Doffing My Dunce Cap to Feser

Edward Feser vigorously defends his book in a new post. He finds some of my criticisms reasonable but finds others "unjust and intemperate" and "quite outrageous". It seems that in comparing his casual dismissals of non-Thomist scholastics to modern philosophers' causal dismissals of Thomism I struck a nerve.

though the rival views are neither agreed with nor treated at the length that would be required to turn a Scotist or Suarezian into a Thomist, they are nevertheless discussed respectfully. There is no polemic whatsoever against Scotist and Suarezian views, nor the least suggestion that those views are unserious or unworthy of study.

This is true. I'm not sure that I said otherwise. Feser certainly never says that alternative scholastic views are unserious or unworthy of study. What I claim is that he does not in fact seem to treat them seriously or study them, despite wanting to give the appearance of doing so.

nowhere in the book do I say or imply that “Scholasticism = Thomism,” nor does Sullivan quote any passage to that effect. Indeed, as Sullivan admits, I explicitly say that that is not the case.

Feser accuses me of nitpicking, and I'm reluctant to give him more fodder for the accusation by looking for more nits to pick. But I did point out already some examples of Feser saying "the Scholastic view on this subject is x", where x is simply the Thomist view, and handwaving away any alternative views, even and especially when among scholastics the Thomist view is very controversial. And in his first response Feser gave a defense of the stance that Thomism is the default view for scholastics and that non-Thomistic views should be seen as departures or divergences from it. Surely I'm not making this up.

I think it is clear enough what is going on... He’s got a bee in his bonnet; he’s got a hair trigger; he’s got issues.

This is to a certain extent fair enough. I decided to review Feser's book because I was specifically asked from a couple of quarters to provide a Scotist perspective; and what I found was that Feser treats non-Thomist scholastics much like nearly every other Thomist does. As I think I've already indicated, it's not that Feser's work is particularly egregious so much as that there are in my opinion grave structural deficiencies in the tradition he's working in, and I criticize his book as an instance of a type.

The problem is not really philosophical, then, but attitudinal. And the remedy is as dry, bracing, and agreeable to a refined palate as a page of Scotus: I recommend to Sullivan a glass or two of good Scotch, in honor of the Subtle Doctor. I’ll buy it for him if we’re ever at the same conference or the like.

I would love a glass or two of good Scotch and will gladly take Feser up on his offer should the occasion arise. I've got some 18-year Glenlivet left over from my birthday. Maybe I'll have some tonight. No doubt it will have a salutary effect on my attitude.

Unsurprisingly Feser disagrees with some of my structural criticisms of his book, which is fair enough. I won't try to analyze the attitude of his replies as he does mine, but it does seem here and elsewhere that his feelings were a bit hurt: whereas elsewhere Sullivan complains that I too slavishly follow “the standard neo-Thomist manuals,” here I am to be blamed for departing from them. I can’t win! I note that I admire much in the manuals and have learned from them myself, though as a genre they have their limitations; so neither following them nor departing from them is a virtue in itself. In the present case my point is that there are good reasons for treating the causes in a certain order. Feser has his own reasons for departing from that order. I won't go over those issues in any more detail. He makes his case, and the reader can decide for himself.

The Scholastics are all operating within a conceptual landscape defined by essentially Platonic and Aristotelian boundaries. The landscape is very broad and some thinkers fall far to one side of it rather than to the other; some even appear to end up falling off this or that edge of it. But that this landscape constitutes their common framework distinguishes them from the moderns, who have all decided to step out of it. ... Hence when I characterize the position of my book as “Scholastic” and not merely “Thomistic,” I am, again, indicating precisely that I am trying to bring what all or at least most Scholastics have in common to bear on contemporary disputes in analytic metaphysics -- albeit with a strongly Thomistic emphasis and despite the fact that I agree with the Thomist position when it differs from the other Scholastic views. I mean precisely to include the other Scholastic positions in the debate, not exclude them.

