"The way I and so many other philosophers tended to read the Five Ways was, as I gradually came to realize, laughably off base."
"There can be no natural right to expression that is positively contrary to what is good for us given our nature as rational social animals. However, that by no means entails that just any old limitation on free speech imposed in the name of a good cause is a good idea, or even justifiable in principle."
The famous-in-certain-circles Catholic conservative — sometimes even reactionary — philosopher Edward Feser is an interesting case when it comes to typing. He sits almost exactly on the seam between LII and LSI. In general, when Talanov's tests (as well as less formal attempts to diagnose in this spirit) load up on explicit political questions, characters like Feser come out LSI, slightly over LII; when the questions go easier on politics, the reverse is true.
Feser's own framing of his conversion to conservative Catholicism — a turn made "out of rational necessity," "no single event, but a gradual transformation" — is the LII relationship to a conclusion: the valid abstract argument lands where it lands, and the change happens slowly as one logical domino after another falls. He reconstructs the whole chain years later, link by link — Fregean realism making Platonism unignorable, Searle's arguments sinking existing materialism, the Russellian point that we don't even know what matter is, finally Aristotelian hylomorphism.
His life's work is the exposition and defense of the most completely architected metaphysics in the Western canon — the Aristotelian-Thomistic system, a total interlocking deductive structure. Dawkins was refuted for, as Feser insisted, going after a "modern, parochial, overly anthropomorphic" strawman God instead of the classical one. That is the LII signature: the objection is to a logical error. The Times Literary Supplement praises him for the "rare gift" for making esoteric arguments lucid, which is the same thing Quine once praised in Bertrand Russell.
Typological approaches that boast of restricting their analysis "purely to the subject's cognition" would treat that as the "real" Feser and treat his combativeness and the integralist-adjacent commitments as a separate political layer painted over a neutral reasoning engine. That division is implausible to me: the heightened sensitivity to norm-violation — registering as transgression what others walk past, perceiving social reality as a structure with a proper order that can be intact or breached — is also a part of cognition. Valuing hierarchy is of a piece with this — it is perceiving the social world as properly ordered.
A good example of Feser's thinking is a blog article titled "How not to limit free speech," because in it Feser sets out to build a theory of censorship from scratch. He derives the entire account deductively from a single first principle: the telos of our rational and communicative faculties, according to him, is the discovery and dissemination of what is true and good, and every conclusion descends from that one root. There is a natural right to speech because speech serves that end; therefore no right to speech that is "positively contrary" to the end; therefore — and here the structure becomes explicitly architectural in a Ti sense — four joint conditions for an act of censorship. He builds in the characteristic LII self-audit, too. The famous problem for any restrictionist, "who censors the censors?", is not waved away but written into the framework as conditions 2 and 3: a censorship policy must be genuinely motivated by the common good rather than partisan grudge, and must be "calmly and carefully thought out, not impulsive." He concedes his own side's failure modes with apparent even-handedness.
But now look at what the neutral-sounding apparatus is built to generate. Readers who are lulled by the initial phrasing would be quite surprised to see where Feser actually comes out. The telos premise presents as ecumenical and even liberal-friendly — a presumption in favor of free expression, error corrected through "the give and take of discussion and debate." The outputs are something else entirely. Pornography "should simply be banned", flag-burning (notably, protected as legitimate free speech even by other very conservative US currents) is bannable as an offense against the virtue of piety that can "destabilize the social order." Relativism, Nazism, Marxism, and Critical Race Theory are merrily grouped together as "subversive of the social order" and prohibited from schools, lest they reach the young, who are "governed more by feeling than reason." The recurring vocabulary is telling: subversive, destabilize, piety, the family, the foundation of all social order.
That vocabulary is the LSI tuning operating not merely as an additional layer on the basic perception of the world, but as cognition itself, selecting which cases are salient and which side of every line they fall on. His "moderate" approach — positioned against permissive liberals on one flank and "philistine" conservative "yahoos" on the other — produces, by the end, a notably highly restrictive position, because the neutral-looking premise has been worked by an apparatus set to register disorder as the central danger. Such is the signature of an LII deductive method driven by LSI salience. His cognition is double-tuned, to logical error and to normative breach alike. Even the Talanov-style Qi and Di seem to be about equal in him: the Qi in his initial independent search for the global truth and the evident pleasure he takes in dissenting from some positions on his side, the Di in his role as a loyal heroic defender of established Thomistic hierarchies.
His vocation is a minor point on the LII side, and a reason why I placed LII first. Compare the clear LSI philosophers, who tend to be philosopher-statesmen: a good example is Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Procurator of the Holy Synod for a quarter-century, tutor to two Russian tsars, architect of the reactionary course under Alexander III, whose contempt for parliamentarism as "the great lie of our time" was the working rationalization of an order he was personally maintaining from inside. A typical LSI values philosophy, but views it as the operator's manual, a reflection of action in power. Feser's positions are ones he holds and publishes, not order he imposes. And "expound and defend the internal logic of the most architected system available" is the LII's native relationship to a structure, exactly as "operate and enforce it from within" is the LSI's.
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