Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I'm about 24 years late to the party, but I've recently learned that Ernan McMullin, of the University of Notre Dame, wrote a fascinating take-down of an essay by Alvin Plantinga. This must have been big news in the world of Christian theologians/apologetics in 1991. Plantinga was easily the better known of the two: he was once (in 1980, or eleven years before McMullin took him on) described by TIME as "America's leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God."  The exchange may have seemed to some like a hopeless mismatch, a case of "Alvin v. the chipmunk."  The essay of his that drew McMullin's ire was titled "When faith and reason clash: Evolution and the Bible."  Plantinga writes that "[In]  all the areas of academic endeavor, we Christians must think about the matter at hand from a Christian perspective; we need Theistic Science." Theistic science will come to conclusions that a science devoted to methodological natur...

Two days ago (as you reckon time, oh real-time reader of these prepared-for-vacation notes) I said that I am thinking of writing something about the historiography of the Holocaust. Somewhat related to that ambition: I see that Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, a very high-profile social scientist, formerly an associate professor of political science at Harvard, has a new book out called   The Devil That Never Dies. From what I've heard it is not so much as history as a work of personal meditation on the past, present, and future of anti-Semitism.  It is also the object of a very sharply worded critique in the September 13th WALL STREET JOURNAL by Anthony Julius. Julius says that he is himself of Goldhagen's "party," that is, anti-anti-Semitism, but ... to do the good work of that party one has to be a "smart, truth-telling" participant in the "terrible struggle" against the enemies of the Jews. And this, Goldhagen is not. I shouldn't comment ...