Special thanks to Brian Kemple for the free book to review.
Brian Kemple is definitely knowledgeable in the fields he's wanting to give an introductionSpecial thanks to Brian Kemple for the free book to review.
Brian Kemple is definitely knowledgeable in the fields he's wanting to give an introduction to. Unfortunately, the book reads like a more academic work, so I wouldn't say that just anyone interested in these topics should read the book. Kemple writes from an Aristotelian perspective which, of course, is philosophically complex but Kemple does a good job of explaining the concepts that come up, and even goes into a bit more detail about some things that I haven't seen in the books of other Aristotelian-Thomistic writers. Since the book reads a bit more academically, it is pretty dry in most places, although there is a bit of humor sprinkled in here or there. And there are an excessive amount of typographical errors. It's enough to be distracting, and in some cases even changes the meaning of what Kemple attempts to convey. It makes me wonder if he had the book proofread before he published it (he mentions that the book is self-published).
Kemple's book tackles three areas of philosophy: logic, physics, and personhood (physics, of course, is a branch of science, but all sciences must be informed by philosophy in order for good work to be done). His book does contain footnotes but it also contains glosses in case you want to read up on further information regarding whatever the gloss is referring to. Kemple doesn't just explain these concepts from an Aristotelian perspective, but he gives a lot of background information that is necessary to understand before informing you about the subject at hand.
I would say the book is worth considering for a read, but may not be of interest to anyone not specifically interested in pursuing philosophy. And a little bit of background knowledge of Aquinas' thought will probably be helpful. I'd recommend reading Aquinas (A Beginner's Guide) by Edward Feser before trying to tackle this....more
I came across this book by accident at a Barnes & Noble in Bakersfield. It looked interesting, so I picked it up. I study logic and philosophy, and teI came across this book by accident at a Barnes & Noble in Bakersfield. It looked interesting, so I picked it up. I study logic and philosophy, and teach it to homeschool kids, so I thought this might be a book that illustrates these fallacies in an entertaining way. Unfortunately, as I read through it, it seems that Pirie doesn't quite have a great handle on some of the arguments he uses as examples in this book, which frankly puts the credibility of the rest of the book in severe doubt.
Let me give an example from his section "Conclusion which denies premises" on pp. 66-68 of his book.
Pirie describes an this type of fallacy as follows: "The conclusion which denies its premises is one of the 'oh-dear-I-forgot-what-I-started-to-say" fallacies. It starts by maintaining that certain things must be true, and ends up with a conclusion which flatly contradicts them." This seems to be another way of stating that the conclusion is self-defeating because it relies on contradictory premises.
One of the examples he uses is one of the standard arguments of Christian apologetics, the Kalam Cosmological Argument. Pirie describe the argument as follows: "Everything must have a cause. That, in turn, must result from a previous cause. Since it cannot go back forever, we know that there must be an uncaused causer to start the process." The conclusion is that God exists (as the "uncaused causer"), but one of the premises in the argument is that everything has a cause, and God would be part of "everything", so God must have a cause. Nanny-nanny-boo-boo.
However, there are two glaring issues with this argument. The first is that Pirie is conflating two *separate* arguments for God's existence, the Kalam Cosmological Argument and the Contingency Argument. The second is that no Christian thinker, in the long history of Christian thinkers, has ever defended the proposition that everything must have a cause. Pirie even has the audacity to claim that Aristotle and Aquinas used this kind of argument, of course without citation so you can't check to make sure his understanding of these thinkers is correct. Now, the proposition defended by Christian thinkers, such as modern philosopher William Lane Craig, is that "Everything *that begins* to exist has a cause." This is an important different. Christians have always believed that God does not have a cause because God did not have a beginning, being uncreated and self-existent. This is the same blunder that Richard Dawkins fell into with his book The God Delusion (the one that made atheist philosopher Michael Ruse "ashamed to be an atheist"), except that Dawkins at least has the excuse that he's not a trained philosopher. Pirie doesn't have such a recourse to explain such an elementary blunder (and if it seems I'm being a bit harsh, it's only because this is such an easy to avoid falsehood yet I see it all the time from atheists who don't bother to learn about what they want to criticize).
