Results matching “alston”

Valerie Alston told me yesterday that the memorial service for Bill will be on Nov. 2 at 11am in Syracuse, NY. There has been a delay because a grandson has been leading a wilderness expedition. I have no other particulars yet, but Valerie said she will keep me posted, and I will post another message when I find out.

Valerie's eyesight is too poor to read the many wonderful tributes to Bill, but one of her grandchildren is going to read them to her. I will make sure she sees them. Valerie is deeply appreciative of all the support she has received. I am not a blogger, but I have read these tributes with great love and comfort, and I know so many of you feel the same way.

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Updated: 09/29

A memorial service will be held at St. Paul's Cathedral in Syracuse on November 2, 2009 at 11:00 a.m. Fairchild & Meech are in charge of arrangements.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral, 310 Montgomery Street, Syracuse, N.Y. 13202.

Jeremy's post did a great job laying out many of William Alston's contributions and helped me understand the role Bill played long after I had left Syracuse and Bill had retired. Thanks very much for your thoughts and reportage, Jeremy. There is one item, though, that I'd like to correct. Bill's dissertation director was Charles Hartshorne, not Wilfred Sellars. In fact, I remember Bill saying that two of the three members of his dissertation committee were Hartshorne and Carnap. And it turned out that Quine was at Chicago on the day of his defense and (somehow) he ended up sitting in. How would y'all like to defend your dissertation in front of those guys? How could one say anything that they'd all agree with? How could one say anything at all?

As for me, my first meeting with Bill Alston didn't go particularly well. I had arrived in Syracuse the week before to begin graduate school. I was at SU primarily because that's where Alston was. I had corresponded with him a bit about the doctoral program there and had been impressed that he had taken the time to write back to a prospective student. Bear in mind that this was in the day of the electric typewriter--there was no email and almost no one yet had a personal computer. So writing a letter meant running paper through the roller, typing out what you wanted to say (undoubtedly having to dab some whiteout along the way), and then addressing the envelope.

I heard late last night about William P. Alston's death earlier in the day, strangely not through any departmental channels but through a friend who never met him. He was one of the professors I've most respected in my entire academic career. He wrote his dissertation with Wilfred Sellars Charles Hartshorne on the work of Alfred North Whitehead but spent most of his career on philosophy of language, philosophy of religion, and epistemology. Along with Alvin Goldman and Alvin Plantinga, he helped spearhead the externalist/reliabilist revolution in epistemology, a tradition that I think took things in the right direction. He also was one of the most important figures in the revival of philosophy of religion in the last four decades from a point where it had become looked upon as a joke to a point where some of the most important philosophers today are Christians or other theists. Alston himself was not a Christian when he began his philosophical career, a path shared with several other notable Christian philosophers (Norman Kretzmann and Peter van Inwagen come to mind).

It was always encouraging to me to think about how successful he was in philosophy given his personality and philosophical temperament, which I think are similar to mine in a number of ways that I'm not like most of my philosophical colleagues. He wasn't a system-builder. He wrote about what he had something to say about but wasn't trying to put together a comprehensive philosophical view on every issue he could have something to say about.

Most of his work didn't involve coming up with brilliant views on cutting-edge issues that no one had ever thought of before (although I think there are a few occasions of that in his work, especially in his most recent work in epistemology). He tended to favor traditional views, sometimes so traditional that the majority in philosophy had left the view so far behind that they considered it a joke until people like him came along to disabuse them of such notions by defending the views in novel ways. His defense of the Theory of Appearing is a good example of this.

Some of the most important philosophical figures are noteworthy for one or both of those reasons (system-building and novel views). Alston, however, filled a role of simply doing good philosophy, often in small but important details. He might see a fallacious argument that was nonetheless popular and apply an important distinction, perhaps one known to the medievals but often ignored by contemporary philosophers, to show why the argument fails. He found elements of competing views that might be compatible and explained why a moderating position might be better than either original view. He applied new arguments in epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, or metaphysics to some problem in philosophy of religion to show why a new trend in a completely different area makes Christian belief more favorable (e.g. his application of functionalism, a recent view in materialist philosophy of mind, to explain how language about God can be literally true even if not used in exactly the same sense as the same terms are used for us).

