What is Matter? | Prof. Edward Feser

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 25 February 2020

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This lecture was given at Cornell University on February 11, 2020.

For more events and info please visit thomisticinstitute.org/events-1.

Prof. Edward Feser is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College, and has also been a Visiting Assistant Professor at Loyola Marymount University. He received a PhD in philosophy from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is the author of books including Philosophy of Mind (A Beginner's Guide), The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, Aquinas (A Beginner's Guide), Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction, NeoScholastic Essays, Five Proofs for the Existence of God, and By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment. He blogs at edwardfeser.blogspot.com/

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Thank you so much for that introduction, Thomas, and thank you all for being here.
0:06.0	What Thomas failed to mention is that most of the laughter raised by my book, Aristotle's Revenge, has been laughing at the book rather than,
0:13.0	I hope I'm joking.
0:16.0	Just because it's not funny doesn't mean it wasn't a joke.
0:18.0	Just a courtesy chuckle would be.
0:24.6	So the title of my talk, the main title is What Is Matter? I thought of giving an acute title like, what's the matter?
0:27.6	And I realized that first of all, that would be kind of lame, and second of all,
0:31.6	it might draw a totally different audience.
0:32.6	People would come expecting a self-help lecture or pop psychology lecture or something.
0:36.6	So I just stuck with the boring old what is matter.
0:40.1	And it's worth commenting a little bit on my subtitle from Aristotle to quantum mechanics
0:43.7	and back again because to give credit where it's due, that's an homage to a book by, not
0:48.8	one of his better known books, but still an important book by Etienne Gelsone, 20th
0:52.9	Century Thomist, who wrote a book with
0:55.0	the title from Aristotle to Darwin and back again, by which he tried to show that there was
0:59.9	more continuity between the Aristotelian way of thinking about biology and the modern way
1:04.1	of thinking about it than people often realize.
1:05.8	So what I'm trying to do is something similar, but in this case, in the context of physics
1:10.6	and especially quantum mechanics rather than biology. case, in the context of physics and especially
1:11.4	quantum mechanics, rather than biology. So that's the source of that subtitle. That's, I've got to
1:16.2	give credit to Jill Sohn. Okay, I trust everybody's got the handout that was available at the
1:24.7	back or before you come in the door and that'll give us a little
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Thomistic Institute, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Thomistic Institute and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.