The Engaged Thomist

Joe Schmid of Majesty of Reason released a three-thousand subscriber special Q&A video on his channel a few months ago, and one of the questions he was asked revolved around a possible way that a naturalist could avoid skepticism while also not being committed to the Pruss-Koons PSR. For those who don’t know, the Pruss-Koons PSR states that all natural facts, where natural means bounded or limited, have explanations; Pruss and Koons have a phenomenal paper where they provide powerful reason for thinking that a denial of their PSR entails global skepticism (see here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11098-020-01482-3 ). In the Q&A, Joe goes over two possible ways a naturalist could avoid this skepticism whilst remaining not committed to the Pruss-Koons PSR (see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0QRtp07TbQ&t=9906s - the relevant section is at 2:43:35). In the paper, and in Koons’ discussion with Oppy, they argue that if one denies their PSR they have no reason...

There was a phenomenal discussion on Majesty of Reason between Joe Schmid and Trenton Merricks on existence and ontological monism (see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhSnuXDkswI&t=15s ). Specifically, they discussed Merricks’ 2019 paper: “The Only Way to Be” (see here: https://philpapers.org/archive/MERTOW.pdf ). The paper is very interesting and Merricks lays out some, common, criticism of ontological pluralism and I would like to respond to a few of these points. There was a great response to Merrick’s paper by Byron Simmons, but I would like to respond from a Thomistic perspective. I would still recommend Simmons’ paper, though, as it gives a good summary of the response that many contemporary ontological pluralists give to common critiques of their view (see here: https://philpapers.org/archive/SIMOPA-2.pdf ).  One of the main things that Merricks’ brings up in his paper is a, supposed, dilemma for pluralists: either pluralists accept 1. that pluralists accept gener...

I recently re-watched an interesting debate on the morality of homosexual acts on the phenomenal philosophy channel Majesty of Reason (see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPen831EkYg&t=1971s ). There were good points that were brought up on both sides of the discussion and I would not like to discuss whether homosexual acts are immoral or not, but I would rather like to address two points brought up by Dustin Crummett on intrinsic teleology. In the discussion, Crummett objected that: 1. intrinsic teleology doesn’t exist and 2. that most contemporary philosophers don’t believe that intrinsic teleology exists. I would like to address the second point first. After I watched the debate for the first time, several months ago, I emailed Rob Koons to see if intrinsic teleology was as unpopular among contemporary philosophers as Crummett made it seem. Here is the email exchange I shared with Koons:  Dear Dr. Koons,   I hope you are doing well.    I recently watched...