...from being whacked last Spring. How else to explain why he would post a link to a not very substantive, but critical, review of my book from an obscure blog? I guess he thinks it harms me! (If so, I guess my re-linking it is a failure of prudence on my part!)
The review itself elicits a pretty good response in the first comment from another libertarian reader of the website, who concludes, "Leiter’s book is one that is worthy of a real response. A review of his book, especially in a high quality site like this one, should be written by somebody with the professional and intellectual competence to do this." I can agree with all that! The reviewer, Mr. Anderson, is, for the record, co-author of a rather notoriously silly (Thomist-inspired) paper on the metaphysics of marriage, that I noted on my philosophy blog here in 2011. (It's a special feature of this kind of silly metaphysics that you can perform it on artifacts!)
For those actually interested in Thomism, pages 86-91 of my book are given over to the Thomist argument for the specialness of "religion." I rely on John Finnis's version of those arguments, viewing him, correctly, as a serious representative of the position. I argue that his argument's aren't very persuasive or sound. What the reviewer's counter-arguments are to my position remains, as of this writing, top secret.
(As if to prove the old adage, "There's no such thing as bad publicity," since Zywicki linked the review, the book went from a rank of around 250,000 on Amazon to the top 50,000.)
ADDENDUM: For those interested, there has been some adult discussion of themes from the book at the Talking Philosophy blog.
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