In my last year at Rochester, there was a steady stream of people in to pay last respects to one they truly respected. I turned down three opportunities to go see him, because I felt it wouldn't be right, since I hadn't known him in his prime. I can tell you though that figures as diverse as Linda Zagzebski and Alvin Goldman came through to pay their final respects, in each case Ed Weirenga facilitated the visits.

In my own case, my philosophizing has been dominated by four phases of Alston's work: 1. Deontogical justification, 2. Levels issues, 3. Combining aspects of internism and externalism, and 4. Pluralism about epistemic desiderata.

Only three other people have made anything like the kind of total contribution to my overall approach to epistemology. And those are all people I worked with very closely.

The result has been that it is not far from true to say that 99% of my epistemological theorizing has been significantly influenced by Alson, even though that theorizing has been quite far flung. Now matter where I went, his tracks were already there.

And of course he made signal contributions in the philosophy of language and philosophy of religion as well. And, what's more, the way he personally influenced multiple generations of philosophers--Al Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen, Dean Zimmerman, and Tom Senor just to name a few.

Losing him reminds me of the George Jones song "Who's gonna fill their shoes?" I know I can't, but perhaps if lots of us try we can collectivly fill a portion of the void.

William P. Alston. 1921-2009. Requiesat in Pace

As many of you know, I'm the philosophy of religion area editor for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  I'm always on the lookout for more articles in this area.  A list of desired articles can be found here. 

As the IEP's coverage expands to include most of the major issues in the field, I thought it would be good to begin a series of articles on influential contemporary philosophers of religion.  I'm thinking of (though certainly not thinking only of):

• Adams, Marilyn
• Adams, Robert
• Alston, William
• Flew, Anthony
• Hasker, William
• Hick, John
• "New Atheism," the (Dennett, Dawkins, etc...)
• Plantinga, Al
• Rowe, WIlliam
• Swinburne, Richard
• van Inwagen, Peter
• Wolterstorff, Nick

Given the overlap with existing IEP entries, most of these would likely be fairly short (approximately 4,000 words).  If interested in contributing such an entry, please feel free to send me an email.  Since all IEP articles are blind reviewed, contributing is also a good way to add to one's cv (as many Prosblogion contributors have already done or are in the process of doing).

William Lane Craig wrote the cover story for this month's edition of Christianity Today. It can be found here. He speaks of a renaissance of Christian/theistic philosophy in secular academia, he reviews some of the main arguments for God's existence, and he talks about the relevance of arguments in today's "postmodern culture".

I've read about the need for good PR for philosophy over at Leiter's blog. One thing I'm happy about is that, in Christian circles, there's been an increasing amount of positive PR for philosophy, primarily by way of Christian apologetics. Lee Strobel's books The Case for Faith and The Case for a Creator feature interviews (and philosophical discussions) with professional philosophers such as William Lane Craig, J.P. Moreland, and Robin Collins. I rarely meet Christians nowadays who have never heard of Strobel's books, and a surprising number of them have actually read and enjoyed the books. Other Christian apologists who are not active, professional philosophers (e.g., Norman Geisler, Ravi Zacharias, Gregory Koukl, etc.) all speak with high regard for the value of philosophy. More recently, Pastor Timothy Keller's very popular book The Reason for God makes use of arguments that draw right out of the professional literature (mostly from Plantinga and Alston). I've found that many Christians walk away from reading/hearing these apologists with a higher appreciation for philosophy. Some enjoyed the arguments so much that they went into a full time study of philosophy. (I believe that many Talbott graduates fit this description.)

So I'm happy that there is this PR for philosophy in Christian circles. We can hope that this will contribute to good PR for philosophy in society generally!

Warning! Shameless plug to follow...

In the last few years I've looked at numerous syllabi used in philosophy of religion courses. Besides the usual caveats, grading scales, and policies, these syllabi often make nods towards the objective of thinking philosophically about religion. However, 'religion' is, in almost all cases, largely restricted to western theism. One of the challenges of breaking out of this mold is that most introductory textbooks and readers are geared towards philosophy of religion in the western context. Up until now it has been difficult to know where to start if you wanted to include more non-Western sources. Enter Andrew Eshleman's edit volume Readings in the Philosophy of Religion: East Meets West from Blackwell. The volume has a nice selection of readings from names that we've all come to know like Swinburne, Plantinga, Mackie, Alston, Rowe, Hick, Craig, Paley, and more. Interspersed throughout each section though are selections from Hindu, Daoist, Confucian, and Buddhist, thinkers. Frankly this is a book that has probably been long overdue.

