Here is a substantive (and very kind) review of The Last Superstition from Martin Cothran. As the author of a series of books on traditional logic, Cothran understands the significance of the moderns’ shift away from Aristotelianism better than most.
Cothran on TLS
by Edward Feser
Comments (3)
I just finished the book and I thought it was excellent. I am about to graduate from college without having to take a single course on Scholasticism or any other medieval philosophy, and I am a philosophy major! The way the academics have designed it, students study minimal Greek philosophy before moving into Descartes and his successors. This is then topped off with classes that deal exclusively with singular issues like law, the mind, or even racism. Most students probably leave school intimidated by the supposed complexity of all these issues or by the amount of useless writing done by the professors in order to impress their colleagues.
What everyone misses out on, though, is actual philosophy. They see an historical jumble of different men saying differently sounding things that have no connection to each other. This is especially true of post-modernism. Actual philosophy is none of this. It is the same project that both Aristotle and Aquinas were working on. It is what Plato was doing, what Plotinus was doing. It is the elucidation of reality. Ancient men might have come to different conclusions, but only moderns can claim to have thrown out everything done before and start anew with each new thinker. It is no longer about discovering reality but making up your own using convoluted language and ideological jargon.
The Last Superstition shows not only that this is the case but that we cannot avoid going back to what the ancients have taught us. After all, we live in the same world that they were describing.
Posted by Edward the Lesser | August 17, 2009 7:11 PM
Martin Cothran is old school chum of mine. We both did M.A.s in apologetics at the old Simon Greenleaf University, whose founding dean was a dynamic Lutheran theologian and lawyer named John Warwick Montgomery. SGU merged with Trinity International University (Deerfield, IL) in 1997.
It was at a CoCos in Anaheim Hills one evening in late 1983 that Martin turned me on to a book by a young Congressman from Georgia named Newt Gingrich, Window of Opportunity. Prior to that I had considered myself a political moderate. After reading Gingrich, I then read, again at the behest of Martin, Chesterton's Orthodoxy.
Posted by Francis Beckwith | August 17, 2009 8:12 PM
Frank,
I don't remember the Gingrich book, but I do remembering giving you heaping doses of Chesterton. If I had only known the effect it would eventually have on you ... :)
Posted by Martin Cothran | August 17, 2009 8:35 PM