It seems that the disagreement here is not so much a matter of principle as about the execution. Feser complains that I criticize him for not having written a different sort of book, while I see as my primary complaint that the book he wrote doesn't do what he claims he wants it to do. When Feser brings to bear one position on (say) universals or individuation to engage with analytic metaphysics, and eliding the rest, he's not bringing to bear what all or at least most scholastics have in common. He may mean to include the other positions, but in practice I think he does exclude them by not really taking them seriously. And that's frustrating.

Finally, Sullivan is very critical of my treatment of the dispute between Thomists and Scotists vis-à-vis the theory of distinctions

I picked the section on distinctions to discuss at some length because the issue has very wide-ranging ramifications and because it's one instance in which Feser spends more than a sentence or two on the Scotist view. I could have picked any number of other issues to focus on. Perhaps some what of what I said wasn't clear enough. Get it? Me neither, but then we can’t all be Subtle Doctors. That's ok. I won't hold it against you.

Sullivan goes on at length about the dispute between Thomists and Scotists concerning real, logical, and formal distinctions, and its relevance to issues like the relationship between essence and existence. And what he has to say is hardly less tendentious than what I have to say about these matters in my book. He surely realizes that Thomists would simply not agree with the assumptions that lie behind his arguments, nor with his insinuation that they have no principled but only ad hoc grounds for rejecting those assumptions. Yet Sullivan writes as if the burden of proof were on me or other Thomists to establish the superiority of our position to the Scotist one, rather than on Scotists to establish the superiority of theirs.

Sure, I realize Thomists don't agree with my position. I'm not talking about burdens of proof here at all. The point of my discussion was to indicate that Feser's book mentioned and rejected the formal distinction without making clear what it was or why someone might hold it. I didn't try to prove the necessity of the formal distinction, but to indicate what it was. Feser's claim was that there was "no room" for a distinction between real and logical ones and so no need for the formal distinction. My counter-claim is that Scotists do see room for an intermediate distinction because of characteristics of reality not adequately captured by the dichotomy between fully real and merely logical distinctions. And my complaint is that when Feser claims that the formal distinction ends up collapsing into either one or the other, he hasn't really considered the reasons for denying this because he hasn't noticed any of the reasons for positing it in the first place. Again, if Feser wants to avoid all intra-scholastic debate, that's his prerogative. Just present Thomism. It's precisely where he brings up an alternative just to dismiss it out of hand without getting what he dismisses right that I get really frustrated.

It is, after all, hardly as if the Scotist position, with its famous (some would say notorious) subtlety and abstraction, were somehow more intuitive or obvious than the Thomist one.

Hey, nobody said philosophy was easy! Seriously, though, just yesterday I came across a quote from Heidegger in What is a Thing? to the effect that philosophy is that at which thoughtless people laugh. The whole popular image of the "Dunce" began as a mocking way to dismiss serious, thoughtful, carefully-reasoned attempts to grapple with reality as so much nonsense, without having to do any of the thinking oneself, and it takes Scotus as the paradigm of such thinking. If philosophy is stupid, or mere blather, or nothing but abstruse jargon, or so subtle or abstract that we can know it's disconnected from reality a priori, or if it suffers from "the paralysis of analysis" (a favorite phrase of people who don't care to analyze their positions), then there's no need to think it through. A Thomist rejecting a philosophical position, or refusing to try even to grasp it, on the basis of its "notorious subtlety and abstraction", ought to think uncomfortably about Locke's dismissal of the whole scholastic tradition, of Hobbes' Kingdom of the Fairies at the end of Leviathan, of Hume's "commit it to the flames" at the end of his Enquiry. Perhaps I do have a bee in my bonnet about that kind of attitude.

At the end of the day, Sullivan’s beef is that he just doesn’t agree with me that Thomism is the strongest version of Scholasticism.

That's not my whole beef. But if that isn't clear by now I won't belabor the point.

