From alcohol and drug addiction to rage on national highways and in airports, many human beings have kept themselves in perpetual turmoil and despair. From encroachment on individual rights and liberties to wars of attrition and mass genocide, human history has continually repeated itself due to a failure to see the light. Containing numerous skill-building exercises, Critical Thinking Unleashed seeks to cultivate the reasoning skills required to overcome such destructive human tendencies and to live meaningful and productive lives in a democratic society. In contrast to other treatments of practical reasoning, Elliot D. Cohen not only teaches students how to identify and refute irrational premises_he also teaches them how to construct rational antidotes to combat the personal, social, and political obstacles they confront in everyday life. Moreover, Cohen encourages students to use the theories and ideas embodied in the history of philosophy in order to construct these rational guides, drawing examples from many contemporary sources. Demonstrating the practical relevance and import of many historically significant philosophers (e.g. Socrates, Aristotle, Epictetus, Hume, Kant, Mill, Sartre, and Nietzsche), the book presents a practical, non-technical, and comprehensive approach to critical thinking.

This book contains a selection of the papers presented at the Logic, Reasoning and Rationality 2010 conference (LRR10) in Ghent. The conference aimed at stimulating the use of formal frameworks to explicate concrete cases of human reasoning, and conversely, to challenge scholars in formal studies by presenting them with interesting new cases of actual reasoning. According to the members of the Wiener Kreis, there was a strong connection between logic, reasoning, and rationality and that human reasoning is rational in so far as it is based on (classical) logic. Later, this belief came under attack and logic was deemed inadequate to explicate actual cases of human reasoning. Today, there is a growing interest in reconnecting logic, reasoning and rationality. A central motor for this change was the development of non-classical logics and non-classical formal frameworks. The book contains contributions in various non-classical formal frameworks, case studies that enhance our apprehension of concrete reasoning patterns, and studies of the philosophical implications for our understanding of the notions of rationality.

Graham Priest presents an original exploration of philosophical questions concerning the one and the many. He covers a wide range of issues in metaphysics-including unity, identity, grounding, mereology, universals, being, intentionality, and nothingness-and deploys the techniques of paraconsistent logic in order to offer a radically new treatment of unity. Priest brings together traditions of Western and Asian thought that are usually kept separate in academic philosophy: he draws on ideas from Plato, Heidegger, and Nagarjuna, among other philosophers.

John Stuart Mill considered his A System of Logic, first published in 1843, the methodological foundation and intellectual groundwork of his later works in ethical, social, and political theory. Yet no book has attempted in the past to engage with the most important aspects of Mill's Logic. This volume brings together leading scholars to elucidate the key themes of this influential work, looking at such topics as his philosophy of language and mathematics, his view on logic, induction and deduction, free will, argumentation, ethology and psychology, as well as his account of normativity, kinds of pleasure, philosophical and political method and the "Art of Life."

Philosophy means 'love of wisdom,' but author Edmond Holmes fears the encroaching dominance of intellect over feeling. In this title, Holmes argues that metaphysics' reliance on intellect and pure reason undermines the study of philosophy. Rather, Holmes suggests a return to intuitional philosophy, combining thought and feeling. First published in 1930, this title will be ideal for students interested in Philosophy and Western Civilisation.

Peirce's Speculative Grammar: Logic as Semiotics offers a comprehensive, philologically accurate, and exegetically ambitious developmental account of Peirce's theory of speculative grammar. The book traces the evolution of Peirce's grammatical writings from his early research on the classification of arguments in the 1860s up to the complex semiotic taxonomies elaborated in the first decade of the twentieth century. It will be of interest to academic specialists working on Peirce, the history of American philosophy and pragmatism, the philosophy of language, the history of logic, and semiotics.

