This course focuses on an in-depth reading of Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis …
This course focuses on an in-depth reading of Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis by Isaac Newton, as well as several related commentaries and historical philosophical texts.
This course examines the history of MIT through the lens of the …
This course examines the history of MIT through the lens of the broader history of science and technology, and vice versa. The course covers the founding of MIT in 1861 and goes through the present, including such topics as William Barton Rogers, educational philosophy, biographies of MIT students and professors, intellectual and organizational development, the role of science, changing laboratories and practices, and MIT's relationship with Boston, the federal government, and industry. Assignments include short papers, presentations, and final paper. A number of classes are concurrent with the MIT150 Symposia.
This lesson is intended for classrooms that want to show the entire …
This lesson is intended for classrooms that want to show the entire How AI Works video series in a single day. It is not intended to be taught in sequence with the other lessons in this unit, which introduces each video one day at a time.
Students follow along with each video by matching vocabulary from the video, then answering a reflection question about each video. The lesson plan and slides are very sparse and open-ended to allow for improvisation and customization to fit your classroom.
This presentation combines some Prezi with Camtasia to produce a narrated result. …
This presentation combines some Prezi with Camtasia to produce a narrated result. Covers basic ethical paper-writing and uses the 1995 movie "Outbreak" as an illustration of a moral issue.
This multimedia reader examines how people use a humanities lens to make …
This multimedia reader examines how people use a humanities lens to make sense of what they experience, as well as share their experiences with the rest of the world. The information is presented using a pedagogical approach called reverse teaching, which introduces artifacts in their historical, social, political, personal, and other contexts. Along with the narrative, questions for creative and critical thinking prompt the reader to practice self-exploration.
Inferring and Explaining is a book in practical epistemology. It examines the …
Inferring and Explaining is a book in practical epistemology. It examines the notion of evidence and assumes that good evidence is the essence of rational thinking. Evidence is the cornerstone of the natural, social, and behavioral sciences. But it is equally central to almost all academic pursuits and, perhaps most importantly, to the basic need to live an intelligent and reflective life.
This volume reflects the development and theoretical foundation of a new paradigm …
This volume reflects the development and theoretical foundation of a new paradigm for critical thinking based on inquiry. The field of critical thinking, as manifested in the Informal Logic movement, developed primarily as a response to the inadequacies of formalism to represent actual argumentative practice and to provide useful argumentative skills to students. Because of this, the primary focus of the field has been on informal arguments rather than formal reasoning. Yet the formalist history of the field is still evident in its emphasis, with respect to both theory and pedagogy, on the structure and evaluation of individual, de-contextualized arguments. It is our view that such a view of critical thinking is excessively narrow and limited, failing to provide an understanding of argumentation as largely a matter of comparative evaluation of a variety of contending positions and arguments with the goal of reaching a reasoned judgment on an issue. As a consequence, traditional critical thinking instruction is problematic in failing to provide the reasoning skills that students need in order to accomplish this goal. Instead, the goal of critical thinking instruction has been seen largely as a defensive one: of learning to not fall prey to invalid, inadequate, or fallacious arguments.
The Republic of Plato is one of the classic gateway texts into …
The Republic of Plato is one of the classic gateway texts into the study and practice of philosophy, and it is just the sort of book that has been able to arrest and redirect lives. How it has been able to do this, and whether or not it will be able to do this in your own case, is something you can only discover for yourself. The present guidebook aims to help a person get fairly deep, fairly quickly, into the project. It divides the dialogue into 96 sections and provides commentary on each section as well as questions for reflection and exploration. It is organized with a table of contents and is stitched together with a system of navigating bookmarks. Links to external sites such as the Perseus Classical Library are used throughout. This book is suitable for college courses or independent study.
This reformation will present readers a view of interdisciplinarity and the foundational …
This reformation will present readers a view of interdisciplinarity and the foundational components that have been present throughout human history. You might ask, why is there a problem with interdisciplinarity now? What this book outlines are the questionable and potentially, malevolent ideals that have been pervasive in our society that go against the forms of logic and reason. This will be a catalyst towards a reform for epistemological connections in logic, ethics and emotion that relate to us as autonomous individuals that impact our learning, life, and society.
This textbook is an introduction to Ethics. It covers the origins of …
This textbook is an introduction to Ethics. It covers the origins of ethics, ethical judgment, decision making, mistakes in reasoning, rethical theories, and contemporary ethical issues.
