Top products from r/AcademicPhilosophy

Clayton Littlejohn, in his Justification and the Truth-Connection, takes the idea that truth-guaranteeing justification is required for knowledge and develops it non-skeptically.

The picture that comes out is a kind of knowledge-first epistemology (Williamson's Knowledge and Its Limits also owes a great debt to Zagzebski).

The author says that

>In order for the level of justification for a belief [to be knowledge] to be non-arbitrary, it is clear that one should be aware of all of the relevant pieces of information

Williamson and Littlejohn would say the only thing you need to be aware of to guarantee the truth of p is p. They argue that "being aware of p" is just another way of saying "knowing that p". So whether you're justified in believing p is determined by whether you are aware that p, which is determined by whether or not you know p.

Similarly, the only evidence you need to have a guarantee of the truth of p is p. If your evidence is what you know (Williamson believes this. Littlejohn's account is more complicated), then we get: Whether you're justified in believing p is determined by what your evidence is, which is determined by what you know.

What this points to, I would say, is that saving JTB by going for SJT doesn't do much saving: Strong justification just is knowledge.

You can find all the handouts and text here if you scroll down down to Trinity 2006. You can also buy the book that these lectures turned into here.

It's a very difficult set of lectures, but, if you're interested in contemporary pragmatism or philosophy of language generally, they're deeply rewarding, and Brandom is brilliant as usual.

This is a great text.

The introduction (a lengthy chapter actually) covers deductive and inductive logic, syllogisms, fallacies, etc. The first chapter is Reality which covers metaphysics and ontology(study of being/existence) and the second is Religion. So your primary interests are covered right up front and there is a wealth left over.

This was my undergrad 101 book and I use it today in my own class.

I wish I could find the .pdf of the paper, but in all honesty he didn't go much more in depth than Lennox's article on SEP article.

I believe, the essay itself ended up in this book, but I am honestly not sure. It was something he had unpublished but was travelling and lecturing with for some time.

I've used both:

Athenaze

and

Reading Greek

Both books have a second part or volume and both are intended to be course books and do a reasonable job. I think that Athenaze is the better one. Both are more gentle introductions you might want to use before moving on to more hardcore books like the Mastronarde book.

I took an intro logic course this past fall St my community college and we used this textbook http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Logic-Irving-M-Copi/dp/0205820379

My prof picked and chose chapters. I really really enjoyed the class and this book. I got an A in the class if that helps endorse it from a new philosopher's POV.

I think Searl's book was titled "Minds, Brains, and Science" and one of his papers was called "Minds, Brains, and Computers", otherwise I agree with this list completely, adding in David Chalmers' "Consciousness and its Place in Nature" as well.

The Chalmers compilation Burnage mentions below contains most of these essays, and a few others that are also very good.

OP, this is the collection mentioned.

>I honestly find it unnecessary to be so hostile towards this. It's unfair to assume his Aristotle scholarship is affected by his support for Rand.

A reading of the preface to his new Aristotle book would indicate otherwise. It's almost like he can't stop talking about her. As I mentioned in another post, he said in an interview that Rand's "epistemology workshop," which he attended, was "the equivalent of having Aristotle in the room." Is this the sign of a philosopher of sound mind?

The textbook everyone seems to use is http://www.amazon.ca/Greek-Intensive-Course-Hardy-Hansen/dp/0823216632 -- my friend the classics professor and my friend the classical philosophy professor both learned ancient Greek from the Hansen and Quinn.

That depends on why you're studying Logic.

Do you plan to use Logic as a tool for doing Philosophy? If so, I recommend studying Logic for Philosophy by Theodore Sider. You will get a more rigorous, formal treatment of propositional and predicate logic than what your introductory textbook likely contained. You will be exposed to basic proof theory and model theory. You will also learn, in depth, about several useful extensions to predicate logic, including various modal logics.

Do you want to become a logician, in some capacity? If so, the classic text would be Computability and Logic by Boolos and Jeffrey. This is an extremely rigorous and intensive introduction to metalogical proof. If you want to learn to reason about logics, and gain a basis upon which to go on to study the foundations of mathematics, proof theory, model theory, or computability, then this is probably for you.

Also, perhaps you could tell us what textbook you've just finished? That would give us a better idea of what you've already learned.

