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19Nagel on Public Education and Intelligent DesignJournal of Philosophical Research 35 209-219. 2010.In a recent article, Thomas Nagel argues against the court’s decision to strike down the Dover school district’s requirement that biology teachers in Dover public schools inform their students about Intelligent Design. Nagel contends that this ruling relies on questionable demarcation between science and nonscience and consequently misapplies the Establishment Clause of the constitution. Instead, he argues in favor of making room for an open discussion of these issues rather than an outright pro…Read more
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19Beyond Hellenistic Epistemology: Arcesilaus and the Destruction of Stoic Metaphysics. By Charles E. SnyderAncient Philosophy 42 (2): 585-588. 2022.
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19Why We Argue : A Guide to Political DisagreementRoutledge. 2013.Why We Argue : A Guide to Political Disagreement presents an accessible and engaging introduction to the theory of argument, with special emphasis on the way argument works in public political debate. The authors develop a view according to which proper argument is necessary for one’s individual cognitive health; this insight is then expanded to the collective health of one’s society. Proper argumentation, then, is seen to play a central role in a well-functioning democracy. Written in a lively …Read more
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18On Diogenes and Olympic VictorsEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy. forthcoming.Diogenes’s exchange with Cicermos the Olympic pankratist is unusual in that it is both a dialectical exchange and is successful in changing Cicermos’s mind. Most Cynic rhetoric is physical or gestural and more often alienates than convinces. The puzzling difference is explained by the rhetorical choices Diogenes makes with his uniquely receptive audience.
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18The Ambitious and the Modest Meta-Argumentation ThesesRes Philosophica 101 (1): 163-170. 2024.Arguments are weakly meta-argumentative when they call attention to themselves and purport to be successful as arguments. Arguments are strongly metaargumentative when they take arguments (themselves or other arguments) as objects for evaluation, clarification, or improvement and explicitly use concepts of argument analysis for the task. The ambitious meta-argumentation thesis is that all argumentation is weakly argumentative. The modest meta-argumentation thesis is that there are unique instanc…Read more
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16Cicero’s Academici Libri and Lucullus: A Commentary with Introduction and Translations. By Tobias ReinhardtAncient Philosophy 43 (2): 570-574. 2023.
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15When the Dog Bites the SubalternEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 28 (2): 173-191. 2024.Many fans of Diogenes of Sinope laud his parrhesia, free speech used for critique. However, Diogenes abused not only the powerful but also the socially marginalized. We argue that interpreters of Diogenes cannot explain away the undeniably troublesome things that Diogenes said about those at the margins. But we also argue that Diogenes ought nonetheless to be preserved. Some of his chreiai can be reminders of how to be courageous and fight for the downtrodden, and others can serve as reminders o…Read more
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15Fallacies of Meta-argumentationPhilosophy and Rhetoric 55 (4): 360-385. 2022.This article argues that the theoretical concept of meta-argumentative fallacy is useful. The authors argue for this along two lines. The first is that with the concept, the authors may clarify the concept of meta-argumentation. That is, by theorizing where meta-argument goes wrong, the authors may capture the norms of this level of argumentation. The second is that the concept of meta-argumentative fallacies provides an explanatory model for a variety of errors in argument otherwise difficult t…Read more
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15Augustine and Academic Skepticism: A Philosophical Study, written by Blake Dutton (review)International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 9 (1): 65-68. 2019.
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14Methodological and Valuational Priority in Epictetus’ Enchiridion 52History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis 23 (1): 123-142. 2020.Epictetus’ Enchiridion ends with a paradox—that the methods one learns to do philosophy have results contrary to one’s reasons to do philosophy. One comes to philosophy to improve one’s life, to live with wisdom. This requires that one find truths to live in light of, and in order to find those truths, one must perfect one’s reason. And to perfect one’s reason, one must attend to technical details of reasoning and metaphysics. The trouble is, in attending to these technical details, we develop t…Read more
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13Fallacy theory has three significant challenges to it: the generality, scope, and negativity problems. To the generality problem, the connection between general types of bad arguments and tokens is a matter of refining the use of the vocabulary. To the scope problem, the breadth of fallacy’s instances is cause for development. To the negativity problem, fallacy theory must be coordinated with a program of adversariality-management.
