[This book offers] compilation of examples from TV, newspapers, magazines, advertisements, and our nation's political dialogue.

A comprehensive introduction to formal logic, Logic and Philosophy: A Modern Introduction is a rigorous yet accessible text, appropriate for students encountering the subject for the first time. Abundant, carefully crafted exercise sets accompanied by a clear, engaging exposition build to an exploration of sentential logic, first-order predicate logic, the theory of descriptions, identity, relations, set theory, modal logic, and Aristotelian logic. And as its title suggests, Logic and Philosophy is devoted not only to logic but also to the philosophical (...) debates that led to the development of the field. Much new material has been added for the 13th edition. An introduction to set theory and its relationship to logic and mathematics, including philosophical issues, is now part of Chapter 13. Chapter 15 is an introduction to modal logic and Kripke semantics, concluding with a discussion of philosophical problems with any logical accommodation of modalities. Instructors who do not wish to present proof methods will find chapters on truth trees for both sentential and first-order logic, and a presentation of trees for modal logic. Special features of this text include presentations of the history of logic, alternatives to traditional methods of conditional and indirect proof, and a discussion of semantic problems with universal and existential instantiations. Throughout, the authors are sensitive to philosophical issues that arise from the relationship between ordinary language, symbolic logic, and justifications for the syntax and semantics of the various symbolic languages. Discussions range from the justification of the truth table for the sentential rendering of if... then statements to semantic and syntactic paradoxes, including some troubling paradoxes that arise in ordinary language (e.g., the so-called hangman or surprise quiz paradox). Logic and Philosophy includes ample material for a one-semester or two-semester course and provides a thorough preparation for more advanced logic courses. (shrink)

Recent theorists have suggested that human altruism toward non-family members evolved because of the tremendous benefits of reciprocity. Developing further the notion that evolutionary theory can help to explain moral sentiments, Howard Kahane proposes that a sense of fair play is essential to ethics and argues that moral obligation, too narrowly construed, prevents us from living rationally. He brings his account of fair play to bear on the ethics of various domains of social life including friendship, taxes, civil (...) rights, and nation states. (shrink)

One of the fundamental problems in the fields of inductive logic and the philosophy of science is the one concerning inferences or projections containing so-called “grue-like” or “pathological” predicates. This problem was first put into sharp focus by Nelson Goodman, who called it the “new riddle of induction.”Goodman has shown that the few attempts by others to solve this problem are not adequate. However, very little has been written concerning Goodman's own attempt to solve the problem, namely his theory of (...) entrenchment. The purpose of this article is to show that Goodman's entrenchment theory also is inadequate as a solution to the new riddle of induction. I shall try to do this by presenting two kinds of counterexamples to the entrenchment theory: one kind illustrating a general objection to the theory as a whole ; the other kind, specific objections to particular parts of the theory. (shrink)

Unfortunately, an at least equally important and fundamental dispute among intensionalists themselves has tended to be blurred and/or ignored, with the result that many, perhaps most, contemporary philosophers are either inconsistent or vague on the issue.

An introduction to informal logic, critical thinking and rhetoric utilizing actual public discourse .

Permit me to reply to the recent note [1] in this journal by Robert J. Ackermann, concerning my critical comments on Nelson Goodman's entrenchment theory.

The loss of the federally protected constitutional right to an abortion is a threat to the already tenuous autonomy of pregnant people, and may augur future challenges to their right to refuse unwanted obstetric interventions. Even before Roe’s demise, pregnancy led to constraints on autonomy evidenced by clinician-led legal incursions against patients who refused obstetric interventions. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court found that the right to liberty espoused in the Constitution does not extend to a (...) pregnant person’s right to an abortion. With Roe’s demise, the right to request specific types of care has been vitiated. The same argument underpinning that holding may now become ballast for attacks on the traditionally more robust right, the right to refuse. Here we discuss how the elevation of fetal and embryonic rights may lead to a cascade of medical intrusions and deprivations of liberty against pregnant persons, and offer an argument opposing these improprieties. (shrink)

In ‘Induction and Natural Kinds’, I proposed a solution to the problem of induction according to which our use of inductive inference is reliable because it is grounded in the natural kind structure of the world. When we infer that unobserved members of a kind will have the same properties as observed members of the kind, we are right because all members of the kind possess the same essential properties. The claim that the existence of natural kinds is what grounds (...) reliable use of induction is based on an inference to the best explanation of the success of our inductive practices. As such, the argument for the existence of natural kinds employs a form of ampliative inference. But induction is likewise a form of ampliative inference. Given both of these facts, my account of the reliability of induction is subject to the objection that it provides a circular justification of induction, since it employs an ampliative inference to justify an ampliative inference. In this paper, I respond to the objection of circularity by arguing that what justifies induction is not the inference to the best explanation of its reliability. The ground of induction is the natural kinds themselves. (shrink)

A brief article on faith as a psychological attitude.

