system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How "accepted" is Feser's thesis that modern philosophy emerged out of a *desire* to displace scholastic Aristotelianism?

He makes this argument in *The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism*.

He basically maintains that if the metaphysical assumptions of Aristotle/Aquinas/etc are accepted, then the idea of a God, the soul, objective morality, religion, etc. being true is almost inevitable. These assumptions include the distinction between actuality and potentiality, the idea that all things are irreducible to matter and form, realism about universals, four causes, etc.

He lays out some reasons for why modern philosophers (i.e. beginning with Descartes, etc.) were motivated to reject Aristotelianism. These reasons aren't as important as the fact they were motivated, not by rational argument, but a priori conclusions. They then constructed arguments to fit these conclusions. (Note that Feser *doesn't* claim that there was *no* arguement, but that there was *little* argument; and that the little argument—against scholastic Aristotelianism—was weak.)

This took place, primarily, in the scientific domain; where ideas like formal and final causes were displaced by "mechanical philosophy": a theory of science where everything is made of atoms which act in accordance to arbitrary laws of nature. This removed all meaning from nature. The modem project, then, defined itself *in opposition to* that metaphysics. It didn't offer solutions so much as it *rejected* that metaphysics.

I, being not well-read in this area, am not in a position to evaluate his conclusions - hence the question in my title.

EDIT: I was asked to provide quotes from the book. So here's a pertinent one:

> So, while the ancients pursued wisdom and virtue for their own sakes, and
the medievals applied ancient learning to shoring up the claims of religion and
directing man toward his destiny in the hereafter, the moderns, naturally enough
given the new cultural climate that shaped their values and perceptions, sought to reorient intellectual endeavor to improving man’s lot in this life, and to
defusing post-Reformation religious tensions by sowing a general skepticism
about the possibility of attaining much in the way of religious knowledge, so that
there’d be little left to fight over. Hence Bacon’s conception of a new science
that would give us mastery over nature, the promise of new technologies, and
hope for making this world a fitting habitation for man. Hence Locke’s aim of
drawing definite limits to what was strictly knowable where religion was
concerned, so as to put all conflicting creedal claims on an equally low epistemic
footing and thereby to lay the predicate for his doctrine of religious toleration.
“And what is wrong with all that?” many readers will ask. Well, there
might be nothing at all wrong with it; and then again, there might be something
very deeply wrong with it. But the point for now is not to determine whether this
project was good or bad, but rather to emphasize that to a very great extent it
was *a desire to further the project*, and not an actual refutation of Aristotle, that
moved modern thinkers away from his metaphysics. The agenda determined the arguments rather than the other way around

(Emphasis his.)

Although, later, he does say this:

> Animus, attitude, agenda, but little in the way of argument. That, I have
suggested, is what lay behind the intellectual revolution that displaced the
classical philosophy of Plato and Augustine, and especially of Aristotle and
Aquinas, and enthroned the modern philosophy of Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes,
Locke, Hume, and all the rest. But “little” is not “nothing,” and there were some
arguments, though none of them very impressive.

He then goes on to explain how, in his view, early modern philosophers' criticisms of scholasticism were flawed. In particular, he focuses on Locke.
gpt
The thesis you describe has not even negligible acceptance in the broader philosophical community. More than that, it's bad to the point of coming across like satire, and it would be good advice if you were encouraged to get your knowledge of modern thought from a different author.

Feser's account is unhistorical in a lot of ways. Popular Thomists like him like to present medieval philosophy as involving an enviable unity brought about by Aquinas, which continues until it's disrupted by modernity. There never was any such unity: Aquinas was met with sustained criticism from the get-go and represented only one of many major schools of philosophy even if we restrict ourselves to 13th century scholasticism. The challenge to the traditional metaphysics broadly shared by scholastics in this period didn't arise with modernity but rather with late scholasticism around the turn to the 14th century. The challenge to scholasticism writ large, including this later tradition antithetical to Feser's interests, likewise didn't arise with modernity but rather with humanism and subsequent schools of Renaissance philosophy beginning with the 14th century.

Invoking God in this narrative is particularly unhistorical, as modern philosophy remained not just theistic but theocentric, and the change away from this style of philosophy occurred not with the shift to modernity but in the middle of the 19th century.

And much of the technical content Feser likes to point to are just red herrings without significant bearing on the issue. For instance, actuality and potentiality: the sense of these terms needed for the cosmological argument is perfectly consistent with the characteristic premises of modern philosophy, in any case this argument is happily reformulated in terms of cause and effect or necessity and contingency or grounding relations... etc., in fact such formulations were already developed in the ancient and medieval periods -- in fact they predate Aristotle's formulation of actuality and potentiality, and in any case the cosmological argument remained a mainstay well into the modern period rather than being undermined by the shift to modernity.

The whole shtick about just "wanting" to get rid of Aristotelianism, rather than being persuaded to on rational grounds, is just a an extended exercise in ad hominem. There is extensive argument offered for modern anti-Aristotelianism, and it is a product of a long trend of philosophical development at each step of which we find extensive argument. The thing to do is deal with the details of those arguments, not try to impugn the chsracter of one's interlocutors.

The bit about not offering solutions is nearly uninteligible. There's, like, all of modern philosophy that offers putative solutions. Just open any page of any modern philosophy book and throw a dart at it, and you'll likely to hit such a putative solution being offered.