Harvard University
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 1963
Eugene, Oregon, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Epistemology
Metaphysics
  •  5
    The Power of Powerlessness
    Philosophical 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
  •  2
    In 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
  •  52
    What's in a Name?
    Philosophical Investigations 31 (4): 340-358. 2008.
    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 a…Read more
  •  68
    ‘Where have you been?’ I expect philosophers to ask me this when I tell them that this paper is on the Gettier Problem. I found it difficult to participate in the discussion of the problem until now because instead of wanting to consider what could be done to revive the project of identifying necessary and conditions for knowledge after the apparent damage done to it by Gettier counter-examples, I wanted to question the legitimacy of the project itself
  •  66
    The Limits of Critical Thinking
    Informal Logic 14 (2). 1992.
    This paper examines Robert Fogelin's suggestion that there may be deep disagreements, where no argument can address what is at issue. A number of possible bases for Fogelin's position are considered and rejected: people sometimes do not have enough in common for reasons to count as reasons; doubt is possible only against the background of framework propositions; key premises may be inarguable; argument must occur within a conceptual framework. The paper concludes by reflecting on why it is impor…Read more
  •  4
    Hoaglunds Critical Thinking
    Informal Logic 18 (2). 1996.
  •  60
    Determinism, as the thesis that given the state of the world at a moment there is only one way it can be at the next moment, is problematic. After explaining why the thesis is defined as it is, the paper goes on to raise questions about the terms in which it is defined. Is the ‘world’ to be understood as constituted by whatever figures in our talk or thought, or to what is reconstituted by an ontology seemingly derived from the sciences? Either way of understanding it is shown to be inadequate.
  •  18
    The Trouble with Harry
    Nordic 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
  •  39
    Review of Avner Baz: When Words Are Called For: A Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy , Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012
  •  58
    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 …Read more
  •  15
    Philosophy and the Bible: The Case of Open Theism
    Philosophy 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
  •  136
    God, Wittgenstein and John Cook
    Philosophy 84 (2): 267-286. 2009.
    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 …Read more
  •  28
    Words of Power (review)
    Radical Philosophy Review of Books 5 (5): 15-17. 1992.
  •  35
    Begging what is at issue in the argument
    Argumentation 8 (3): 265-282. 1994.
    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 t…Read more
  •  26
    The Liar Parody
    Philosophy 63 (243). 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
  •  12
    The Liar Parody
    Philosophy 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
  •  49
    Representation: The eleventh problem of consciousness
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 40 (4): 457-473. 1997.
  •  15
    In Defense of Rhetoric
    Philosophy and Rhetoric 28 (4). 1995.
  •  521
    Did God deprive pharaoh of free will?
    Philosophy and Literature 32 (1). 2008.
    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 w…Read more
  •  44
    The Unbearable Vagueness of Being
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 34 (4): 471-492. 2010.
  •  100
    Against the logicians
    The Philosophers' Magazine 51 (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.
  •  54
    Teaching Logic
    Teaching 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
  •  20
    Hypothetical Cases and Abortion
    Social Theory and Practice 13 (1): 17-48. 1987.
  •  15
    Words of Power (review)
    Radical Philosophy Review of Books 5 (5): 15-17. 1992.
  •  20
    Why do illiterates do so badly in Logic?
    Philosophical Investigations 19 (1): 34-54. 1996.
  •  24
    The Power of Powerlessness
    Philosophical Investigations 39 (2): 237-253. 2016.
    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 de…Read more
  •  66
    Surprise!
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 38 (3): 447-464. 2000.