Arbitrary Marks

I’ve been a bad philosophy blogger. But just in time for tonight’s presidential debates, I give you:
Informal Fallacy Bingo!
You and your friends can download this free PDF and play bingo during tonight’s debates. Just put an “X” over the spot where the speaker commits one of these errors. For advanced players, confident in their ability [...]

This is why I’m reading Martha Nussbaum’s Liberty of Conscience. A graduate student and Quaker was fired from California State University East Bay for amending her state oath to include the word “non-violently.” Here’s what she did:
Each time, when asked to “swear (or affirm)” that she would “support and defend” the U.S. and state Constitutions [...]

This is a promised review, a year in coming. Soft Skull Press sent me a copy of this book about this time in 2006 and I thought I’d get around to reading it when the semester was over. Wrong.
Honestly, after my disappointment with the other text they sent me, I was a little hesitant [...]

Okay, I can’t let this go. What if my logic textbook does have more fallacious arguments being characteristically conservative? I could go the Stephen Colbert approach and chalk it up to “reality’s liberal bias.” But at least I want to know whether, statistically, that’s the case.

Last night I drove 90 minutes (both ways) in a Chicago snowstorm to teach an in-person review session to my online logic  class.  It was like a strip from PhDComics.com, though I’m sure the two students who took the time to show up will do well on their final exam.  While I was there, getting black dry-erase marker [...]

I was flabbergasted when I read about Mitt Romney’s speech on the news wires this morning. In case you haven’t seen it yet, here’s what he said:
“Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom [...]

The title of this post is from an article published in 1996 in Pacific Affairs, Vol. 69, No. 2.  In a little under twenty pages, Josef Silverstein surveys the history of Myanmar (then Burma) and the development of concepts of political freedom.  Aung San Suu Kyi, the central figure in the democratic movement, has been explicit [...]

So why are the Theravadan Buddhist monks in Myanmar leading protests for democracy? That was my immediate question when I saw the news. In looking over the coverage of the protests, the stories I read mostly said things like the monks are the "highly revered moral core of Burmese society" and then moved [...]

I’ve been negligent in not drawing attention to this story, which has been going on for a while, but is now heating up.  Monks and nuns in Myanmar had been protesting peacefully for democracy. At first the police were respectful.  Soon, though, things grew violent, with police opening fire on protestors and eventually barricading monks in [...]

I probably won’t get to the other topics before I leave for the weekend.  But I wanted to draw attention to Joel and Jason’s comments on my last post.  Here we have a neo-Pagan and a Reformed Christian saying the same thing to Fish: “Hey, you’re painting with too broad a brush.” 
In the first case, [...]