later.

Now, there may be problems with my own explanation—apparently, another philosopher named Crawford Elder argued

that conventionalism about essences is self-defeating. For we are the source of our conventions, and if conventionalism were true in general it would have to be true about us. But then our conventions would have to be logically prior to us; but, on the contrary, we are logically prior to our conventions. Hence conventionalism about us could not be true. (See Elder 2004: ch. 1.) The implication is that if conventionalism is not true in respect of us, why should it be true in respect of anything else? (There is a conventional aspect to the essences of artefacts, but that is not the same as saying that conventionalism about artefacts is true.)[25]

There are a few responses I could give, even though I’m not a professional philosopher. Off the top of my head, it may be true that our minds have “essences,” but it’s obvious this doesn’t apply to everything else, both artifacts (phoenixes don’t have essences) and natural substances (Griangles don’t have a real essence, despite obviously existing). But that discussion would be suited for an essay laying out my own metaphysics rather than addressing Aquinas’s. In any case, even if conventionalism does not apply to us, it clearly does apply to many other things—my Griangles exist on their own and are no less “natural substances” than equilateral triangles are, so they cannot be “artefacts.” If I just made those up, it ought to cast a bit of doubt on essentialism, even if nothing more, and I’ll be happy with that for today.

Well, whether it’s a lot or a little, doubt is a scary thing, eh? Even a bit of it can shake the foundations of an ideology literally thousands of years old, dating from the days of Aristotle himself. Perhaps I should feel guilty about my attempts to undermine something so ancient and august. After all, it’s not like essentialists themselves are evil people—Oderberg has apparently spoken up for the good treatment (though not rights) of our cute animal friends,[26] and Feser is a fan of jazz[27], so he can’t be all that bad (though, as we’ll see, he may well be pretty bad). But it seems to me essentialism can easily lead to some fairly deleterious effects, particularly in the world of science. Oderberg tries to defend it from this charge, saying

“the effect of essentialism on scientific practice should be the exact opposite of what Popper claims it to be. Rather than hinder progress, it is a positive stimulant to progress. The search for ultimate explanations provides a conceptual terminus that focuses and unifies enquiry. As long as the scientist does not believe reality to be far less difficult to grasp and comprehend than it is – and it is no part of essentialism that reality is easy to fathom – the promise of an ultimate explanation is precisely what should goad him into ever more strenuous efforts to reach that goal. It is the search for how things really are, in their ultimate reality, that encourages the scientist not to rest content with whatever observable characteristics of things happen to cross his gaze.”[28]

This sounds all well and good, but if scientists themselves (as opposed to metaphysicians like Oderberg) have seen fit to abandon essentialism, I’m not terribly inclined to gainsay their conclusions. Less flippantly, insisting we look for “ultimate explanations” (as opposed to merely contenting ourselves with empirically observed patterns) is not a mode of thinking that will make scientists very productive. One reason science has been able to make so much progress in recent years is its specialization—we have chemists, physicists, and biologists, all of whom respect the other disciplines even as they recognize the distinctiveness of each. To insist that they’re all working towards some vague “ultimate explanation” would be to muddy the lines between their disciplines and introduce confusion where there was previously none before. Instead of just worrying about the definitions and interactions of fundamental particles (physicists), the way those particles combine to form molecules (chemists), and how those molecules interact among living things (biologists), all of our scientists would be muddling with each other about which of their disciplines reflects “how things really are” the best. Seems a little harder to get good work done in the lab.

