Are you confident you can reason clearly? Are you able to convince others of your point of view? Are you able to give plausible reasons for believing what you believe? Do you sometimes read arguments in the newspapers, hear them on the television, or in the pub and wish you knew how to confidently evaluate them? In this six-part course, you will learn all about arguments, how to identify them, how to evaluate them, and how not to mistake bad arguments for good. Such skills are invaluable if you are concerned about the truth of your beliefs, and the cogency of your arguments.

Word Count: 23227

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It is our hope that the successful student who completes a class using all or some of this text will have improved skills with application inside the discipline of philosophy, but also with application to work in other disciplines within academia. Our ultimate goal, however, is to help people develop techniques which support curiosity, open-mindedness, and an ability to collaborate successfully with others, across differences of experiences and background. Our dream is to help people “put their heads together.”

Can Higher Order Thinking Be Tested?

Short Description:
This second edition of CRITICAL THINKING EDUCATION AND ASSESSMENT: Can Higher Order Thinking be Tested? contains a series of important papers from the first edition and a new Introduction by Jan Sobocan. The essays are an important read for anyone interested in the issues raised by the teaching of critical thinking and consequent attempts to test its success.

Long Description:
This second edition of CRITICAL THINKING EDUCATION AND ASSESSMENT: Can Higher Order Thinking be Tested? contains a series of important papers from the first edition and a new Introduction by Jan Sobocan. The essays are an important read for anyone interested in the issues raised by the teaching of critical thinking and consequent attempts to test its success. They discuss attempts to use testing to ensure educational accountability, the politics of testing regimes, and the shortcomings and the strengths of standard tests used to teach and assess students, courses, programs, and the tests themselves. The ebook can serve as a useful introduction to the questions that this raises, at the same time that it provides answers to these questions from the perspective of many different trends within contemporary argumentation theory.

This anthology’s contributors include many leading figures in the fields of informal logic, critical thinking, testing, argumentation theory, and educational theory: Carol Ann Giancarlo, Leo Groarke, Ralph H. Johnson, Robert H. Ennis, William Hare, Jan Sobocan, Roland Case, Gerald Nosich, Donald L. Hatcher, Frans H. van Eemeren, Bart Garssen, J. Anthony Blair, Linda Kaser, and Sharon Murphy.

Word Count: 90589

ISBN: 978-0-920233-97-9

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 This is a collection of Infographics to help visual students understand the differences between the terms presented in an Introduction to Critical Thinking course. 

Thinking critically is a complicated but important endeavour that involves learning how to think clearly, acquiring problem-solving skills, and applying these skills in real life contexts. This text offers students an introduction to critical thinking methods, principles, and applied examples. It engages the reader to question their attitude and approach to critical thinking and provides a detailed introduction to the role of belief in critical thinking. It outlines the use of argument forms for validity, definitions and classification, syllogistic reasoning, categorical logic, and the method of informal fallacy identification. With up-to-date examples, current issues, links to videos, exercises and answer keys, a glossary, quick charts, and key takeaways, this resource is engaging and designed for students’ success.

This is a discussion designed in Canvas to help critical thinking students apply their knowledge of argumentation and syllogisms.

Short Description:
As students in an undergraduate cognitive psychology course learned about memory processes, they applied course content to the social issues of racism, sexism, and ableism. In a series of essays students explain the cognitive processes that underly bias and offer readers sound, empirically based suggestions for how to address and change these implicit biases. When we know how memory works, we can use its power for good.

Long Description:
As students in an undergraduate cognitive psychology course learned about memory processes, they applied course content to the social issues of racism, sexism, and ableism. In a series of essays students explain the cognitive processes that underly bias and offer readers sound, empirically based suggestions for how to address and change implicit biases. When we know how memory works, we can use its power for good. Readers are sure to take away a deep understanding of how memory processes make us who we are, and how we can control these processes in the pursuit of social justice.

Word Count: 69447

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Culture, Embodiment, and the Senses will provide an historical and cross-cultural analysis of the politics of sensory experience. The subject will address western philosophical debates about mind, brain, emotion, and the body and the historical value placed upon sight, reason, and rationality, versus smell, taste, and touch as acceptable modes of knowing and knowledge production. We will assess cultural traditions that challenge scientific interpretations of experience arising from western philosophical and physiological models. The class will examine how sensory experience lies beyond the realm of individual physiological or psychological responses and occurs within a culturally elaborated field of social relations. Finally, we will debate how discourse about the senses is a product of particular modes of knowledge production that are themselves contested fields of power relations.

This course examines computers anthropologically, as artifacts revealing the social orders and cultural practices that create them. Students read classic texts in computer science along with cultural analyses of computing history and contemporary configurations. It explores the history of automata, automation and capitalist manufacturing; cybernetics and WWII operations research; artificial intelligence and gendered subjectivity; robots, cyborgs, and artificial life; creation and commoditization of the personal computer; the growth of the Internet as a military, academic, and commercial project; hackers and gamers; technobodies and virtual sociality. Emphasis is placed on how ideas about gender and other social differences shape labor practices, models of cognition, hacking culture, and social media.