Finally, I want to reiterate that I hold Feser in respect and that I enjoyed his book and think it has many strengths. If my review focused on what I see as its deficiencies, that's hardly a rarity in academic book reviews, and Feser (deservedly) has many admirers to sing his praises. But sharp criticism between friends - sparring in the gym - is part of the training process in preparing for the real battles.

Well, fine. He should write his own book. I’d buy it.

Well, maybe I will!

Feser's Scholastic Metaphysics: A Book Review, Part II

Feser is a good writer. Like the best analytics, he's clear without sacrificing precision, is on occasion entertaining, and spices his abstract discussions with plentiful concrete examples, something non-analytic philosophy could use a lot more of. Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction was by and large a pleasure to read. Keeping in mind that it is an introduction and that we shouldn't expect an exhaustive treatment of any given topic, there's a lot in the book I would recommend to any amateur looking to get a handle on the issues covered, for example: the "prolegomena" chapter against scientism and conceptual analysis, the discussion of causal powers in chapter 1, the discussion of the Principles of Non-Contradiction and of Sufficient Reason in chapter 2, the discussion of essentialism in general in chapter 4. I learned a good deal from Feser's survey of analytic positions and his responses to them. To take one example, section 3.3.2.1, "Against four-dimensionalism", presented a position I knew about but frankly had not taken seriously since I was a teenager, and broke down the reasons not to take it seriously in a way I wasn't familiar with (as I said in part I of my review, my familiarity with the state of the art in contemporary metaphysics is limited). I particularly approve of the way Feser frequently appeals to retorsion arguments, which I think are underdeployed against stupid philosophies.

There is, then, a lot that's good in the book. There's also plenty I think is less good. One general observation is a tendency throughout to present the Thomist position on a topic while putting off actually arguing for it. Over and over again the reader encounters remarks to the effect that "my position is this, but the reasons for it depend on something I'm going to say in a later chapter"; this gives the impression of getting the run-around, as though the good deep arguments are always just around the corner. I emphasize that Feser does not always do this; but he does it enough for it to be frustrating.

Sometimes the arguments are not put off, they're simply omitted. The Thomist doctrine is instead handed to the reader on a plate without justification. An early glaring example is section 1.1.3, "Divisions of act and potency". Feser writes on page 38, "Given the distinction between act and potency, quite a few sub-distinctions can be made and commonly are made by Scholastic writers." He then spends the next few pages unloading a boatload of distinctions on the reader without bothering to establish the reality of any of them or show that they are more than ad hoc. I'm not saying it can't be done, Feser doesn't do it and I have a hard time seeing how anyone who doesn't already consider his traditional conceptual apparatus as authoritative is going to be motivated to absorb it.

In my opinion there are also some structural problems. For instance, in my opinion the treatment of causality is pretty seriously defective. Anyone who's read much Feser knows that one of his biggest concerns is to defend the reality of final causality against reductionists who want to eliminate all but efficient causality. This is a project I am fully on board with. Unfortunately this concern leads him to begin his discussion of causality with final vs efficient causes, which is a misstep. Material and formal causality are put off until the following chapter, under the discussion of substance. The result is that the nature and force of the reasons for accepting the reality of final causality always remain somewhat obscure, because final causality is unintelligible without formal causality. Feser is quite right to bemoan the elimination of final causality by the moderns, but why did they do it? Because they eliminated formal causality first, as the most casual reading of, say, Hume (the early modern Feser devotes the most time to, with good reason) will confirm. A huge part of the revolution in modern philosophy and science was to replace the total formal cause of a thing with that dimension of it which is subject to mathematical formalization, and, as Aristotle pointed out, mathematical objects precisely as such prescind from the good and the end. Reducing form to quantity wipes out the notion of finality. The proper way to get back to final causality is to reinstate the robust notion of form; and this is, by the way, the order the causes are treated in in the standard neo-Thomist manuals I'm familiar with. In taking things backwards I think the clarity and rigor of Feser's exposition suffers.

