{"id":826,"date":"2024-04-22T20:49:14","date_gmt":"2024-04-22T20:49:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/?p=826"},"modified":"2024-04-22T20:49:14","modified_gmt":"2024-04-22T20:49:14","slug":"the-lewis-and-anscombe-debate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/the-lewis-and-anscombe-debate\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lewis and Anscombe Debate"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>C S Lewis helped found the Socratic Society at Oxford which hosted some of the liveliest debates of the post-WWII era.\u00a0 Lewis was not just a popular author and public speaker, but was a distinguished academic who was happy to engage in a cross-disciplinary manner with his philosophical peers.\u00a0 Elizabeth Anscombe was first a student, and then an authority on Wittgenstein, and was also a Catholic philosopher.\u00a0 She dissected C S Lewis&#8217; argument for God from <em>Miracles<\/em> and was regarded as having effectively shown its shortcomings.\u00a0 However, the Anscombe\u2013Lewis debate is the subject of much misrepresentation which suggested that Anscombe had so decimated Lewis during the debate that he had shrunk back to his quarters at Oxford never to write any philosophy or apologetic work again, preferring to write children\u2019s books.\u00a0 In fact, Lewis <em>did<\/em> respond to Anscombe and Anscombe complimented Lewis\u2019 revised argument, even stating that for some of the questions he posed, \u2018<em>we still await an answer<\/em>\u2019.\u00a0 John Beversluis, who had previously made much of this alleged event to criticize Lewis\u2019 inadequacy as a philosophical apologist, allowed himself to be corrected and wrote an extensive retraction in review of another critical intellectual biography of Lewis (Beversluis, 1992).\u00a0 The most comprehensive account regarding this incident and of Lewis\u2019 work in apologetics is found in Reppert (2003).\u00a0 Reppert himself has taken on and tidied Lewis\u2019 argument.<\/p>\n<h2>Further Reading<\/h2>\n<p>Beversluis, J. (1992). Surprised by Freud: A Critical Appraisal of A.N. Wilson&#8217;s Biography of C.S. Lewis. <em>Christianity and Literature, 41<\/em>(2), 179-195.<\/p>\n<p>Reppert, V. (2003). <em>C.S. Lewis&#8217;s Dangerous Idea.<\/em> Downers Grove: IVP.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>C S Lewis helped found the Socratic Society at Oxford which hosted some of the liveliest debates of the post-WWII era.\u00a0 Lewis was not just a popular author and public speaker, but was a distinguished academic who was happy to engage in a cross-disciplinary manner with his philosophical peers.\u00a0 Elizabeth Anscombe was first a student, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":828,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,13,17],"tags":[296,297,298],"class_list":["post-826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-philosophy","category-philosophy-of-religion","category-science-and-religion","tag-c-s-lewis","tag-elizabeth-anscombe","tag-miracles"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - 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