Essay
The ethics of invective
It’s often said that while sticks and stones can break our bones, words can never hurt us. But it isn’t true. Were we mere animals, it would be true, but we’re not. We are rational […]
Articles by Dr. Edward Feser
The Dispatch
Etienne Gilson’s essential book on philosophy and its history
You might suppose from the title of Etienne Gilson’s The Unity of Philosophical Experience [orig. 1937; Ignatius Press, 1999] that it is a book about philosophy in general. And ultimately it is. But its bulk is […]
Essay
Pro-lifers must resist Trump on abortion and IVF
Pro-lifers should rejoice in the defeat of Kamala Harris, and of the Democratic Party, which remains the greatest threat to the unborn in American politics. But they cannot rest, because their job is only half […]
Essay
Donald Trump has put social conservatives in a dilemma
Let’s begin with the obvious. No social conservative could possibly justify voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. They are pro-abortion extremists, as Ryan Anderson shows in an article on Harris at First Things and Dan McLaughlin shows in […]
Features
Fight, yes, but for what?
It is impossible not to admire the resilience and fighting spirit with which Donald Trump responded—literally within moments—to the failed attempt to take his life. And that he is among the luckiest of politicians is […]
The Dispatch
Plato and Aristotle on youth and politics
As faculty, including even philosophy professors, aid and abet student bad behavior on campus, it is worth considering what the most serious thinkers of the Western tradition would have thought about the political opinions and […]
The Dispatch
The metaphysics of individualism
Modern moral discourse often refers to “persons” and to “individuals” as if the notions were more or less interchangeable. But that is not the case. In his book Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau (especially in chapter […]
Essay
Science, microphysics, and the everyday world
Science, we’re often told, gives us a description of the world radically at odds with common sense. Physicist Arthur Eddington’s famous “two tables” example illustrates the theme. There is, on the one hand, the table […]
The Dispatch
A comment on the Lofton affair
For any readers of my recent reply to Michael Lofton who have not been following events at Twitter and YouTube, Lofton has, over the course of the last few days, posted a series of tweets at […]
Analysis
Lofton’s YouTube straw man
There’s a popular mode of online intellectual discourse that I rather dislike, which might be labeled “the extended YouTube hot take.” It involves a talking head riffing, for an hour or so, on something someone […]