Daniel Larison, senior editor: I’ve been reading Blunder: Britain’s War in Iraq by Patrick Porter. Blunder is an investigation into how the British government helped to start and wage the disastrous Iraq war that began in 2003. Porter’s study is an effort to understand how such a massive blunder could be committed in part to ensure that the same errors aren’t repeated in the future. It was also written to make sure that Britain didn’t quickly forget about its role in the war. Porter writes: “To encourage the forgetting of Iraq’s memory would not only breach civic duty to commemorate the dead. It would do a disservice to the living and the unborn, especially given that the war’s consequences are still with us.” All opponents of the war will be familiar with much of this history, but because this is specifically a history of Britain’s war in Iraq it will likely offer American readers a fresh and different perspective on the debacle. Though clearly opposed to the war, Porter’s book is a careful inquiry rather than a polemic. Blunder “takes a hammer to the war’s rationale,” as Porter says, but it also seeks to understand why advocates for the invasion acted as they did. 

♦♦♦

Casey Chalk, contributor: 

After passing twenty centuries as the very model of those self-evident facts that only a madman would ever dream of doubting, the existence of the external world finally received its metaphysical demonstration from Descartes. Yet no sooner had he demonstrated the existence of the external world than his disciples realized that, not only was this proof worthless, but the very principles which made such a demonstration necessary at the same time rendered the attempted proof impossible.

This is the bitingly clever beginning to French philosopher Etienne Gilson’s Thomist Realism and The Critique of Knowledge, first published in 1939. Thomist Realism is a criticism of those philosophers who sought to reconcile Thomist philosophy and the Cogito ergo sum (“I think therefore I am”) of Cartesian philosophy. The fundamental problem with Descartes’ famous aphorism is, as Gilson wryly observes, that it rejects the self-evident truth of the reliability of man’s senses. Descartes thought himself clever by trying to prove existence without reference to the senses—rather, he helped contribute to the radical skepticism and cynicism that now defines so much of contemporary philosophy, and our broader Western culture. Yet our knowledge of reality cannot be severed from our senses precisely because we are essentially hylemorphic beings, meaning we are composed of both the material and immaterial, body and soul. In one of the final chapters, Gilson explains the meaning of this inescapable truth:

No one really doubts that sight, touch, hearing, taste, and even smell are normally competent to attest to existence, and whenever it is necessary to verify the existence of anything it is to the testimony of one or more of the senses that we turn. This conviction of the reliability of our senses is simply the self-evidence of our experience. Since we are here concerned with self-evidence, it is futile to demand a demonstration. All we can do for one who does not see something is point it out to him.

Gilson’s introductory remarks cited above refer back to Aristotle, one of the very first Western philosophers to write of this self-evident truth. It was then most effectively communicated in the West’s Christian tradition through Thomas Aquinas, whose philosophy so deeply channels Aristotelian concepts. It is called realism precisely because it starts from premises that are so fundamentally real to human experience, from “life’s first cry to final breath,” as the popular hymn goes. Gilson, a secularly-trained philosopher, World War I veteran, Nobel Prize nominee, and member of the French academy, is an exceptional guide through these philosophical ideas, which, contrary to popular perceptions, are far from esoteric. Indeed, the West’s rejection of realism—in favor of both epistemological skepticism and a Gnostic severing of body and soul—has justified all manner of social engineering that undermines, if not destroys, the human person. What the West needs, as the introduction to Thomist Realism observes, are more “meat and potatoes” philosophers like Gilson, who help connect us not only to the reality of the world around us, but ultimately, to ourselves and and to God.