This course asks students to consider the ways in which social theorists, institutional reformers, and political revolutionaries in the 17th through 19th centuries seized upon insights developed in the natural sciences and mathematics to change themselves and the society in which they lived. Students study trials, art, literature and music to understand developments in Europe and its colonies in these two centuries. Covers works by Newton, Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Marx, and Darwin.

This course explores the relationship between ancient Greek philosophy and mathematics. We investigate how ideas of definition, reason, argument and proof, rationality / irrationality, number, quality and quantity, truth, and even the idea of an idea were shaped by the interplay of philosophic and mathematical inquiry. The course examines how discovery of the incommensurability of magnitudes challenged the Greek presumption that the cosmos is fully understandable. Students explore the influence of mathematics on ancient Greek ethical theories. We read such authors as: Euclid, Plato, Aristotle, Nicomachus, Theon of Smyrna, Bacon, Descartes, Dedekind, and Newton.

This activity helps students learn to be open-minded and to participate in respectful discussion using evidence and reasoning. These are great life skills that any citizen of the world should have. They’re also scientific argumentation skills. The ability to change one’s mind based on evidence and reasoning, to see issues as complex, and to look at issues and claims from different perspectives are all scientific argumentation skills. Students also learn that absolute answers rarely exist. These skills and understandings are useful beyond science for anyone interested in figuring things out and in talking with others about issues, particularly with those who have different perspectives and opinions.

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Why study Quantitative Literacy?

Most students sign up for this course to fulfill a general education mathematics requirement. And this text is certainly aimed at that general audience. But by the time the course is completed, the authors hope that you will have developed some appreciation for the usefulness and elegance of the subject. Without doubt, some level of competency and comfort in working with numerical data is needed to navigate the modern world; and we have tried to cover topics that can be used in day to day life.

In this book, we will focus on problem solving and critical thinking skills. Our goal is not to prepare you just for the next math class, but to equip you with the necessary tools so that you can apply basic mathematical reasoning to a wide variety of commonly encountered problems. Along the way, we will learn basic logic, how to work with percentages and units, the basics of consumer finance, and how to use and interpret basic statistical data.

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 is premised on the belief that emotions are a fundamental part of human nature. Accordingly, understanding emotions and incorporating emotions into our research can help us better explain variation in important political phenomena. Research on emotions and how emotions can influence decision-making has dramatically increased over the past two decades. This class aims to pick up on new findings from psychology and other disciplines and marshal this knowledge toward the most important issues of political science.

A series of lectures delivered by Peter Millican to first-year philosophy students at the University of Oxford. The lectures comprise of the 8-week General Philosophy course, delivered to first year undergraduates. These lectures aim to provide a thorough introduction to many philosophical topics and to get students and others interested in thinking about key areas of philosophy. Taking a chronological view of the history of philosophy, each lecture is split into 3 or 4 sections which outline a particular philosophical problem and how different philosophers have attempted to resolve the issue. Individuals interested in the 'big' questions about life such as how we perceive the world, who we are in the world and whether we are free to act will find this series informative, comprehensive and accessible.

This is an introductory textbook in logic and critical thinking. The goal of the textbook is to provide the reader with a set of tools and skills that will enable them to identify and evaluate arguments. The book is intended for an introductory course that covers both formal and informal logic. As such, it is not a formal logic textbook, but is closer to what one would find marketed as a critical thinking textbook. Downloadable as a pdf file.

Philosophy (from Greek φιλοσοφία, philosophia, literally "love of wisdom") is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. The term was probably coined by Pythagoras (c. 570 – c. 495 BC). Philosophical methods include questioning, critical discussion, rational argument and systematic presentation. Classic philosophical questions include: Is it possible to know anything and to prove it? What is most real? However, philosophers might also pose more practical and concrete questions such as: Is there a best way to live? Is it better to be just or unjust (if one can get away with it)? Do humans have free will?

