Kleist is a famous misreader of Kant, but this study pitches the latter's principles against the more restricted scope of his own examples in order to develop an ethics and an account of the sublime in keeping with Kleist's literary works.

A timely and accessible guide to 100 of the most infamous logical fallacies in Western philosophy, helping readers avoid and detect false assumptions and faulty reasoning You’ll love this book or you’ll hate it. So, you’re either with us or against us. And if you’re against us then you hate books. No true intellectual would hate this book. Ever decide to avoid a restaurant because of one bad meal? Choose a product because a celebrity endorsed it? Or ignore what a politician says because she’s not a member of your party? For as long as people have been discussing, conversing, persuading, advocating, proselytizing, pontificating, or otherwise stating their case, their arguments have been vulnerable to false assumptions and faulty reasoning. Drawing upon a long history of logical falsehoods and philosophical flubs, Bad Arguments demonstrates how misguided arguments come to be, and what we can do to detect them in the rhetoric of others and avoid using them ourselves. Fallacies—or conclusions that don’t follow from their premise—are at the root of most bad arguments, but it can be easy to stumble into a fallacy without realizing it. In this clear and concise guide to good arguments gone bad, Robert Arp, Steven Barbone, and Michael Bruce take readers through 100 of the most infamous fallacies in Western philosophy, identifying the most common missteps, pitfalls, and dead-ends of arguments gone awry. Whether an instance of sunk costs, is ought, affirming the consequent, moving the goal post, begging the question, or the ever-popular slippery slope, each fallacy engages with examples drawn from contemporary politics, economics, media, and popular culture. Further diagrams and tables supplement entries and contextualize common errors in logical reasoning. At a time in our world when it is crucial to be able to identify and challenge rhetorical half-truths, this bookhelps readers to better understand flawed argumentation and develop logical literacy. Unrivaled in its breadth of coverage and a worthy companion to its sister volume Just the Arguments (2011), Bad Arguments is an essential tool for undergraduate students and general readers looking to hone their critical thinking and rhetorical skills.

Reasons Inquisition: On Doubtful Ground is an exploration in the literature of political philosophy before and after Alfarabi and ranging from Thucydides to Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin. These studies, most of them previously unpublished, open inquiries into theory and practice, reason and revelation, and the relation between thinkers ancient and modern. Readers may be surprised to see the Platonist Alfarabi presented as a critic of Plato’s theory in the name of practice, while Alfarabi and Hobbes are shown to have a common interest in a theory commensurate with action. Strauss, Voegelin and Lucien Febvre all explore the problem of reason and revelation in relation to the limits of human knowledge. An ambitious study of Shakespeare’s Macbeth explores the ambiguity of both nature and knowledge in relation to male and female, good and evil, present and future. The contrast between ancients and moderns is explicit in questions of the modern aspects of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and of Rousseau’s reversal of Plato. Kierkegaard and Heidegger bring radical modernity into focus against a Platonic background in the closing essay. These diverse essays attempt to follow the thinkers and themes explored in turning a critical gaze upon reason itself.

The proposition that the existence of God is demonstrable by rational argument is doubted by nearly all philosophical opinion today and is thought by most Christian theologians to be incompatible with Christian faith. This book argues that, on the contrary, there are reasons of faith why in principle the existence of God should be thought rationally demonstrable and that it is worthwhile revisiting the theology of Thomas Aquinas to see why this is so. The book further suggests that philosophical objections to proofs of God's existence rely upon an attenuated and impoverished conception of reason which theologians of all monotheistic traditions might wish to reject. Denys Turner proposes that on a broader and deeper conception of it, human rationality is open to the 'sacramental shape' of creation as such and in its exercise of rational proof of God it in some way participates in that sacramentality of all things.

In this work Schum develops a general theory of evidence as it is understood and applied across a broad range of disciplines and practical undertakings. He include insights from law, philosophy, logic, probability, semiotics, artificial intelligence, psychology and history.

This book is the first attempt made to analyse the equivocal language of the Absurd Theatre via pure linguistic models carefully employed and illustrated by a wide range of significant examples, questions, and discussions. It provides the multiple tools necessary for understanding this language from various perspectives. Dr. Haidar K. Al-Abedi was Lecturer in English at University of Baghdad, Al-Muthana University, and Al-Israa University College. ``Haidar has to be complimented at the outset for selecting a very interesting topic . . . It is not surprising that a person from Iraq – and the ravages the country is sadly facing these days – is interested in an area which has its significant socio-cultural origin in the ravages of the World War II. The scope of the research also effectively covers the entire school of the British exponents of the Absurd Theatre. In fact, the first chapter discusses the central keyword – equivocation – in scholarly detail. There is an interesting discussion about the various types of equivocation from chapter two to five quite elaborately conducted by the researcher.'' Dr. Sanjay Mukherjee, Saurashtra University, India ``This book is an elaborate analysis of a number of plays written by different dramatists. By elucidating the equivocal verbal and non-verbal communication used by characters, the book addresses a wide range of social, religious, cultural, and political themes and issues which appeal to its audience/readers and are involved in constructing meaning through its peculiar use of language.'' Dr. Adel Saleh, Wasit University, Iraq

This book sets out for the first time in English and in the terms of modern logic the semantics of the Port Royal Logic (La Logique ou l’Art de penser, 1662-1685) of Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, perhaps the most influential logic book in the 17th and 18th centuries. Its goal is to explain how the Logic reworks the foundation of pre-Cartesian logic so as to make it compatible with Descartes’ metaphysics. The Logic’s authors forged a new theory of reference based on the medieval notion of objective being, which is essentially the modern notion of intentional content. Indeed, the book’s central aim is to detail how the Logic reoriented semantics so that it centered on the notion of intentional content. This content, which the Logic calls comprehension, consists of an idea’s defining modes. Mechanisms are defined in terms of comprehension that rework earlier explanations of central notions like conceptual inclusion, signification, abstraction, idea restriction, sensation, and most importantly within the Logic’s metatheory, the concept of idea-extension, which is a new technical concept coined by the Logic. Although Descartes is famous for rejecting "Aristotelianism," he says virtually nothing about technical concepts in logic. His followers fill the gap. By putting to use the doctrine of objective being, which had been a relatively minor part of medieval logic, they preserve more central semantic doctrines, especially a correspondence theory of truth. A recurring theme of the book is the degree to which the Logic hews to medieval theory. This interpretation is at odds with what has become a standard reading among French scholars according to which this 16th-century work should be understood as rejecting earlier logic along with Aristotelian metaphysics, and as putting in its place structures more like those of 19th-century class theory.

Believable Evidence argues that evidence consists of true beliefs. This claim opens up an entirely overlooked space on the ontology of evidence map, between purely factualist positions (such as those of Williamson and Dancy) and purely psychologist ones (such as that of Conee and Feldman). Veli Mitova provides a compelling three-level defence of this view in the first contemporary monograph entirely devoted to the ontology of evidence. First, once we see the evidence as a good reason, metaethical considerations show that the evidence must be psychological and veridical. Second, true belief in particular allows epistemologists to have everything they want from the concept of evidence. Finally, the view helps us locate the source of the normative authority of evidence. The book challenges a broad range of current views on the ontology of reasons and their normative authority, making it a must-read for scholars and advanced students in metaethics and epistemology.