A Modern Introduction To Philosophy

[Vittoria Pretlow]

Thisis a reference request. I'm looking for a modern, rigorous, and intelligently written introductory book on informal logical reasoning and critical thinking, aimed at a non-mathematical audience (think lawyers, the general educated reader).

I have graduate-level training in philosophy and am surprised I cannot find a book that meets these criteria to use with students who don't need to learn any mathematical logic, so I'm hoping this forum can help! To simplify the statement of the problem: if you were stranded on a desert island, which one introductory book on reasoning would you wish you had with you? Of course this way of asking the question makes it subjective, but I hope it will rule out responses of truly second- or third-rate writing.

If you asked most mathematicians the same question regarding an introductory calculus book, a very large proportion would probably say Spivak's Calculus. I'm looking for the analog for basic reasoning. I'm afraid it might not exist.

Let me tell you where I'm coming from: Yes, I've seen all the textbooks with their unending treatments of logic ... Ugh! Sure, logic is important, but why the insistence on formal logic proofs? We have logic courses for that. Indeed, just the fact that the focus is on deductive logic seems rather silly. Most real life reasoning is not deductive and so all this logic has very limited applicability. Yes, logic teaches one to be careful and organized in one's reasoning, but let me put it this way: when it comes to people coming to bad beliefs and making bad arguments, logic is probably the least of our problems. Much more problematic are our cognitive and social biases. When you cover fallacies, you'll find that they can almost all be traced back to those biases, rather than to any logical reasoning impairment.

I suppose I should also that say that I define Critical Thinking basically as "thinking about beliefs (especially your own!) and seeing if they make sense". Or: how to not get caught up in bullshit and be an actual truth-seeker! That of course already goes far beyond merely analyzing some prose... it about developing a critical mind-set ... and the many, many psychological and social barriers that exist both inside and outside of us that prevent us from being genuine truth-seekers.

Statistical/inductive reasoning: really important stuff! And by the way: I take a very 'anti-math' approach here as well: you can do all the probability theory and statistics you want, but in the end so many people are still convinced by some hasty generalization of refutation based on one piece of personal experience or anecdotal evidence: that's the kind of crazy thinking that I want my students learn to prevent.

Oh, and in case you think I'm all anti-math and don't like logic: I teach Introduction to Logic, Intermediate Logic (meta-logic; soundness, completeness, etc) and Computability and Logic (undecidability of logic, Godel results), and I love it! ... So yes, I could certainly teach a whole critical thinking course all around logic ... it would certainly be a lot easier for me to teach (and assess!) than what I do now ... I just don't think logic has all that much to offer as far as critical thinking goes.

Sorry, all more than 15 years old I'm afraid, but at least they go beyond mere arguments: there is a lot of psychology and sociology behind the formation of our beliefs, and you have to instill awareness of that in the students, or else in my eyes it fails to be a critical thinking course. If there is one key to critical thinking, it's independent thinking!

Thomists look to the thought of Thomas Aquinas, his major interpreters, and Aristotle for guidance in addressing a full range of perennial problems that face philosophers. This is especially true regarding metaphysical (or metametaphysical) examinations. Although these authors are pre-scientific in the modern sense of the term, Thomists think that they get the principles right -- principles that are comprehensive and flexible and can contextualize, ground and enlighten subsequent discoveries gained by the progression of the empirical sciences. Whereas Thomists have also been actively engaged with the history of philosophy -- bringing Thomas's thought to bear on Heidegger, Kant, Hume, etc. -- a weakness is the dialectical distance between many Thomistic and analytic treatments. However, there are a growing number of so-called "analytic Thomists" who see great fruitfulness in an exchange of ideas between Thomism and the best that contemporary analytic philosophy has to offer. Yet, analytic Thomism is fraught with difficulties and can easily become misdirected. A successful translation and identification of battle lines in the debate are not easy to come by. Opposing but deeply seated presuppositions -- including logical, linguistic, intuitional and terminological! -- separate contemporary analytic philosophers and defenders of scholastic thought from the get-go. Edward Feser demonstrates a facility with both Scholastic and contemporary analytical concepts, and does much to span the divide between the two radical camps. His book continues to open up a space where real progress can be made not only in scholastic metaphysics, but metaphysics broadly envisioned.

