October 2005 Archives

Louis Pojman, Professor of Philosophy, United States Military Academy, died peacefully at home on October 15th. He had liver cancer secondary to cirrhosis and hepatis-C contracted via blood transfusion 18 years ago.

Lou is survived by his wife, Trudy, and his children, Ruth and Paul (an assistant philosopher at Towson University in MD).

The family is planning a Memorial Service for Lou as follows:

2:00 P.M. Friday December 30th
The Unitarian Church of All Souls, 1157 Lexington Ave. at 79th St. in Manhattan
A Reception follows in the Church Hall

Does Prayer Change God? by Philip Yancey appears on the pages of ChristianityToday. Yancey discusses the dilemma of reconciling claims that God is changeless with those that indicate he is moved by our prayers. "Truth to tell, we want some of both: a trustworthy, dependable God we can count on and yet a God who allows himself to be affected by us."

D.S. Oderberg (University of Reading) reviews John Haldane's Faithful Reason: Essays Catholic and Philosophical in A Durable Consolation. "Contemporary Western philosophy can be roughly divided into two camps... those thinkers who see philosophy as primarily a technical subject aimed at solving self-contained problems using logico-mathematical techniques, and those who see philosophy as a humane discipline aiming at the love of wisdom."

Paul Russell's (University of British Columbia) entry on Hume on Religion is now available in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The entry addresses both Hume's arguments relating to religion and Hume's commitments on this subject. Also of interest from Russell is his forthcoming article on "Free Will and Irreligion in Hume's Treatise" to appear in Donald Ainslie ed. Hume's Treatise: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press: forthcoming).

Antony Flew has a humorous critical notice of I.M.N. Al-Jubouri's History of Islamic Philosophy in Philosophy Now. The notice is funny in part because Flew takes time to make weak excuses in response to Al-Jubouri's complaint that Flew's own 510 page An Introduction to Western Philosophy dismisses the whole of Islamic philosophy in six lines.

Peter Sellick reviews Larry Witham's The Measure of God: Our Century-Long Struggle to Reconcile Science and Religion. This is the first I've heard of this book which provides an overview of the Gifford Lectures. If you are unfamiliar, for the last 117 years the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews and Aberdeen have hosted lectures on the relationship between science and religion, or natural theology. So, for example the 1900-1902 lectures were by William James and resulted in a little work known as the The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Finally, the Guardian gives us Why do we believe in God? an excerpt from Robert Winston's forthcoming The Story of God.

Here's a question indirectly related to the doctrine of the Incarnation, but I won't explain the connection until after asking the question, in case that will encourage unprejudiced reflection on the question.

As background for the question, assume that individuals belong to natural kinds, and that properties can be essential to both individuals and kinds. In addition, an individual can belong to a kind either essentially or accidentally.

The question has to do with which properties are displayed by individual members of a kind, and I'll first note some relationships that don't hold here. Suppose P is essential to kind K (such as animality being essential to humanity), and V is a member of kind K.

I'd like to welcome Prosblogion's latest contributor Tom Senor. Tom is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Arkansas. His areas of specialization include epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. Readers may wish to preorder Tom's forthcoming book on religious belief, which I'm sure will be fantastic.