Full disclosure: Eshleman was one of my professors as an undergrad and I read drafts of the introductory material for the book. However, I'd have plugged the book in any case because such a volume deserves to be brought to broader attention.

I was thumbing through Richard Fumerton's Epistemology text tonight when I ran across a curious remark.

"An atheist, quite literally, would have trouble surviving in philosophy at certain historical moments. These days it's hard to find theists in the philosophical community." Fumerton pg6

I'll grant the first line, but the second... really? It's a surprising remark coming from an epistemologist if one considers the number of reputable epistemologists who are theists. (i.e., Alston, Audi, Bergmann, DeRose, Greco, Hawthorne, Kvanvig, Plantinga, Senor, Warfield, Zagzebski, just to name a few.) I know it's just a throwaway line, but it is an unfortunate line for two reasons. It gives introductory students an incorrect impression of the field, and it perpetuates a myth that exists in the minds of some.

I should mention that the book is otherwise quite good!

I did this at Certain Doubts for top-rated epistemologists by this metric, so for fun I thought I'd do it here.  I didn't really try to get a comprehensive list of people in philosophy of religion, but simply used the Leiter Report specialty rankings for philosophy of religion departments, and gleaned likely suspects from faculty lists for those departments.  So people at non-PhD programs will be slighted here, but I'll be happy to insert any such philosophers into the list when the omissions are noticed.  Anyway, the list is below the fold, for what it is worth.  But first:  I hereby disavow the implication that I myself think such metrics measure something important--it is true, however, that more and more administrators are thinking it measures something important, so if one doesn't, it will be useful to become acquainted with the metric and its flaws.   The measure used is the Hirsch number, and there are links to more information about it at Certain Doubts; what I've done relies on research citations for people who work in philosophy of religion, excluding citations of edited volumes and other non-research publications.

It's been a bit quiet around here of late. I'm sure many of us are back to regular work, swamped with a backlog of projects, and enjoying the first hints of fall. So, here is an easy but fun project post that I started thinking about after reading a similar post at Right Reason. The project is to answer the following question. "What are the most important philosophy of religion articles published since 1950? I know there were many influential books written during this period, but that's a list for another day. I've answered only for the period 1950-1979 but I'd like to extend this list up trough the 90's. I'm interested to see what other people would add or subtract from the list. The list is below the fold.

Mark your calendars and assure your transportation -- SLU's Graduate Student Conference is right around the corner. Robert Audi is the keynote speaker, and Prosblogion's own Trent Dougherty will be presenting a paper co-authored with Ted Poston.

Here's the scoop; more below the fold:

2006 Saint Louis University Philosophy Graduate
Student Conference
Sponsored by the Saint Louis University Philosophy Department and the Graduate School
The Epistemology of Religious Belief
Sept. 21 & 22, 2006

Keynote Address by Robert Audi, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy and David E. Gallo Professor of Business Ethics (University of Notre Dame)

Panel Discussion with Robert Audi, Ph.D., John Greco, Ph.D. (Saint Louis University), and Eleonore Stump, Ph.D. (Saint Louis University)

Thursday, Sept. 21: Humanities Building, Room 142

3:30 p.m. Welcoming Reception

4:00 p.m. Keynote Address - Dr. Robert Audi: “The Dimensions and
Normative Authority of Religious Experience”

5:15 p.m. Break

5:30 p.m. Panel Discussion: The Epistemology of Religious Belief
Robert Audi, Ph.D., John Greco, Ph.D., and Eleonore Stump, Ph.D.

The much anticipated Knowledge and Reality: Essays in Honor of Alvin Plantinga is finally out. Only a few of the essays are specifically philosophy of religion, with most being in epistemology. With Plantinga, however, some of his most important PR work depends in part on his epistemology.

