Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Ed Feser tries to refute the idea that animals think, but all of his arguments rest on mistaking abstract thought for thought itself. But as idealists, beginning with Hegel and especially with the British Idealists, showed us, abstract thought is derivative and concrete thought is primary. We could not abstract anything from a world of "primary sensations" or "pure sense data" where such worlds are supposed to exclude thought and be an "I know not what." It is nonsense to suppose that we can start with something about which we have no idea what it is and "abstract" from that incomprehensibility to produce useful concepts! It is as though I told you, "Take a gwefr of qtywe, a cbshfd of qweet, and a tfbkdl of fqgksf, and tell me what they all have in common." (You might answer, "They are all nonsense," but this just shows you already understood each separate bit as nonsense.) Feser offers some arguments from Donald Davidson...

'I was dead wrong. There are two main problems with the idea of self-ownership -- the "self" part, and the "ownership" part.' -- Ed Feser Read the whole thing .

it's tough love. Ed Feser on why harsh rhetoric can be quite appropriate at times: Sometimes, "breaking the spell" of a powerful rhetorical illusion requires equal and opposite rhetorical force (if I can borrow Dennett’s phrase). When you treat an ignorant bully arguing in bad faith as if he were a serious thinker worthy to be engaged respectfully, you only reinforce his prestige and maintain the illusion that he might be onto something. You thereby make it easier for people to fall into the errors the bully is peddling.

I've begun reading Ed Feser's Aquinas , hoping to fill a lacuna in my philosophical education. Now Ed is a fine writer and a clear thinker, so I figure if anyone can sell me on the superiority of scholastic metaphysics over its rivals, it will be Ed. As is my recent practice, I plan to blog the book as I read it: this helps me to take notes for later, and hopefully will prove useful for somebody else as well! Now, let me open with a caveat here: it is early days in my contemplating the idea of potencies, and I may decide later I was just confused at present, but so far, despite Ed' protests to the contrary, he has done nothing to convince me that Molière was not correct: these Scholastic categories are explanations empty of any empirical content and also otiose. Consider this: Feser quotes Aquinas as saying "the form of numbness is in the eel which makes the hand numb" (p. 23). OK, this strikes me as: 1) Being exactly like the opium example that Molière mocked...

Ed responds to a blog post of mine here . In a seemingly common move by modern Aristotelians, he first plays the "but he doesn't really understand what we are saying" card. Well, no, Ed, I understood perfectly well that the issue was about qualia, about whether there is something it is like to be a plant. That being cleared up, let's get down to the empirical issues that we might use to judge whether there is something it is like to be a plant. Here, I believe the key issue is that much of the activity of plants does not look like activity to us, so that only careful scientific investigation reveals how active they actually are. For instance, Ed says: "Hence, imagine that dry grass could feel the oppressive heat of the sun or experience thirst and the craving for water. What would be the point? It would not be able to do anything about its circumstances and would thus, unlike an animal, suffer without being able even in principle to remedy the circumstan...