The man standing on top of the tower pictured above is Benjamin Franklin, one of the true luminaries of the Enlightenment and perhaps the one person most responsible for the successful launching of our country. …

My idea of critical thinking, reading, and writing is developing our skills for determining what is true (or false) in the communications that people make to us, and how to express such truth as we are able to find in, particularly, the writing that we do. A related, but very…

Descartes’ method was to search for an indefeasible truth that could function as a starting point for a series of deductions. The nature of a deductive inference is that it transfers the truth value of the premiss to the conclusion. …

Descartes thought he had discovered an indefeasible truth in the Cogito because he assumed that a thing had to exist for it to have any qualities or attributes. That is, the thing that is “I” must exist in order to have the attribute of consciousness. But there is more. Why…

I would not describe liberal indoctrination through media, academia, and Hollywood as a three-pronged assault on democracy for at least two reasons: There is no indoctrination and there is no assault on democracy (in the ways that the claim implies). Professor Jonathan Haidt has recently been citing statistics, on several…

The short, and perhaps disappointing, answer is, “probably not.” Among the first things to understand is that Kant wished to account for our ability to know certain kinds of truths: synthetic a priori truths. That is philosopher’s talk for truths that are known before any observation is made, but whose…

To My Students at a Nearby Community College This course is pretty old school, and that is something I know a little about since I am near the end of a teaching career that began in 1978. I do not pretend to know much or anything about what is to…

Point of View Taxonomy Here is an algorithm to help you identify the point of view of a narrative text. Algorithm 1) Examine the text, excluding lines of dialogue spoken by the characters, for the pronouns used. 2) If the pronouns “I” or “we” are found, determine the degree of…

This is a difficult question to answer since we do not seem to have a satisfactory definition of knowledge itself. Plato makes a lengthy and systematic attempt to define knowledge in his Theaetetus, which some philosophers consider his greatest work. As with many of the Socratic dialogues, however, Theaetetus is…