Adolf Grunbaum

(1923 - 2018)

In earlier writings, I argued that neither of the two major physical cosmologies of the 20th century support divine creation, so that atheism has nothing to fear from the explanations required by these cosmologies. Yet theists ranging from Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, and Leibniz to Richard Swinburne and Philip Quinn have maintained that, at every instant anew, the existence of the world requires divine creation ex nihilo as its cause. Indeed, according to some such theists, for any given moment t. God's volition that the-world-should-exist-at-t supposedly brings about its actual existence at t. In an effort to reestablish the current viability of this doctrine of perpetual divine conservation. Philip Quinn argued (1993) that it is entirely compatible with physical energy conservation in the Big Bang cosmology, as well as with the physics of the steady-state theories. But I now contend that instead, there is a logical incompatibility on both counts. Besides, the stated tenet of divine conservation has an additional defect: It speciously purchases plausibility by trading on the multiply disanalogous volitional explanations of human actions.

In my 1984 book on The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, I addressed two main questions: Are the analyst’s observations in the clinical setting reliable as ‘data,’ and if so, can they actually support the major hypotheses of the theory of repression or psychic conflict, which is the cornerstone of the psychoanalytic edifice, as we know? In the book, I argued for giving a negative answer to both of these questions. Clearly, if the evidence from the couch is unreliable from the outset, then this defect alone suffices to jeopardize the very foundations of the clinical theory. But, as I strongly emphasized, even if clinical data were not contaminated by the analyst’s influence, the inability of the psychoanalytic method of clinical investigation by free association to warrant the required sort of causal inferences leaves the major pillars of the theory of psychic conflict ill-supported. Thus, I see a two-fold threat to the psychoanalytic case-study method as a means of scientific inquiry.It is an immediate corollary of my challenge that it applies not only to Freud’s own original hypotheses, but also to any and all post-Freudian versions of psychoanalysis that rely on his clinical methods of validating causal inferences, though the specific content of their theories of psychic conflict is different. After all, the alteration in the content of the hypotheses hardly makes their validation more secure. Therefore, as Morris Eagle documented in a recent publication, those analysts who have objected to my critique as anachronistic have simply not come to grips with it. For example, such inadequate engagement is present, in my view, in the recent Freud Anniversary Lecture ‘Psychoanalysis as a Science: A Response to the New Challenges,’ given by Robert Wallerstein, the current president of the International Psychoanalytical Association. As he tells us, ‘The Freud Anniversary Lecture was intended primarily as a response to Grünbaum.’ Yet he does not come to grips at all with the gravamen of my challenge: Even if clinical data could be taken at face value as being uncontaminated epistemically, the inability of the psychoanalytic method of clinical investigation by free association to warrant causal inferences leaves the major pillars of the clinical theory of repression ill-supported.

Ellis and Bowman's account of nonstandard signal synchronizations is examined as a prolegomenon to this paper. Attention is called to some consequences of an important ambiguity in their account of the transitivity of nonstandard synchrony. Then an analysis is given of the principle of relativity to assess E & B's claim that this principle either restricts nonstandard signal synchronisms or rules them out altogether. It is argued that the latitude for choices of nonstandard synchronisms is not circumscribed by the factual content of the principle of relativity; instead, the exclusion of such synchronisms by this principle depends on a tacit appeal to the particular conventions implicit in certain formulations of the principle. Hence E & B's claim is rejected as an argument against the factual tenability of nonstandard synchronisms.

Dirac's classical electrodynamics countenances "preaccelerations" of charged particles at a time t as mathematical functions of external forces applied after the time t. These preaccelerations have been interpreted as evidence for physical retrocausation upon assuming that, in electrodynamics no less than in Newton's second law, external forces sustain an asymmetric causal relation to accelerations. And this retrocausal interpretation has just been defended against the critiques in (Grunbaum 1976), (Grunbaum and Janis, 1977 and 1978) by appeal to the formal assimilation of the electrodynamic laws of motion to Newton's second law. It is argued below that this latest defense of the retrocausal interpretation is even more ill-founded than the prior ones in the literature

With respect to the reproach by habermas and ricoeur that freud will fall prey to a "scientistic self-misunderstanding" i submit that it was not freud, but these hermeneuticians themselves, who forced the clinical theory of psychoanalysis onto the procrustean bed of a philosophical ideology demonstrably alien to it. as against the generic "disavowal" of causal attributions advocated by some hermeneuticians, i maintain that it is a nihilistic, if not frivolous, trivialization of freud's entire clinical theory. far from serving as a new citadel for psychoanalytic apologetics, the embrace of such hermeneuticians is, i submit, the kiss of death for the legacy that was to be saved. (edited)

According to some cosmologists, the big bang cosmogony and even the (now largely defunct) steady-state theory pose a scientifically insoluble problem of matter-energy creation. But I argue that the genuine problem of the origin of matter-energy or of the universe has been fallaciously transmuted into the pseudo-problem of creation by an external cause. A fortiori, it emerges that the initial "true" and "false" vacuum states of quantum cosmology do not vindicate biblical divine creation ex nihilo at all.

Moon and Spencer maintain that there is a divergence between Einstein's analysis of simultaneity, as set forth in his fundamental paper on relativity of 1905, and my treatment of that concept in a recent publication. They write: “Einstein decided that simultaneity is meaningless in all cases of relative motion. … Grünbaum decided that even Einstein's restriction is not sufficiently stringent and that simultaneity is a questionable concept even with stationary observers. … Grünbaum rejects Postulate VI [which states that ‘If A and B are not in relative motion, the time taken for a pulse of radiation to travel in a vacuum from A to B is the same as from B to A’] and is thereby unable to synchronize clocks even when they are stationary.”