I've read enough of his other work that touched on the subject that it didn't surprise me that he took that position. He generally comes at it from the more abstract, metaphysical side, e.g. "What must be true in order for any of this at all to be possible, regardless of the specific results of experiments?" rather than looking at empirical results and reasoning from them to some conclusion. Obviously there is always a little of the latter in any attempt at natural philosophy, or even metaphysics, because we always have to work from some knowledge gained from our senses. But I think his approach is pretty common among philosophers who are not also trained in any empirical sciences, and it also matches up to Feser's particular interests in the area of natural philosophy in general, which seem to be addressing either cases where one starts with metaphysical errors and produces some bad natural philosophy from it, or else cases where one takes some empirical results and wrongly argues from them to a bad metaphysical conclusion.
That's a good assessment.
His book should be subtitled: "The
Methodological Foundations of Physical and Biological Sciences", but considering his position, it makes sense he'd say
Metaphysical instead.
I mostly agree with Feser when he writes:
Disagreement about whether to label the ideas in question “scientific” or “metaphysical” seems at the end of the day much less important than these matters about which there is agreement.
However, it's dangerous to subject physics to metaphysics because so much "metaphysical" baggage/scaffolding—such as epicycles, Descartes's vortices, the phlogiston, mechanical models, or, lately,
the field, "Length contraction, time dilation, Lorentz’s invariance, Lorentz’s transformations, covariant laws, invariant laws, Minkowski’s metric, Minkowski’s spacetime, four-dimensional space-time, energy-momentum tensor, Riemannian geometry applied to physics, virtual photon, Schwarzschild’s line element, tensorial algebras in four-dimensional spaces, quadrivectors, metric tensor gμν, Christoffel’s symbols, string theory, super strings, curvature of space, dark matter, dark energy, wormholes, etc." (
Assis 2014, 310)—has crippled the advancement of modern physics.