There are two kinds of facts: normative and non-normative. Facts about how things should be, what is or is not properly functioning, what is right or wrong, what is healthy or not, and what is good or bad are normative. Facts about how things are or how they could be or statistically tend to be…

Neo-Aristotelianism is indeed resurgent in contemporary philosophy. The renaissance has been underway for at least fifty years, beginning with a new focus on classical metaphysical themes by Roderick Chisholm, David M. Armstrong, Alvin Plantinga, and Robert M. Adams. In the 1960’s and 70’s, these anglophone philosophers began digging themselves out of the rubble of logical…

My overall aim in this brief response to Paul Gould’s lead essay is to draw the reader’s attention to an area of contemporary moral philosophy—Neo-Aristotelian metaethics—that is ripe for rediscovery in the wake of the ongoing resurgence of Neo-Aristotelianism in metaphysics and philosophy of science. Sketching A Metaphysical Picture Let me begin with a thumbnail…

I am grateful to Professor Gould for his invitation to respond to his introductory remarks for this symposium. Professor Gould is especially interested in a framework for philosophical thought and a particular comprehension of nature, that, as he says, held sway for millenia. He refers to this as the “Neo-Aristotelian picture,” according to which “the…

Our conception of nature and the natural shapes our way of perceiving, thinking, and living. Let me explain. On the dominant way of conceiving the world and our place in it today, gifted to us by the Enlightenment thinker David Hume among others, the universe is like a clock—a mechanism—and is wholly composed of bits…

I am grateful to all the participants for their thoughtful comments on my book and to Hans Madueme for inviting me to participate in this symposium. Response to Jennifer Frey I appreciate Jennifer Frey’s careful summary of the main themes of the book, especially her emphasis on the distinction between univocal and analogical causality. Her…

Michael Dodds’s Unlocking Divine Action is an impressive and deeply learned attempt to deepen conversation about the relationship between divine action and scientific understanding of the natural world. Dodds claims, quite reasonably, (1) that important ways of understanding action and causation were lost in the transition from Aristotelian/Thomistic thought to what he calls “Newtonian science,”…

Michael Dodds’s proposal for understanding divine action is fundamentally analogical. It is based on an understanding of ex nihilo creation that also can only be expressed analogically. Because there are different orders or levels of reality, our language of creation in general and causation in particular must be able to stretch across such levels. Whether…

I am grateful for the opportunity to read and comment on Fr. Michael J. Dodds’s excellent work, Unlocking Divine Action. In the interest of space, I have been asked to confine my remarks to one or two areas of divine action discussed by Fr. Dodds. I have chosen, therefore, to focus on his use of…

While the stated topic of the book is divine action, the subtitle does a lot of work: Contemporary Science & Thomas Aquinas. Dodds believes that modern views of causality are impoverished, and that Aristotelian-Thomist metaphysics provides the remedy. While this is doubtful in my opinion, the mapping of medieval concepts to contemporary science should be…