News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.
In memory of the inventor of this ingenious argument and its faithful reporter, both recently lost: “Is the ontological argument…
I did not know Timothy Smiley well, and his pioneering joint book on Plural Logics is sitting on my shelves…
Smiley cowrote the single best introduction to his field (formally and otherwise) I think will ever be written. I’m grateful…
Worldly Indeterminacy, by Chien-hsing Ho, at Oxford University Press. Available at: https://academic.oup.com/book/63418. Description The book provides a framework to support…
This is exactly right. I’m a writer, and this is already accepted by the literary reading public: the human origin…
Dear Robert of Invisible America, Having read your outstandingly interesting comments here, I would now very much like to have…
Mark, in my view, the article is stronger historically than philosophically precisely because it conflates three distinct questions: whether a…
Professor Smiley, who spent his academic career at Cambridge (where he became Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy), was well-known for his work in logic. The Clare College, Cambridge memorial notice is here. Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Smiley or for those who would like to comment on the significance of his work.
(Thanks to David Gordon for the pointer.)
Smiley cowrote the single best introduction to his field (formally and otherwise) I think will ever be written. I’m grateful to him (and Oliver) forever.
I did not know Timothy Smiley well, and his pioneering joint book on Plural Logics is sitting on my shelves waiting to be read, but I do want to say that when I was an undergraduate in Cambridge in the late 1970s, Smiley was the teacher who impressed me the most. I can still remember him explaining to the logic class that in those ‘Days of Giants’ (when Frege and Russell were developing modern logic) people did not think that they needed completeness proofs. He struck me as both really smart – a great deal more intelligent than, say, Bernard Williams – but also as modest, friendly (to undergraduates) and unassuming. I am a verbal rather than a mathematical thinker, but he managed to make formal logic fun (not easy but fun). It was probably Smiley who put me on to Susan Haack’s excellent The Philosophy of Logics. A great tree fallen in the forest.
In memory of the inventor of this ingenious argument and its faithful reporter, both recently lost: “Is the ontological argument valid? Professor Timothy Smiley of Cambridge once offered a succinct and trenchant argument in favour of its validity. Define the ontological argument, he said, as the best possible argument for the existence of God. Now clearly an argument for the existence of God which is valid is better than an argument for his existence which is invalid. Therefore the best possible argument for the existence of God is valid and so the ontological argument is valid.” (Anthony Kenny, What is Faith?: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion. Oxford: OUP, 1992, p. 110)
Leave a Reply