{"id":10245,"date":"2011-10-27T14:28:51","date_gmt":"2011-10-27T14:28:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/10\/27\/peter-hitchens-on-an-evening-without-richard-dawkins\/"},"modified":"2011-10-27T14:28:51","modified_gmt":"2011-10-27T14:28:51","slug":"peter-hitchens-on-an-evening-without-richard-dawkins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/10\/27\/peter-hitchens-on-an-evening-without-richard-dawkins\/","title":{"rendered":"Peter Hitchens on an Evening Without Richard Dawkins"},"content":{"rendered":"

Excerpt<\/a> (emphasis added)<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The most moving \u2013 and most enjoyable \u2013 contribution of the evening came from the marvellous Dr Stephen Priest, simultaneously diffident and extremely powerful. I won\u2019t try to summarise it because I\u2019m sure I\u2019d fail. I hope it will eventually make it on to the web. It reminded me of why I had once wanted to study philosophy, a desire which faded rapidly when I was exposed to English Linguistic Philosophy and various other strands of that discipline which made me wonder if I had wandered into a convention of crossword-compilers, when what I wanted was to seek the origins of the universe.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Many of you will know that in his failure to face William Lane Craig, Professor Dawkins was not alone. Several other members of Britain\u2019s Atheist Premier League found themselves unable or unwilling (or both) to take him on.<\/span><\/p>\n

The important thing about this is that what Craig does is simple. He uses philosophical logic, and a considerable knowledge of physics, to expose the shallowness of Dawkins\u2019s arguments. I would imagine that an equally serious Atheist philosopher would be able to give him a run for his money, but Dawkins isn\u2019t that. He would have been embarrassingly out of his depth.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It would be interesting to compile a list of those who were dissuaded, or almost dissuaded, from pursuing philosophy by their encounter with the Ordinary Language movement<\/a>.  Hector-Neri Casta\u00f1eda<\/a>  once told me that the dominance of the latter in the '50s and '60s almost convinced  him to drop philosophy as a profession abd go to law school.  Not being a native English speaker, he could not hope to contribute to discussions in which the subtleties of ordinary English usage are put under the microsope.  But then things changed in that wild decade of the '60s in which so many things changed, the epigoni<\/em> of Wittgenstein went into eclipse, and systematic philosophy was back on track and attractive of the better heads.<\/span><\/p>\n

My posts on OLP are collected in the Ordinary Language Philosophy<\/a> category.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Excerpt (emphasis added) The most moving \u2013 and most enjoyable \u2013 contribution of the evening came from the marvellous Dr Stephen Priest, simultaneously diffident and extremely powerful. I won\u2019t try to summarise it because I\u2019m sure I\u2019d fail. I hope it will eventually make it on to the web. It reminded me of why I had … Continue reading “Peter Hitchens on an Evening Without Richard Dawkins”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[191,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism-and-theism","category-ordinary-language-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10245\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}