I'm consistently surprised that Heidegger never comes up in these kinds of lists. His fascinating argument against the cogito is something to be reckoned with--at least not completely ignored. For those who do not know, his primary thesis is that, before cognitive thinking, we have a pre-understanding of our being in the world, which accounts for qualia. Only as being as a foundation can we begin to have cognitive thoughts. Instead of the "I think, therefore I am," it is an "I am, therefore I think." I'd recommend Being and Time (after some preparation with Husserl along with basic phenomenological texts) and What is called Thinking?

Additionally, I would suggest using this book: http://www.amazon.com/What-Are-You-Going-That/dp/0226038823/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1422121402&sr=1-1&keywords=so+what+are+you+going+to+do+with+that

It can help you navigate the transition from academic--> corporate. Additionally, What Color Is Your Parachute is another good choice--cheesy as it is, working through the "Flower" exercise really helped me to be precise about what I wanted--and subsequently, it really helped me out while I was networking.

You're a graduate student, not an artist. There's so much "artistic freedom" in here that the paper is twice as long as it needs to be and it takes forever to make its point. That's why I'm not reading the whole thing. I don't mean to be insulting. Sorry.

In general, I think this is a really helpful book. More academics should read it.

Computability and Logic by Boolos, Burgess and Jeffrey is good but seems to cover much of the stuff in Hunter. You may want to dig deeper into set theory, model theory, proof theory or recursion theory and look at some references specific to those topics.

>One might ask, "but are you not assuming the existence of lan- guage. Therefore the whole theory rests on this assumption making it axiomatic?". To which I would answer that since a language is required to formulate that question, the question is self-defeating.
In fact any written, spoken or sign-based counter argument to the existence of language would have to use language and would be self- defeating. Hence, the existence of language is immune against all language-based counter-arguments.

This is too quick. I can understand and communicate an objection through language, but that doesn't mean the objection is self-defeating, even though the objection is self-referential in some sense. The objection in fact seems well founded to me, you are indeed relying on axiom-like conceptions rooted in language throughout your exposition about what constitutes primitive notions, primitive theories, primitive predicates, laws of unrestricted semantics, and so on.

Edit: This project, even if it were successfully argued, overstates it's achievement. It may be that the universe is informational in nature (you might be interested in Floridi's Philosophy of Information), but this is a major claim to be defended, and is exactly the issue at stake if you want to say that all physical phenomena can be represented by a number together with some unspecified set of rules of inference. If the universe is informational, then the fact that the universe can be represented as information is a trivial tautological corollary -- that is exactly what it means to say the universe is informational! It is not particularly interesting to specify exactly how we might represent the information content -- I imagine there are many ways of doing this. It's also unclear what is meant to be achieved by making your digitalization system 'axiomless' -- you certainly aren't going to be able to escape the concerns over naive foundationalism simply because you avoid the word 'axiom' in your ontology.

Jerry Fodor - Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong

This is exactly what you're looking for.

You'll need this

Maybe some excerpts from Roger Scruton's "Kant: A Very Short Introduction".

In response to the same question, my Logic professor suggested:

• Computability and Logic - George S. Boolos
  
• Naive Set Theory - P. R. Halmos

Here's a recently published one:

http://www.amazon.com/Oxford-Handbook-Philosophy-Time-Handbooks/dp/0199298203/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1344040384&sr=1-9&keywords=the+philosophy+of+time

I don't know how good it is though. This one I do know is good:

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415437271/

Also, there was a compilation of many years of the journal Chronos (premier phil of time journal) in book form, I saw it once but I can't seem to find it again.

As a personal suggestion, on the topic of presentism, you'd do well to read William Lane Craig, The Tensed Theory of Time: A Critical Examination, and The Tenseless Theory of Time: A Critical Examination. Argues strongly in favor of presentism.

Rowe's and Draper's arguments from evil. Read them, and read the responses by Van Inwagen, Bergman, etc., and then read the responses to those responses. Then you will know the way.

Or, alternatively, buy this book: https://www.amazon.ca/Evidential-Argument-Indiana-Philosophy-Religion-ebook/dp/B016VZDARW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1520521391&sr=8-1&keywords=the+evidential+argument+from+evil