Book reviewed in this article: The American Blood Supply. By Alvin W. Drake, Stan N. Finkelstein, and Harvey M. Sapolsky. Blood: Gift or Merchandise. By Piet J. Hagen. New York: Alan R. Liss.

Tarihte herhalde çok az soru Tanrı’nın varlığı sorusu kadar sık sorulmuş, çok yanıtlanmış ve verilen birbirinden farklı onca yanıta rağmen kesin bir sonuca ulaştırılamayıp tartışılmaya devam etmiştir. Yine de geçmişe dönüp baktığımızda bu soruya verilen farklı yanıtların farklı uygarlıkların inşa edilmesine, bazılarının yıkılmasına, acımasız çatışmalara ve her şeye rağmen kucaklaşmalara da vesile olduğunu görüyoruz. Tanrı var mı? Varsa onu nasıl bilebiliriz? Tanrı yoksa her şey mubah mı? İnsan aklı ilahi olanı kavrayabilir mi? Tanrı’nın varlığı ahlaklı olmanın şartı mı? Evren akıllı (...) bir tasarımcının imzasını taşıyor mu? Bu kitapta felsefeci William David Beck, bu sorulara tarihte verilen yanıtları ve bu konudaki tartışmaları ele alarak meselenin genel ve tarihsel bir tablosunu bize sunuyor. Platon, Aristoteles, Marcus Aurelius gibi Eski Yunan ve Roma düşünürlerinden Anselmus, Thomas Aquinas, Augustinus ve Yahudi-Hıristiyan geleneğine, Doğu’nun bilgelerine, İbni Rüşd, Fârâbî ve Gazzâlî gibi İslam düşünürlerinden Alvin Plantinga, Graham Oppy, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Max Tegmark gibi Batılı modern ilahiyatçılara, bilim insanlarına ve Yeni Ateizm hareketine kadar uzanan bir çizgide “Tanrı var mı?” sorusuna verilen çeşitli yanıtları ve bu yanıtlara sunulan akılcı gerekçeleri ortaya koyarak soruya felsefece bir yanıt vermenin nasıl bir iş olduğunu da gösteriyor. (shrink)

I begin by introducing the ideas of possible worlds, books on worlds, and essential properties. A possible world is a broadly logically possible state of affairs that is maximal. Furthermore, for any possible world W and proposition p, let the book on W be the set S of propositions such that p is a member of S if W entails p. Finally, an object x has property P essentially if and only if x has P and has it in every (...) world in which x exists. I use the above three concepts to give a sound argument for the conclusion that human persons are essentially immaterial. (shrink)

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In The Nature of Necessity, Alvin Plantinga asserts that “the number 7 exists necessarily and Socrates does not.” This is, to my way of thinking, reasonable enough. Unhappily, cannot be reconciled with Plantinga's further claims that an object x has a property P essentially or necessarily if and only if x has P in every world in which x exists and existence is itself, although not “an ordinary property,” nevertheless a property.

Theodore Roszak wrote of the counter-culture, Charles Reich of Consciousness III, and Alvin Toiler of Future Shock. In Culture Out Of Anarchy, Judson Jerome, an eminently successful college teacher with all the sensitivity of an accomplished poet, brings all these concerns to bear upon the reconstruction of American higher education. Jerome, however, has no clear consistent thesis, and his proposals for academic change seem rather vague, general, and even undramatic. Part I, entitled "The Fifth Estate," describes the social/political context (...) of contemporary academe. Part II, "Threshold of Change," describes six recent experimental colleges. Part III, "Tomorrow's Schools...," is Jerome's prognostication for the reconstruction of American colleges and universities. It seems from evidence in the book that the author had students tape a number of interviews, these tapes forming the background for much of the book. There are no documentary references and index. The result is that much of the book reads like an interminable college-student bull session. The discussion is serious and intense, interspersed with many personal experiences and suffused throughout with high idealism. But the reader is apt to suffer from the same kind of hangover one feels after sitting through an all-night session. One remembers many personal details, but he can recall very few well-defined principles and has no carefully constructed proposals for genuine educational reform. Perhaps professional educators can read Culture Out Of Anarchy and distill enough essence to rejuvenate the old forms of education. Or perhaps today's anarchists can see in this book the emerging new culture. There are others who only feel dulled with a foggy hangover.--E. W. R. (shrink)

In this paper, we attempt to show that if Plantinga’s free will defence succeeds, his O Felix Culpa theodicy fails. For if every creaturely essence suffers from transworld depravity, then given that Jesus has a creaturely essence (as we attempt to show), it follows that Incarnation and Atonement worlds cannot be actualized by God, in which case we have anything but a felix culpa.

Recent approaches to the social epistemology of belief formation have appealed to an epidemiological model, on which the mechanisms explaining how we form beliefs from our society or community along the lines of infectious disease. More specifically, Alvin Goldman (2001) proposes an etiology of (social) belief along the lines of an epistemological epidemiology. On this “contagion model,” beliefs are construed as diseases that infect people via some socio-epistemic community. This paper reconsiders Goldman’s epidemiological approach in terms of epistemic trust. (...) By focusing on beliefs as diseases, Goldman misconstrues and underestimates the central role that epistemic trust plays in their formation (maintenance, revision, etc.). I suggest that we put trust, accordingly, as the center of an epidemiological model of social doxology—epistemic trust, rather than beliefs, is the disease with which one is infected. So, contra Goldman, beliefs themselves aren’t the disease—they are symptoms. Trust, on this approach, can be viewed as a pathology. This point connects Annette Baier’s (1994) work on moral trust—taking a cue from her “pathologies of trust.” The real pathology centered in social doxology is the epistemic trust manifested by those beliefs. Accordingly, I shall explore (and tentatively defend) an epidemiological model for such “pathological” epistemic trust inspired by Baier’s work on moral trust, one which can more adequately account for the infectious epistemic trust at work in social belief formation. (shrink)