1 of 1- ArmandoAlvarez
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Atheist reviews The Last Superstition
Jayman over at Feser's blog posted this link to an atheist reviewing The Last Superstition. I thought it would be good to use the review as a post here since it parallels some of my questions in reading TLS, specifically I question what would be the essence of squirliness (or any other species) in an evolutionary world and I don't understand what would be the final cause for anything that isn't man-made, with the possible exception of organs. (Even with an organ, with evolution, an organ that is "defective" from one perspective might be useful for a new function.)
But I thought the reviewer's objections could be a good starting point for a broader discussion that would be helpful to beginners like me, so I thought I'd put it here.
- Scott
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Re: Atheist reviews The Last Superstition
(1) Evolution is irrelevant to the question of essences. Each individual squirrel has an essence -- roughly, a "what" that it is -- whether or not previous or future generations of more-or-less-squirrel-like animals have essences exactly identical to its. All individual squirrels have a common form -- roughly, belong to a "kind" -- whether or not their offspring a million years from now belong to exactly the same "kind."
(2) A "final cause" needn't inherently involve deliberate design or conscious intention*. A match has an inherent tendency to cause fire (under certain conditions, namely being struck) , so (a) a match is (or can be) an efficient cause of fire and (b) fire is (one of) the final cause(s) of the match. You can't have efficient causes without final causes; each one is just the flipside of the other.
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*Aquinas does argue in his Fifth Way that the existence of final causes that aren't themselves intelligent requires an ordering intelligence, but that's another matter.
- ArmandoAlvarez
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Re: Atheist reviews The Last Superstition
1. That's very interesting and makes a lot of sense. I think my question and the reviewer's arguments are because, if I remember correctly*, Feser says something like "the squirrel's essential squirreliness," and mentions characteristics like eating nuts. That sounds like there's something essential in the biological species, which would go against evolutionary theory.
*(I got TLS from the library so I can't reference it.)
2. That's very interesting and leads me to think I really need to read about the four causes The standard illustration is manmade objects, which may contribute to the standard caricatures of teleogy as ludicrous on its face.
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Thread Starter- iwpoe
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Re: Atheist reviews The Last Superstition
While you're learning telos and end (and purpose, but this word has, unfortunately, become over-psychologized in English) should be separated very strictly in the mind from the meaning of design. In fact, I'm not even properly sure what the Aristotelian account of design is. An answer to that would be some kind of exploration into anthropology and psychology, which is not usually pursued by the Aristotelian philosopher, but the answer to that question is totally irrelevant to what is actually meant by telos.
Darwinians in the 19th century stacked the deck by collapsing telos into design and then spending all their argumentative time refuting the appearance of human-like design in nature. There my be such, but it is irrelevant to the phenomena of tele, which are undeniable.
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