The work of Bertrand Russell had a decisive influence on the emergence of analytic philosophy, and on its subsequent development. The essays collected in this volume, by one of the leading authorities on Russell's philosophy, all aim at recapturing and articulating aspects of Russell's philosophical vision during his most influential and important period, the two decades following his break with Idealism in 1899. One theme of the collection concerns Russell's views about propositions and their analysis, and the relation of those ideas to his rejection of Idealism. Another theme is the development of Russell's logicism, culminating in Whitehead's and Russell's Principia Mathematica, and Hylton offers a revealing view of the conception of logic which underlies it. Here again there is an emphasis on Russell's argument against Idealism, on the idea that his logicism was a crucial part of that argument. A further focus of the volume is Russell's views about functions and propositional functions. This theme is part of a contrast that Hylton draws between Russell's general philosophical position and that of Frege; in particular, there is a close parallel with the quite different views that the two philosophers held about the nature of philosophical analysis. Hylton also sheds valuable light on the much-disputed idea of an operation, which Wittgenstein advances in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Featuring a previously unpublished essay and a helpful new introduction, Propositions, Functions, and Analysis will be welcomed by anyone engaged with the history of twentieth-century ideas.

This book develops new techniques in formal epistemology and applies them to the challenge of Cartesian skepticism. It introduces two formats of epistemic evaluation that should be of interest to epistemologists and philosophers of science: the dual-component format, which evaluates a statement on the basis of its safety and informativeness, and the relative-divergence format, which evaluates a probabilistic model on the basis of its complexity and goodness of fit with data. Tomoji Shogenji shows that the former lends support to Cartesian skepticism, but the latter allows us to defeat Cartesian skepticism. Along the way, Shogenji addresses a number of related issues in epistemology and philosophy of science, including epistemic circularity, epistemic closure, and inductive skepticism.

From alcohol and drug addiction to rage on national highways and in airports, many human beings have kept themselves in perpetual turmoil and despair. From encroachment on individual rights and liberties to wars of attrition and mass genocide, human history has continually repeated itself due to a failure to see the light. Containing numerous skill-building exercises, Critical Thinking Unleashed seeks to cultivate the reasoning skills required to overcome such destructive human tendencies and to live meaningful and productive lives in a democratic society. In contrast to other treatments of practical reasoning, Elliot D. Cohen not only teaches students how to identify and refute irrational premises he also teaches them how to construct rational antidotes to combat the personal, social, and political obstacles they confront in everyday life. Moreover, Cohen encourages students to use the theories and ideas embodied in the history of philosophy in order to construct these rational guides, drawing examples from many contemporary sources. Demonstrating the practical relevance and import of many historically significant philosophers (e.g. Socrates, Aristotle, Epictetus, Hume, Kant, Mill, Sartre, and Nietzsche), the book presents a practical, non-technical, and comprehensive approach to critical thinking."

When did Rembrandt get old? If you keep removing single grains of sand from a heap when is it no longer a heap? These questions and the many others like them will eventually lead us to the problem of vagueness. Timothy Williamson traces the history of the problem from discussions of the heap paradox in classical Greece to modern formal approaches, such as fuzzy logic. He shows the problems with views which have taken the position that standard logic and formal semantics do not apply to vague languages and defends the controversial realist view that vagueness is a kind of ignorance - there really is a grain of sand whose removal turns a heap into a non-heap, but we cannot know which one it is.

eBook available with sample pages: 020301426X

"This is a learned book without being ponderous; a book which explores most abstruse regions of philosophy and social theory while remaining legible and lucid thoughts; uncompromising in its determination to confront all the ecruciatingly complex issues of Foucault's legacy and its manifold reprecussions, without ever losing the reader's attention and facing the readers with an argument they can follow, assimilate and learn from "Zygmunt Bauman, Emeritus Professor in Sociology, Leeds University
This book places Foucault's methodologies against central currents in soical theory and philosophy to provide a guide to doing historical sociology and to chart an original position on the condition of social science today. It is addressed to those working at the cutting edge of social research and to those who wish to understand Foucault's legacy.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203414217