The chapter introduces and characterizes the notion of fittingness. It charts the history of the relation and its relevance to contemporary debates in normative and metanormative philosophy and proceeds to survey issues to do with fittingness covered in the volume’s chapters, including the nature and epistemology of fittingness, the relations between fittingness and reasons, the normativity of fittingness, fittingness and value theory, and the role of fittingness in theorizing about responsibility. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of issues to (...) do with fittingness that aren’t covered extensively by the volume’s chapters in order to indicate avenues for further research. (shrink)

A new history of liberalism which argues that liberalism has been predicated on definite morality and should be viewed as an attempt to encompass both fear and hope. Liberalism, argues Alan Kahan, is the search for a society in which people need not be afraid. Freedom from fear is the most basic freedom. If we are afraid, we are not free. These insights, found in Montesquieu and Judith Shklar, are the foundation of liberalism. What liberals fear has changed over time (...) (revolution, reaction, totalitarianism, religious fanaticism, poverty, and now populism) but the great majority of liberal thinkers have relied on three pillars to ward off their fears and to limit the concentrated power that causes fear: freedom, markets, and morals, or, to put it another way, politics, economics, and religion or morality. Most liberal thinkers emphasize one or two pillars more than another, but it is typical of liberalism down to the Second World War to rely on all three, although there were always minority voices who preferred to stand on only one leg. After WWII, "thin" procedural/market liberals, who wanted to strip any moral or religious basis or purpose from liberalism, dominated "thick" liberal moralists, who thought liberalism needed a moral basis and/or goal. It is the political contention of this book that liberalism is most convincing as program, language, and social analysis when it relies on all three pillars, and that the relative weakness of liberalism at the end of the twentieth century had much to do with neglect of the moral pillar of liberalism. Its historical contention is that for much of the past two centuries it did rely on all three pillars. But Kahan also argues that liberalism is not only a party of fear. It is also a party of hope, or the party of progress. Many of the contradictions typical of liberalism derive from the seemingly contradictory effort to encompass both hope and fear. If in case of conflict fear often trumps hope for liberals (loss aversion applies in politics as much as in economics), and utopia is subject to indefinite postponement, progress in personal autonomy and development has always been at the heart of liberalism. Liberals typically support their hopes on the same three pillars of freedom, markets, and morals which they use to ward off their fears. Nevertheless, in one respect those historians and political theorists who identify liberalism with laissez-faire economics are not wrong. It is characteristic of liberalism then that it bases its hopes not on the state but on civil society, which for liberals is the common source of a free politics, a free market, and of morals. Alan S. Kahan is Professor of History at the Université de Versailles. His previous books include Tocqueville, Democracy, and Religion: Checks and Balances for Democratic Souls (Oxford 2015), Alexis de Tocqueville (Continuum Books) and Mind vs Money: The War Between Intellectuals and Capitalism (Transaction Publishing, 2010). (shrink)

Published in 1982 by CUP (pb. 2009) it discusses the forms of materialism then current, including Davidson, early Rorty, but concentrating on Smart and Armstrong, and arguing that central state materialism fails to give a better 'occurrent' account of conscious states than does behaviourism/functionalism, as Armstrong claims. The book starts with a version of the 'knowledge argument' and ends with a chapter claiming that our conception of matter/the physical is more problematic than our conception of mind.

This chapter contains section titled: Main Approaches to Wittgenstein Interpretation Themes and Controversies Questions of Style and Method The Articles in This Volume.

