In this work, Jamie Mayerfeld undertakes a careful inquiry into the meaning and moral significance of suffering. Understanding suffering in hedonistic terms as an affliction of feeling, he claims that it is an objective psychological condition, amenable to measurement and interpersonal comparison, although its accurate assessment is never easy. Mayerfeld goes on to examine the content of the duty to prevent suffering and the weight it has relative to other moral considerations. He argues that the prevention of suffering is (...) morally more important than the promotion of happiness, and that the duty to relieve suffering is much stronger than most of us acknowledge. (shrink)

Jamie Dow presents an original treatment of Aristotle's views on rhetoric and the passions, and the first major study of Aristotle's Rhetoric in recent years. He attributes to Aristotle a normative view of rhetoric and its role in the state, and ascribes to him a particular view of the kinds of cognitions involved in the passions.

In 2006 Jamie Tworkowski wrote a story called "To Write Love on Her Arms" about helping a friend through her struggle with drug addiction, depression, and self-injury. The piece was so hauntingly beautiful that it quickly went viral, giving birth to a non-profit organization of the same name. Nine years later, To Write Love on Her Arms (TWLOHA) is an internationally-recognized leader in suicide prevention and a source of hope, encouragement, and resources for people worldwide. Jamie's words have (...) been shared hundreds of thousands of times online. They've shown up on T-shirts and posters and even tattoos. Now, for the first time, Jamie's writing is available in the form of a book. If You Feel Too Much is a celebration of hope, wonder, and what it means to be human. From personal stories of struggling on days most people celebrate to offering words of strength and encouragement in moments of loss, the essays in this book invite readers to believe that it's okay to admit to pain and it's okay to ask for help. If You Feel Too Much is an important book from one of this generation's most important voices. (shrink)

Wolf Haas' Detective Brenner series has become wildly popular around the world for a reason: They're timely, edgy stories told in a wry, quirky voice that's often hilarious, and with a protagonist it's hard not to love. In this episode, Brenner-forced out of the police force-tries to get away from detective work by taking a job as the personal chauffeur for two-year-old Helena, the daughter of a Munich construction giant and a Viennese abortion doctor. One day, while Brenner's attention is (...) turned to picking out a chocolate bar for Helena at a gas station, Helena gets snatched from the car. Abruptly out of a job, Brenner decides to investigate her disappearance on his own. With both parents in the public eye, there's no scarcity of leads-the father's latest development project has spurred public protest, and the mother's clinic has been targeted by the zealous leader of an anti-abortion group. Brenner and God is told with a dark humor that leaves no character, including Brenner, unscathed. Haas tells the story of a fallible hero who can be indecisive and world-weary, baffled and disillusioned by what he finds, but who presses forward nonetheless out of a stubborn sense of decency-a two-year-old is kidnapped, so you find her, because that's just what you do. (shrink)

This study applied a body of knowledge derived from the common core thesis of mysticism to investigate the hypothesis that similarities in belief significantly contribute to the appearance of overlap between mystical and positive dimension schizotypal phenomena. Data from 211 university students who completed Hood's Mysticism Scale and Eckblad and Chapman's Magical Ideation Scale were submitted to correlational analyses. Contrary to the hypothesis, results indicated that positive schizotypy correlates more strongly with the experiential dimensions of mysticism than with the interpretive (...) dimension of mysticism. These correlation differences suggest criteria for distinguishing mystical and schizotypal experiences and identify specific points of overlap. Suggestions for future research into this relationship, and implications for schizotypy research, are noted. (shrink)

Mathematical investigation, when done well, can confer understanding. This bare observation shouldn’t be controversial; where obstacles appear is rather in the effort to engage this observation with epistemology. The complexity of the issue of course precludes addressing it tout court in one paper, and I’ll just be laying some early foundations here. To this end I’ll narrow the field in two ways. First, I’ll address a specific account of explanation and understanding that applies naturally to mathematical reasoning: the view proposed (...) by Philip Kitcher and Michael Friedman of explanation or understanding as involving the unification of theories that had antecedently appeared heterogeneous. For the second narrowing, I’ll take up one specific feature (among many) of theories and their basic concepts that is sometimes taken to make the theories and concepts preferred: in some fields, for some problems, what is counted as understanding a problem may involve finding a way to represent the problem so that it (or some aspect of it) can be visualized. The final section develops a case study which exemplifies the way that this consideration – the potential for visualizability – can rationally inform decisions as to what the proper framework and axioms should be. The discussion of unification (in sections 3 and 4) leads to a mathematical analogue of Goodman’s problem of identifying a principled basis for distinguishing grue and green. Just as there is a philosophical issue about how we arrive at the predicates we should use when making empirical predictions, so too there is an issue about what properties best support many kinds of mathematical reasoning that are especially valuable to us. The issue becomes pressing via an examination of some physical and mathematical cases that make it seem unlikely that treatments of unification can be as straightforward as the philosophical literature has hoped. Though unification accounts have a grain of truth (since a phenomenon (or cluster of phenomena) called “unification” is in fact important in many cases) we are far from an analysis of what “unification” is.. (shrink)

