Don Levi

The ad baculum is not a fallacy in an argument, but is offered instead of an argument to put an end to further argument. This claim is the basis for criticizing Michael Wreen's "neo-traditionalism," which yields misreadings of supposed cases of the ad baculum because of its rejection of any consideration of what the person using the ad baculum, or someone who refers to that use as an "argument," is doing. The paper concludes with reflections on the values that should inform talk of a fallacy in an argument such as the one that Wreen is giving

Frank Ebersole's extraordinary investigations of certain key philosophical ideas behind problems in epistemology and metaphysics are the subject of this article-review. I have resisted providing what many readers will expect me to provide, namely, a critical examination of his philosophical methodology. I do question his unwilligness to say why his investigations only yield I negative results, and I do have something to say about classifying him as an ordinary language philosopher. However, my main focus is on trying to engage critically with what he actually does in his work. To this end, I provide a narrative of the investigation he carries out into the possibility of comparing the objects of perception and dreams, and I cite other works of his in support of my understanding of that investigation. Although one of his lengthiest essays seems to be devoted to an anticipation of an objection to his approach, I explain why even there he is not concerned with the question of why he always seems to get negative results. After suggesting why some of his later essays seem to be so hard to read, I conclude by saying something about what I take to be his achievement.

This paper is a critique of certain arguments given by the Milindapanha and Jay Garfield for the conventional nature of reality or existence. These arguments are of interest in their own right. They also are significant if they are presumed to attack an obstacle we all face in achieving non-attachment, namely, our belief in the inherent or substantial existence of ourselves and the familiar objects of our world. The arguments turn on a distinction between these objects, and some other way of conceiving of them, in terms of which their conventional existence becomes apparent. After the distinction and the arguments that depend on it are shown to be problematic, the paper concludes with some reflections on the doctrine of skillful means and its applicability to Buddhist philosophical argument.

This paper presents three lessons designed to alert students to the setting in which they are learning (the classroom) and the ways in which this setting provides the context for a discourse which is different than everyday discourse. In the first lesson, students examine empirical studies that illustrate how being in a classroom significantly changes how one reasons about even the most basic logical relationships. In the second lesson, Levi critiques an imaginative way of teaching logic that, while appearing to call on students to use critical reasoning skills they already possess, still fails to take into account its setting. In the final lesson, students translate an editorial into the form of declarative sentences, ordered as premises and a conclusion. Students are prompted to consider what is lost in this rendering and how it distorts the original argument, after which a more successful strategy for paraphrasing and evaluating arguments is attempted. These lessons aim to teach students to think for themselves by encouraging them not to learn logic by wrote, but to see its lessons as tools whose very applicability to real life is something they must critically evaluate.

Does God know what people will freely do? An obvious source to consult is the Bible—which is what the philosophers who debate about open theism do. They agree that God is omniscient. However, open theists insist that God does not know what we will freely do, and the other side disagrees. The problem is that both sides seem to misread the Bible in order to make it philosophically relevant, which is not surprising because the philosophy they read into it is problematic. This result raises questions I try to answer: How are their readings questionable because they are used for philosophical purposes? How should the relevant texts be read?

This essay is a meditation on Wittgenstein's injunction to ‘look and see’, especially when it is applied to the debate over theological realism. John Cook thinks that the injunction should be followed in metaphysics and epistemology, something he believes that Wittgenstein himself did not do. I am inclined to think that Cook is right about this, even though I am not persuaded by him that Wittgenstein goes wrong because he was committed to Neutral Monism. Interestingly, Cook thinks that there is no need to adopt the look-and-see approach when it comes to the philosophy of religion, and this paper tries to show why he is wrong to think so.

This paper objects to treating begging the question as circular reasoning. It argues that what is at issue in the argument is not to be confused with the claim or position that the arguer is adopting, and that logicians from Aristotle on give the wrong definition and have difficulty making sense of the fallacy because they try to define it in terms of how an argument is defined by logical theory - as a sequence consisting of premises followed by a conclusion. That the problematic about begging the question depends on treating an argument as a context-less sequence of statements seems to be anticipated by the pragma-dialectical approach. The paper offers a critique of this dialogical approach, as exemplified by Douglas Walton in his recent book on begging the question, on the grounds that it raises more problems than it solves. It concludes with the suggestion that what is really at issue in discussions of begging the question is the need for a theory of fallacy