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24Teaching LogicTeaching Philosophy 21 (3): 237-256. 1998.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, w…Read more
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19The Trouble with HarryNordic Wittgenstein Review 3 (1): 91-111. 2014.The Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP), according to which we are responsible for what we did only if we could have done otherwise, is relied upon in the argument for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. Compatibilists, like Harry Frankfurt, attack PAP with stories that they devise as counter-examples; why are their stories, and the stories devised by defenders of PAP, so bad? Answers that suggest themselves are that these philosophers do not try to imagine how things actu…Read more
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19Philosophy and the Bible: The Case of Open TheismPhilosophy and Literature 38 (1): 169-187. 2014.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 question…Read more
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18Against the logiciansThe Philosophers' Magazine 51 80-86. 2010.Logic as a subject has existed for a long time. Aristotle and the Stoics identified some of its principles, as did Indian logicians. And this ancient logic underwent an extraordinary mathematical development in the last hundred and fifty years. So logic certainly exists, at least as a branch of mathematics. The question is whether it is anything more than that.
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14The Liar ParodyPhilosophy 63 (243): 43-62. 1988.The Liar Paradox is a philosophical bogyman. It refuses to die, despite everything that philosophers have done to kill it. Sometimes the attacks on it seem little more than expressions of positivist petulance, as when the Liar sentence is said to be nonsense or meaningless. Sometimes the attacks are based on administering to the Liar sentence arbitrary if not unfair tests for admitting of truth or falsity that seem designed expressly to keep it from qualifying. Some philosophers have despaired o…Read more
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10Review of Essays on Skepticism, Relativism, and Ethics in the Zhuangzi by Paul Kjellberg; Philip J. Ivanhoe (review)Philosophy East and West 49 (4): 529-531. 1999.
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8The Power of PowerlessnessPhilosophical Investigations 39 (3): 237-253. 2015.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 (AA) 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 a…Read more
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4In Defense of Informal Logic (edited book)Springer. 2000.My impulse when I decided to collect into a single volume the essays on topics in logical theory and related subjects that I have written in the last fifteen years was to borrow from the title of a work by Sextus Empiricus, and call my collection "Against the Logicians." Although the essays address a variety of problems that interest me, the thread that runs through them is a scepticism about how logicians see things. So, the title appealed to me. However, I had second thoughts and chose instead…Read more