In a number of recent publications, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler have argued for a novel approach to the design of public policy. Their proposal has received a great deal of attention, both within academic circles and the public at large. Drawing upon evidence from behavioral economics and empirical psychology, the authors attempt to demonstrate that the conventional antagonism between libertarians and paternalists within political theory dissolves in conditions that obtain widely in public decision-making. Where free choice and the promotion (...) of individual welfare can coexist, the authors believe that designers of public policy ought to be libertarian paternalists. -/- In this paper I criticize their proposal on grounds that the authors are unable to sufficiently motivate the paternalistic element of their approach. I argue that the empirical evidence cited by the authors is capable of supporting a number of competing approaches, including what I call libertarian utilitarianism and libertarian justice. Since the evidence that the authors draw upon does not provide us any grounds for selecting between these rival approaches, I conclude that Sunstein and Thaler are unable to provide us with a convincing guide for the design of public policy. In order to show that this is the case, I consider three arguments in favor of libertarian paternalism, and find each lacking. I end with some comments about what we can properly conclude on the basis of Sunstein and Thaler’s arguments. (shrink)

In two studies, we predicted and found that inferences about motive and character influence intentionality attributions about foreseeable consequences of action (i.e., side effects). First, we show that inferences about intentionality are greater for good side effects than bad side effects when a target person's character is described positively. In Study 2, we manipulated information about a target person and found that inferences about intentionality were greater when side effects were consistent with a target person's character and motives. Overall, our (...) data cast doubt on the generality of the side-effect effect. We discuss our findings and their implications for future research on intentionality and social perception. (shrink)

Searle has long maintained a position that non-biologically based machines , no matter how intelligently they may appear to behave, cannot achieve “intentionality” or “consciousness,” have a “mind,” and so forth. Standard replies to Searle’s argument, as commonly cited by researchers in Artificial Intelligence and related communities, are sometimes considered unsatisfactory by readers outside of such fields. One possible reason for this is that the Chinese Room Argument makes a strong appeal to some people’s intuitions regarding “understanding” and necessary conditions (...) for consciousness. Rather than contradict any such intuitions or conditions, I present what in my view is an independent and largely compatible intuition: If Searle’s argument is sound, then surely a human placed under similar testing conditions as a non-biological machine should succeed where a machine would allegedly fail. The outcome is a new rebuttal to the Chinese Room that is ideologically independent of one’s views on the necessary and sufficient conditions for having a “mind.”. (shrink)

This article asks how we should understand the maxim liber est causa sui when we encounter it in the writings of Thomas Aquinas. The maxim – most easily translated as “the free is the cause of itself” – is taken from the first book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics,and Thomas uses it when he needs to show that something, or someone, is free. The first section of this paper shows that Thomas does not intend us to understand the maxim as indicating self-creation: (...) as he himself often says, Nihil est causa sui. The second part of this paper argues that Thomas intended us to understand something more than agent causality or acting “from oneself” when he cited this maxim. Thomas’s meaning when citing this maxim includes Aristotle’s meaning in writing it, and Aristotle did not primarily mean that the free being caused itself to act. Instead, he meant that the free being acted for the sake of an end that was its own – it acted “for its own sake.” Passages in which Thomas cites the maxim – particularly De veritate 24.1 – must be understood to include two senses of causa sui. When Thomas applies the words causa suito something, he does not simply mean that its actions are from itself or a se; he also intends to signify that its actions are “for its own sake” or propter se. (shrink)

Companion to the bestselling book, this guided journal takes you on a deep dive into abiding in Christ, helping you exchange false ideas about "God," the world, your neighbors, and yourself for the life-changing pursuit of knowing God experientially.

