UGADawg wrote:

I think my main problem with the book was that the rhetoric therein often didn't match up with the strength of the argumentation, e.g. his all too easy rejection of Kant rests on a straw man. I was also a bit disappointed he never updated his retorsion argument for PSR; pretty much every philosopher I've talked to about the argument has more or less given the same objection to it, yet Feser has nowhere directly addressed it, as far as I'm aware.

This was my own problem. I was expecting a technical treatment of the subject matter on a par with Real Essentialism, but the book was not that, and I felt like I was reading just another Feser book, as indeed I was.

I’m one of those who just began reading Feser (and philosophy for that matter), so I suppose I missed the more knowledgeable readers’ criticisms. If this is a trend with Feser (namely, avoiding the tougher questions, or at least failing to go in depth with the material), perhaps what we could do is compile a list of questions we’d like him to answer and send them to him. I’m not sure if this is possible, but maybe it would work.

Evander wrote:

I’m one of those who just began reading Feser (and philosophy for that matter), so I suppose I missed the more knowledgeable readers’ criticisms. If this is a trend with Feser (namely, avoiding the tougher questions, or at least failing to go in depth with the material), perhaps what we could do is compile a list of questions we’d like him to answer and send them to him. I’m not sure if this is possible, but maybe it would work.

 
I don't think ir's fair to say he "avoids the tougher questions". He does answer tough questions, even in his books, though these are more often meant to be introductory texts. You have to keep in mind that in philosophy there are pretty much always some objections available; the volume of work in analytic philosophy is very large and it is pretty much impossible to cover everything. This shouldn't mean that his arguments do not work; they do, and his point is to present them in a general form to show how they can be quite powerful (for instance, he quite explicitly says in the book that there can be more discussions about the specific nature and scope of PSR, but nevertheless the arguments should give us very significant reason to beliefe that at least some version or other of PSR is true). He also usually tries to answer the more technical objections in specific articles.

When it comes to Kant and PC, for instance, I think a more charitable reading of Feser is that what he argues is that the burden of proof is up to the Kantian to justify his (rather eccentric) anthropological and epistemological views while still avoiding the relevant principle and the arguments presented. Also actual Kantianism is quite a minority view.

UGADawg wrote:

When it comes to Kant and PC, for instance, I think a more charitable reading of Feser is that what he argues is that the burden of proof is up to the Kantian to justify his (rather eccentric) anthropological and epistemological views while still avoiding the relevant principle and the arguments presented.

Sure, but that is the entire point of the CPR and more contemporary works like Allison's Kant's Transcendental Idealism, so clearly this isn't going to be a sufficient rebuttal.

Quick edit: This is w.r.t. the point about the Kantian needing to justify his views; Feser's argument in Five Proofs is different, and rests on the misunderstanding that Kant argues we come to know PC through experience and thereby can only apply it to the realm of experience, when in fact Kant explicitly denies the former, and offers separate reasons for the latter.

 
If someone tries to defend Kant's system that's well and good; the point was just the burden of proof w.r.t. PC and its related arguments. If someone somehow finds Kantianism more plausible than the PC even in face of arguments for it, that's their assessment after all.

I don't think Feser says Kant thinks we come to know PC by experience; I think his point just is that we *can* argue for PC from experience, and indeed we can (it is a standard argument found in contemporary defenders such as Pruss, Rasmussen, Norris Clarke, and even classical authors such as Leibniz when he says the method of "experimental philosophy" confirms PSR). The idea is that PC is the best and simplest explanation for why the world seems so orderly: we tend to always find causes when we look for them, and we never really see things coming into being with no cause.

That the metaphysical PC holds of necessity is the best explanation for that. Kant could avoid this with his own system, that it is our experience which is structured in accordance with PC etc., but that of course requires someone to accept Kant's general epistemological and anthropological views. While the simplest and quite straightforward explanation would just be that things can't come into existence without a cause; or that the existence of contingent things require causes; or that potency can only be actualized by something already actual, etc. So all things being equal, experience would support PC, and it is up to the Kantian to resist that inference and instead justify his (more complex) system.

So after I finish Five Proofs (I have still a few more questions I'd like to post here), what would you all recommend for more advanced writings on classical theism? I hear people mention David Oderberg and Brian Davies. Anyone else that is worth reading, given that I am still relatively new to this area of study?