It's also worth noting that the Big Bang had not yet been discovered by the time of Aristotle and Aquinas. To them, the universe existing forever was a valid possibility (much less valid now). So they had no idea whether or not the universe, itself, had a beginning, requiring a cause to start it. The arguments Aquinas defends will succeed even if the universe was eternal (and therefore, not having a prior cause).
So let me separate the two arguments. First, the Kalam Cosmological Argument:
P1: Everything that begins to exist has a cause. P2: The universe began to exist. C: Therefore, the universe had a cause.
Now, one can infer God from this argument, but the argument, itself, does not lead to the conclusion that God exists, only to the conclusion that the universe had a cause. Thinkers like Dr. Craig use this argument as part of a cumulative case for God's existence, since it does not lead to the existence of the Christian God on its own.
Aquinas does defend a similar argument (as does Aristotle, but I'm less familiar with his version), an Argument from Motion. I will not defend it here, because it would require a lot of space to do so, but I will give a very brief and basic treatment of the argument. The universe moves (and to Aquinas, movement was not necessarily simply locomotion, but a movement from potency to actuality). Since the universe moves, it has potentials that need to be actualized. But a potential must have something outside itself to actualize it (e.g. wood has the potential to catch fire, but something that can produce fire needs to set it on fire). This means that the universe, having potentials that need actualizing, must have something outside itself to do the actualizing. This would require something that is pure act with no potentials at all, otherwise you are left with an infinite regress, which would be impossible. This thing of pure act we call God.
The second argument is the Contingency Argument. The argument essentially states that the universe, and everything in the universe, are contingent things. Since the universe itself is contingent (e.g. we know the universe will one day die in a heat death), something that is contingent requires something outside itself for its existence, a necessary entity. This necessary entity we call God.
Again, a different argument from the one Pirie outlined in his book. Pirie tries pay lip service to "saving the argument," trying to give what he thinks would be a Christian attempt to save the argument (as I just showed, there is no need for a Christian thinker to save the argument because Christian thinkers are not as dumb as Pirie apparently thinks they are) by changing "everything has a cause" to "everything in the universe must have a cause outside itself..." then argues against that statement. Again, of course, he's wasting his time because the real statement doesn't need to be adjusted, and the one he adjusted it to is clearly a poor statement, as well (since obviously the universe is not inside the universe).
That's all I'll say about that.
There are other problems with the book, such as Pirie also not understanding the political atmosphere very well (or perhaps he only looks to the uneducated members instead of the good thinkers holding positions he disagrees with). He speaks of the "argumentum ad antiquitam and argumentum ad novitam arguments, which collectively fall under the umbrella "chronological snobbery" (argumentum ad antiquitam being that the old is better because it's old, and argument ad novitum being that the new is better because it's new). He states that the argumentum ad antiquam argument finds it home among Conservatives. This can be true, but he also fails to mention that many Conservatives make arguments for their positions. I oppose same-sex marriage, not because all cultures have traditionally rejected the concept (which is true), but because of what marriage *is*, and gender complimentarity is an essential property of marriage.
Now, he goes on to say that while Liberals use to be the home of argumentum ad novitam, curiously he argues that it now makes it home among Conservatives (which is news to me, since conservatives literally want to conserve the status quo). He states that Liberals are now looking back to the time of social reform (likely making a comparison of trying to win certain rights for homosexuals based on social reform for blacks and women). But this comparison is a false analogy, for a couple of reasons: It was conservatives, not liberals, who fought for and won rights for blacks and women (Lincoln was a Republican, and most of the civil rights pioneers, like Martin Luther King, Jr., were conservative Christians). Second, opposition to interracial marriage was based on racism but was still considered marriage, whereas opposition to same-sex marriage is not based on "homophobia" but on the fact that two people of the same sex just do not make a marriage. As Lincoln once said, you can call a dog's tail a leg, but that doesn't change the fact the dog has four legs. Calling same-sex marriage marriage does not make it so.
Unfortunately the negatives here outweigh the positives, as they don't exactly inspire confidence that this is an objective look at these fallacies. There are much better books that can teach you how to logic and reason well....more
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