Anthony Esolen, writing in the new issue of
Touchstone Magazine:
The wise men of our day have been busy inverting our commonsense perception of things. They tell us, with the hair-tossing flippancy of a sophomore, that a thing is nothing but the aggregate of matter that composes it. I illustrate for my students the madness of that instance of the compositional fallacy by scratching my arm. There go fifty thousand cells. "I'm not the man I used to be," I say. So determined are the wise men to deny God, they will gladly deny also the existence of perduring things, and even of real personal identity.
Read the rest
here.
' They tell us, with the hair-tossing flippancy of a sophomore, that a thing is nothing but the aggregate of matter that composes it. I illustrate for my students the madness of that instance of the compositional fallacy by scratching my arm. There go fifty thousand cells. "I'm not the man I used to be," I say. '
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, Esolen, with the hair-tossing flippancy of a freshman, pretends that holding there is no evidence for us being anything other than or beyond the material (which is what most materialists would state) is equivalent to saying that because what our body is made of is material, we are as a whole purely material (fallacy of composition).
In effect, he is admitting to presenting a complete straw man argument to his students.
'The wise men of our day have been busy inverting our commonsense perception of things. They tell us, with the hair-tossing flippancy of a sophomore, that a thing is nothing but the aggregate of matter that composes it.'
Even worse, he is telling us that we should accept common sense beliefs over empirical data...an approach that has proved woefully unreliable in the past and that we are still struggling to overcome today.
Some 450 years ago, Esolen would probably have told Galileo he was being 'sophomoric' when he challenged the 'common sense' belief of Aristotle that objects fall faster or slower depending on their weight.
It used to be 'common sense' that the earth was flat and it used to be 'common sense' that a cannoball will take less time to fall to the ground than a ball made of soap.
Empirical evidence derived from careful experiment and observation overturned those beliefs dramatically.
I bet Esolen's students are delighted to receive this quality of teaching.
Martin,
ReplyDeleteCan you link directly to the article (as, in my wisdom, I can't seem to find it at the Touchstone site)?
Sincerely,
Daniel