Is anyone familiar with the work of Adolf Grünbaum? I never heard of him until encountering this review of volume I of his collected works, on Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2014.11.14
http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/53749-collected ... smologies/
Adolf Grünbaum, Collected Works Volume 1: Scientific Rationality, the Human Condition, and 20th Century Cosmologies, Thomas Kupka (ed.), Oxford University Press, 2013, 280pp., $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199989928.
Reviewed by Gary L. Hardcastle, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania
This is from the review, summarizing some topics tackled by Grünbaum. Sounds very interesting, e.g. his claim that both theism and atheism are "morally sterile."
"Grünbaum's topics are wide-ranging, but not haphazard. Grünbaum is at pains, for example, to defend inductivism -- the notion that evidence that conforms to a hypothesis (under certain conditions) gives us reason to believe that hypothesis -- against its critics. He argues at great length that determinism (or, for that matter, indeterminism) is no threat to human free will, nor therefore to any science which attempts to study the "inner life of free choice." Grünbaum argues at greater length that theism is undeserving of the high moral ground it has appropriated, and that theism (like atheism) is "morally sterile," although atheism does fit comfortably within a secular humanism, which may in turn provide moral imperatives. In four successive essays, Grünbaum addresses several facets of the question of whether our most current understanding of the origin and nature of the cosmos warrants belief in the existence of a omniscient, omnipotent, and all-loving deity, taking up for example in the first of these the question of why anything exists at all, or, more carefully, why all the things that exist and yet might have not existed exist, as opposed to nothing that might not have existed existing. The claims of theists like Richard Swinburne and Philip Quinn that any satisfactory answer to this question requires theism depend, Grünbaum argues, on confusion and non sequiturs.
This last question Grünbaum dubs the "Primordial Existential Question" (p. 151), but in fact most of the questions Grünbaum takes up are primordial, albeit in the term's less grand sense. These essays concern existence, suffering, love, death, God, sex, passion, social activism, religion, evil, free will, and human nature, and, throughout, the capacity of reason to enable us to think clearly and correctly about these things. It is with these sorts of questions that philosophy begins, in the utterly prosaic sense that it is with these sorts of questions that many undergraduates enroll in Introduction to Philosophy. More generally, these are the sorts of questions that the non-philosophical public expects philosophers to be able to at least address, if not illuminate and answer."