Now let's look at some of the book's content from a specifically Scotist perspective. Consider 1.3.1, "The Scholastic theory of distinctions". Feser gives the definitions of real vs logical distinctions. A real distinction "reflects a difference in extra-mental reality" and a logical distinction "reflects only a difference in ways of thinking about extra-mental reality". He then subdivides logical distinctions into pure and virtual. A purely logical distinction is merely verbal while a virtual distinction "has some foundation in reality". And so on. It's Thomist boilerplate. As expected, then, when Feser presents Scotus' formal distinction, he gives it short shrift. According to Feser, to take his example, rationality and animality in man are virtually distinct. This is a logical distinction because the two are not separable and not really distinct in the thing, and so are really identical. Feser says that a virtual distinction "may appear at first glance to be hard to distinguish from a real distinction. But the key to understanding the difference between any logical distinction and a real one is this: IF the intellect's activity is essential to making sense of a distinction, it is logical; if not, it is real." Good. But the whole point of the formal distinction is that it picks out realities which are inseparable in the thing but are distinct aside from the activity of the intellect considering it; that's why Scotists say that it is a distinction ex parte rei or ex natura rei and deny that it's a logical distinction: because according to them, rationality and animality in Socrates are really not identical in Socrates, even before anyone thinks of them, and even though they are inseparably united in him.

Feser says that it's hard to see how the formal distinction can avoid collapsing into either a real distinction or a virtual or logical distinction. The short answer to this is that Thomists play a shell game with the notion of real distinctions: sometimes they act as though separability is an obvious criterion and sometimes as if it isn't. The Scotist position is that a fully real distinction in general is one to which the separability criterion applies (with a very few special exceptions), and that the formal distinction is a species of lesser real distinction to which the separability criterion does not apply. It's not a virtual or logical distinction because, to take Feser's example, animality and rationality are really non-identical prior to and aside from any consideration of the intellect. It's not a "fully" real distinction because Socrates is one animal and is one rational thing, and both of those are one real thing, not two. You can't separate the animal and the rational thing in Socrates the way you could separate his arms from his trunk or his substance from one of his accidents (say, his location).

Feser's account of the formal distinction doesn't address this sort of consideration. Instead it begs the question, and avoids the fact that the various varieties of virtual distinction he lays out were formulated by Thomists specifically in order to jimmy out of admitting the formal distinction as a lesser variety of real distinction, because to do so would threaten other areas of Thomist metaphysics. Feser writes, "For either the intellect plays some role in the distinction or not." The Scotist replies that it does not play a role in making the formaliter distincta, the things which the formal distinction distinguishes, distinct; but it does play a role in how we articulate the distinction, since we typically distinguish formalities by their formal ratios or definitions, i.e. by their formal contents with reference to whether they can be defined and thus apprehended independently of each other. The non-identity of inseparably united formalities is identified by our ability to conceive them independently, not constituted by it.

According to Feser, "Whereas if they are distinct because the intellect separates out the [formalities] ... then we have a logical distinction with a foundation in reality, namely a virtual distinction. There just doesn't seem to be some third, 'formal' distinction." Again this is question-begging, for it is precisely this Thomist tendency to handwave away the "foundation in reality" without explaining it that leaves them unable or unwilling to account for formalities - not incidentally, since the motivation for all this is the Thomist commitment to preserve the unicity and simplicity of all forms. The Scotist insight that really disturbs Thomists is not the formal distinction itself but what it's there to cope with, the layers of a kind of ontological complexity in even "simple" beings. Feser suggests that perhaps the Thomist and Scotist theories differ primarily in emphasis: "Scotus, on this interpretation, is merely concerned to emphasize ... the fact that virtual distinctions are grounded in mind-independent 'formalities'". If the dispute is really about terminology and you prefer "virtual" to "formal, there's no real argument. But it isn't. The whole question is: is fA distinct from fB when inseparably united in x even when we're not thinking of it? In x, does fA=fB? We say no, that when either a) I can define them independently, showing that they have nonidentical formal content, or b) when I can show that A and B even if they can't be separated in x can exist independently of each other in y and z, then this indicates that even in x they are non-identical, distinct among themselves formally and not merely in how they can be considered by us, logically.