This Introduction to Ethics textbook was developed as an Open Textbook (OER, …
This Introduction to Ethics textbook was developed as an Open Textbook (OER, Open Educational Resource) for use in a lower-level Philosophy course at Golden West College (a California Community College) as part of a sabbatical project in Spring 2019. This work is effectively an anthology of contemporary moral issues and classic ethical theory, in the vein of Rachels' "The Right Thing to Do" or Cahn's "Exploring Ethics". Many of the articles were crowdsourced from talented philosophers and the rest are classic historical readings in the public domain. It is released under a CC-BY license, which means all of the works within it contain licenses that allow them to be used and distributed freely and openly and may be printed (even for commercial purposes).
forall x is an introduction to sentential logic and first-order predicate logic …
forall x is an introduction to sentential logic and first-order predicate logic with identity, logical systems that significantly influenced twentieth-century analytic philosophy. After working through the material in this book, a student should be able to understand most quantified expressions that arise in their philosophical reading.
This books treats symbolization, formal semantics, and proof theory for each language. The discussion of formal semantics is more direct than in many introductory texts. Although forall x does not contain proofs of soundness and completeness, it lays the groundwork for understanding why these are things that need to be proven.
Philosophy of science asks questions that attempt to clarify exactly what science …
Philosophy of science asks questions that attempt to clarify exactly what science is, how it is different from other human endeavours, and how it works. We will take the opportunity to engage with the following pivotal questions of the philosophy of science in the first half of this textbook, all the while drawing from the rich history of science
This course studies what is language and what does knowledge of a …
This course studies what is language and what does knowledge of a language consist of. It asks how do children learn languages and is language unique to humans; why are there many languages; how do languages change; is any language or dialect superior to another; and how are speech and writing related. Context for these and similar questions is provided by basic examination of internal organization of sentences, words, and sound systems. No prior training in linguistics is assumed.
This is an introductory textbook in logic and critical thinking. The goal …
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.
The goal of this text is to present philosophy to newcomers as …
The goal of this text is to present philosophy to newcomers as a living discipline with historical roots. While a few early chapters are historically organized, the goal in the historical chapters is to trace a developmental progression of thought that introduces basic philosophical methods and frames issues that remain relevant today. Later chapters are topically organized. These include philosophy of science and philosophy of mind, areas where philosophy has shown dramatic recent progress. This text concludes with four chapters on ethics, broadly construed. Traditional theories of right action is covered in a third of these. Students are first invited first to think about what is good for themselves and their relationships in a chapter of love and happiness. Next a few meta-ethical issues are considered; namely, whether they are moral truths and if so what makes them so. The end of the ethics sequence addresses social justice, what it is for one's community to be good. Our sphere of concern expands progressively through these chapters. Our inquiry recapitulates the course of development into moral maturity. Over the course of the text, the author has tried to outline the continuity of thought that leads from the historical roots of philosophy to a few of the diverse areas of inquiry that continue to make significant contributions to our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in.
This textbook is an introduction to Philosophy. It covers the nature of …
This textbook is an introduction to Philosophy. It covers the nature of philosophy, logic, ethics, metaphysics and epistemology, and the philosophy of religion.
The goal of this text is to present philosophy to newcomers as …
The goal of this text is to present philosophy to newcomers as a living discipline with historical roots. While a few early chapters are historically organized, my goal in the historical chapters is to trace a developmental progression of thought that introduces basic philosophical methods and frames issues that remain relevant today. Later chapters are topically organized. These include philosophy of science and philosophy of mind, areas where philosophy has shown dramatic recent progress. This text concludes with four chapters on ethics, broadly construed. I cover traditional theories of right action in the third of these. Students are first invited first to think about what is good for themselves and their relationships in a chapter of love and happiness. Next a few meta-ethical issues are considered; namely, whether they are moral truths and if so what makes them so. The end of the ethics sequence addresses social justice, what it is for one’s community to be good. Our sphere of concern expands progressively through these chapters. Our inquiry recapitulates the course of development into moral maturity
Aesthetic Theory and Practice offers fresh perspectives on canonical and emerging topics …
Aesthetic Theory and Practice offers fresh perspectives on canonical and emerging topics in aesthetics, and also brings attention to a number of culturally sensitive topics that are customarily silenced in introductions to philosophical aesthetics. The papers are heterogeneous in terms of length and degrees of difficulty, inviting the reader into the study of contemporary aesthetics, which spans a lifetime.
This collection is co-created thanks to contributions from the Americas, Japan and China, Australia and Austria, England and France, Italy, Germany and Ethiopia. It is not surprising, therefore, that all eleven chapters adopt active critical and often multicultural perspectives, so as to evaluate aesthetics in relation to the tradition, its cultural potential, and the messy, geopolitical circumstances of the 21st century.
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