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Product Review Summary: Atheistic Tract The Transcendent is marked by Permanent Presence. God is a Permanent Presence. God isn't on the other side of an uncrossable barrier. To hold that God is other than Present is to attempt to advance atheism. This is what this book does.
Product Review Summary: God & Other Minds Once again another classic by Alvin Plantinga. This book is extremely insightful, and his general thesis is very creative. His grouping of the belief in other minds with the belief in God as epistemologically the same type of belief was a great move. This book however was a bit of a tough read because of the heavy use of modal logic. In order to get the most out of this book you need to have at least a minimal background in formal logic. However, if you dont you will still be able to get the general jist of it (which is still really good).
Product Review Summary: Plantinga is a genius. Plantinga is the greatest Christian philosopher of the 20th century, and probably one of the top Christian philosophers of all time given the originality and impact of his arguments. This is one of his first books, but it is well written and argued. Plantinga is careful to define terms, redefine terms, write arguments as clear cut syllogisms, and reevaluate each step of the syllogism with precision. This book needs to be read slowly and carefully.
It is a very interesting read because in the first section, he goes through all the classical arguments for the existence of God and shows why they fail. In the second chapter, he goes through all the arguments for the non-existence of God and shows why they fail. In the third chapter, he goes through the question of "how do we know that other minds exist" and gives what seems to be a satisfactory answer until almost the very end where he shows it fails. So interestingly enough, with only about 3 pages left, all Plantinga has done is shown that everything fails. Then in the last few pages, he shows why the rejection of the argument for other minds is equivalent to a rejection of the teleological argument for God's existence. So all in all, even though we have no arguments that work to prove God's existence, a belief in the existence of God is equivalent to a belief in other minds (epistemological speaking). I don't think I am even close to understanding the brilliance of this. It's just very fascinating, a totally different flavor than anything I have ever read.
Product Review Summary: If P Implies Q All throughout the Seventies and early Eighties, I lived in Detroit and worked as a school janitor. The reason I had originally come to Detroit in 1965 was to study graduate philosophy at Wayne State University. My goal was to teach philosophy myself, although there were a few problems with that plan. One of them was that I didn't like academic philosophy, the subject I would have been teaching. Sometimes I even hated it. And yet I felt like a person who had a talent for it, or at least for philosophical thinking, and in fact this was the one thing about myself that I truly had confidence in. The only objective corroboration of this inner feeling, however, was a test I had taken my senior year in college called the GRE (Graduate Record Exam). In the philosophy exam, I scored in the 99th percentile of all those who took it that year.
Whatever this test measured, it obviously wasn't a reliable predictor of how a student would do in graduate school. I did miserably, but part of the blame for that definitely fell on the school. Before I got to Wayne State, I assumed it would be something like undergraduate college where I had two philosophy professors that I liked. They were good teachers and neither had an obvious philosophical preference that they tried to impose on their students.
At Wayne State it was just the opposite, and the person who came to personify everything I didn't like about this department was actually just an adjunct professor, someone who taught primarily at Calvin College, a religious school in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He would take the train down to Detroit a couple of days a week to offer a seminar, a relatively small class where the students all sat around a single long table. Alvin Plantinga, a tall physically fit man in his early thirties, would be in his short-sleeved white shirt and tie, smoking his cigar, handing out mimeographed chapters of his forthcoming book, "God and Other Minds" that we would then proceed to discuss and critique.
Professor Plantinga was, in my opinion, an intellectually divided man. On the one hand he would ponder deep religious questions along the lines of "why bad things happen to good people", questions that for a believing Christian cannot not be answered rationally but only by more belief. Then on the other hand, he would try to use the empty techniques of 20th Century logical philosophy to prove that there was a God, when God is a profound mystery that can only be intuited or felt by some human faculty that goes deeper than our rational minds. Not to mention that he was wrong about Other Minds. The so-called "Other Minds" problem was the question of how we really know other people actually have conscious minds (as opposed to just being extremely sophisticated robots or whatever). This is not a matter of inferring that since I have a mind, and other people behave and look like I do, therefore they must have a mind too. The premise of this position doesn't really make any sense, for one thing, because a person can't start from the knowledge that they themselves have a mind and then speculate about how they know that other people do also.
I received a grade of `C' in Plantinga's class, which in graduate school was the equivalent of failing. It probably didn't help that my paper was only three pages long, but I wrote it in the style of my favorite philosopher, Wittgenstein-- concise numbered thoughts. Actually, it was more an imitation of the later Wittgenstein, rather than the almost incomprehensible one-sentence aphorisms of Wittgenstein's first book, the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus." The Tractatus contained a series of hierarchically numbered propositions, such as "1. The world is all that is the case" or "4.1212 What can be shown, cannot be said." If you took away the German translation, which made up half of the "Tractatus", its length would only have been about 72 pages. And yet it had an enormous impact on philosophy.
The Wayne State department was totally committed to idea that language could be reduced to logic, which was the basic argument behind the "Tractatus", but we never even studied that book. Probably it was because the book was so hard to understand, but also perhaps because Wittgenstein later recanted his earlier beliefs and proposed an alternative theory of language in his later "Philosophical Investigations." So they focused instead on the more accessible works of Bertrand Russell and his followers. To me, Bertrand Russell and the writings of his followers were like the Old Testament, while Wittgenstein's "Investigations" was the New Testament. I couldn't grasp why Wayne State professors refused to see the light and remained trapped in the past.
In class we would argue about the dumbest things-- so-called "paradoxes", which were only problems that came about from the misguided attempt to convert the complex meanings of language into the narrow and somewhat contrived concepts of logic. For example: 1. George IV wished to know whether Sir Walter Scott was the author of "Waverly". 2. Scott was the author of "Waverly". 3. Therefore, George wished to know whether Scott was Scott--which is patently absurd.
They would convert these three sentences into logical propositions that supposedly showed it was a genuine philosophical dilemma that had to be dealt with by inventing a new logical term, called "denoting". Actually, it was just an example of how language with all its complex meanings can't be converted into logic. This wasn't one little isolated example, but rather a symptom of how their whole Bertrand Russell-inspired program of trying to replace ordinary language with symbolic logic was totally misguided.
They didn't seem to care about traditional philosophy at all. Most other schools offered a course or two in symbolic logic, but they weren't devoted to it the way the Wayne State department was. This collection of professors, who all more or less thought the same way, had been largely assembled by one man, the department chairman, who was a tall, dark, and handsome fellow who had written a number of books. In my two years at Wayne State, I only saw him one time. There was a special evening talk given by a British professor that I attended, just a small gathering of graduate students and a couple of the professors in the seminar room. As I came through the door with one or two other students, the department head asked me, "Are you a student here?" I answered yes. "I've never seen you," he said. "I know," I said. A few years later in 1968, he left for the greener pastures of the University of Indiana, and the change of orientation signaled by his arrival as chairman prompted all but three of the existing professors to resign, and so he had a chance to build up another department into a bastion of logical analysis.
Meanwhile back at Wayne State, it wasn't long before almost all the other philosophy professors got the hell out of Detroit themselves. The only one left was the man who had been my "adviser", and he happened to be a Detroit native.
Post Office Paranoid
Product Review Summary: Wrong is wrong. Wrong's wrong. All the sophisticated argumentation in the world won't change that. Doctrines and mere theism simply do not deserve the elevated status of axioms or a priori true basic beliefs. The fact that unlike actually agreed upon axioms, theism is not universally agreed on as a self evident truth should be sufficient to make that clear.
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