In keeping with his usual practice, Feser writes in an entertaining and accessible style, but this time around he uses it to defend his own philosophical formulations (five formal proofs, each with clearly numbered steps), rather than to defend the best academic interpretations of others (Aristotle and Aquinas), as he did in previous books.įeser defends the traditional view that we can know the fact of God’s existence. i With his new book, Five Proofs of the Existence of God, Edward Feser continues his unfashionable but rigorous quest for the truth about the way things are in relation to God. It thereby serves as a refutation both of atheism and of the fideism that gives aid and comfort to atheism.Saint Thomas Aquinas, in one of his commentaries on Aristotle, remarked that “the study of philosophy has as its purpose not to know what people have thought, but rather the truth about the way things are”. Its aim is to vindicate the view of the greatest philosophers of the past- thinkers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz, and many others- that the existence of God can be established with certainty by way of purely rational arguments. This work provides as ambitious and complete a defense of traditional natural theology as is currently in print. Finally, it answers at length all of the objections that have been leveled against these proofs. It also offers a thorough treatment of each of the key divine attributes-unity, simplicity, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, and so forth-showing that they must be possessed by the God whose existence is demonstrated by the proofs.
This book provides a detailed, updated exposition and defense of five of the historically most important (but in recent years largely neglected) philosophical proofs of God's existence: the Aristotelian, the Neo-Platonic, the Augustinian, the Thomistic, and the Rationalist.
0 kommentar(er)