As I mentioned earlier, Thomists are unable to maintain the separability criterion for a real distinction (when, for instance, it comes to essence and existence), and they're happy to abandon it all over the place precisely in order to avoid endorsing the formal distinction where we think it obtains. Feser says on page 76, "If every real distinction entailed separability, then there would have to be some intermediate, 'formal' distinction between a real distinction and virtual distinction; but there is no such distinction, since the formal distinction collapses on analysis into either a real distinction or a virtual distinction; so not every real distinction entrails separability." I hope it's clear by this point that this is arguing in a circle. I could just as easily respond: since a real distinction entails separability, and A and B are distinct aside from any operation of the intellect, therefore we must accept some distinction besides real and logical or virtual ones.

The argument Feser takes from Oderberg on the same page doesn't help him, since it confuses properties in the sense of predicates with properties in the sense of real ontological items. Oderberg argues that "there is obviously a real distinction between the properties having a radius and having a circumference" but that having a radius can never exist in a circle without having a circumference. But "having a radius" etc is not a real being in the sense that the radius is. In a given circle the circumference and the radius have a necessary ratio to one another, but as two lines they are really distinct: I can draw the circumference but not draw the radius, and vice versa. In a circle in which the circumference but not the radius is drawn you might say that the radius has a virtual existence in the circle, since its length is necessarily determined whether it's drawn or not (Scotists talk about virtual distinctions in a different sense than the Thomist one Feser gives here: for instance, to describe the way an effect exists in its cause). But they are really distinct: one can actually exist without the other. And they are formally distinct: they have different essential properties: the circumference is necessarily curved and the radius is necessarily straight, etc.

Now some of these disagreements are merely terminological and some involve obfuscation or misunderstanding. Feser sometimes sounds like they would evaporate if the formal distinction is "really" a real distinction, and sometimes that they would do so if it is "really" a logical or virtual one. This waffling itself suggests some Thomist blurring over for the sake of simplicity. Feser does not seem to consider the position that the formal distinction is diminished variety of real distinction, one in which the distincta can remain ontologically inseparable and so not really distinct in the fullest and most perfect sense.

Clearly to go on like this and show every place in Feser's book where he handwaves away non-Thomistic scholastic alternatives to his position without really giving them a hearing would require a book-length commentary, and I'm not going to do that. Suffice it to say that whether or not you accepts the formal distinction has a huge ramification on the rest of your metaphysics, and all of those areas are dismissed with cavalier breeziness in Feser's book without exception. If I were so inclined I could write at length about my problems with his presentation of the notion of substance, the unicity of form, individuation, the nature of matter, and so on - not simply that he presents a view controversial among scholastics as "the Scholastic position", but also that other positions are grossly mis- or under-represented to the extent that it would be better not to mention them at all than present a caricature. But I'll confine myself to one more example, the crown jewel of Thomist metaphysics, the "real distinction" between essence and existence.

