Miracles, historical testimonies, and probabilities

History and Theory

Volumn 44, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 373-390

  Tucker, Aviezer ^a  

^a AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149704659     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2005.00330.x     Document Type: Review

References (36)

1. Doris Goldstein, "History at Oxford and Cambridge: Professionalization and the Influence of Ranke," in Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, ed. Georg G. Iggers and James M. Powell (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 141-153.
2. George M. Schlesinger, "Miracles and Probabilities," Nous 21 (1987), 219-232;
3. Jordan Howard Sobel, "On the Evidence of Testimony for Miracles: A Bayesian Interpretation of David Hume's Analysis," Philosophical Quarterly 37:147 (1987), 166-186;
4. David Owen, "Hume vs. Price on Miracles and Prior Probabilities: Testimony and the Bayesian Calculation," Philosophical Quarterly 37:147 (1987), 187-202;
5. Phillip Dawid and Donald Gillies, "A Bayesian Analysis of Hume's Argument Concerning Miracles," Philosophical Quarterly 39:154, (1989), 57-65;
6. Ruth Weintraub, "The Credibility of Miracles," Philosophical Studies 82 (1996), 359-375;
7. Rodney D. Holder, "Hume on Miracles: Bayesian Interpretation, Multiple Testimony, and the Existence of God," British Journal for Philosophy of Science 49 (1998), 49-65;
8. John Earman, Hume's Abject Failure: The Argument against Miracles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
9. Elliott Sober, "A Modest Proposal," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (2004), 487-494.
10. Aviezer Tucker, Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
11. David Hume, "Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" (1777), Section 10, "Of Miracles," in Earman, Hume's Abject Failure, 143.
12. G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Cambridge, Eng. : Cambridge University Press, 1983), 117-118.
13. R. J. Hankinson's massive and impressive Cause and Explanation in Ancient Greek Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) mentions laws of nature three times: twice in the body of the work to distinguish Greek thought from the modern concept of laws of nature, and once in the introduction to say that "The basic features which distinguish scientific from other sorts of explanation are their universality and simplicity. . . . Laws and regularities need not take the form of the contemporary mathematical conception of a scientific law, one in which (whatever your metaphysical predilections) physical quantities are related by general functions that establish their co-variability, along the lines of the classical modern account of the relations between law and explanation offered by Hempel. . . . Something of that kind of course will certainly count as a scientific law; but so, on this account, will something looser and less rigorous, namely any assertion of a universal or even general truth . . . " (2-3). In the rest of this 450-page work, Hankinson does not require natural laws to describe and explain how Greek philosophers, medics, and astronomers explained and adduced causes.
14. Schlesinger, "Miracles and Probabilities," 230-232;
15. Owen, "Hume vs. Price on Miracles and Prior Probabilities," 201;
16. Holder, "Hume on Miracles," 59-63.
17. Owen, "Hume vs. Price on Miracles and Prior Probabilities";
18. Sobel, "On the Evidence of Testimony for Miracles";
19. Dawid and Gillies, "A Bayesian Analysis of Hume's Argument Concerning Miracles";
20. Earman, Hume's Abject Failure.
21. Weintraub, "The Credibility of Miracles";
22. Sober, "A Modest Proposal. "
23. Pierre Simon Marquis de Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, transl. Frederick Wilson Truscott and Frederick Lincoln Emory (New York: Dover Publications, 1951), 109-125.
24. Wesley C. Salmon, "Rationality and Objectivity in Science, or Tom Kuhn Meets Tom Bayes," in Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues, ed. Martin Curd and J. A. Cover (New York: Norton, 1998), 551-583;
25. Elliott Sober, Reconstructing the Past: Parsimony, Evolution, and Inference (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1998).
26. Tucker, Our Knowledge of the Past, 117-124.
27. Judah Halevi, The Kuzari (Kitab al khazari): An Argument for the Faith of Israel, transl. Hartwig Hirschfeld (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), 43.
28. There are marked similarities between Halevi's argument for the existence of God, and Saul Kripke's theory of rigid designation in Naming and Necessity. Both rely on a tradition to authenticate existence and direct reference respectively. Accordingly, Kripke's theory of language suffers from the same ahistorical flaws as Halevi's proof for the existence of God. See Aviezer Tucker, "Kripke and Fixing the References of God," International Studies in Philosophy 34:4 (2002), 155-160.
29. Salmon, "Rationality and Objectivity in Science. "
30. Sober, "A Modest Proposal," note 13, 97.
31. Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origins of Its Sacred Texts (New York: Free Press, 2001)
32. and Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (New York: HarperCollins, 1989), are popular introductions, respectively, to Biblical archeology and contemporary biblical criticism with useful extensive bibliographies.
33. Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, Einleitung in das Alte Testament (Göttingen: Carl Eduard Rosenbusch, 1823).
34. Wilhelm Martin Leberecht De Wette, Beiträge zur Einleitung in das Alte Testament (Halle: Schimmelpfennig, 1806-1807).
35. Carl Peter Wilhelm Gramberg, Kritische Geschichte der Religionsideen des Alten Testaments (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1830).
36. Hume, "Of Miracles," 149-150.