Quotes from Edward Feser

First, as I have said, the distinction between natural science and the philosophy of nature is not always observed in practice by either philosophers or scientists. Nor is it desirable that investigations in these areas be kept rigorously separate.

I have said that the philosophy of nature is concerned with the most general features of empirical and material reality. Other expositions written from an Aristotelian-Thomistic point of view often characterize the field instead as concerned with changeable reality (though some earlier writers do characterize it the way I have, e.g. Bittle 1941, p. 13).

And one way the Aristotelian philosopher of nature might defend the reality of change against his rivals is precisely by appealing to the nature of the material reality that both sides affirm, and arguing that it entails the possibility of change.

the moral views now associated in the secularist mind with superstition and ignorance in fact follow inexorably from a consistent application of the metaphysical ideas we've traced back through Aquinas and the other Scholastic thinkers to Plato and Aristotle, the very greatest of the Greek founders of the Western intellectual tradition.

on using the word "physics" in the older sense. So as to forestall misunderstandings of the sort in question, it is better to acquiesce to the modern usage of "physics" and apply instead the label "philosophy of nature" to those aspects of Aristotle's account of the nature of the physical world that are still defensible today (as most contemporary Aristotelians and Thomists in fact do).

philosophy of nature, albeit a rival to the Aristotelian philosophy of nature. Hence to characterize the very field of the philosophy of nature as essentially concerned with change might seem to beg the question in favor of the Aristotelian approach. Better to characterize it instead in terms of what both sides agree upon, viz. the existence of the empirical and material world.

Change just is the realization of some potentiality; or as Aquinas puts it, "motion is the actuality of a being in potency

its very nature, scientific investigation takes for granted such assumptions as that: there is a physical world existing independently of our minds; this world is characterized by various objective patterns and regularities; our senses are at least partially reliable sources of information about this world; there are objective laws of logic and mathematics that apply to the objective world outside our minds;

From a Thomistic point of view, Paley and Co. have sold their birthright for a mess of pottage; and while the Darwinians have been unquestionably thuggish and often dishonest in their critiques of the "Intelligent Design" movement, to the extent that ID proponents have followed Paley in trading in Aristotle for a basically mechanistic picture of the physical universe, they have been "asking for it.

at the end of the day, human beings are products of nature, and if humans have purposes, then at some level purposefulness must arise from nature and therefore be inherent in nature … Might purpose be a genuine property of nature right down to the cellular or even the subcellular level? (p. 121–2)

Wanda: But you think you're an intellectual, don't you, ape?  Otto:     Apes don't read philosophy.  Wanda: Yes, they do, Otto. They just don't understand it. A Fish Called Wanda (1988) One cannot help but think of A Fish Called Wanda when one reads Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion; or at least I can't.

uncaused cause, or to use Aristotle's famous expression, an Unmoved

Suppose you try to convince someone, even if only yourself, that change is an illusion. You work your way through each step until you or your listener is convinced. Yet that your mind entertains one premise after the other and finally reaches the conclusion is itself an instance o f the change the argument denies.

Compared to the way in which final causality has – in actual practice, if not in theory and rhetoric – maintained its grip on biological thinking, the Darwinian "revolution" is a trivial blip on the continued silent and unacknowledged hegemony of Aristotle.

science," for the Aristotelian, is an organized body of demonstrated truths concerning the things falling within some domain and their causes. Hence, not only physics, chemistry, biology, and the like, but also metaphysics, ethics, natural theology, and indeed the philosophy of nature itself (since, for the Aristotelian-Thomistic thinker, these fields of inquiry rest on rational arguments and analysis no less than physics, chemistry, etc. do) count as sciences.

current usage (which confines the application of the term "scientific" to claims that are empirically falsifiable) that to insist on it would be to invite needless confusion.

Better in most contexts (such as the present one) once again to acquiesce to standard contemporary usage and classify fields like metaphysics, ethics, natural theology, philosophy of nature, etc. as branches of philosophy rather than of "science.

Other potentially misleading terms include "cosmology" and "psychology." In

Progressivism is essentially about privatizing morality and socializing the costs of immorality, in such a way that big business can profit from the former and big government can profit from the latter.

As with the terms "physics" and "science," so too with terms like "cosmology" and "psychology," the wisest policy is, in my view, not to quibble about contemporary usage but rather to use the best modern labels, qualify them as one sees fit, and then to get on with matters of substance.

I have indicated, the most fundamental concepts of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy of nature (the theory of actuality and potentiality, hylemorphism, and so forth) overlap with those of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics.

What is the epistemology of the philosophy of nature itself? Is it an a priori discipline the way that mathematics and metaphysics are often claimed to be? Or are its claims subject to empirical falsification the way that those of natural science typically are? These

The emphasis in philosophy of nature is always on metaphysical questions, whereas the accent in the philosophy of science (at least where it isn't essentially just philosophy of nature under another name) is on epistemological and methodological issues.

Even those modern secularists and liberals who hate the metaphysics illustrated by Plato's allegory of the cave thrill to the idea that the common man is in the grip of illusion and ought to be ruled by philosopher-kings, even if their idea of a philosopher-king would have filled Plato with abject horror.