Secondly, Oderberg is right that scientists should not “rest content with whatever they happen to observe,” but this is because they should recognize observations can be incorrect or fallacious, or, most importantly, not necessarily universal (at least for biologists). That is to say, they should evince an epistemological caution precisely the opposite of what an essentialist, with his belief that “real essences” are out there and only waiting to be discovered, would encourage. Even if one wishes to argue that the findings of physicists are as “universal” as those of geometers, the fact that they work in labs rather than only with calculators should encourage them to be more circumspect than “essentialism” encourages. If a mathematician gets a proof wrong, he can only blame himself. A physicist, on the other hand, always has to worry about dust getting into the Large Hadron Collider or Joe the Janitor spilling coffee into the fusion reactor. Even if his research into fundamental particles is universal, many more factors would blur their “true essences” than is the case for the mathematician. So much so, in fact, that he may be better off abandoning the quest to discern “how things really are” and satisfy himself with mere replicable regularities.

Finally, Oderberg himself gives a few examples of how meddling essentialists could conceivably hinder scientific progress. In the preface to Real Essentialism, he implies that metaphysicians should have the right to tell scientists, “‘According to sound metaphysical principles, it could not have happened like that – even if I cannot tell you how it did happen.’”[29] A few pages later he attempts to defend essentialism from the charge that it propped up flawed scientific theories; for instance, phlogiston “was tenaciously held on to because for all its faults it had immense unifying and predictive power and seemed to explain such phenomena as the combustion of metals. Chemists thought they had alighted on an ultimate explanation, though it turned out to be false and was finally overthrown by Lavoisier. But there was no incompatibility between regarding phlogiston as ultimately explanatory while continuing to test the behaviour of metals in order to see whether the predictions of the theory were after all correct.”[30]

But it’s obvious the only way Lavoisier was able to do this was because he didn’t have to worry about any nagging philosophers distracting him with “metaphysical” concerns. Imagine what would have happened if metaphysicians like David Oderberg had been around, shouting that “phlogiston is a metaphysical necessity, and however your experiments seem to be working, Lavoisier, they can’t be working like that—even if I don’t know how!” Lavoisier’s experiments would have been stopped in their tracks!

It therefore strikes me as the height of chutzpah for Oderberg to claim that essentialist metaphysics could not hinder science, indeed, that metaphysics itself is the “queen of the sciences.”[31] Science has made impressive progress indeed by ignoring metaphysics, and it seems it can continue making such progress by continuing to ignore metaphysics. And while I won’t go so far as to say metaphysics is useless—that would be crass, and committing the sin of “scientism” which I find to be as annoying as the essentialism I’m critiquing—one can certainly make a cogent argument that science would be meaningfully worse off if anyone actually listened to Oderberg, or Feser, or Aristotelian philosophers in general like Nancy Cartwright, outside of the well-quarantined ivory tower of academic philosophy.

Feser seems to address these concerns, albeit cursorily, in A Beginner’s Guide. According to him, the “problem of induction” formulated by Hume implies that science is impossible, because it “is in the business of discovering objective causal relationships between things, of describing the world in general (the unobserved portions as well as the observed ones), and of making predictions on the basis of that description…The ‘mechanistic’ or non-teleological picture of the natural world that purportedly made modern natural science possible in fact seems to make it unintelligible.”[32]

Sounds impressive, but note the mention of ‘teleology.’ Here Feser is referring to the idea of final causes, which we haven’t gotten to yet (soon, my friends, soon) but are distinct from the idea of essences we’re looking at right now. To say that “essences” are not always or necessarily objectively real and meaningful, or useful in science, is not to say there are no causal relationships at all between anything in general.

It is also to say that the business of at least some branches of science may be a bit humbler than Feser implies. You could argue that physics and chemistry often make general predictions based on limited experimentation—declaring that force = mass x velocity or that the chemical structure of water is H2O despite not demonstrating this on other planets. Thus, you could perhaps argue that physical forces and atoms (along with the molecules and chemicals they comprise) have essences in the sense Oderberg and Feser might like. But this quickly breaks down when you come to biology. At least some branches of biology tend towards description and discovery rather than prediction per se, and what predictions they do make tend to be fuzzier than those given by physicists—for instance, an ornithologist saying this or that species of bird will migrate is not saying they absolutely have to and absolutely will do so in the same sense water absolutely has to be H2O. Certainly, no biologist would say something like, “since this species of plant we discovered, or even this bunch of plants we’ve discovered, are green, it follows by logical necessity that plants in general are green.”