Here's the squib from from the publisher (available here):

This volume comprises essays presented to Alvin Plantinga on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Plantinga is one of the leading figures in Anglo-American metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of religion; his work in these areas has been the focus of wide scholarly attention. This collection of essays, all of which were written specifically for this volume in honor of Plantinga’s 70th birthday, ranges broadly over topics in metaphysics and epistemology and includes contributions by some of the best philosophers writing today. The volume will be of particular interest to metaphysicians, epistemologists, philosophers of religion and theologians as it includes important recent work by some of the leading thinkers in these fields.

With contributions from William P. Alston, Michael Bergmann, Richard Fumerton, Jenann Ismael, Jonathan Kvanvig, Trenton Merricks, Richard Otte, John Pollock, Michael C. Rea, Eleonore Stump, James Tomberlin, Peter van Inwagen, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Keith Yandell.

I'll post the table of contents below the fold to save space.

A couple of years ago I heard a funny, and saddening, story about a conference that sought to bring together analytic philosophers of religion and theologians for a conference. I'm sure it seemed like a great idea at the time, but from the report I got the event was an unmitigated disaster. Apparently someone hadn't taken into account that the philosophical background of most contemporary theologians is largely continental/French theory/postmodern. Pick your unmixable metaphor to imagine how well analytic philosophy and postmodernism go together--most certainly a recipe for disaster.

I've wondered about the influence of postmodern thought on seminaries and religious studies programs. I even posted on the subject last year after attending a regional AAR event. As I said then, there is no sign that postmodernisms influence on religious thought is on the way out. If anything postmodern thought is gaining serious ground, especially in emergent churches. This state of affairs is a little mystifying when one considers that analytic philosophy is the dominant style of philosophy in the English speaking world. So, why has analytic philosophy been spurned by so many theologians?

In case you missed it, there was a debate this last Friday between Peter van Inwagen (hereafter PVI) and Michael Tooley of the University of Colorado. It was announced here if you want to see how it was billed and compare that with this review.

According to the report (which for me was continually interrupted by very distracting Victoria's Secret ads!!) Tooley was arguing the "affirmative" Be it resolved: God does not exist. His gambit was, a bit surprisingly, the logical problem of evil. This wouldn't be surprising if it were some guy off the street, but it's surprising to see a professional philosopher with some knowledge of the philosophy of religion taking that route, especially with PVI who is on record as saying "It used to be widely held that evil was incompatible with the existence of God: that no possible world contained both God and evil. So far as I am able tell, this thesis is no longer defended" about the same time Bill Alston said "It is now acknowledged on (almost) all sides that the logical argument [from evil] is bankrupt."

The presumably neutral Daily Collegian (which, I must say, must be sponsored by Victoria's Secret, man I'm not kidding) describes the transition this way "The tone of the debate was switched from Tooley's fervency to subtleness when Professor Peter van Inwagen took a stand." PVI then gives an impressively frank and heartfelt presentation of the free will defense with a hint of Swinburne's oft-pressed point about the necessity of natural laws for human knowledge.

Sadly, the Q&A ended like a lot of my Intro to Ethics classes: "How can one define what is moral and immoral?"

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews has posted a review of the second edition of Richard Swinburne's The Existence of God by Joshua Golding, Bellarmine University. Apparently this edition is a substantial update over the 1991 revised edition. Tighter arguments are always nice, but it is a bummer that I will now have to purchase a new copy of the book. The review does a good job of summarizing the structure, aim, and flow of the book, and I find myself in agreement with his criticism of Swinburne's reliance on the principle of simplicity. Of possible interest to some of our readers (Clayton) it looks like Swinburne has changed some of his views on the problem of evil; conceding that that evil reduces the probability that God exists.

Golding offers some other questions and criticisms that I think the theist philosopher probably has a ready answer to. I want to shine light on one passage that struck me as odd. Golding says that, "It seems very plausible that even if God did not exist, people would be inclined to imagine that there is a God and even imagine that they are having experiences of God, when in fact their experience is not veridical." Perhaps I'm simply conceptually blocked, or I give the ontological argument to much credence, but I don't find it plausible at all that in a world where God did not exist people would simply imagine that he existed anyway. Not only would they imagine that he existed but they would imagine that they were having experiences of him. What good reason do we have for thinking that this is true? You might object that it isn't logically impossible that such a world exist, but that doesn't rise to the level of making such a view plausible. Golding goes on to suggest that our "tests and checking procedures for a religious experience should be more rigorous than in other cases," but why should religious claims have a special burden. There are plenty of people who base some of their everyday beliefs on wishful thinking, but we don't subject them to an extra burden in order to justify their belief. Further, to borrow from Alston, why think that our religious perceptual practices are, or should be, subject to the same kinds of tests and standards as our regular perceptual practices.

