Edward Feser has responded to my blog-posts (on mythic history of science, on Nagel's abuse of the PSR, on naturalism in analytical philosophy) about Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos. His is a very long post, but makes for interesting Holiday reflections. (I hope to respond in depth when I return from holiday.)
For the Aristotelian-Scholastic philosopher, then, modern metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of religion, etc. are in the same shape that Alasdair MacIntyre famously argued modern ethics is in. In the former cases no less than the latter, crucial philosophical notions have been ripped from the intellectual contexts that gave them their intelligibility and have become distorted as a result, and the range of theoretical options visible to the modern philosopher has shrunk drastically. Nagel’s proposals are bound to seem odd and ill-motivated, not only because they are inchoate, but because fully to work out their implications would require a far more extensive rethinking of current orthodoxy than Nagel himself probably realizes. (That is no doubt one reason why his ideas are inchoate.) Questions about PSR, teleology, etc. cannot properly be understood if they are treated as mere add-ons to a basically naturalistic-cum-scientistic picture of knowledge and reality, which leave that picture essentially intact. The picture as a whole needs to be rethought if any part of it is seriously to be rethought...
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