Feser has done his homework. He is quite familiar with modern analytic philosophy along with other modern systems. He came to Aristotle and Aquinas, whom he knows well, from his realization of problems in the modern systems. Likewise, Feser is acquainted more than most with the various texts that were once profitably used in Catholic university and seminary philosophy departments but later abandoned during the last half century. Feser recognizes that these writers, who were perhaps not perfect, were often very good thinkers in their own right as well as familiar with the intellectual tradition of the West…
One of the pleasures of this book is that Feser is locked in argument with those who seek to explain reality but whose examination of it often leaves out something important. He is not afraid to say that an argument is “bogus” or “absurd” or “incoherent,” nor is he afraid to explain why. Feser says these things only after he shows the point that grounds his judgment…
In this sense, Feser’s book is quite the opposite of the “fuzziness” of the modern mind that claims that nothing is true or that all is relative…
[I]t is one of the most refreshing books I have come across in years. Who else is willing to make a case, to articulate in the name of scholasticism, a cohesive case, for teleology, analogy, prime matter, causality, substance, common sense, esse et essetia, and the validity of the mind’s knowing powers?
Feser is aware of many good philosophers who, like himself, are working their way through the modern mind. They discover, often surprising themselves, that their pursuit leads them to Aristotle, Aquinas, and the scholastic tradition. This tradition, newly reflected on, turns out, after having been downgraded by Catholic educators for decades, to be the newest thing on the block…
[Feser’s work] is a prime example of a quiet revolution that is taking place whereby the basics of the scholastic tradition are recovered and developed. Such scholars as Feser see that more needs to be said than modern thought or most Catholic thought has been willing to acknowledge…
In Feser’s little “manual,” we have the seeds of something great, the realization that, on philosophical grounds themselves, the scholastic tradition in the heritage of Aristotle and Aquinas is in fact the newest thing in academia.
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