The Philadelphia Inquirer has a brief review of Keith Ward's newish book The Case for Religion. Ward is the Regius Professor of Divinity and head of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oxford, and former Professor of History and Philosophy of Religion at the University of London. This quote, which put me in mind of James, will probably prod me into purchasing the book.

Ward's "case for religion" rests on denying that truth can only be arrived at by means of "publicly accessible, repeatable and testable evidence." Religious belief, he says, "is not fundamentally a matter of evidence. Religion may be based on experience, but that is very different from saying that it is based on evidence."

Freud aside I have always thought that the argument from religious experience is rather compelling. I set Freud aside because he is the common objection, but following William Alston I'm always curious as to why people should be troubled by the unsubstantiated claims of speculative psychology. I should add that contra James I think the argument is strong justification for others to believe in the existence of God. One might consider something like CD Broad's argument:

1. There is an enormous unanimity among mystics in regards to the spiritual nature of reality.

2. When there is such unanimity among observers as to their experience it is reasonable to think their experiences are verdical unless we have reason to believe they are deluded.

3. There is no good reason to think these experiences are delusive

4. ∴ It is reasonable to believe the mystical experiences are verdical.

Obviously 3 is going to take a drubbing, but I think that if one emphasizes the good reasons aspect the case can be made. One can certainly grant that we might consider some cases delusive, but I cannot see good reason to think all or most are.

In the first post, I gave some indications of why I think denying God's foreknowledge of free human acts doesn't really explain that much evil. What I'd like to do now is lay out a number of elements of the traditional response to the problem of evil, the one that open theists find unsatisfying. This will all be at a fairly basic level, but I'd like to get all the general things on the table before going into depth on how denying foreknowledge is supposed to help.

One of the primary strategies for responding to the problem of evil is to treat some good as a higher-order good in the sense that it can't exist without allowing some evil to exist yet the good is worth the evil it allows in some sense. Many traditional presentations of the problem of evil have assumed utilitarianism, and thus they will talk about the consequences for happiness and unhappiness, saying that more unhappiness is created than the happiness that requires it, so it's not ultimately worth it. Some theists have responded that utilitarianism is false, and thus the theist has more resources to explain evil. Some kinds of evil may simply be wrong to prevent, with no relevant questions about how much evil is allowed by not doing that wrong thing. If it's wrong to do it, then God shouldn't be expected to do it. So I don't want to assume utilitarianism here, even though it's easier to frame the problem of evil if you do have such assumptions. The way to think of higher-order goods in a non-utilitarian framework would be to see some goods as being so important that it would be wrong not to pursue them. Alternatively, one might simply see preventing certain evils as morally wrong, because any method of preventing that kind of evil would involve doing something wrong. Most theodicies or defenses (I'm not going to deal with the distinction some philosophers make between the two) fall under some kind of higher-order good, I would say.

David Efird's post on whether Divine Command Theory (DCT) can be shown to be false or circular contained the following argument:

(1) Necessarily, if God commands that subject S commit action A, then it is ethically right for S to commit A.
(2) Possibly, God commands subject S to commit an act of wanton cruelty.
So, (3) Possibly, it is ethically right for S to commit an act of wanton cruelty.

David wanted to deny (1) and had to deal with a charge of circularity. My inclination was to deny (2) and say that God couldn't command something contrary to his nature, but David's worry about that was that you then have denied DCT. DCT is supposed to explain morality in terms of God's will, but then if you deny (2) it seems to be not God's will but God's nature that grounds morality. I think this is a mistake, and William Alston's "Suggestions for Divine Command Theorists" gives a way to do this without that consequences. In the comments, I'd mentioned Alston's solution, but now that I've gone back and read his paper I think I did his suggestion some serious injustice, so I'd like to explain how Alston's response would handle the issue at hand.