Beyond identifying the scope and intentions that he has in mind, in the Prolegomenon Feser argues specifically for an approach inconsistent with naturalism and signals his intellectual sympathy with Scholastic, especially Thomistic, metaphysical modalities. In other words, Feser envisions the task of metaphysics not as articulating a metaphysical theory that trims its sails close as possible to the winds of science, nor merely engaging in conceptual analysis of folk notions that have no traction for conveying reality, but rather as engaged in an enterprise that is both prescriptive and prior in nature -- be it to the contributions of natural science or otherwise. For Feser, metaphysics is about nothing other than "the absolutely first principles of being" (pp. 6-7). Why take his particular tack? For one thing, what Feser takes as his primary competitor, scientism, is fundamentally flawed. He offers in quick succession three arguments against scientism: it is either self-defeating or uninteresting; it cannot provide a complete description of (even physical) reality; it cannot in principle offer a complete explanation of reality. Emboldened by recent work by Thomas Nagel and Michael Rea, among others, on the principled limitations of naturalism, and the direct way in which he targets weaknesses in that position, I thought that the arguments that Feser raises here are strong; and certainly strong enough to justify departing from contemporary naturalism, seeking greener pastures elsewhere where alternative beliefs are given the opportunity to stand on their own two legs.

Feser begins by scrutinizing Aristotelian actuality and potentiality. Signaling the importance of this chapter, Feser tells us that act and potency serves as "the organizing theme" insofar as what is said about other topics follows from it (p. 7). Not only is the act/potency relationship under-appreciated in contemporary scholarship on hylemorphic metaphysics (e.g., it is certainly not an organizing theme in Robert Pasnau's insightful recent Metaphysical Themes), but it provides the kind of conceptual framework that will help us best understand where hylemorphism is supposed to get us in understanding composite entities. As Thomas Aquinas mentions in De ente et essentia, considerations of a substance according to either formal or material considerations are distinct ways, based on really distinct principles, through which to correctly consider the substance as a whole: the material principle expresses potentiality in the whole whereas the form expresses what is actual in the same whole. Feser articulates this desideratum clearly.

In chapter one, Feser is largely concerned to show how a Thomistic account of act and potency, and the arguments supporting such a distinction, can be brought to bear on a contemporary metaphysics of causal powers, in hopes of overcoming contemporary limitations on the issue. He motivates the distinction by appeal to the reality of bone fide change and causal power. To account for one and the same thing changing -- a round ball becoming flattened -- one needs to recognize that when the ball actually has a round shape, that same ball has the potency to be flat. To deny this is to commit oneself to one of two absurd views: the static view where nothing changes or the view there is nothing permanent at all. Insofar as causal power (specifically at this point, efficient causal) should be understood as "that which brings something into being or changes it in some way" (p. 42), it should also be understood as the actualization of a potency. For example, to accurately describe a scenario where the sun is fading the color of a piece of fabric involves ascribing to the sun the causal power (active potency) to fade the color of fabric and ascribing to the fabric a potency to be faded by the sun. In fact, to deny that fabric has this (potential) feature in reality is to deny that it can be faded by the sun, and to deny such a real power to the sun is to deny that it can fade fabric!

By pointing to the interest of contemporary philosophy in the notion of powers (specifically in contexts of metaphysics and philosophy of science), Feser is saved from pleading for a relevancy for causal powers. However, Feser points out that contemporary metaphysicians are re-treading ground covered in a rather sophisticated way within scholastic thought; the latter transcends problems faced by contemporary thinkers due to the fact that they presume Humean views about the looseness and separateness between a cause and its effect when thinking through the issue. As a case in point, Feser looks to sustained criticisms of Lewis's counter-factual view of causation, which tries to analyze causation based solely on what happens (actualities) without appeal to powers. Likewise, in the philosophy of science, Feser sides with Nancy Cartwright, who argues that a powers ontology makes better sense of science, and Anjan Chakravartty, who maintains that a powers ontology saves scientific realism. Beyond a mere assent to causal powers, Feser thinks that causal powers are really distinct from the substances that have them (if they weren't, then change would be impossible) and that there are, fundamentally, categorical (expressing actuality) and dispositional properties (expressing potency); although the latter are mistakenly treated by philosophers today as actualities in their own right, thereby undercutting a correct view of reality that is expressed by a genuine real distinction among actuality and potentiality.

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