Don Levi

Philosophers should forget what they think they know about divine assistance, power, control, up-to-usness, freedom-from and free will, when it comes to alcoholism, given what Alcoholics Anonymous says. Alcoholics will never be free of their alcoholism; although it is up to them to acknowledge their powerlessness over alcohol, often that is not possible until they hit bottom, and even then they might not acquire the power of powerlessness without help from a Higher Power. After explaining and defending these insights of AA, the unwarranted assumptions behind how philosophers criticise them are identified.

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.

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.