7/23/2017 Edward Feser: Mad dogs and eliminativists

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Edward Feser
"One of the best contemporary writers on philosophy" National Review

"A terrific writer" Damian Thompson, Daily Telegraph

"Feser... has the rare and enviable gift of making philosophical argument compulsively readable" Sir Anthony
Kenny, Times Literary Supplement

Selected for the First Things list of the 50 Best Blogs of 2010 (November 19, 2010)

W E D N E S D A Y, A U G U S T 2 1 , 2 0 1 3 About Me

Mad dogs and eliminativists Edward Feser

I am a writer and philosopher

living in Los Angeles. I teach
philosophy at Pasadena City
College. My primary academic
research interests are in the
philosophy of mind, moral and
political philosophy, and
philosophy of religion. I also write
on politics, from a conservative
point of view; and on religion,
from a traditional Roman Catholic
perspective.
As an epilogue to my critique of Alex Rosenbergs paper
View my complete profile
Eliminativism without Tears, lets take a brief look at Rosenbergs
recent interview at 3:AM Magazine. The interviewer styles Rosenberg
the mad dog naturalist. So perhaps in his bid to popularize
eliminative materialism, Rosenberg could put out a Weird Al style
parody of the old Nol Coward song. Or maybe he and fellow Followers
eliminativist Paul Churchland could do a re-make of ZZ Tops classic
Eliminator album. Dont know if theyre sharp-dressed men, but
theyve got the beards. (I can see the video now: The guys, electric
guitars swaying in unison and perhaps assisted by Pat Churchland in a
big 80s hairdo, set straight some benighted young grad student who
still thinks the propositional attitudes are worth salvaging. Romance
ensues, as does a job at a Leiter-ranked philosophy department)

Two passages in the interview call for special notice. The interviewer
notes that in the rather heated response to Jerry Fodors
provocations about natural selection your response was one of the
few that recognized that he was onto something. Rosenberg replies:

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7/23/2017 Edward Feser: Mad dogs and eliminativists

When Fodor argued that natural selection cant see properties, and Followers (673) Next
cant produce organic systems, for example brainsthat respond to,
represent, register properties, he thought he was providing a
reduction [sic] ad absurdum of Darwinian theory I believe that
Fodors attempted reductio of Darwinian theory is a modus tollens of
representationalist theories of the mind, theories that accord to the
wet stuff, to neural states what Searle calls original intentionality.
Its an argument for eliminativism about intentional content. So
Fodor is totally wrong abut [sic] Darwinian theory, but his argument
shows that we Darwinians (and all the physicists if I am right that
Darwins theory is just the 2d law in action among the
macromolecules) have to go eliminativist about the brain.

End quote. See Eliminativism without Tears for similar remarks Unfollow
about Fodor. This, my friends, is why Rosenberg gets paid the big
money: to see more clearly than either his fellow naturalists or most Main website
theists what is really at stake. Naturalists (such as many of Thomas
edwardfeser.com
Nagels critics) and ID theorists alike are endlessly farting around with
questions about the probability of this or that biological phenomenon
Books by Edward Feser
having arisen through natural selection, and other such relative
trivia. In the dispute over Darwinian naturalism, that is a side show By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A
at best. The serious questions are not empirical but metaphysical, Catholic Defense of Capital
matters of what is possible even in principle rather than of Punishment (with Joseph M.
probability. It is not what can be read off from the empirical results Bessette)
of science, but rather what has been read into them philosophically Neo-Scholastic Essays
from the start, that is both the source of naturalisms apparent
Scholastic Metaphysics: A
strength and in reality its Achilles heel. And that is the dogmatic
Contemporary Introduction
insistence that the natural order is utterly devoid of any immanent,
built-in, Aristotelian-style teleology, finality, or directedness toward Aristotle on Method and
an end. It is the ancient Greek atomist view of the world as a kind of Metaphysics
vast clockwork, of all observable phenomena as entirely explicable at Aquinas
least in principle in terms of aggregates of particles in motion or the The Last Superstition: A
like. Refutation of the New Atheism
Locke
Once you grant that supposition, even for the sake of argument, then
you have conceded the naturalists key move. He will always be able The Cambridge Companion to
to come up with some far-fetched but seemingly possible account of Hayek
the origin of any empirical phenomenon in these terms, the only Philosophy of Mind
remaining question being whether there is direct empirical evidence
On Nozick
that things actually happened as the account says they did. And once
youve conceded the general correctness of his method, the naturalist
Articles by Edward Feser available
will think even the most far-fetched and empirically unsupported
online
specific applications of that method are more plausible than any
alternative, on grounds of the general success of the method coupled Archive of TCS Daily articles
with Ockhams razor. The alternatives will always seem ad hoc, god- Archive of Public Discourse
of-the-gaps exceptions to the rule, destined to be superseded and articles
thus not worth bothering with in the first place. That is what the ID
Archive of National Review articles
theorist fails to see.
Archive of City Journal articles
Once you grant the supposition, though, you have also implicitly All other articles
committed yourself to a radical eliminativism. If there is no such
thing as teleology, finality, directedness, one thing pointing to Recommended philosophers'
another, etc. in the natural world in general, then there can be no websites
such thing in the biological realm specifically or in the human realm Alexander Bird
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7/23/2017 Edward Feser: Mad dogs and eliminativists

