Graham Oppy is "Professor of Philosophy, and Head of the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies (SOPHIS) at Monash." He is "Chair of Council of the Australasian Association of Philosophy" and "elected Fellow of the Australian Academcy [sic] of Humanities in 2009." So, I was very surprised by this unprofessional and self-absorbed review. For, he uses almost 2,000 words (out of a 2100 word review) to offer a taxonomy "not directly addressed anywhere in the work under review" in order to provide us with the mere assertion that, "while not denying that there has been an increase in serious activity in philosophy of religion, I am sceptical that there has been any movement at all in the first kind of project that I have identified." (The first project is "the 'neutral' assessment of competing worldviews in terms of global theoretical virtues -- simplicity, fit with data, explanatory scope, predictive accuracy, and the like.") Oppy then concludes with an entirely gratuitous list of authors who wrote "some outstanding chapters," including one from which he says he "learned many things that I am now pleased to know."
Let's grant that writing a review of (yet another) Handbook is no easy task; one often doesn't have space to even summarize all the chapters and, even if one did, mere summary is not the fundamental aim of any review worth having. Reviews play a crucial role in maintaining standards in a field, for explaining to the community what a book is about and at whom it is (primarily) aimed (a non-trivial issue with Handbooks), and what contributions it makes or should have made, etc. A review of a handbook also allows one to evaluate the 'state of play' in an intellectual community. There is a lot of room for different approaches to reviewing a Handbook, of course. Yet, Oppy's pontificating review does not meet the minimal standards for reviewing.
The review is a disgrace to NDPR.
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