According to the Principle of Techno-Geek Proportionality, for every million times a nerd gets excited about “the latest thing” the world might change once. Central bank digital currency (CBDC) may be that once. There is nothing new about digital money, but there may be many profoundly new things about CBDC. This is especially so for “retail” CBDC – that is, CBDC freely available to the public rather than “wholesale” CBDC, which is restricted to some registered users and central bank systems. (...) At the moment, the vast majority of money in existence takes the form of deposits at Santander, Barclays and the other commercial banks. As the Bank of England makes clear, most of this is originally produced when a bank extends a loan and creates a sum as a deposit which the borrower can then spend. This money flows around our payments system and the money supply, albeit there is more to money supply than just this, grows as cumulative debt grows and shrinks as debt is paid down. In the UK (and equivalents apply in any modern economy that has commercial banks), though we rarely think about it, since the money is denominated in s and the central bank essentially guarantees that it will exchange at par for central bank money, most of what we think of as money is really Santander or Barclays etc. credit units. Retail CBDC could change this state of affairs and the issues are sufficient to require public debate – not only regarding the scope of the technology but also the role and adequacy of central banks. This, in turn, provides an opportunity to discuss the nature of process. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 56–58 Nechvatal, Joseph, Immersion Into Noise , Open Humanities Press, 2011, 267 pp, $23.99 (pbk), ISBN 1-60785-241-1. As someone who’s knowledge of “art” mostly began with the domestic (Western) and Japanese punk and noise scenes of the late 80’s and early 90’s, practices and theories of noise fall rather close to my heart. It is peeking into the esoteric enclaves of weird music and noise that helped me understand what I think I might like art to be: (...) A way of learning about the world through perturbation—exploration by incitement and speculation of possible conditions. What I have always loved about artistic investigations influenced by noisy aesthetics or sensibilities is that they can be simultaneously transcendent and absurd, amusing and revelatory, singular and pluralistic, mindless and intensely penetrating. The provocative friction that noise brings to bear on aesthetic experience, artistic practice, and “the” Art World acts as a kind of impulse response, proposing new energies while revealing underlying structure; noise signals are a simultaneous synthesis and analysis of spaces, subjects and relations. About two weeks prior to Christmas 2011, Joseph Nechvatal was generous enough to spend some time with me at 39 Quai des Grands Augustins, Paris . We each had one glass of red wine, briefly discussed common acquaintances, shared points of interest, and his published writings. We also, I recall, disagreed lightheartedly about how much contemporary relevance the ideas of telematic-artist Roy Ascott have for today’s art-and-technology practitioner (Joseph > Jamie). After the encounter, I read through a PDF version of Immersion Into Noise Joseph was kind enough to send me ( the HTML version is here ). A number of points of entry into cultures of “noise” are available these days. There are the acoustic-spatial approaches of thinkers like Douglas Kahn, Brandon LaBelle and Salome Voegelin; the techno-cultural musicologies of Jonathan Sterne and David Toop; the political writings of Jacques Attali, former adviser to President François Mitterrand, in his Noise: The Political Economy of Music (spoiler alert: It’s not really about music). Enter the new writings of one Joseph Nechvatal, with his invitation of an Immersion Into Noise . Nechvatal has been active for over 20 years in on- and off-line discussions of art, technology, virtuality, as well as his own set of art-theoretical departures and terminologies. A practicing artist, and instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Immersion Into Noise , is Nechvatal’s third published volume. His writings, broadly, address a concern with the possibilities of a synthesis between the biological and the virtual, and the contemporary artistic resonances that these possibilities suggest. Nechvatal’s project is to try to name contemporary currents of artistic practice within our technologized culture. He comes at this through art history, post-modern philosophy, anthropology and consciousness studies. Portions of Immersion Into Noise have appeared in his PhD dissertation, as well as online art publications like Zing Magazine . An open-access publication, and part of the impressive and heartening activities of the Open Humanities Press, Nechvatal’s book is a somewhat unexpected addition to the Critical Climate Change series edited by Tom Cohen of SUNY University and Claire Colebrook of Penn State. Other titles in the series have address themes of post-globalism and cultures of threat. Joseph Nachvetal’s title is the first to focus entirely on art history, art practice and aesthetics. It is awkward to too easily fit Nechvatal’s writings in with the aforementioned burgeoning canon of cultural and artistic practice in, and writings on, noise (Russolo, Schaeffer, Cage and Yves Klein through to Kahn, LaBelle, Voegelin, et. al). Immersion Into Noise is not primarily an examination of sound-noise or phenomenologies of sound, and the relativist, non-objectivist possibilities arising therefrom in social, public, and exhibition art practices. Although Nechvatal makes mention of sonic practice and experience (his own encounter in 1968 with the technological complex was set in motion at a Jimi Hendrix concert at the Chicago Coliseum), he does so only by way of introducing a broader concept of “art-noise.” The noise-scape can envelope various kinds of involvement in all kinds of art, by artists, audiences, and distributed amalgams of all of these. Midway through the book, we are offered characteristics of an “immersive noise vision theory.” This theory, leading to an even more syncretic thinking about the art experience, is sketched out through further reference to the author’s personal observation, as well as his art-historical research and notes. Personal examples take on the reflex of a kind of art-noise-travel-writing, as Nechvatal visits Ryoji Ikeda’s Datamatics [ver 2.0] installation at the Centre Pompidou, Paris), hears Cecil Taylor at Alice Tully Hall in New York, spends time with the cave paintings of Lascaux, France, and explores the Wagner-inspired Venus Grotto of Linderhof, Bavaria, to name a few. These site-events, to varying degrees, are renderings of noise-art’s potential to “place us back into a ritual position by dragging art down into the felt 360° noise-perspective of the enthusiastic and participatory.” (p.103) The arc of the ideas proposed here position immersiveness, saturation and “scopic all-over tension” as most productively foundational to noise art, or art-noise. An itinerary from the most ancient of artistic expressions (cave drawings) to the most digital of presentations is charted (Ikeda’s minimal/maximal bitwise works for synchronized audio and visual projection). The harsh sonic onslaught of Masami Akita (a.k.a. Merzbow), is, under this analysis, not so far from colossal denseness of the churches of the High Baroque (Nechvatal visits the Rosario Chapel in Santo Domingo Church, Puebla, Mexico). And there is much more here, eaten up by noise: A rethinking of the work of Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Nicolas Schöffler (whom Nechvatal names the true “the Father of Cybernetic Art”) and the Happenings of Alan Kaprow, all as art-noise in their own right. Each of these artists and moments demonstrate techniques of destabilization, immersiveness, frame-breaking and “all-over fullness and fervor.” Here is writing on art and art history that is as ambitious as it is promising: “wildly visionary,” Nechvatal states as in conclusion. Self-admittedly far-reaching to the point of verging on totalization, we are asked to consider that the moments, spaces, arts and artists Nechvatal appreciates in the book all derive from an increasingly prevalent “noise consciousness.” Along the way we gain an appreciation of noise as a productive and proactive tension in art, rather than an unwanted signal or unwelcome intrusion. Most promising here for me are Nechvatal’s revealing descriptions of the potential for noise to make manifest the material-perceptual framework of individual and collective art experience. How might we allow what we have been repeatedly taught is our contemporary condition of “information overload” to transform itself into a calm, warm, sympathetic kind of inundation. Treatment of experience in this way, dissolves boundaries between the bodily, informational, material and technical complexes that make up our world, and is the promise of a radical, if momentary, Immersion Into Noise. (shrink)

