Open Letter to Alvin Plantinga (after minor typographic/spelling editing)

From:Eric Schliesser <[email protected]>
To:[email protected]
Sent: Sat, May 14, 2011 3:43:11 PM
Subject:Open Letter to Alvin Plantinga

Dear Professor Plantinga,

I read in yesterday's New York Times, that you wrote the editors of Synthese after the publication of Prof. Forrest's article in that journal. The Times reports you as follows: “I thought her article didn’t measure up to the usual academic standards of Synthese at all,” he said on Thursday. “It was heavy on character assassination and innuendo and light on anything Beckwith ever said.”

You are entitled to your judgment, of course. Moreover, you have every right to call professional misdeeds to the attention of the editors of any journal you wish.  But now I wonder if you would also lend your stature to help rectify a wrong that is the (indirect?) consequence of your actions; I am thinking of the disclaimer inserted by the general editors and the subsequent use, or shall we say, abuse made of it by Professor Beckwith. As you probably recall the general editors inserted a disclaimer, with the following line, “that some of the papers in this issue employ a tone that may make it hard to distinguish between dispassionate intellectual discussion of other views and disqualification of a targeted author or group.” 

Here's what Professor Beckwith does with the passage: "Forrest’s assessment of my work is a professional embarrassment. So much so that the editors of this journal—not to be confused with the editors of the “special issue” in which Forrest’s article appears—have done something unprecedented: they have included in the front of the issue a disclaimer (Branch and Fetzer 2011, p. 170). They have distanced themselves from her literary misconduct, her article’s personal attacks and bizarre tangents into my religious pilgrimage that surround and embed her case against my work. As much as I do not deserve Forrest’s attempt at character assassination, I surely do not deserve the generosity of the Synthese editors. For in the grand world of academic philosophy, I am a minor figure, who, to be sure, has been blessed to be part of a first-class philosophy department at an outstanding university."

 

I was struck that in addition to echoing your judgment, Professor Beckwith also calls Professor Forrest's analysis of his work "a professional embarrassment." Surely, if anything counts, this counts as "character assassination?" I hope you will join me in contacting the editors of Synthese that such claims do not belong in the pages of Synthese.

 

Sincerely,

Eric Schliesser

UPDATE [not in the original letter; ES]: some readers may find the reasons why I (and my fellow bloggers, Mark Lance and John Protevi,) disagree with Professor Plantinga's considered judgment of Professor Forrest's article useful.