Liberalism has been one of the leading incarnations of political thought for the past two centuries and it was also the first form of political theory to acquire a truly global reach. This volume examines the work of the most pivotal thinkers in the liberal tradition, starting with Montesquieu and proceeding to a wide range of authors from the French Revolution to the present. The book is distinctive in encompassing the wide spectrum of views historically encompassed by liberalism, revealing its (...) geographical as well as intellectual scope by including conceptions of liberalism formed in Latin America, the Middle East and Asia. Twenty-four chapters cover thinkers including Madame de Stael, Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln, John Stuart Mill Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, John Dewey, Hu Shih, Hannah Arendt and John Rawls. Each chapter offers a commentary on a short critical passage from the author concerned. Essayists use their chosen passage to explore the meaning and significance of the author's work for both the historical tradition of liberalism and for political thought more generally. The book is organized chronologically, building up a richly detailed overview of the tradition of liberalism and its key writings. The book will be an indispensible companion to courses on liberal thought, on political ideologies and on the history of political thought and will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, philosophy and history. (shrink)

We live in times where it is possible to control our emotions using biomedical means – for example by taking pills that make us feel better. This chapter discusses one worry about the biomedical enhancement of mood. It is a worry that seems to play an important role in more familiar objections to biomedical enhancement of mood, such as the objection that it would lead to inauthenticity. The worry is that the use of positive mood enhancers will corrupt emotional lives. (...) Ethical questions about the biomedical enhancement of mood are often really questions about our affective reasons. Negative emotions typically feel bad, positive ones typically feel good. Here our hedonic reasons come into direct competition with affective reasons. Those who entirely dismiss affective reasons, or at least think that negative affective reasons are extremely weak, are likely to see little problem with positive mood enhancers. (shrink)

It has been repeatedly argued, most recently by Nicholas Maxwell, that the special theory of relativity is incompatible with the view that the future is in some degree undetermined; and Maxwell contends that this is a reason to reject that theory. In the present paper, an analysis is offered of the notion of indeterminateness (or "becoming") that is uniquely appropriate to the special theory of relativity, in the light of a set of natural conditions upon such a notion; and reasons (...) are given for regarding this conception as (not just formally consistent with relativity theory, but also) philosophically reasonable. The bearings upon Maxwell's program for quantum theory are briefly considered. (shrink)

Background: Current practice frequently fails to provide care consistent with the preferences of decisionally-incapacitated patients. It also imposes significant emotional burden on their surrogates. Algorithmic-based patient preference predictors (PPPs) have been proposed as a possible way to address these two concerns. While previous research found that patients strongly support the use of PPPs, the views of surrogates are unknown. The present study thus assessed the views of experienced surrogates regarding the possible use of PPPs as a means to help make (...) treatment decisions for decisionally-incapacitated patients. -/- Methods: This qualitative study used semi-structured interviews to determine the views of experienced surrogates [n=26] who were identified from two academic medical centers and two community hospitals. The primary outcomes were respondents’ overall level of support for the idea of using PPPs and the themes related to their views on how a PPP should be used, if at all, in practice. -/- Results: Overall, 21 participants supported the idea of using PPPs. The remaining five indicated that they would not use a PPP because they made decisions based on the patient’s best interests, not based on substituted judgment. Major themes which emerged were that surrogates, not the patient’s preferences, should determine how treatment decisions are made, and concern that PPPs might be used to deny expensive care or be biased against minority groups. -/- Conclusions: Surrogates, like patients, strongly support the idea of using PPPs to help make treatment decisions for decisionally-incapacitated patients. These findings provide support for developing a PPP and assessing it in practice. At the same time, patients and surrogates disagree over whose preferences should determine how treatment decisions are made, including whether to use a PPP. These findings reveal a fundamental disagreement regarding the guiding principles for surrogate decision-making. Future research is needed to assess this disagreement and consider ways to address it. (shrink)

This chapter starts by restating the causal-hallucinatory argument against naive realism. This argument depends on the possibility of “philosophers' hallucinations.” It draws attention to the role of what the chapter refers to as the nonarbitrariness of philosophers' hallucinations in supporting this argument. The chapter then discusses three attempts to refute the argument. Two of them, those associated with John McDowell and with Michael Martin, are explicitly forms of disjunctivism. The third, exemplified by Mark Johnston, has, the chapter claims, disjunctivist features. (...) None of these responses to the argument is plausible. (shrink)

