A Lesson in the Practicality of Philosophy I Learned Today

[Mudhammam]

The majority opinion of analytic philosophers does not count as proof; although does rightly give pause. The majority opinion of neo-Scholastic philosophers is otherwise. We could pit my experts against yours, but either way determining who is correct based on the number of adherents would be fallacious.

As I understand it, from reading Neo-Scholastic sources, Kant’s critique is self-refuting. Why does he allow the use deductive logic in his attempt to undermine the idea of deduced findings?

Of course. As you said, though, it ought to give pause. As a further matter, what's Neo-Scholasticism and who are its proponents? I imagine they're quite popular in the church...and very little elsewhere. That's not stated as an argument against their merit, merely as an observation that would seem to coincide with my intuition: Redressing old arguments in new language does nothing to counter the force upon which Kant dealt his fatal blow.

Among all else, Kant demonstrated that one cannot deduct from concepts positive knowledge about noumenal reality when the entirety of their content and application relates only to the phenomenal. One cannot borrow the law of causality from the parts--only meaningfully conceived as a condition of objects in time--and then insist that it applies to the whole (time itself); oh, and with one exception, of course!

Of course Hume is the darling of atheists, yet some of the problems he pose are not really problems at all just errors, like his unjustified divorce of efficient from final causes, in favor of ‘constant conjunction’. What principle provides for the said constancy of observed conjunctions?

Primal Matter to be exact, i.e. whose only attribute is the propensity to be. But whither its ability to instantiate the many substances known by experience?

As those are questions about a reality that isn't given to us in immediate experience, we can only defer to those fields of inquiry that expand the limits of the understanding that perception imposes by expanding the limits of perception that the understanding imposes, and therefore, are best suited to address them: the physical sciences.