Teaching Philosophy

What is the likelihood of another 9-11?

Presidential Debate 1, Question 8 Static Link

Russia.

Presidential Debate 1, Question 7 Static Link

What is your reading of the threat from Iran?

Presidential Debate 1, Question 6 Static Link

Afghanistan - do you think new US troops should be sent? How many and when?

Presidential Debate 1, Question 5 Static Link

A 59-year old Home Depot employee from West Linn, OR won the Great American Thinker contest last month. I am not familiar with the contest, but it looks essentially like an oratory / essay contest. The web site (linked previously) has the finalist essays - which certainly should be usable in a CT course.

What are you going to have to give up as a result of the financial rescue plan?

Presidential Debate 1, Question 3 Static Link

I’ll be posting these as they come out. We’re playing fallacy bingo around here, which is great fun. I may post the bingo cards at some point.

Where do you stand on the financial recovery plan?

Presidential Debate 1, Question 1 Static Link

I haven’t noted all the fallacies yet, but feel free to comment and point them out!

• When McCain begins, he does so by sending his best wishes to the ailing Ted Kennedy (who famously endorsed Obama, and sat next to Obama at the State of the Union last year). This may be used to demonstrate both an appeal to friendship / kindness. Plausibly, if Kennedy is a good friend of Obama, one would expect Obama to mention his concerns, not McCain! We feel friendly towards those who are concerned about their friends - and we worry about the character of one who does not show such concern. See Aristotle Rhetoric Book 2, Ch 4: Friendship and Emnity.

I’ve been hard at working building the American Association of Philosophy Teacher’s members-only website for the past two weeks, and hence haven’t had the chance to post. This blog will be moving there in some capacity, once I figure out precisely how - i.e. via XML-RPC or just an RSS feed. If you’re not a member of the AAPT in good standing: Become one! Really. It is a great organization, and the site we’re building will have blogs, forums, archives, news updates and social networking - all in all, it should be a really useful resource for all Philosophy teachers.

Anyway, a colleague of mine, Anne, was looking for good examples of arguments from analogy. Hillary Clinton’s new stump speech contains a line something like:

“sending the Republicans back to the White House is like asking the iceberg to save the Titanic” - see the Orlando Sentinel: Hillary on the stump for Obama

Here are the two that I use frequently:

It is from the Washington Post in 2004, but I appear to have lost the specific date. I’ll try to recover it. The other is the famous Apple 1984 ad:

Of course, one could get Meta-analogical, and use the fan-created Obama 1984 ad from last spring:

Mark Lieberman at the Language Log recently posted his views on the validity of arguments from etymology:

Querkopf von Klubstick returns

While I’ll admit using these for rhetorical effect (i.e. introductory material) in informal settings, I’ve always shied away from them in formal academic prose. The question for me, here, is whether or not they deserve to be included in a critical thinking course.

It certainly seems - and Lieberman’s example of T.D. Jakes on Oprah serves to prove the point - that arguments of this sort abound in those areas of discourse our students are likely to encounter in their daily lives. And hence, it follows that they should be covered.

The question really is whether they form a distinct category of fallacy over and above the standardly covered ‘genetic’ fallacy, or a variation on an equivocation (i.e. equivocating between the contemporary meaning in light of the historical one). It may be precisely because they fall between these two categories that they deserve their own classification. Any thoughts?

I’ve captured this for use on my own site. It is also available at youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M70emIFxETs:

Hillary 08: Red Phone Static Link

In a twist, the actress who plays the sleeping 8-year old made headlines by ‘coming out’ as a Obama supporter - that is wholly uninteresting in itself, but it is worth pointing out that she criticizes the ad as an appeal to fear: Girl seen in Clinton’s ‘3 a.m.’ ad supports Obama