This edited volume presents a comprehensive history of modern logic from the Middle Ages through the end of the twentieth century. In addition to a history of symbolic logic, the contributors also examine developments in the philosophy of logic and philosophical logic in modern times. The book begins with chapters on late medieval developments and logic and philosophy of logic from Humanism to Kant. The following chapters focus on the emergence of symbolic logic with special emphasis on the relations between logic and mathematics, on the one hand, and on logic and philosophy, on the other. This discussion is completed by a chapter on the themes of judgment and inference from 1837-1936. The volume contains a section on the development of mathematical logic from 1900-1935, followed by a section on main trends in mathematical logic after the 1930s. The volume goes on to discuss modal logic from Kant till the late twentieth century, and logic and semantics in the twentieth century; the philosophy of alternative logics; the philosophical aspects of inductive logic; the relations between logic and linguistics in the twentieth century; the relationship between logic and artificial intelligence; and ends with a presentation of the main schools of Indian logic.
The Development of Modern Logic includes many prominent philosophers from around the world who work in the philosophy and history of mathematics and logic, who not only survey developments in a given period or area but also seek to make new contributions to contemporary research in the field. It is the first volume to discuss the field with this breadth of coverage and depth, and will appeal to scholars and students of logic and itsphilosophy.

In the past 15 years a host of critical thinking books have appeared that teach students to find flaws in the arguments of others by learning to detect a number of informal fallacies. This book is not in that tradition. The authors of this book believe that while students learn to become vicious critics, they still continue to make the very mistakes they criticize in others. Thus, this book has adopted the approach of teaching the construction of good arguments first and then introducing criticism as a secondary skill. Moreover, the emphasis of the book is not on learning to name fallacies, but on being able to identify weaknesses in an argument so as to be able to construct an effective critique of that argument. The book is accompanied by a workbook featuring a wealth of examples to help students acquire the material.

In the past 15 years a host of critical thinking books have appeared that teach students to find flaws in the arguments of others by learning to detect a number of informal fallacies. This book is not in that tradition. The authors of this book believe that while students learn to become vicious critics, they still continue to make the very mistakes they criticize in others. Thus, this book has adopted the approach of teaching the construction of good arguments first and then introducing criticism as a secondary skill. Moreover, the emphasis of the book is not on learning to name fallacies, but on being able to identify weaknesses in an argument so as to be able to construct an effective critique of that argument. The book is accompanied by a workbook featuring a wealth of examples to help students acquire the material.

Originally published in 1938. This compact treatise is a complete treatment of Aristotle's logic as containing negative terms. It begins with defining Aristotelian logic as a subject-predicate logic confining itself to the four forms of categorical proposition known as the A, E, I and O forms. It assigns conventional meanings to these categorical forms such that subalternation holds. It continues to discuss the development of the logic since the time of its founder and address traditional logic as it existed in the twentieth century. The primary consideration of the book is the inclusion of negative terms - obversion, contraposition etc. - within traditional logic by addressing three questions, of systematization, the rules, and the interpretation.

Epistemic Logic studies statements containing verbs such as 'know' and 'wish'. It is one of the most exciting areas in medieval philosophy. Neglected almost entirely after the end of the Middle Ages, it has been rediscovered by philosophers of the present century. This is the first comprehensive study of the subject. Ivan Boh explores the rules for entailment between epistemic statements, the search for the conditions of knowing contingent propositions, the problems of substitutivity in intentional contexts, the relationship between epistemic and modal logic, and the problems of composite and divided senses in authors ranging from Abelard to Frachantian.

G.E. Moore, more than either Bertrand Russell or Ludwig Wittgenstein, was chiefly responsible for the rise of the analytic method in twentieth-century philosophy. This selection of his writings shows Moore at his very best.
The classic essays are crucial to major philosophical debates that still resonate today. Amongst those included are:
* A Defense of Common Sense
* Certainty
* Sense-Data
* External and Internal Relations
* Hume's Theory Explained
* Is Existence a Predicate?
* Proof of an External World
In addition, this collection also contains the key early papers in which Moore signals his break with idealism, and three important previously unpublished papers from his later work which illustrate his relationship with Wittgenstein.

The distinguished scholar of ancient philosophy J.L. Ackrill here presents the best of his essays on Plato and Aristotle from the past forty years. He brings philosophical acuity and philological expertise to a range of texts and topics in ancient thought - from ethics and logic to epistemology and metaphysics - which continue to be widely discussed today.

Perhaps everyone who can think has the concept of possibility, but no one understands it. The metaphysical theory of Determinism is a symptom of this lack of understanding, and the inconclusiveness of its opponents' arguments indicates that the lack is universal. In this book, first published in 1968, the author shows that there are a number of different kinds on non-logical possibility, subtly interrelated, each requiring separate explanation. An original contribution to the subject, it is essential reading for all students of philosophy.

