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.

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.

An argumentative passage that might appear to be an instance of denying the antecedent will generally admit of an alternative interpretation, one on which the conditional contained by the passage is a preface to the argument rather than a premise of it. On this interpretation. which generally is a more charitable one, the conditional plays a certain dialectical role and, in some cases, a rhetorical role as welL Assuming only a very weak principle of exigetical charity, I consider what it would take in a given case to justify accepting the less charitable interpretation. I then present evidence that those conditions are seldom met. Indeed, I was unable to find a single published argument that can justifiably be charged with denying the antecedent

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 important to have a point of view when thinking critically about an argument and whether that fact constitutes a limitation as to what can be achieved by critical thinking

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 actually unfolded; what it would be like for a real person in the situation; and actual talk of someone being responsible or being able to do otherwise. That they do not imagine these things also can be explained by their unwarranted assumption that when they talk, for example, about someone not being able to do otherwise, they are talking not about talk of it (in a story), but of the thing itself, not-being-able-to-do-otherwise

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 an argument such as the one that Wreen is giving