Professor A.G.N. Flew. R.I.P.

eSkeptic, the newsletter of the Skeptic Society wrote an interesting piece following the recent passing of one of my favorite philosophy professors, Antony Flew. Prof. Flew was a prolific writer and educator of philosophy, but was perhaps best known for two things: 1. his expertise on David Hume, and 2. his lifelong public defense of atheism and the lack of evidence for God, or coherence about the concept of God.

The eSkeptic article is available here: http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/10-04-21/#comment-1716.

I contributed my recollection and comments, which I reproduce here.

Thanks for the article on Professor Flew. I took three courses with Professor Flew at York University in the early to mid 1980s, including two undergraduate courses and a graduate seminar on David Hume Second Treatise, and loved every minute of it. Flew was always smart, witty, engaging, and best of all, given he was a philosopher, rational and intelligent. He had a real passion for his work and loved to share, inquire, argue, and educate. He didn't tolerate fools lightly, and wasn't afraid to strongly argue his opinions.

He also had his own peculiar eccentricities and quirks, both in mannerisms and speech. He spoke the way he wrote, and when I read Flew, I read him in his voice at times. I carried out a brief correspondence with him following my graduation, and he would always respond promptly and kindly in his distinctive scrawl. In the few times I met him in social situations, he was always gracious and gentlemanly.

His detail to epistemological and logical thinking is what I gained most by being a student. Like others who knew him, it is hard for me to accept his statements that had abandoned atheism. In the few online interviews I have read, there seemed to always have been a bit of a wink to these statements, as if he was having one on with everyone. He had previously dealt with all of the arguments he himself had put forth to justify his conversion. It is impossible to reconcile his personal admission that he had flipped with his prior body of work. To do so was for him to abandon his earlier commitment to logic and sound epistemology, to disregard his own earlier arguments. Your article helped to explain how this may have happened - how a statement or confusion may have been manipulated into a political coup by those who were powerless to oppose the blinding light of Flew's reasoned arguments opposing irrationalism and mysticism.

The best we can do to preserve the memory and work of Antony G.N. Flew is to continue to invoke his own arguments against theism with the passion and certitude that he himself brought to the challenge.