New Books in Intellectual History

The story goes: you are walking in the woods and see a wrist-watch on the ground; you don’t know how it got there or why it has come to be abandoned here, but you can surmise that someone somewhere designed and made it due to its complexity. This is the basic premise of the argument for intelligent design, mobilized by the religious in their efforts to demonstrate evidence for their belief in a divine creator. So how does this relatively simple story translate into a more fully fleshed out philosophy for understanding our world and universe, and how does that philosophy stand up to mathematical scrutiny? This is what Professor Elliott Sober works to elaborate in his new book The Design Argument, which is a monograph in Cambridge University Press’s series “Elements in the Philosophy of Religion.” Sober’s book analyzes the various forms that design arguments for the existence of God can take and focuses primarily on two of these. The first is known as biological creationism and concerns the complex adaptive features that organisms have. The second design argument––referred to as the argument from fine-tuning––begins with the assertion that life could not exist in our universe if the constants found in the laws of physics had values that differed more than a little from their actual values and our remarkable luck here points to a divine creator. Elliott Sober is the William F. Vilas Research Professor and Hans Reichenbach Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin. He is widely regarded as having played a formative role in the establishment of the field of philosophy of biology and is the recipient of the 2014 Hempel Award for lifetime accomplishment in the philosophy of science. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Scott A. Mitchell‘s recent monograph, Buddhism in America: Global Religion, Local Contexts (Bloomsbury, 2016), provides a much-needed up-to-date overview of Buddhism in the United States. To tackle such a large topic, Mitchell draws on Thomas Tweeds work and approaches American Buddhism as comprising worldviews and sets of practices that are born of local circumstances but which can be firmly located within global cultural networks that extend far beyond the local and beyond America. The book is usefully divided into three sections. In the first, Mitchell provides a short introduction to Buddhism and then discusses the history of Buddhism in the US up to around the 1960s. Here he also touches on the nineteenth-century European interest in Buddhism, on the ways in which US immigration policy influenced Buddhist demographics, and on the Zen boom of the 1950s. The second section presents a rich overview of Buddhism in the US, organized according to a tripartite distinction between Theravada traditions, East Asian Mahayana traditions, and Vajrayana traditions, including Japanese esoteric Buddhism. For anyone who wants to know who established what temple or group and when, this is essential reading. A third section then addresses a handful of themes or developments through which to examine American Buddhism more broadly. Here Mitchell sheds fresh light on a number of issues that will be familiar to anyone involved with Buddhism in the US. For example, he examines commercial uses of Buddhist ideas and imagery, but goes beyond characterizing such use as mere cultural appropriation for monetary ends by providing examples in which it is practicing Buddhists themselves who are behind the commercial use. Here he also looks at visual art and literature that straddles the border between Buddhist and non-Buddhist, thus bringing our attention to the gray areas in which readers notions of what is and is not Buddhism are challenged. Other topics addressed in this third section include issues around identity, pan-Buddhist and secular Buddhist movements, and various forms of socially-engaged Buddhism. In the interview we only touch on a few of these topics, and readers will have to pick up a copy for themselves to appreciate the full scope of this volume. The book is in part designed to be used in the classroom, and each chapter is accompanied by a useful chapter overview, discussion questions, and a list for further reading. That being said, the book offers a wealth of information, and is thus a must-read for any scholar wanting to know about the history and current state of American Buddhism. Furthermore, written in clear prose as it is, the book can also be enjoyed by those without a prior understanding of Buddhism, and it will provide anyone who is interested with the most up-to-date and comprehensive account of American Buddhism currently available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history