Thursday, February 02, 2023

75th Anniversary of Lewis's exchange with Anscombe

 This is the 75th anniversary of Anscombe's famous paper presentation. Clearly Lewis believed 1) That Anscombe's criticism showed a serious problem with his presentation of the argument in Miracles, and 2) her criticisms did not show, as she claimed, that the naturalist is off the hook from objections to the effect that it naturalism is inconsistent the validity of reasoning. I think this is clear from Lewis's comment in his reply to Pittenger and his the short reply in the Socratuc Digest, not to mention his revision of the chapter for Fontana which appeared in 1960, twelve full years after the original exchange. The issue here isn't the popular nonsense about giving up apologetics and writing Narnia instead. The question is why, being critiqued in this way by Anscombe, and believing that the core of the argument holds nonetheless, why he didn't present a paper to the Socratic subsequently called "A Reply to Miss Anscombe's Argument that Naturalism is Not Self-Refuting." That's what I would have done, and have done in response to my critics over the years.

See the appendices here.

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