Feser says on page 241, talking about the distinction "commonly drawn in Scholastic metaphysics" between essence and existence, that "Considered by itself, a contingent thing's essence is taken to be a kind of potency, and its existence a kind of actuality." It's important to note, and Feser seems to have no inkling of the fact, that in actual scholasticism this claim in incredibly controversial. Anyone conversant with the "A" side of so-called "A-T" should know that for Aristotle, form is actuality and the essence of a thing is (or includes) its form. Form is the act of which matter is the potency, and saying that the essence is in potency to existence struck many scholastics wrongheaded and as a basic confusion of the role of form in the constitution of a substance. The essence is not like a quasi-matter waiting around to be actualized by existence in a quasi-formal role. Aquinas' doctrine that on one level the essence is the actuality of a substance, while on another level it is a potency to another really distinct actuality, existence, was deeply troubling to many, perhaps most, non-Thomist scholastics. They argued that it reduces existence to a kind of quasi-accident of the form and reified the abstracted essence which, apart from its existence, isn't really in potency to anything. Suffice it to say that a Scotist would distinguish between possibility and potency, and say that an essence considered as abstracted from its existence is a possible, but not that it has potency, since whatever has no existence has no real being, and whatever is in potency to further actualization is real being and something that exists. The whole Thomistic presumption that essence and existence are related as potency and act and analogously as matter to form is very widely rejected in the broader scholastic tradition.

Feser casually lumps Scotus and Suarez together as rejectors of the "real distinction" and says that "in Scotus' view it is merely a formal distinction", since for Scotus potency and act are only formally distinct. He claims this several times throughout the book but never gives a reference for the claim. In fact Scotists do not regard the distinction between act and potency, or between essence and existence, as formal distinctions, for the obvious reason that neither act nor potency nor existence precisely as such can in any sense be considered formalities. The distinctions that obtain between these items are modal distinctions, but of course the whole notion of intrinsic modes (another sort of ex parte rei distinction other than a real or logical distinction), a central pillar of Scotist and thus of vast swaths of scholastic metaphysics, is entirely ignored in Feser's book. But never mind that. The point at present is that the very presumption that the relation of essence and existence is obviously an instance of the relation of potency to act, (where potency and act are distinct modes of really existing being) is suspect from the default scholastic point of view - i.e. starting on a basis of Aristotelianism - and needs at least to be justified and objections to it dealt with. But the only such objections Feser gives are those from analytic philosophers, making it a case of analytic philosophy vs scholasticism, rather than what it really is, an issue in scholastic philosophy with many possible resolutions. Neither scholasticism nor Thomism nor their engagement with modern thought is served by the pretense that the Thomistic position is the obvious default one from within a scholastic framework - it isn't. And frankly, I wonder whether analytic philosophers might not be more inclined to give scholastics a hearing if they were ever told that some of their objections to Thomism, or analogues to them, had been anticipated from within his own tradition, rather than being presented with what seems to be more or less a monolith of thought.

This is only the barest thumbnail sketch of an enormous topic. (I dealt with essence and existence and how differing conceptions of them play out in different fields at much greater length in my doctoral dissertation, if anyone cares to look that up - it's available on this blog.) I'm going to end this review by repeating that Feser's book has much to commend it, but many defects as a presentation of scholastic metaphysics as such. He makes very little attempt to even acknowledge alternative possible viewpoints within his own tradition, and when he does he makes very little attempt to get them right, instead presenting the most airy caricatures in order to blow them away with the merest breath. The most disappointing thing about this is that this is exactly what he frequently complains of contemporary philosophers doing to scholastic (i.e. Thomist) views. For example, a very recent post showed Feser complaining of the casual dismissal of the cosmological argument by philosophers who clearly had no idea what they were talking about, an all-too-common phenomenon. Sadly I see Feser and nearly all Thomists doing the exact same thing to their closest philosophical relatives, casually dismissing non-Thomist arguments and positions while making it abundantly clear that he hasn't bothered to study them at all. If he wants to be given the courtesy of a hearing and the benefit of the doubt by his enemies, who are both totally ignorant of Thomism and unwilling to consider the possibility that it has something to offer, perhaps he and other Thomists might extend the same courtesy to their friends.

Judging a book by what it doesn't cover - Reply to Feser

Dr Feser begins his response to the first part of my review of his recent book with a reference to the encyclical Aeterni Patris. My only reply to this is to repeat the quote from Pius XI with which I headed my original post. For those without Latin it translates, "nor should anyone be prohibited from following that opinion which seems more to true to him in those matters about which the more noteworthy authors in the Catholic Schools are accustomed to debate." Pius XI was concerned, like all the recent popes, to promote and extoll Thomism, but already in his day there was a tendency on the part of Thomists to claim that because of this official endorsement that Thomism was, in Feser's words, "normative for Scholastic thinking more generally". And that is not the case, however much Thomists love to claim that it is.

