I've heard from older, experienced professors that doing a dissertation on or specializing in philosophy of religion may hurt your chances of getting a philosophy job or getting tenure at a secular university. It's better to focus on some other subject and then do philosophy of religion after you get tenure.
Is this true? If so, why? It doesn't make sense to me; it seems that schools would want professors who could teach philosophy of religion.
Just got my advance copies of Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion I. The Oxford link is here, which has the table of contents for your perusal.
Word has it that quality of critical essays on material in the book goes up when you own your own copy!
Here's a news story for those of you who do not particularly like The Beatles and think you will not particularly like Expelled. (In other words, it is a post for me, everyone else in humanity that died before The Beatles, and no one else?)
If you're too lazy to click:
John Lennon's sons and widow, Yoko Ono, are suing the filmmakers of "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" for using the song "Imagine" in the documentary without permission.
HT to PZ.
I thought this was just awesome. I found it on Dylan Dodd's website.
"Those who deny such manifest things need punishment..., for as Avicenna puts it: "Those who deny a first principle should be beaten or exposed to fire until they concede that to burn and not to burn, or to be beaten and not to be beaten, are not identical." And so to, those who deny that some being is contingent should be exposed to torments until they concede that it is possible for them not to be tormented."Duns Scotus, Reportatio I A prol. q. iii. art. i
I thought this was just awesome. I found it on Dylan Dodd's website.
"Those who deny such manifest things need punishment..., for as Avicenna puts it: "Those who deny a first principle should be beaten or exposed to fire until they concede that to burn and not to burn, or to be beaten and not to be beaten, are not identical." And so to, those who deny that some being is contingent should be exposed to torments until they concede that it is possible for them not to be tormented."Duns Scotus, Reportatio I A prol. q. iii. art. i
St Paul denies that Christians do evil that a greater good may come of it. But what about allowing evil that a greater good may come of it? Is that permitted? Suppose that killing Jones would make possible the production of a vaccine that would save thousands. This is not permitted. But suppose that I see someone else working in my lab who is going to do this. Am I obliged to stop him, or can I say that although I am not permitted to do evil that good may come of it, I am permitted to allow evil that good may come of it?
There are two interrelated theological arguments that it is permissible to allow evil that greater good may come of it: (1) standard Christian theodicies suggest that God allows evils to happen in order to bring greater goods out of them, and, specifically, (2) the Christian tradition calls the sin of Adam a felix culpa, rejoicing that this sin made possible Christ's salvific sacrifice, and suggests that this is why God permitted that sin.
On the other hand, once one is talking about allowing an evil that good may come of it, one seems to be implying that the evil is intended as a means, a means that one brings about through non-action rather than action. But it is always wrong to intend an evil, since that sets one's will on the evil.
The Christian philosopher thus seems to have a trilemma: either (1) undercut theodicy by insisting that one should not even permit an evil that a greater good may come of it, or (2) deny the basic principle that one should not set one's will on evils, even as means, or (3) hold that ethics is essentially different for God and human beings (and not just different in application, so that God may kill me because he owns my life, while you may not because you don't).
I want to reject the third horn completely. I am going to argue that there is still a way out of the dilemma between (1) and (2).
First take the case of Adam and Eve. Deny Molinism. Then there is no fact of the matter whether Adam would sin unless Adam in fact chooses between good and evil. Therefore (and I suppose an argument is needed here, but I am just going to proceed intuitively--I suspect the blanks can be filled in; I need to refute Frankfurt examples to do this, but that I think should be doable) God cannot ensure that Adam does not sin without taking away Adam's choice between good and evil. What God intentionally allows is Adam's choice between good and evil. Let us suppose he foreknows that the choice is in fact going to be for evil. It does not follow that God intends the choice to be for evil, especially since without Molinism, God's foreknowledge of Adam's choice of evil is going to have to be explanatorily (but not temporally) posterior to God's decision to allow Adam the choice.
Nonetheless, the insight from the tradition that the sin of Adam is a felix culpa is still relevant. For God might be argued to be remiss in intentionally allowing Adam to choose between good and evil if the expected value of the effects choice were too low (this is of course like stuff that Swinburne says). Without actually intending that Adam will sin, God can consider the fact that if Adam sins, things will be even better in the long run than if he doesn't, and this consideration makes it reasonable for God to offer him the choice. (I might allow my child a decision where I know the child might choose something bad if I know that should the child choose the bad thing, a good will come of it, say the child's learning a lesson. In doing so, I need not be intending that the child choose the bad thing, but simply considering the contingencies, and thinking that whatever happens, it won't be bad in the long run, so I can allow the decision to the child.)
Mike Almeida passed on an interesting student question that I thought Prosblogion readers might be able to answer better than I could.
" . . . . What I'm really interested in is rankings, comparisons, and specialties among departments of theology. Is there a comprehensive list available in regards to schools of theology? If not, are there any resources which would be of help? I'm open to any suggestions. Much gratitude"
In short, where is the Theology Gourmet Report?
I just got a note from the Stanford Encyclopedia that this entry is now available, so I thought I'd let everybody here know about it. You can find it here.
The first volume of Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion is now in press, and I thought it might provide a nice teaser to list the table of contents here. So here it is:
Finch&Rea, "Presentism and Ockham's Way Out"
Fischer, "Molinism"
Frances, "Spirituality, Expertise, and Philosophers"
Hajek, "Are Miracles Chimerical?"
Koons, "Epistemological Foundations for the Cosmological Argument"
O'Connor, "Theism and the Scope of Contingency"
Pruss, "On Three Problems of Divine Simplicity"
Senor, "Defending Divine Freedom"
Stump, "The Problem of Evil and the Desires of the Heart"
Van Inwagen, "What Does an Omniscient Being Know about the Future?"
Zagzebski, "Omnisubjectivity"
First, a confession. The title of this post is chosen partly just to get people to read. But I promise, it isn't entirely gratuitous. So bear with me.
Second, another confession. I have a fetish for numbers. I like prime number in particular. (So I'm pleased that this is the 401st entry on Prosblogion insofar as 401 is itself prime.) I recently became aware of a survey about a survey that Brian Weatherson ran about the rankings of philosophy journals. The full results can be found here. In looking at the results, a few things stood out to me regarding the philosophy of religion journals.
First, related to comments made by Jeremy Pierce and Andrei Buckareff in the discussion on Leiter's blog about the recent ESF ranking of philosophy journals, neither Philo, Philosophia Christi, Religous Studies, nor Sophia are mentioned in the ESF rankings--only Faith and Philosophy and the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion. Of these, only F&P, IJPR and RS are in the results from Weatherson's survey. Here is the data on these three from that survey (you'll have to go in to the permalink for this post to see the whole picture--click here):
There are a number of things that I find interesting about these scores. First, I was quite surprised to see F&P ranked the lowest of these three in terms of quality.
Second, I was surprised by the rather sizable gap in terms of how people over 40 evaluated IJPR and RS compared with those under 40.
Third, it didn't really surprise me to see students rank IJPR over F&P, and for faculty to rank F&P higher than did students.
But what really caught my eye was that both IJPR and RS scored a 0 with females (see, I made good on my promise!). I'm guessing that this is because no females evaluated those two journals, though I can't be sure on the basis of the available data.
I found this data interesting. But then again, I also know the difference between twin primes, cousin primes and sexy primes (oh yes, there are such things as sexy primes!).