But should we care about scientific progress, whether in biology or anywhere else? As Feser says in the Beginner’s Guide, and in a passage mirrored almost word for word in The Last Superstition, “the moderns’ preference for the new [that is, non-essentialist, non-Aristotelian] method seems to have been motivated less by any purported metaphysical superiority it had over Aristotelianism – again, the philosophical arguments made in its favor were in general surprisingly feeble – than by a practical interest in reorienting philosophy and science to improving material conditions of human life in this world. The ancients and the medievals had tended to regard intellectual inquiry as a search for wisdom, understood as knowledge of the ultimate causes and meaning of things, in light of which one might improve one’s soul and prepare for a life beyond this one.”[33]

Lofty words indeed, but alas, that’s not quite enough to convince me. First, as an amusing aside, this little sermon appears in a similar form in The Last Superstition, and one of Feser’s less-kind reviewers had this to say about it:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2RETCY4TFAQ5D/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1587314525

“Finally, Feser wants a return to the good old days of Scholastic values that include the “benefits of poverty” and rejection of the Reformer’s “industry, thrift and acquisition.” (3272.) So then why did I have to pay for this book? Why doesn’t Feser freely distribute it to promote Scholastic values and the love of wisdom? Looks like he’s not such a big believer in poverty-is-virtue after all and has become a hard-core, pipe-hittin’ Calvinist when it comes to book sales. ;-)”[34]

Still, that’s a bit of a lark. More seriously, I very much suspect that Aristotle’s metaphysics are not as unassailable as Feser would have it. I’d say I’ve done at least a competent job of critiquing them in this essay so far (I confess to being proud of my little MSpaint potentiality pictures), and if I haven’t, Aristotelianism has been attacked, and its attackers (Hume, Descartes, etc.) defended, by enough guys with Ph.Ds (such as Aaron Boyden) that I suspect the old Greek is not entirely infallible.

Second, one would expect the true “meaning of things” to be reflected in the natural world, a subject studied by scientists rather than metaphysicians. The fact that scientists have had more success in abandoning Aristotle than following him would seem to lend some credence to the idea that his metaphysics might possibly be as mistaken as his attempts at science. Feser would rightfully say that’s not a slam-dunk argument, but surely it should at least make us a little suspicious.

Thirdly and lastly, the nice-sounding bit about the “health of the soul” and “life beyond this one” presupposes the existence of those immaterial things, as well as the idea that there is some objective way to benefit them. Feser thinks Aquinas firmly established the truth of both premises. Perhaps he has for the first one—I’ve little interest in demonstrating that human beings are soulless. But to insist there is some objective way of caring for the soul is another thing entirely. And Feser has not proved this, which a continued examination of his metaphysics shall demonstrate.

Part 1.3: Metaphysical Meanderings: Fumbling with Four Causes

Let us jump back in the Beginner’s Guide, from page 29 (essence and existence) to page 16, where Feser explores the idea of the four causes. A brief summary: Aquinas said (according to Feser) that everything has four causes, and Feser uses a rubber ball as an example. The ball’s “material cause” would be what it’s made of (i.e rubber), its formal cause would be what form it takes (the shape of a ball), its efficient cause would be how it was made and/or who made it (the worker at Acme rubber ball company), and its final cause would be why it was made, or its purpose, end, or goal (entertaining a child as a bouncy toy).[35]

This schema, particularly the last bit, is crucial to Aquinas’s metaphysical system, and by extension his ethics, theology, and psychology. Biological organs such as the heart also have “final causes” or functions; that is to say, their goal is obviously to pump blood or oxygenate the blood. But for Aquinas, everything, and I mean absolutely everything, has a “final cause,” not just man-made artifacts or organs, and they don’t have to be aware of it either. As Feser said,