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12The academic at the crossroads: a dialectical assessment of Augustinian pragmatic anti-skepticismSynthese 202 (6): 1-16. 2023.Skepticism is regularly a target for the _apraxia_ challenge, namely, that skepticism robs us of the cognitive means for life (or at least the life well-lived). Skeptics have replied to the _apraxia_ challenge in various manners, and anti-skeptics have then answered with objections to these skeptical replies. St. Augustine’s crossroads case in _Contra Academicos_ is one such second-stage pragmatic anti-skepticism, one targeting Academic probabilism in particular. This dialectical assessment chal…Read more
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12Knock Knock: Meta-Argumentative Humor, Who? in advanceInquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines. forthcoming.In this essay, we give a theoretical overview of how humor can play a meta-argumentative role, particularly in making clear the norms and stakes of arguments. This, we think, has salutary consequences for teaching critical thinking and argument evaluation—humor is a useful tool for making those things clear. However, there are troubling features of humor’s functions that problematize its use in teaching settings. These are what we call the cruelty, audience, accessibility, and gender gap problem…Read more
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11The Stoic Sage Does not Err: An Error?Symposion. Theoretical and Applied Inquiries in Philosophy and Social Sciences. forthcoming.Scott Aikin ABSTRACT: The Stoics held that the wise person does not err. This thesis was widely criticized in the ancient world and runs afoul of contemporary fallibilist views in epistemology. Was this view itself an error? On one line, the view can be modified to accommodate many of the critical lines against it. Some …
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10The Stoic Sage Does not Err: An Error?Symposion: Theoretical and Applied Inquiries in Philosophy and Social Sciences 9 (1): 69-82. 2022.The Stoics held that the wise person does not err. This thesis was widely criticized in the ancient world and runs afoul of contemporary fallibilist views in epistemology. Was this view itself an error? On one line, the view can be modified to accommodate many of the critical lines against it. Some of these lines of modification are consistent with traditional Stoic value theory. However, others require larger modifications to Stoic axiology. A version of the no errors thesis emerges as defensib…Read more
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10Pragmatic Infallibilism, Skeptical Perseverance, and Bar Room KnowledgeSouthwest Philosophy Review 39 (2): 61-63. 2023.
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7The Regress Argument for SkepticismIn Michael Bruce & Steven Barbone (eds.), Just the Arguments, Wiley‐blackwell. 2011-09-16.
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7Straw ManIn Robert Arp, Steven Barbone & Michael Bruce (eds.), Bad Arguments, Wiley. 2018-05-09.This chapter deals with one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy called “Straw Man”. How one can straw man someone's view or argument happens in many ways. The chapter focuses on three ways. The first is the representational straw man fallacy. The second form of the straw man fallacy is that of the selectional straw man, or better the weak man. The third is what we will call the hollow man. The straw manning requires a form of misrepresentation of the overall intellectual situation in a…Read more
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6Living Skepticism: Essays in Epistemology and Beyond, edited by Stephen Hetherington and David MacarthurInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism 1-3. forthcoming.
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6Free SpeechIn Robert Arp, Steven Barbone & Michael Bruce (eds.), Bad Arguments, Wiley. 2018-05-09.This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy: free speech fallacy (FS). The FS consists in thinking one's political right to freedom of expression includes protection from criticism. Those who commit this fallacy allege that critical scrutiny is either tantamount to censorship or equivalent to the imposition of one's views on others. The error in the fallacy is that the freedom of expression includes critical expressions. The trouble with the argument is that freedom…Read more
Nashville, Tennessee, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |
American Pragmatism |
Informal Logic |