This course explores the origins of magic, science, and religion as forms of belief within and across cultures. It addresses the place of rationality and belief in competing sociocultural theories, with a focus on analyzing modern perspectives. It also examines how cases of overlap between magic, science, and religion raise new questions about modernity and human nature.

This course considers a range of philosophical questions about the foundations of morality, such as whether and in what sense morality is objective, the nature of moral discourse, and how we can come to know right from wrong.

“Reading Poetry” has several aims: primarily, to increase the ways you can become more engaged and curious readers of poetry; to increase your confidence as writers thinking about literary texts; and to provide you with the language for literary description. The course is not designed as a historical survey course but rather as an introductory approach to poetry from various directions – as public or private utterances; as arranged imaginative shapes; and as psychological worlds, for example. One perspective offered is that poetry offers intellectual, moral and linguistic pleasures as well as difficulties to our private lives as readers and to our public lives as writers. Expect to hear and read poems aloud and to memorize lines; the class format will be group discussion, occasional lecture.

We are pleased to release this digital edition of Ralph Johnson’s The Rise of Informal Logic as Volume 2 in the series Windsor Studies in Argumentation. This edition is a reprint of the previous Vale Press edition with some minor corrections.

We have decided to make this the second volume in the series because it is such a compelling account of the formation of informal logic as a discipline, written by one of the founders of the field. The book includes essential chapters on the history and development of informal logic. Other chapters are key reflections on the theoretical issues raised by the attempt to understand informal argument. Many of the papers were previously published in important journals. A number of them were co-authored with J. Anthony Blair. Three of them have appeared only in the present book.

Do poems think? Recurrent images of the poet as an inspired lunatic, and of poetry as a fundamentally irrational art, have often fostered an understanding of poets and their work as generally extraneous to the work of the sciences. Yet poets have long reflected upon and have sought to embody in their work the most elementary processes of mind, and have frequently drawn for these representations on the very sciences to which they are thought to stand - and sometimes do genuinely stand - in opposition. Far from representing a mere departure from reason, then, the poem offers an image of the mind at work, an account of how minds work, a tool for eliciting thought in the reader or auditor. Bringing together readings in British poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with writings from the emergent sciences of psychology and the physiology of the brain, this interdisciplinary course will explore the ways in which British poets, in years that witnessed the crucial development of these sciences, sought to capture an image of the mind at work. The primary aim of the course is to examine how several prominent genres of British poetry - the lyric, for instance, and the didactic poem - draw from and engage in this period with accounts of cognition within the sciences of psychology, physiology, and medicine. More broadly, the course aims to give undergraduates with some prior experience in the methods and topics of literary study an introduction to interdisciplinary humanistic research.

Learn how to write an expository essay with opinion, reason and evidence while creating your very own comic strip!
With superhero Captain Opinion and her sidekicks, Reason and Evidence, the viewer goes on a fun adventure into the world of opinions and the importance of supporting them with lots of reasons and evidence.
Learning Objective:
Have students write an expository essay that establishes a central idea in a topic sentence; includes supporting sentences with simple facts, details, and explanations; and contains a concluding statement.

¡Aprende cómo escribir un ensayo expositivo con opinión, razón y evidencia mientras creas tu propia tira cómica!

Con el superhéroe Capitán Opinión y sus compañeras Razón y Evidencia, el espectador se embarca en una divertida aventura en el mundo de las opiniones y la importancia de sustentarlas con muchas razones y evidencias.

Objetivo de Aprendizaje:
Hacer que los estudiantes escriban un ensayo expositivo que establezca una idea central en una oración temática; incluye oraciones de apoyo con hechos simples, detalles y explicaciones, y contiene una declaración final.

In this lab, students will learn how to make an assumption and how to support their assumption. They will be able to achieve this goal by participating in a Spy Game, where students will ask questions to acquire enough information to make an educated guess. 

In this lab, students will learn how to make an assumption and how to support their assumption. They will be able to achieve this goal by participating in a Spy Game, where students will ask questions to acquire enough information to make an educated guess.