Review of Gray etc.

Readers of the Claremont Review of Books may want to look for my review of John Gray’s book The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Mythsin the Spring 2014 issue.  At the moment the review is behind a pay wall, but subscribing will fix that problem.

On another matter, readers keep asking me how to get hold of Scholastic Metaphysics, which was released on April 1, somewhat ahead of schedule.  Apparently the book sold out very quickly because supply could not meet all the pre-orders and Amazon has been out of stock for some time.  I have been told that a new shipment arrived at the U.S. distributor’s warehouse a week or so ago and that the book should once again be available from Amazon this week.  So, sit tight, and many, many thanks for your patience and interest.

While you’re waiting, you could always pick up a copy of my book Locke, which, as I recently learned, Prof. Joseph Pappin III very kindly reviews in Vol. 22 of the journal Studies in Burke and His Time.  Readers wanting to understand how modern philosophy moved away from what once was the Aristotelian-Scholastic mainstream will find the book of interest.  From Pappin’s review:

Edward Feser’s Locke is not only an outstanding introduction to the full range of John Locke’s philosophy, it is also a penetrating interpretive work, presented with clarity and conciseness.  One of its strengths is stated by Feser in Chapter One: “Locke straddles the medieval and post-modern worlds, the age of faith and the age of skepticism and secularism.”  Feser’s book is in large part framed by this tension he finds in Locke’s corpus.

Locke is divided into six distinct chapters, with individual chapters of considerable length devoted to the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and another on the Second Treatise of Government.  Preceding these chapters is a sustained examination of the Aristotelian-Scholastic background to Locke’s thought while setting before the reader “The Lockean Project” … Feser justifies this approach “because,” as he declares, “nothing less would serve as an appropriate introduction to the intellectual background against which Locke was reacting”…

This reviewer highly recommends Feser’s tome as an ideal introduction… [and] successful interpretation of the strengths and inherent weaknesses of the “Lockean project.”