Hello Friends:
I haven’t posted a blog since last spring. Some of you may have forgotten that you were actually subscribed. It’s been a very busy past six months, personally and professionally, but I‘m hoping to begin regular blogging as we approach the New Year.
At this time, I have a few announcements and a preview of a forthcoming blog.
First, I’m happy to announce that my book on empirical arguments for survival (in progress) is now under contract with Palgrave Macmillan, and the book is scheduled for completion and submission in November 2014. The book will be published in the Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion series. A recently revised Book Prospectus is currently available.
Second, I have two forthcoming articles. (1) My recently completed article on empirical survival arguments for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy will likely be published in January 2014. (2) In March 2014, my article on mediumship and survival will appear in Adam Rock’s edited collection The Survival Hypothesis: Essays on Mediumship (McFarland, 2014), which will also feature an article from fellow philosopher Stephen Braude.
Finally, in the next few weeks I’ll be posting a preview of a new article I’m writing entitled “Recalibrating the Empirical Survival Debate: the Role and Relevance of Predictive Power.” In this article I explore the implications of predictive power for two prominent challenges to traditional empirical arguments for survival: the alternative explanation challenge (which tries to deflate the case for survival by appealing to alternative non-survival explanations of the data) and the antecedent probability challenge (which tries to deflate the case for survival by arguing that the survival hypothesis has a low antecedent probability). I argue that standard survivalist responses to these long-standing challenges are inadequate when the challenges are reformulated in the light of salient issues surrounding the predictive power of the survival hypothesis. In this way, I hope to bring greater clarity to some of the fundamental problems that infect traditional empirical arguments for survival.
Michael Sudduth
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