In his work Old-fashioned Ethics and Common-sense Metaphysics, William Thornton stepped aside from his usual economics topics and paid attention to philosophical issues. The book contains several essays that harshly criticize the views and opinions of multiple respected philosophers and intellectuals. It exposes, among others, David Hume, Thomas Henry Huxley, and the Utilitarian movement as a whole.

The concept of likeness to truth, like that of truth itself, is fundamental to a realist conception of inquiry. To demonstrate this we need only make two rather modest aim of an inquiry, as an inquiry, is realist assumptions: the truth doctrine (that the the truth of some matter) and the progress doctrine (that one false theory may realise this aim better than another). Together these yield the conclusion that a false theory may be more truthlike, or closer to the truth, than another. It is the aim of this book to give a rigorous philosophical analysis of the concept of likeness to truth, and to examine the consequences, some of them no doubt surprising to those who have been unduly impressed by the (admittedly important) true/false dichotomy. Truthlikeness is not only a requirement of a particular philosophical outlook, it is as deeply embedded in common sense as the concept of truth. Everyone seems to be capable of grading various propositions, in different (hypothetical) situations, according to their closeness to the truth in those situations. And (if my experience is anything to go by) there is remarkable unanimity on these pretheoretical judge ments. This is not proof that there is a single coherent concept underlying these judgements. The whole point of engaging in philosophical analysis is to make this claim plausible.

The "Gentleman's magazine" section is a digest of selections from the weekly press; the "(Trader's) monthly intelligencer" section consists of news (foreign and domestic), vital statistics, a register of the month's new publications, and a calendar of forthcoming trade fairs.

Her Brentwood home became a hotbed for homicide. But in the wake of intense public and media attention, one saliant and hard truth was often overlooked: the murder of Nicole Brown-Simpson, while brutal and heinous in its form, was just one of thousands of homicides committed during that same year. Most escaped the scrutiny of public interest. Many never made it to trial, and still others were dismissed as natural deaths-perfect crimes that remain forever unsolved. How, then, do investigators solve a murder when the trail goes cold? Like mariners navigating without landmarks under a starless night sky-lacking a reliable witness or smoking gun-they plot their course through the clues by applying their own style of Dead Reckoning, reconstructing the crime by disciplined observation, careful reasoning, and experience. Dead Reckoning: The Art of Forensic Detection examines the applications of logic and science to decipher chaotic death scenes and difficult cases, and to derive orderly explanations from their jumbled clues. The 10 case studies in this book illustrate the powers of observation exercised in reading the signs, identifying them as clues, and reasoning from them to the best explanation. For investigators, as well as forensic pathologists, coroners, prosecutors, and defense attorneys, Dead Reckoning: The Art of Forensic Detection stresses the importance of trusting your own observations even in the wake of contradictory evidence.