So far my entire objection to Feser's book has been that it claims to be an introduction to scholastic metaphysics when really it's an introduction to Thomist metaphysics. There's nothing wrong with this; there are lots of other such introductions; it's perfectly legitimate to write another one aimed specifically at an engagement with contemporary analytic thought. But Feser wants to say he's writing an introduction to scholastic metaphysics. Contrary to his impression, that word has a meaning, and it's not "Thomism." In the second sentence of his book he grants that scholasticism is "that tradition of thought" which includes not only Aquinas and his followers but also such "luminaries" as Scotus, Ockham, Suarez, etc. But that tradition of thought, the one that includes Scotus etc., is most emphatically not Thomism. This should be too obvious to insist on, but here we are.

In the decades after Leo’s encyclical appeared, the Neo-Scholastic movement sought to implement his program. One key feature of this movement was that its representatives tended to treat Thomism as normative for Scholastic thinking more generally.

This is true, but deplorable. The best way to understand the Church's endorsement of Thomism is in the context of St JPII's Fides et Ratio: Thomism in general and the works of Aquinas particularly are models of how philosophical theology and philosophy informed by the Christian experience should be done. They are not normative as regards specific positions and arguments.

Another key feature was that the Neo-Scholastics were keen to emphasize that Scholasticism is not a museum piece but a living tradition that offers a serious response to modern assumptions in philosophy. Accordingly, the emphasis in Neo-Scholastic works was not on historical scholarship but rather on articulation of the structure of the Scholastic system and application to contemporary problems.

This is good and I said as much already in my original post. One recent example of this kind of work from a Scotist perspective is Antoine Vos' book on Scotus' philosophy, which is both informed by the best current historical scholarship and also intent on engaging modern analytic thought. It seems Feser has never heard of it.


These tendencies by no means reflected a blind submission to papal authority.

As a matter of fact Thomists have been trying for over a century now to co-opt papal authority to endow Thomist philosophical arguments with quasi-dogmatic status, saving them the trouble of understanding or engaging with alternative views and replacing argument with triumphalism. I don't accuse Feser himself of this, but its truth in general will be obvious to anyone acquainted with Catholic philosophy circles.

The Neo-Scholastics had arguments for the view that Scholastic, and in particular Thomistic, positions were superior to those of the modern systems of thought (rationalist, empiricist, idealist, etc.) that had supplanted Scholasticism.

I agree with these arguments.

And they had arguments for the view that the departures from Thomism represented by writers like Scotus, Ockham, and Suarez were often harmful to the integrity of the Scholastic system, and inadvertently contributed to the dissolution of the Scholastic synthesis and rise of the modern systems.

Here's the problem. To represent the thought of Scotus, Ockham, etc., as "departures from Thomism" is total bunk. It assumes that Thomism is normative and the default position without having to do any work to establish it. In my pretty wide experience it's a good bet that anyone who thinks this way has not made any serious effort to read and understand any non-Thomistic scholastics on their own terms. This includes big names like Jacques Maritain and Edward Feser. Thomists with wider learning and a more realistic perspective, like Gilson, don't (at least always) talk like this. (Look at Gilson's book on Bonaventure, in which he goes out of his way to emphasize that Thomism and Bonaventureanism have metaphysics which are irreducible to each other, and that you can't read legitimately read Bonaventure as anticipation or incomplete stage on the way to Thomas. Gilson also had to revise his views on Scotism as a critique and departure from Thomism once he learned something about the actual sources of Scotus' views. Hint: Scotus was usually not even thinking of Aquinas at all.) They know that, even if they think that Thomism is superior to its competitors, the latter can't be reduced to a poor version of the former. Scotus is not a "departure" from Aquinas in any sense unless you already know that Thomism is the default standard by which all other thinkers are to be judged. But the only way that Thomists establish that is on the basis of papal authority. They certainly don't do it by diligently studying the other scholastics on their own terms and concluding that Aquinas is the rule from which the others are departures. Show me a died-in-the-wool Thomist alive today who has done so and I'll eat my hat.