This class addresses important, current debates in media with in-depth discussion of popular perceptions and policy implications. Students will engage in the critical study of the economic, political, social, and cultural significance of media, and learn to identify, analyze, and understand the complex relations among media texts, policies, institutions, industries, and infrastructures. This class offers the opportunity to discuss, in stimulating and challenging ways, topics such as ideology, propaganda, net neutrality, big data, digital hacktivism, digital rebellion, media violence, gamification, collective intelligence, participatory culture, intellectual property, artificial intelligence, etc., from historical, transcultural, and multiple methodological perspectives.

The goals of this activity are to facilitate team work, critical thinking, and presentation skills in the area of cybersecurity and fake news. Students will be grouped into two teams. As a team, they will choose and analyze cases and ethical questions about fake news through the questions presented in the activity. They will present their analysis to the class.

With 38.5 billion smart devices in existence in 2020 and increasing every year, the potential for security breaches in the Internet of things is also escalating at a dramatic pace. The goal of this team activity is to facilitate team work, critical thinking, and presentation skills in the area of cybersecurity and the Internet of Things. Students will be grouped into two teams. As a team, they will analyze cases about security cameras and smart dolls through the questions presented in the activity. They will present their analysis to the class.

This subject offers a broad survey of texts (both literary and philosophical) drawn from the Western tradition and selected to trace the immediate intellectual antecedents and some of the implications of the ideas animating Darwin’s revolutionary On the Origin of Species. Darwin’s text, of course, is about the mechanism that drives the evolution of life on this planet, but the fundamental ideas of the text have implications that range well beyond the scope of natural history, and the assumptions behind Darwin’s arguments challenge ideas that go much further back than the set of ideas that Darwin set himself explicitly to question - ideas of decisive importance when we think about ourselves, the nature of the material universe, the planet that we live upon, and our place in its scheme of life. In establishing his theory of natural selection, Darwin set himself, rather self-consciously, to challenge a whole way of thinking about these things. The main focus of attention will be Darwin’s contribution to the so-called “argument from design” - the notion that innumerable aspects of the world (and most particularly the organisms within it) display features directly analogous to objects of human design and, since design implies a designer, that an intelligent, conscious agency must have been responsible for their organization and creation. Previously, it had been argued that such features must have only one of two ultimate sources - chance or conscious agency. Darwin proposed and elaborated a third source, which he called Natural Selection, an unconscious agency capable of outdoing the most complex feats of human intelligence.
The course of study will not only examine the immediate inspiration for this idea in the work of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus and place Darwin’s Origin and the theory of Natural Selection in the history of ensuing debate, but it will also touch upon related issues.

Humans are social animals; social demands, both cooperative and competitive, structure our development, our brain and our mind. This course covers social development, social behaviour, social cognition and social neuroscience, in both human and non-human social animals. Topics include altruism, empathy, communication, theory of mind, aggression, power, groups, mating, and morality. Methods include evolutionary biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, social psychology and anthropology.

There is one thing I can be sure of: I am going to die. But what am I to make of that fact? This course will examine a number of issues that arise once we begin to reflect on our mortality. The possibility that death may not actually be the end is considered. Are we, in some sense, immortal? Would immortality be desirable? Also a clearer notion of what it is to die is examined. What does it mean to say that a person has died? What kind of fact is that? And, finally, different attitudes to death are evaluated. Is death an evil? How? Why? Is suicide morally permissible? Is it rational? How should the knowledge that I am going to die affect the way I live my life?

Foundations and philosophical applications of Bayesian decision theory, game theory and theory of collective choice. Why should degrees of belief be probabilities? Is it always rational to maximize expected utility? If so, why and what is its utility? What is a solution to a game? What does a game-theoretic solution concept such as Nash equilibrium say about how rational players will, or should, act in a game? How are the values and the actions of groups, institutions and societies related to the values and actions of the individuals that constitute them?

Christian Kock’s essays show the essential interconnectedness of practical reasoning, rhetoric and deliberative democracy. They constitute a unique contribution to argumentation theory that draws on – and criticizes – the work of philosophers, rhetoricians, political scientists and other argumentation theorists. It puts rhetoric in the service of modern democracies by drawing attention to the obligations of politicians to articulate arguments and objections that citizens can weigh against each other in their deliberations about possible courses of action.

Democracy in difference: Debating key terms of gender, sexuality, race and identity focuses on concepts and analytical frames we use when discussing how marginalised identities navigate their place in an assumed common culture.

This ebook offers a path for exploring how we might build a shared vocabulary when working through the muddle of public debates like identity politics, political correctness, pronouns and what constitutes racism. Democracy in Difference is an unconventional interdisciplinary guide to key concepts, which borrows from decolonial methodologies, Marxism, feminism, queer theory and deconstruction.

Key terms are illustrated through written text, La Trobe Art Institute artworks (centering Indigenous artists), poetry, comedy and song, and customised animations which make difficult terms accessible.

This text is published by the La Trobe eBureau.

In The Democracy of Objects Bryant proposes that we break with the epistemological tradition and once again initiate the project of ontology as first philosophy. Bryant develops a realist ontology, called -onticology-, which argues that being is composed entirely of objects, properties, and relations. Bryant proposes that objects are dynamic systems that relate to the world under conditions of operational closure.