The Logia

I’m in school again, and I am trying to decide what my focus should be. Metaphysics, natural theology, natural law, and political philosophy are my major interests. I want to take a common sense, Scholastic, and Christian approach to each of these fields. But it seems impossible to specialize in all of those fields. So I may drop natural theology just because there’s already a lot of work going into that. But that’s hard because I want to refute existential inertia, brute facts, and the so-called Gap problem. Maybe even offer arguments for the Trinity. I’d prefer not to drop metaphysics because I want to continue developing a Thomistic approach to Quantum Mechanics, offer a defense of prime matter, and defend essentialism. Then as far as natural law, I want to write a book called “A Meta-Ethical Case for Natural Law” where I evaluate every major realist theory of ethics and demonstrate how they must all assume that essence grounds goodness, which would show NL is superior. I also want to evaluate the role of intuitions and provide a defense of the perverted faculty argument. Less abstractly and more practically, I want to write a natural law approach to political philosophy where I offer a defense of classical conservatism and refute competing philosophies, especially those from the Left like John Rawls. Lastly, I want to do something like Descartes. In my opinion, his approach can be salvaged if we use Scholasticism. I’ll assume radical skepticism, show how that fails, return to common sense, demonstrate God’s existence, and then argue for the entire Scholastic foundation. But more than that, I want this to be a poetic, philosophical journey of wonder. Something like “The Consolations of Philosophy” except I’ll go from metaphysics, epistemology, natural law, natural theology, politics, and eventually Christianity itself. It’ll be an encapsulation of my thought process from beginning to end, where I’ll use philosophical + theological arguments to support it. It’ll be a long series. I’ll probably call it “Contemplations.” Anyways, I’m just daydreaming out loud here. Who knows if I’ll ever get to do any of this, or whether it’s even a good idea. Any thoughts? Or other avenues you think I should take?

This is some Sodom & Gomorrah type of depravity. Absolutely disgusting. What’s even worse? I saw a thread where people justified it. They said, “It’s just a movie. The only thing sexual is sex. You’re the ones making this sexual. Anyone who sees this as sexual are the real sickos. This is just an example of girls expressing themselves. It’s a normal thing for girls their age. They should be free to do what they want. If you shame them for this, you’re being sexist. And claiming that this caters to pedophiles is like claiming that adult females dressing “immodestly” are catering to rapists. Shut up. Leave these girls alone.” Words cannot express how furious this makes me. This is a reductio ad absurdum against Leftist sexual ethics. Their minds are absolute trash.

Character matters. No action is done in a void; it either flows out of one ‘s character, or helps to shape one’s character. This is why Jesus says, “For out of the heart come evil thoughts–murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.” (Matthew 15:18). This is why we can judge people’s character based on their actions (Matt 7:16), and we can predict people’s actions based on their character. It also helps us make prima facie judgments. If a kid was shot dead and you were told either Hitler or Mother Teresa did it, who would you think most likely did it? Well clearly Hitler. Legally, this isn’t sufficient to establish guilt (nor should it be) but it is evidence, albeit defeasible evidence. Further facts could reveal our character judgement to be false in a particular instance. Which makes sense because character does not *determine* action, it influences action. But to say character has no relevance at all, or that Teresa and Hitler are equals, would be absolutely foolish.

Thomists sometimes get flack for pointing out that their view is not understood, but for the most part it’s true. The analytic sees an “is-ought” problem but the Thomist sees oughtness laden into the very structure of existence. Moral oughtness is just a special instance. Our idea of physical objects is also radically different. We think that all physical objects are composed of matter and form (hylemorphism), which provides a far richer conception of the world than a mechanistic conception of matter. Qualia isn’t problematic for us. The interaction problem doesn’t exist because an immaterial principle is laden in all physical objects (substantial form). We understand the nature of morality, time, epistemology, etc in a way rather foreign to the modernist paradigm. Metaphysics is king for us. Finally, Thomism is an interlocking system with a rich array of concepts refined by centuries upon centuries of great thinkers. You can’t expect to fully understand the ideas in isolation. For this reason, most analytic philosophers do not want to put the time required to understand it. This is not to say that you can’t have some basic understanding of key concepts like act and potency, but the modernist paradigm can be a great obstacle on the road to full understanding. At the same time, there are quasi-essentialist leaks in the modernist paradigm that would lead to a more Thomistic understanding (e.g, possible world semantics or dispositions). There’s some great value in analytic philosophy. Nevertheless whenever someone says, “I understand Thomism well enough” and proceeds to give objection X, more often than not their objection shows that they do not understand it enough. There are good objections out there, and I’m not saying that if you disagree with it, you can’t possibly be understanding it. There was plenty of disagreement even among Scholastics precisely because the issues are so complex. Disagreement is not the issue. Rather, the issue is that unlike the Scholastics, most of the moderns just don’t have a proper understanding because they interpret it under their paradigm and often never studied it beyond a brief introduction.