even more specifically. That means that the Darwinian naturalist has Alexander Hall
no business helping himself to notions like function, selection for,
Alexander Pruss
and the like. These are irreducibly teleological. Of course, many
naturalists suppose that such notions can be reduced to non- Alfred Freddoso
teleological ones, but as Fodor argued, they cannot be. All attempts Angus Menuge
to reduce them face intractable indeterminacy problems. The
Brian Davies
naturalist also has no business helping himself to notions like
thinking, willing (freely or otherwise), meaning (whether the Brian Leftow
meaning of thoughts, sentences, or anything else), etc. All such Christopher Brown
notions also smack of directedness toward an object, so that
Christopher Martin
intentionality must be as illusory as the naturalist says teleology is.
And all attempts to reduce rather than eliminate intentionality also Crawford Elder
face intractable indeterminacy problems, as Rosenberg notes. David Braine
Eliminativism is forced on you if you consistently deny teleology. This
David Oderberg
is what most naturalists fail to see.
David Stove
That leaves the naturalist with two choices. He can bring teleology David Twetten
back into the picture, which is what Nagel does -- essentially a
Dennis Des Chene
journey from Aristotle to Darwin and back again, as Etienne Gilson
prophetically put it. Or he can bite the eliminativist bullet, which is E. J. Lowe
what Rosenberg commends. The trouble with that is that it cannot Eleonore Stump
coherently be done. Since science is as laden with intentionality as
Francis Beckwith
anything else, you will have to eliminate the very science in the name
of which you are carrying out the elimination; and since philosophy Gyula Klima
(including eliminative materialist philosophy) is also as laden with Howard Robinson
intentionality as anything else, you will also have to eliminate
J. P. Moreland
eliminativism. Eliminativism is a snake that eats its own tail. The
problem can be danced around, but it cannot be solved, for the J. R. Lucas
reasons set out both in my recent posts on Rosenbergs essay and in James F. Ross
my series of posts on his book.
James Lennox

Not that the dummies who hang out in comboxes like Jerry Coynes or John Haldane
Jason Rosenhouses understand the gravity of the problem John Hawthorne
intentionality poses for their position, and thus the motivation for
Jonathan Sanford
Rosenbergs extreme solution. This brings us to a second passage
from the Rosenberg interview: Katherin Rogers
Kathrin Koslicki
What is clear to me about the reception of The Atheists Guide was
Kit Fine
first how hard it is to get nonphilosphers to understand the problem
of intentionality and aboutness, second how much harder to Lloyd Gerson
understand the eliminativist solution to the problem, and most all, Lydia McGrew
the degree to which our emotional attachment to narrativesstories
Mark Anderson
with plots, good guys, bad guys, agents with motivesgets in the way
of our understanding science and applying it to these persistent Michael Gorman
questions. Michael Pakaluk
Michael Rota
Now I know how Berkeley must have felt when Dr. Johnson refuted
him by kicking a stone, especially when I read the puerile self- Monte Ransome Johnson
refutation arguments against my eliminativism. Nancy Cartwright
Patrick Toner
Of course a few theists have identified The Atheists Guide to Reality
as correctly identifying the implications of demonic materialistic Paul Symington
naturalism. But I am actually surprised by how few have done so. Its Robert Koons
no tribute to the intelligence of the rest of them.

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7/23/2017 Edward Feser: Mad dogs and eliminativists

Roger Scruton
And of course naturalists have pretty much ignored the arguments Stephen Boulter
for the same reason. It gives naturalism a bad name with the public,
whom they hope to win over to a humane and civilized point of view. Stephen Mumford
I wish they had been able to succeed in reconciling science and the Timothy McGrew
manifest image. Maybe they yet will. I doubt it. Timothy Pawl

End quote. Note that, as we saw in our look at Eliminativism Travis Dumsday
without Tears, Rosenberg is well aware that not all versions of the Tuomas Tahko
self-refutation objection are puerile. Note also that if its no Walter Ott
tribute to the intelligence of those theists who have failed to see the
radical implications of naturalism, it is hardly a tribute to the William Jaworski
intelligence of most naturalists that they have also failed to see those William Lane Craig
implications. And note that if stories with plots, good guys, bad William Vallicella
guys, agents with motives and the like are all fictions -- as they have
to be on an eliminativist view -- then of course stories about bigoted Aristotelico-Thomism and Neo-
religious believers (the bad guys, agents with bad motives) retarding Scholasticism: Online resources
the advance of science (a story with a plot) and resisted by
Actus Essendi
intellectually honest naturalists (the good guys, agents with good
motives) are also all fictions. That Rosenberg either doesnt see or Alan Aversa's Aristotelian Thomism
doesnt want to advertise this implication hoists him with the same Page
petard he directs toward his more slow and/or intellectually dishonest Aristotelian philosophy of nature
readers.
Center for Thomistic Studies

And then theres this irony: The very scientism Rosenberg is pushing Centre for Thomistic Studies
is, of course, what has made many of his naturalist readers too (Australia)
philosophically shallow to see the problems to which he is trying to Classical Theism, Philosophy, and
call their attention. Religion Forum
Coalition for Thomism
Its a comeuppance worthy of a ZZ Top video!
In medias PHIL
Posted by Edward Feser at 2:11 PM
Institute for the Study of Nature
Ite ad Thomam
113 comments:
Leo Elders Home Page
Maritain Center online archive of
Anonymous August 21, 2013 at 4:20 PM Thomistic and Neo-Scholastic
works
"the dummies who hang out in comboxes like Jerry Coynes or Jason
Rosenhouses" -- seems a bit mean-spirited. Good post though. Mortimer J. Adler Archive

Reply Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange,

Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic
Thought

Edward Feser August 21, 2013 at 4:40 PM Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange: A

Biographical Sketch
Hang out for a while in either one and you'll think I was being too kind.
Resources on Aristotelian Thomism
Reply
Society for Aristotelian Studies
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa
Scott August 21, 2013 at 4:45 PM Contra Gentiles

I was about to remark that Ed's characterization was if anything over- St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa
charitable, but he beat me to it. Theologiae
Thomas Aquinas in English: A
Reply
Bibliography
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