This essay describes a leading approach to philosophical counseling, known as Logic-Based Therapy, that has been developed and used since the 1980s.
Category: Logic & Reasoning
“That’s Subjective”: Subjectivism about Truth, Beauty, and Goodness
People sometimes say that judgments about what’s true, what’s ethical, what others find beautiful or aesthetically pleasing, and more are "subjective." What does “subjective” really mean? Are judgments like these truly “subjective”? This essay introduces different answers to these questions.
Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems—discovered by Austrian logician, mathematician, and philosopher Kurt Gödel (1906-1978)—are central to many philosophical debates about the limits of logical and mathematical reasoning. This essay introduces the Theorems and explains their importance.
Arguments: Why Do You Believe What You Believe?
This essay is an introduction to what arguments are and how they can be good or bad.
Modal Logic: Axioms and Systems for Alethic Modal Logic
An introduction to the axioms and systems for alethic modal logic.
Contemporary Syllogisms
Contemporary syllogisms are part of modern day quantificational logic, which is widely regarded as an improvement upon the approach originally described by Aristotle about 2,400 years ago. This essay discusses the contemporary approach to syllogisms.
Classical Syllogisms
This essay introduces the classical Aristotelian approach to syllogisms.
Formal Logic: Symbolizing Arguments in Quantificational or Predicate Logic
There are many varieties of formal logic of varying complexity. Here we survey one that’s somewhat more complex than sentential or propositional logic, but still fairly elementary: quantificational or predicate logic.
Bayesianism
This essay is an introduction to Bayesianism. Bayesianism says that degrees of belief or justification can be represented by probabilities, and that we can assess the rationality of degrees of belief — of credences — by seeing whether they follow a certain set of rules.
The Ethics of Belief: Is it Wrong to Believe Without Sufficient Evidence?
An introduction to W.K. Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief.”