Quotes from Edward Feser

And needless to say, smugness is half the fun of being a liberal (the other half being the tearing down of everything one's ancestors, and one's betters generally, worked so hard to build).

a distinction between events to motivate the claim that cause and effect might come apart.

Third, the intellect abstracts from even the quantitative features and considers only the most general ways in which a thing might be characterized Ã¢â'¬â€œ in terms of notions such as that of substance, attribute, essence, existence, etc.

Having redefined "success" as the achievement of dramatic technological progress and in general the manipulation of nature to achieve human ends, they essentially won a game the Scholastics were not trying to play in the first place.

First, the intellect abstracts from the individualizing features of concrete material things, but still considers them in terms of the sensible characteristics that they have in common.

Second, the intellect abstracts from even the common sensible features of things and considers only their quantitative features. Mathematics is the field of inquiry corresponding to this degree of abstraction.