Although Karl Marx and Søren Kierkegaard are both major figures in nineteenth-century Western thought, they are rarely considered in the same conversation. Marx is the great radical economic theorist, the prophet of communist revolution who famously claimed religion was the "opiate of the masses." Kierkegaard is the renowned defender of Christian piety, a forerunner of existentialism, and a critic of mass politics who challenged us to become "the single individual." But by drawing out important themes bequeathed them by their shared (...) predecessor G. W. F. Hegel, Jamie Aroosi shows how they were engaged in parallel projects of making sense of the modern, "dialectical" self, as it realizes itself through a process of social, economic, political, and religious emancipation. In The Dialectical Self, Aroosi illustrates that what is traditionally viewed as opposition is actually a complementary one-sidedness, born of the fact that Marx and Kierkegaard differently imagined the impediments to the self's appropriation of freedom. Specifically, Kierkegaard's concern with the psychological and spiritual nature of the self reflected his belief that the primary impediments to freedom reside in subjectivity, such as in our willing conformity to social norms. Conversely, Marx's concern with the sociopolitical nature of the self reflected his belief that the primary impediments to freedom reside in the objective world, such as in the exploitation of the economic system. However, according to Aroosi, each thinker represents one half of a larger picture of freedom and selfhood, because the subjective and objective impediments to freedom serve to reinforce one another. By synthesizing the writing of these two diametrically opposed figures, Aroosi demonstrates the importance of envisioning emancipation as a subjective, psychological, and spiritual process as well as an objective, sociopolitical, and economic one. The Dialectical Self attests to the importance and continued relevance of Marx and Kierkegaard for the modern imagination. (shrink)