It is not written for historians of philosophy, or for Latinists, or for those who are interested in the minutiae of intra-Scholastic debate over the centuries.

If you wrote a book about German phenomenology and failed in your extensive bibliography to cite a single book actually written in German and I noticed it, would you respond "I didn't write it for Germanic philologists"? I'm not a Latinist. I learned Latin specifically to study scholastic metaphysics. (I've since expanded my Latin reading in a lot of other directions, but that's neither here nor there.) Because almost all, and all of the best, scholastic metaphysics is in Latin. I'm not a historian. What I've learned of the history of philosophy has been in the service of trying to understand philosophical issues better.

So, if you are the sort of anal retentive academic historian of philosophy who thinks that (say) a definitive history of the early 14th century dispute over universals must be written before we can begin tentatively to think about gesturing towards a recovery of the point of view from which the question of contemporary application might someday be asked… well, my book is not for you.

If one criticizes Feser one must expect a dose of the patented Feser polemics so I won't get too irritated by "anal retentive", which is insulting for no reason, or "academic historian of philosophy", which is inaccurate (my doctorate is in philosophy, period). I will note though that I didn't ask for anything like what Feser suggests. I specifically said that a historical treatment was unnecessary. What I want, in a book dealing with scholastic metaphysics and universals, is an acknowledgment that there is no such thing as "the" scholastic position on universals (or a ton of other issues where Feser makes similar statements), because scholasticism is not Thomism and is not a philosophical system. Ockham is as scholastic as Thomas. Ockham is a nominalist. Therefore, Ockham's nominalist position on universals is a scholastic one. So there are at least two viable very distinct scholastic positions on universals. Why do we only get arguments for one? Because Feser's not writing an introduction to scholastic metaphysics, he's writing an introduction to Thomistic metaphysics.

Sullivan says that my book is not “scholarly.” By that he means that it does not emphasize primary sources, does not cite works in the original languages, is not historically comprehensive, etc.

I'm not going to have a debate about whether Feser's book is a scholarly one in general, because I've pointedly stated that I don't care and that's not where my complaint is coming from. I've been accused in the past of having an overly-rigorous standard of scholarship, which might be fair enough. I will, however, note that if you profess to discuss a thinker's views multiple times but give no evidence of having read any of that thinker's relevant works, or of having any acquaintance with the basic relevant secondary literature, your scholarship in that area might be questioned.

With the last three paragraphs of Feser's response I agree without reservation. There does indeed need to be more philosophy, not merely historical work, from those of us who admire and learn from the non-Thomistic scholastics. The reasons for its lack are manifold and due to a number of intersecting factors: not least the fact that there are so few of us. In any case I hereby offer to provide as an ongoing service on The Smithy an "ask a scholastic" feature to anyone with a question about metaphysics who wants to get a non-Thomist perspective. Something like this took place quite a while back on the subject of Intelligent Design and it turned out, as I recall, that Dr Feser and I were in almost total agreement, but not for entirely the same reasons.

This whole exchange so far has been about the legitimacy of the Thomistic appropriation of the term "scholastic". That's all well and good but it's not philosophy. In my next post I'll actually address some of the content of Feser's book. A final note: Feser remarks in his response that he thinks I'm a friend of his blog. That's true. I have plenty of both respect and friendly feelings for Feser and his work, despite my reservations and complaints and despite the polemical tone of the exchange. We're all on the same side in the gigantomachia, and if our alliance carries a certain amount of spirited acrimony, that's only because, though we love our friends, we love the truth more.