It is common for young Christians to go off to college assured in their beliefs but, in the course of their first year or two, they meet what appears to them to be powerful defenses of scientific naturalism and crushing critiques of the basic Christian story (BCS), and many are thrown into doubt. They think to themselves something like this: "To be honest, I am troubled about the BCS. While the problem of evil, the apparent cultural basis for the diversity (...) of religions, the explanatory breadth of contemporary science, naturalistic explanations of religious experience and miracle reports, and textual and historical criticism of the Bible, among other things, don’t make me believe the BCS is false , I am in serious doubt about it, so much so that I lack belief of it. In that case, how can I have Christian faith? And if I don’t have faith, how can I keep on praying, attending church, affirming the creed, confessing my sins, taking the sacraments, singing the hymns and songs, and so on? I can’t, unless I’m a hypocrite. So integrity requires me to drop the whole thing and get out." Of course, our student is not alone. Many Christians find themselves for some portion of their lives somewhere on the trajectory from doubt to getting out. Indeed, Christians in the West struggle with intellectual doubt more than they used to, especially university-educated Christians. What should we say to them? Some will say “Get out!,” welcoming the development as a path to liberation. We explore a different response in this essay. (shrink)

Bioethics' interdisciplinary base -- Patient-centered care -- Evidence-based medicine and pay-for-performance -- Community dialogue -- Overview : bioethics, power, and learning to see -- Cross-cultural concerns -- Race and health disparities -- Disabilities -- Environmental and global issues -- New technologies -- Conclusion.

Many believe that severe intellectual impairment, blindness or dying young amount to serious harm and disadvantage. It is also increasingly denied that it matters, from a moral point of view, whether something is biologically normal to humans. We show that these two claims are in serious tension. It is hard explain how, if we do not ascribe some deep moral significance to human nature or biological normality, we could distinguish severe intellectual impairment or blindness from the vast list of seemingly (...) innocent ways in which we fail to have as much wellbeing as we could, such not having super‐intelligence, or not living to 130. We consider a range of attempts to draw this intuitive normative distinction without appealing to normality. These, we argue, all fail. But this doesn't mean that we cannot draw this distinction or that we must, implausibly, conclude that biological normality does possess an inherent moral importance. We argue that, despite appearances, it is not biological normality but rather statistical normality that, although lacking any intrinsic moral significance, nevertheless makes an important moral difference in ways that explain and largely justify the intuitive distinction. (shrink)

Whereas traditional nominalists accept the realist's challenge to solve a 'Problem of Universals', the Ostrich Nominalist responds that there is no such Problem to answer. I suggest that Ostrich Nominalist arguments expose a genuine flaw in the realist project. However, I argue, Ostrich Nominalism is ultimately defeated by a problem about the analysis of qualitative sameness and difference. Qualitative sameness and difference are adequately understood only as sameness or difference in some respect. The need to say what these respects of (...) sameness and difference are (if not universals) constitutes a genuine Problem of Universals; consequently—I claim—the Ostrich Nominalist is mistaken. (shrink)

A survey of Howard Gardner's contributions to our understanding of learning, and how to create environments that support growth in all learners across the lifespan.

The idea that science is objective, or able to achieve objectivity, is in large part responsible for the role that science plays within society. But what is objectivity? The idea of objectivity is ambiguous. This paper distinguishes between three basic forms of objectivity. The first form of objectivity is ontological objectivity: the world as it is in itself does not depend upon what we think about it; it is independent of human thought, language, conceptual activity or experience. The second form (...) of objectivity is the objectivity of truth: truth does not depend upon what we believe or justifiably believe; truth depends upon the way reality itself is. The third form of objectivity is epistemic objectivity: this form of objectivity resides in the scientific method which ensures that subjective factors are excluded, and only epistemically relevant factors play a role in scientific inquiry. The paper considers two problems that arise for the notion of epistemic objectivity: the theory-dependence of observation and the variability of the methods of science. It is argued that the use of shared standard procedures ensures the objectivity of observation despite theory-dependence. It is argued that the variability of methods need not lead to epistemic relativism about science. The paper concludes with the realist suggestion that the best explanation of the success of the sciences is that the methods employed in the sciences are highly reliable truth-conducive tools of inquiry. The objectivity of the methods of the sciences leads to the objective truth about the objective world. (shrink)

An exploration of Immanuel Kant's account of war and the controversies that have arisen from its interpretation. This book brings the ideas of Kant's critical philosophy to bear on one of the leading political and legal questions of our age: under what circumstances, if any, is recourse to war legally and morally justifiable?