The point of departure of David Ellerman's paper is that the role of labour in economics can be looked at in a fundamentally different way than has typically been the case. The paper's purpose is, therefore, oppositional. However, it cannot simply be dismissed. It is clearly articulated, well reasoned, and most importantly, thought provoking. It requires one to rethink how one conceives some basic issues in economics. As such, one does not need to be entirely convinced by the argument to (...) consider it worthy of dissemination. At the same time, if one subscribes to the ethic of structured or critical pluralism one must also consider the pressure points of the argument (see Dow, 2004; Dobusch and Kapeller, 2012). Below, I briefly reconstruct Ellerman's core claims and provide some comment on that argument. Read David Ellerman's paper "The Labour Theory of Property and Marginal Productivity Theory". (shrink)

The recent literature surrounding the realist/anti-realist debates in the philosophy of science has focused its attention towards the role that history plays in explaining why science is successful and thus approximately true. This has been caused, in large part, by the Pessimistic Meta-Induction (PMI), which has challenged attempted explanations by turning our attention towards the large amount of scientific theories that have been abandoned but were still empirically successful. There will be two primary goals of this paper. The first will (...) be to explore the PMI more deeply than it traditionally has been. This will involve demonstrating how the PMI is more malleable than it is normally given credit for as well as how meta-inductions can and have been used in practice. The second goal will be to discuss the implications of this more robust form of the PMI for explanationist realism, or the thesis that scientific realism provides the best answer as to why science is successful. I will argue that explanationist realism, after being cornered by the malleability of the PMI, turns out to be either a trivial or false thesis. Given this demise of explanationist realism as a substantive thesis, I will argue that the strength of scientific realism truly lies in its critical abilities or its ability to normatively assess scientific theories and the way we ought to practice science. (shrink)

Despite the bad press that retributivism often receives, the basic assumptions on which this theory of punishment rests are generally regarded as being attractive and compelling. First of these is the assumption that persons are morally responsible agents and that social practices, such as criminal punishment, must acknowledge that fact. Additionally, retributivism is committed to the claim that punishment must be proportionate to the crime, and not determined by such utilitarian concerns as the welfare of society, or the hope of (...) deterring other criminals. Because the most commonly discussed version of retributivism is developed from Kant's moral and legal theory, I will refer to it as Kantian Retributivism. Despite its appeal, Kantian Retributivism cannot provide a satisfactory response to a kind of case that is receiving increasingly serious consideration in philosophical literature. The case is this: Many crimes are committed by individuals profoundly disadvantaged by unjust social institutions, such as racism, classism, and/or sexism. If such individuals commit crimes, the retributivist is placed in a very difficult position: Either she must claim that the individual has willfully committed a crime and for that reason deserves punishment, seeming to ignore entirely the social background of the individual, or she can claim that the individual—in virtue of being disadvantaged by social injustices(s)—does not deserve punishment because such punishment would be unfair. I have argued elsewhere that neither strategy is tenable. (shrink)

Critical Thinking Critical Thinking is the process of using and assessing reasons to evaluate statements, assumptions, and arguments in ordinary situations. The goal of this process is to help us have good beliefs, where “good” means that our beliefs meet certain goals of thought, such as truth, usefulness, or rationality. Critical thinking is widely regarded … Continue reading Critical Thinking →.

This Element argues that after twenty years of democratization, Indonesia has performed admirably. This is especially so when the country's accomplishments are placed in comparative perspective. However, as we analytically focus more closely to inspect Indonesia's political regime, political economy, and how identity-based mobilizations have emerged, it is clear that Indonesia still has many challenges to overcome, some so pressing that they could potentially erode or reverse many of the democratic gains the country has achieved since its former authoritarian ruler, (...) Soeharto, was forced to resign in 1998. (shrink)

United in Hate analyzes the Left's contemporary romance with militant Islam as a continuation of the Left's love affair with communist totalitarianism in the ...

