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 (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 and defending these insights of AA, the unwarranted assumptions behind how philosophers (and others) criticise them are identified.

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 a title of one of my own essays, "In Defense of Informal Logic", which emphasizes my support for other approaches. Although my criticisms of logical theory are designed to cut deeply, I do not want to be unresponsive to the needs that it is supposed to satisfy. However, my position that we have adequate resources for critically analyzing a particular argument and 00 not need a theory of argumentation, will not completely satisfy those who think that there is a need for it. So, I want them to know that I am taking their concerns seriously.

This paper is about the mode of being of names. The paper begins by explaining why the joke is on commentators who see Lewis Carroll's White Knight as applying the use/mention distinction. Then it argues that the real problem with the distinction is that the idea that names are used to mention what they name depends on mistakenly conceiving of language as existing autonomously; and that philosophers have this conception because they fail to appreciate what they are doing when they philosophise about language. This failure also explains why philosophers mistakenly think of any manifestation of a name as a (physical) token.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Did God Deprive Pharaoh of Free Will?Don LeviWhen Pharaoh was reeling from certain later plagues he agreed to free the Israelites. But each time after the plague stopped, God stiffened Pharaoh's heart, and he refused to let them go. Since it was God who did it, Pharaoh had to refuse to release the Israelites; he could not have let them go. So, he was deprived of free will by God.In this article I question this reasoning. I question whether we can conclude from the fact that God did it that Pharaoh could not release them; and from the fact that Pharaoh could not release them, that he did not have free will. I also question whether it is possible to understand what the free will is that God is supposed to have given to all of us and taken from Pharaoh.IThe Exodus is the story of how the Israelites escaped from slavery and constituted themselves as a people. "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage" (Exodus 20.2).1 This is how God introduces the Ten Commandments: He is the One who led the Israelites out of Egypt; they are the people whom He freed.The stiffening motif underscores how much more powerful God is than Pharaoh. God tells Moses that Pharaoh will let the Israelites go "only because of a greater might" (3.19), and Pharaoh, replies: "Who is the Lord that I should heed Him and let Israel go?" (5.2). That God is by far the more powerful is underscored by having God say that He will "stiffen Pharaoh's heart so that he will not let the people go" (4.21), and by having Him do so, in the cases of several later plagues. After [End Page 58] each plague Pharaoh agrees to release them, only to change his mind when the plague lifted (or, in the case of the final one, when he has released the Israelites), either because he or God stiffened his heart. The disastrous consequences of these reversals reveal him to be concerned with his status as a god-king rather than with the welfare of his people. The motif is part of the developing argument in the Tanakh for a state ruled, not by a Pharaoh or king, but by God and His laws, as transmitted by His prophet, Moses.The problem of whether God deprived Pharaoh of free will by stiffening his heart is a version of the Problem of Evil, albeit with a focus on what God did, not what He did not do. And this focus on God's apparent misbehavior is not an isolated phenomenon. As Kaufman points out, "The Bible ascribes to God actions that, to our way of thinking, lack moral grounds, or even run counter to our moral sense. Indeed, at times they seem to reflect a ruthless, capricious, demonic being."2 To make God more powerful than Pharaoh the text seems to make God too much like Pharaoh.A different understanding of the story arises if we think of the Israelites as its audience, and if we remind ourselves that it is a stage in their developing relationship with God. As Kaufman explains it, the things said about God in the Exodus story as well as elsewhere "express in their own way boundless adoration and reverence of the One" (Religion, p. 75). Later, the Israelites may find different ways of expressing that adoration and reverence. However, what Kaufman is saying is that by making God's behavior towards Pharaoh seem supramoral and demonic, the Torah really is finding a way to express its awe of Him.Nevertheless, in what follows we will try to understand the text as telling us about God, independently of that developing relationship. We will confine our attention to the question of how God's actions deprived Pharaoh of free will. Is that what stiffening someone's heart does; or is it the fact that God did the stiffening? What is interesting is that those who have tried to offer solutions to the problem do not try to answer these questions...

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.

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.

This paper suggests that the flaw in the enthymeme approach to argument analysis is in the requirement, as I come to formulate it, that an argument be restated as a premises-and-conclusion sequence. The paper begins by investigating how logicians show that there are problems with the enthymeme approach. That investigation reveals a failure on the part of logicians to appreciate the importance of the rhetorical context of an argument. This failure, it is argued, is a consequence of what I refer to as the Premise-Conclusion Requirement

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.