Edward Feser

Background

Edward Feser (b. 1968) is an American philosopher and Catholic apologist, professor of philosophy at Pasadena City College, and the most prominent contemporary popular expositor of classical Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics and natural theology in analytic philosophy of religion. Once an atheist (as he recounts in The Last Superstition), Feser re-embraced classical theism through engagement with the scholastic tradition and has since written both academic works (Scholastic Metaphysics) and accessible apologetic volumes (Five Proofs of the Existence of God).

Feser's scholarly style is polemical in the best sense: he argues that the classical cosmological arguments (Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic, Augustinian, Thomistic, Rationalist) are widely misunderstood and have been prematurely dismissed, and he restates them in contemporary vocabulary with the technical apparatus of act-potency, essence-existence, and per-se-causal-series metaphysics intact.

Positions held in this wiki

• The Kalam Cosmological Argument — Feser is cited as the contemporary Thomist who, following Aquinas' Second and Third Ways, argues for a per se cosmological conclusion that does not require a finite past.

Key works in our corpus

Corpus gap: None of Feser's primary works are currently ingested. The most important works for this wiki's cross-reference integrity would be: - Five Proofs of the Existence of God (2017) — systematically restates the Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic, Augustinian, Thomistic, and Rationalist arguments. - Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (2014) — the technical apparatus on which the five proofs draw. - Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide (2009) — accessible introduction to the Thomistic natural-theology program.

See meta/ingestion-queue.md for the acquisition request.

Principal critics

• David Hume — the philosophical ancestor of critiques of causal and necessary-being arguments, which apply (in modified form) to the Thomistic arguments Feser defends.
• Graham Oppy — contemporary Australian naturalist philosopher; has engaged Feser directly on classical-theism arguments (not in corpus).

See also

• Thomas Aquinas — the master whose arguments Feser reconstructs.
• William Lane Craig — the contemporary evidentialist co-belligerent whose kalām argument Feser has criticized as philosophically weaker than the Thomistic alternative.