First published in 1986. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This volume gives a theoretical account of the problem of analyzing and evaluating argumentative discourse. After placing argumentation in a communicative perspective, and then discussing the fallacies that occur when certain rules of communication are violated, the authors offer an alternative to both the linguistically-inspired descriptive and logically-inspired normative approaches to argumentation.
The authors characterize argumentation as a complex speech act in a critical discussion aimed at resolving a difference of opinion. The various stages of a critical discussion are outlined, and the communicative and interactional aspects of the speech acts performed in resolving a simple or complex dispute are discussed. After dealing with crucial aspects of analysis and linking the evaluation of argumentative discourse to the analysis, the authors identify the fallacies that can occur at various stages of discussion. Their general aim is to elucidate their own pragma- dialectical perspective on the analysis and evaluation of argumentative discourse, bringing together pragmatic insight concerning speech acts and dialectical insight concerning critical discussion.

Logical pluralism is the view that different logics are equally appropriate, or equally correct. Logical relativism is a pluralism according to which validity and logical consequence are relative to something. In Varieties of Logic, Stewart Shapiro develops several ways in which one can be a pluralist or relativist about logic. One of these is an extended argument that words and phrases like 'valid' and 'logical consequence' are polysemous or, perhaps better, are cluster concepts. The notions can be sharpened in various ways. This explains away the 'debates' in the literature between inferentialists and advocates of a truth-conditional, model-theoretic approach, and between those who advocate higher-order logic and those who insist that logic is first-order. A significant kind of pluralism flows from an orientation toward mathematics that emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century, and continues to dominate the field today. The theme is that consistency is the only legitimate criterion for a theory. Logical pluralism arises when one considers a number of interesting and important mathematical theories that invoke a non-classical logic, and are rendered inconsistent, and trivial, if classical logic is imposed. So validity is relative to a theory or structure. The perspective raises a host of important questions about meaning. The most significant of these concern the semantic content of logical terminology, words like 'or', 'not', and 'for all', as they occur in rigorous mathematical deduction. Does the intuitionistic 'not', for example, have the same meaning as its classical counterpart? Shapiro examines the major arguments on the issue, on both sides, and finds them all wanting. He then articulates and defends a thesis that the question of meaning-shift is itself context-sensitive and, indeed, interest-relative. He relates the issue to some prominent considerations concerning open texture, vagueness, and verbal disputes. Logic is ubiquitous. Whenever there is deductive reasoning, there is logic. So there are questions about logical pluralism that are analogous to standard questions about global relativism. The most pressing of these concerns foundational studies, wherein one compares theories, sometimes with different logics, and where one figures out what follows from what in a given logic. Shapiro shows that the issues are not problematic, and that is usually easy to keep track of the logic being used and the one mentioned.

The mathematical proof is the most important form of justification in mathematics. It is not, however, the only kind of justification for mathematical propositions. The existence of other forms, some of very significant strength, places a question mark over the prominence given to proof within mathematics. This collection of essays, by leading figures working within the philosophy of mathematics, is a response to the challenge of understanding the nature and role of the proof.

The introduction of Greek philosophy into the Muslim world left an indelible mark on Islamic intellectual history. Philosophical discourse became a constant element in even traditionalist Islamic sciences. However, Aristotelian metaphysics gave rise to doctrines about God and the universe that were found highly objectionable by a number of Muslim theologians, among whom the fourteenth-century scholar Ibn Taymiyya stood foremost.

Ibn Taymiyya, one of the greatest and most prolific thinkers in medieval Islam, held Greek logic responsible for the `heretical' metaphysical conclusions reached by Islamic philosophers, theologians, mystics, and others. He therefore set out to refute philosophical logic, a task which culminated in one of the most devastating attacks ever levelled against the logical system upheld by the early Greeks, the later commentators, and their Muslim followers. His argument is grounded in an empirical approach that in many respects prefigures the philosophies of the British empiricists.

Professor Hallaq's translation, with a substantial introduction and extensive notes, makes this important work available to a wider audience for the first time.