Hard Thinking

I'm a great believer in the notion of the 'life of the mind', but if there's one thing I lack in this direction it's the stamina for doing genuinely sustained hard thinking. I'm referring to the kind of thing that involves relentlessly close study of conceptually demanding material to the point that one achieves some kind of mastery over it - like grasping a particularly dense paragraph of Kant at his thorniest. (Mind you, that's not such a good example as that might just be beyond any mortal.) Over the last couple of years or so I've come to recognise this deficiency in myself and developed something of a tendency to keep telling myself I need seriously to do something about it.

To this end, if I recall rightly, I was intending to get to grips with some heavy duty philosophy last year by reading and thoroughly assimilating (as it were) Ed Feser's Philosophy of Mind (A Beginner's Guide.) Read it I did; assimilate it, not so much. Just too darned lazy and, worryingly, possibly too darned stupid. Anyway, I told myself that one day I'd give it another go, and put it somewhere at the back of my mind.

More recently I got hold of Prof Feser's Aquinas and The Last Superstition, thinking that I really need to get to grips with his argument that Aquinas's five ways of proving the existence of God are valid. After all, as a theist shouldn't I have reason on my side? Well, I do think I have, but find it difficult to clearly articulate why. I read Aquinas last week, but I'm afraid managed to follow only about fifty per cent of the argument, though what I did follow was powerfully convincing stuff. I'm now about two-thirds of the way through The Last Superstition, an at times hilarious polemic against the New Atheists, and, again, following the hard arguments with some degree of clarity, but not enough to count as really grasping the case being made in its entirety.

So this is what I'm going to do. I'll finish The Last Superstition and continue to enjoy the excellent jokes. Then it'll be back to Philosophy of Mind and Aquinas with the intent of knowing exactly why Reason tells us that God exists. Pretty hard, eh? You can't say I lack ambition.