“All functions are instances of final causality, but not all final causality involves the having of a function…for the Aristotelian final causality or teleology (to use a more modern expression) exists wherever some natural object or process has a tendency to produce some particular effect or range or effects. A match, for example, reliably generates flame and heat when struck, and never (say) frost and cold, or the smell of lilacs…It inherently points to or is directed toward this range of effects specifically, and in that way manifests just the sort of end- or goal- directedness characteristic of final causality…goal-directedness exists wherever regular cause and effect patterns do…most final causality is thought by Aristotelians to be completely unconscious…The match is ‘directed towards’ the production of fire and heat, the moon is ‘directed towards’ movement around the earth, and so forth. But neither the match nor the moon is aware of these ‘goals’”[36]

I suppose I can see that, but I’m rather more suspicious of the supposed importance final causality holds. Feser says “final causes are prior to or more fundamental than efficient causes, insofar as they make efficient causes intelligible (DPN 4.25). Indeed, for Aquinas the final cause is ‘the cause of causes’ (In Phys 11.5.186), that which determines all of the other causes. For something to be directed toward a certain end entails that is has a form appropriate to the realization of that end, and thus a material composition suitable for instantiating that form; a knife, for example, if it is to fulfill its function of cutting, must have a certain degree of sharpness and solidity, and thus be made of some material capable of maintaining that degree of sharpness and solidity. Thus the existence of final causes entails the existence of formal and material causes too.”[37]

Hoo boy. Suffice it to say I think a robust critique of this will go a long way in disproving Aristotelianism and ‘natural law’ entirely.

First off, it seems obviously incorrect to claim “final causality makes efficient causality intelligible,” because that would seem to imply we cannot know, or understand, the efficient causes of a thing (what and how) without knowing its final cause, which is clearly incorrect. Take the pyramids of Egypt, which were made for the purpose of entombing their pharaohs (their ‘why,’ their final cause). Yet we do not need to know why they were built to know how and by whom they were built (their efficient cause). Even if someone with no knowledge whatsoever of Egyptian religion were to come across the pyramids, he could easily figure out they were built by ancient Egyptians moving and carving big stones around. He needs no recourse to the “final cause” of the pyramid. How, then, do final causes necessarily make efficient ones “intelligible?”

Indeed, simply knowing the final cause of things, either why they were made or what their function is supposed to be, tells us very little about their efficient causes, or even their forms. South Americans made fairly similar structures (the great ziggurats in what used to be the Aztec Empire) for completely different purposes (human sacrifice rather than entombment—that’s actually a vast oversimplification, as my South American history friends will tell me, but it suffices for this off-the-cuff example). Another example of the other way around would be lungs in mammals and gills in fish. Both structures have the same “final cause”—to oxygenate blood. But even if this tells us what the two organs are supposed to do, we cannot discern from it what their literal, physical forms are or how they do their job, what they’re made of, or how they were formed (their material, formal, and efficient causes). If you told someone who didn’t speak English that the words “lungs” and “gills” both referred to organs whose final cause it was to oxygenate blood, he might think they were just the same thing! And that would obviously be silly. So it seems to me that Feser is just downright wrong when he speaks of “final causality” as a methodological necessity, even if we concede it might be a metaphysical necessity. It seems to me we would be able to figure out at least a little bit about both lungs and gills even if we didn’t know—at first—what they were “for.”

If this is still hard to understand, allow me another example. Remember what Feser said about the moon being “directed” (its final cause) to orbit regularly around the Earth? Yet we could not discern this from its form alone; in fact, there is nothing about its form—a ball of rock smaller than the Earth itself—that dictates it would necessarily orbit the Earth. If it had been shaped like a triangle or square, or made out of rubber or blue cheese, it would still orbit the earth (necessary changes to its trajectory having been made to acco