Edward Feser

Who is Edward Feser?

Edward C. Feser is associate professor of philosophy at Pasadena City College, as well as visiting assistant professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University. He is also a visiting scholar at the social philosophy and policy center at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1999 with a PhD in philosophy; his thesis was entitled "Russell, Hayek, and the mind-body problem".

By his own account, Feser had been an atheist for ten years during his early adulthood. However, as a graduate student in philosophy, his deep readings of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas led him back to a Christian belief in God and the Roman Catholic Church. He is now harshly critical of the "New Atheists" for what he claims are their straw man caricatures and distortions of classical theological arguments. He also considers intelligent design to be incompatible with the classical Thomistic arguments for the existence of God. Feser has also voiced support for felony disenfranchisement.

In recent years, Feser has become well known for his polemical book, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, in which he makes a philosophical argument for the classical Aristotelian-Thomistic worldview over and against the materialist assumptions and scientistic prejudices of contemporary atheists such as Richard Dawkins, of whom he is particularly critical. Additionally, Feser has written a number of articles for the website of the politically conservative Witherspoon Institute.