This paper points out an ambiguity in Cass Sunstein’s recent work concerning whose lives and interests are to be promoted by libertarian paternalism, and argues that this ambiguity stems from a lack of clarity regarding how we should understand the relevance of the heuristics and biases literature for democratic theory. The paper attempts to extract from Sunstein’s work an account of how we should go about identifying biases in social choices. It argues that Sunstein’s view on this issue has changed (...) over the years, and identifies a trend in his thinking moving away from libertarian paternalism and toward libertarian welfarism. (shrink)

A selection of essays dedicated to Hans Herzberger with affection and gratitude for both his profound work and his lasting example. Contributors: I. Levi (on whether and how a rational agent should be seen as a maximizer of some cognitive value), C. Normore (on medieval accounts of logical validity), J. P. Tappenden (on the local influences on Frege's doctrines), A. Urquhart (on the inexpressible), A. C. Varzi (on dimensionality and the sense of possibility), and S. Yablo (on content and carvings, (...) and from there to mathematical realism). (shrink)

In this comprehensive tour of the long history and philosophy of expertise, from ancient Greece to the 20th century, Jamie Carlin Watson tackles the question of expertise and why we can be skeptical of what experts say, making a valuable contribution to contemporary philosophical debates on authority, testimony, disagreement and trust. His review sketches out the ancient origins of the concept, discussing its early association with cunning, skill and authority and covering the sort of training that ancient thinkers believed (...) was required for expertise. Watson looks at the evolution of the expert in the middle ages into a type of "genius" or "innate talent", moving to the role of psychological research in 16th-century Germany, the influence of Darwin, the impact of behaviorism and its interest to computer scientists, and its transformation into the largely cognitive concept psychologists study today. (shrink)

Amongst intellectuals and activists, neoliberalism has become a potent signifier for the kind of free-market thinking that has dominated politics for the past three decades. Forever associated with the conviction politics of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the free-market project has since become synonymous with the 'Washington consensus' on international development policy and the phenomenon of corporate globalization, where it has come to mean privatization, deregulation, and the opening up of new markets. But beyond its utility as a protest slogan (...) or buzzword as shorthand for the political-economic Zeitgeist, what do we know about where neoliberalism came from and how it spread? Who are the neoliberals, and why do they studiously avoid the label? Constructions of Neoliberal Reason presents a radical critique of the free-market project, from its origins in the first half of the 20th Century through to the recent global economic crisis, from the utopian dreams of Friedrich von Hayek through the dogmatic theories of the Chicago School to the hope and hubris of Obamanomics. The book traces how neoliberalism went from crank science to common sense in the period between the Great Depression and the age of Obama. Constructions of Neoliberal Reason dramatizes the rise of neoliberalism and its uneven spread as an intellectual, political, and cultural project, combining genealogical analysis with situated case studies of formative moments throughout the world, like New York City's bankruptcy, Hurricane Katrina, and the Wall Street crisis of 2008. The book names and tracks some of neoliberalism's key protagonists, as well as some of the less visible bit-part players. It explores how this adaptive regime of market rule was produced and reproduced, its logics and limits, its faults and its fate. (shrink)

'You shouldn't drink too much. The Earth is round. Milk is good for your bones.' Are any of these claims true? How can you tell? Can you ever be certain you are right? For anyone tackling philosophical logic and critical thinking for the first time, Critical Thinking: An Introduction to Reasoning Well provides a practical guide to the skills required to think critically. From the basics of good reasoning to the difference between claims, evidence and arguments, Robert Arp and (...) class='Hi'>Jamie Carlin Watson cover the topics found in an introductory course. Now revised and fully updated, this Second Edition features a glossary, chapter summaries, more student-friendly exercises, study questions, diagrams, and suggestions for further reading. Topics include: the structure, formation, analysis and recognition of arguments deductive validity and soundness inductive strength and cogency inference to the best explanation truth tables tools for argument assessment informal and formal fallacies With real life examples, advice on graduate school entrance exams and an expanded companion website packed with additional exercises, an answer key and help with real life examples, this easy-to-follow introduction is a complete beginner's tool set to good reasoning, analyzing and arguing. Ideal for students in basic reasoning courses and students preparing for graduate school. (shrink)