Antony Flew

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Antony Flew

Antony Flew (often mistakenly written Anthony Flew ) (born February 11, 1923 in London , † April 8, 2010 in Reading ) was a British philosopher , long known as a representative of libertarianism and atheism . From 2002 until his death he was a representative of deism.

In his book Thinking Thinking about writing about a form of logical fallacy that since then as a true Scot No (No true Scotsman fallacy) is known.

Life

Antony Flew was a son of the Methodist pastor Robert Newton Flew (1886–1962) and his wife Winifred, née Garrard (1887–1982). He attended St. Faith and Cambridge Kingswood Schools. At the age of 15 he began to reject the idea of ​​God. During World War II, he studied Japanese at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London . He was also an officer in the Royal Air Force Intelligence Service . After serving at the Inter-Services Topographical Department in Oxford, he was transferred to Bletchley Park in June 1944 .

After the war he obtained a very good degree in Literae Humaniores from St John's College in Oxford in 1947 . He also won the John Locke Fellowship in Mental Philosophy the following year . Flew was a student of Gilbert Ryle , who had become known for the philosophy of normal language .

For a year, from 1949 to 1950, Flew was a lecturer in philosophy at Christ Church College , Oxford. From 1950 to 1954 he was a lecturer at the University of Aberdeen , from 1954 to 1971 professor of philosophy at the University of Keele . He also held a professorship at the University of Calgary from 1972 to 1973. Between 1973 and 1983 he was Professor of Philosophy at Reading University. In 1975, in his book Thinking about Thinking, he developed one of his most famous arguments: the fallacy . After retiring, he took a part-time position at York University in Toronto for a few years .

Since the 1950s, Antony Flew was an increasingly prominent atheist author in the Anglophone world. His “ conversion ” to deism , which took place around 2005, accordingly caused a great stir. After the publication of his last book, which was not written by himself (see below), There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (2007), he lived in a nursing home for people with dementia and was no longer available for public statements.

Flew was a member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal .

Turning to deism

After having been known as an atheist for decades, Flew confessed in 2004 that he had changed his mind and that he was now a Deist . This deistic God is not identical with the Christian , Jewish or Islamic God and is not interested in people's beliefs or their actions. Flew originally justified his change of position in a letter to Richard Carrier (October 2004) with the “impossibility of a naturalistic theory of the origin of the first species that reproduces by means of DNA ”. This is the only reason why he began to consider an Aristotelian god. However, he withdrew this justification a short time later in another letter to Richard Carrier (December 29, 2004): “I noticed that I was embarrassed when I assumed that there were no demonstrable theories for the development of inanimate matter to first reproductive organisms. "

In the new edition of God and Philosophy planned for 2005 , Flew wanted to incorporate this topic and explain his new position. The new edition then only mentions ten points in a new foreword, which should be dealt with in future editions without giving precise information about his actual position.

The book There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind , published in 2007 under Flew's name, explains why Flew went from an atheist to a deist. However, Flew admitted to a reporter for the New York Times that he had not written the book himself. It was therefore essentially written by the Christian author Roy Varghese, who also confirmed this himself. According to the publishing house HarperCollins, this version by Roy Varghese was revised and expanded again by the evangelical pastor Bob Hostetler. After this controversy, Antony Flew was interviewed again; in a later statement he confirmed that he stood by what was written in the book.

Fonts

  • Logic and Language , (A. Flew ed.), Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1951
  • A New Approach to Psychical Research , Watts & Co. London 1953
  • Essays in conceptual analysis , (A. Flew ed.), London 1956
  • Hume's Philosophy of Belief: a study of his First Inquiry , Routledge Kegan Paul, 1961
  • God and Philosophy , Harcourt Brace and World, 1966
  • Evolutionary Ethics (New Study in Ethics S.), Macmillan 1968
  • An introduction to western philosophy: ideas and argument from Plato to Sartre , The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1971
  • Thinking about Thinking , Fontana, 1976
  • Dictionary of Philosophy , St. Martin's Press, 1979
  • Politics of Procrustes: Contradictions of Enforced Equality , Temple Smith, London 1981
  • Did Jesus Rise From the Dead? The Resurrection Debate , with Gary R. Habermas, HarperCollins, 1987
  • Merely Mortal ?: Can You Survive Your Own Death? , Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY, 2000
  • How to Think Straight: An Introduction to Critical Reasoning
  • Does God Exist ?: The Craig-Flew Debate
  • God and Philosophy
  • Atheistic Humanism
  • There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind , HarperOne 2007

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Smith, Michael (2000), The Emperor's Codes , Bantam, p. 246
  2. ↑ http://infidels.org/library/modern/antony_flew/flew-bio.html
  3. ^ Who's Who , 1974, London: A. & C. Black, 1974, p. 1118
  4. ^ 'Antony Flew, 1923-2010 - Following the Argument Wherever it Leads', eSkeptic , April 21st, 2010, by Kenneth Grubbs
  5. ↑ “The deist god, unlike the god of the Jewish, Christian or, for heaven's sake, the Islamic revelation, is neither interested in nor concerned about either human beliefs or human behavior,” from The Turning of an Atheist The New York Times, Nov 4, 2007
  6. ↑ “My one and only piece of relevant evidence [for an Aristotelian God] is the apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the origin from DNA of the first reproducing species… [In fact] the only reason which I have for beginning to think of believing in a First Cause god is the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of the origin of the first reproducing organisms. " Richard Carrier. SecWeb, October 10, 2004.
  7. ↑ "I now realize that I have made a fool of myself by believing that there were no presentable theories of the development of inanimate matter up to the first living creature capable of reproduction."
  8. ^ Mark Oppenheimer: The Turning of an Atheist New York Times, Nov. 4, 2007
  9. ^ "Times Magazine Piece on Former Atheist Kicks Up Controversy," Nov. 14, 2007 , Publishers Weekly
personal data
SURNAME Flew, Antony
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Flew, Antony Garrard Newton (full name); Flew, Anthony (misspelling)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British philosopher, proponent of libertarianism and atheism
DATE OF BIRTH February 11, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH April 8, 2010
Place of death Reading