AAPT Members

For “work on harmonious cultural coexistence”, according to the Montreal Gazette:
Taylor joins an elite group
And for “developing a social philosophy intended to help individuals from diverse backgrounds keep their identities and still live peacefully together,” according to the LATimes:
Kyoto Prize goes to UC Berkeley professor

Here is an article I found about a philosophy major who is now doing something interesting. I’ll add to this series as I find them:

Melinda Delahoyde Appointed President of Care Net - From ‘Christian News Wire’

From Central Connecticut State University:
Philosophy–Ways of Thinking, Ways of Living

Mark Lieberman at the Language Log recently posted his views on the validity of arguments from etymology:

Querkopf von Klubstick returns

While I’ll admit using these for rhetorical effect (i.e. introductory material) in informal settings, I’ve always shied away from them in formal academic prose. The question for me, here, is whether or not they deserve to be included in a critical thinking course.

It certainly seems - and Lieberman’s example of T.D. Jakes on Oprah serves to prove the point - that arguments of this sort abound in those areas of discourse our students are likely to encounter in their daily lives. And hence, it follows that they should be covered.

The question really is whether they form a distinct category of fallacy over and above the standardly covered ‘genetic’ fallacy, or a variation on an equivocation (i.e. equivocating between the contemporary meaning in light of the historical one). It may be precisely because they fall between these two categories that they deserve their own classification. Any thoughts?

Here’s the series of disjunctive arguments following the same format as (Validity of conditional arguments via truth-table).
The functionality is the same: (1) Click ’start’ to populate the truth table with ‘T’s and ‘F’s. (2) complete the truth table with the combo boxes provided - click ‘check’ to verify. (3) check off all rows with a false conclusion, making sure there is at least 1 false conclusion in each set of premises, and finally (4) decide whether or not the argument is valid and click ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on the right.  read more »

There were two interesting articles about attempts to introduce philosophy to the public over the weekend:

Daniel Evans: Bringing Marx on the stage of ‘Sunday at the Park’ from the International Herald Tribune about a Tony-Nominated actor who is also a philosophy student.

Festival to Play Up Germany’s Philosophical Hertitage from Deutsche Welle.

I’ve updated the prototype flash document from which all of these diverge, so the functionality is a little different than the last time I posted versions of these (Dynamic Formal argument demos). Specifically:  read more »