Chapters include the following: Lawsuits: These are actual lawsuits allowed into our nation's courts. The only way this chapter would be stranger is if it listed lawsuits so absurd they were not allowed into the courts. Hunting and Fishing: I live in a small drinking town with a hunting and fishing problem. Weather: This includes a column on the benefits of climate change, a subject that most news reports ignore, and why we in Walden, Colorado, are in favor of global warming. Politics: The first column is my abortive attempt to run for president of the United States. Another is on what we should learn from the Greeks, and another on state stereotyping. Yes, that happened. Internet English: This is the Age of the Text. So why do so many of these texters not know basic English? Sadly, examples abound. Technology: I've suggested a number of new inventions. You'll like the Fleshomatic. EEKs: Hope you're not one. Health: You don't realize the value of an eye until you've lost one. Advertising: Dilbert once observed that if marketing worked, it would be illegal. But it must work on some of us. Bureaucracies: If learning about what our government workers are actually doing doesn't drop you into a state of depression, you might be heavily medicated. Human Behavior: None of these columns seemed to fit anywhere else, like what if the passage of an asteroid made us all smarter?

This solidly written book explains the elements of contemporary symbolic logic, and examines the ways in which it illuminates the structure of legal reasoning and clarifies various legal problems. Offering a clear and succinct presentation of standard propositional and predicate logic, it presents the elements of standard logic and applies those techniques to legal materials. It covers the use of standard logic in legal argument, including the denial or distinguishing of premises and the rules of pleading, and makes extensive use of legal materials, cases and statutes, in both examples and exercises. Readers are also given strategies for handling major legal problems in standard logic, including ways for treating conditions contrary to fact, necessary and sufficient conditions, result within the risk, and intent. For logicians and philosophers of law.

This book is a gentle but rigorous introduction to Formal Logic. It is intended primarily for use at the college level. However, it can also be used for advanced secondary school students, and it can be used at the start of graduate school for those who have not yet seen the material. The approach to teaching logic used here emerged from more than 20 years of teaching logic to students at Stanford University and from teaching logic to tens of thousands of others via online courses on the World Wide Web. The approach differs from that taken by other books in logic in two essential ways, one having to do with content, the other with form. Like many other books on logic, this one covers logical syntax and semantics and proof theory plus induction. However, unlike other books, this book begins with Herbrand semantics rather than the more traditional Tarskian semantics. This approach makes the material considerably easier for students to understand and leaves them with a deeper understanding of what logic is all about. In addition to this text, there are online exercises (with automated grading), online logic tools and applications, online videos of lectures, and an online forum for discussion. They are available at http://intrologic.stanford.edu/

The ability to demonstrate critical thinking is essential for students who seek to achieve good grades at university but it typically creates a lot of confusion and anxiety. Critical Thinking Skills provides an easy to follow, step by step guide to developing analytical reasoning skills and applying them to tasks such as reading, note-making and writing. A complex subject is broken down into easy to understand blocks, with clear explanations, good examples, and plenty of activities to develop understanding at each stage. Students can use this book to: · Critically assess other people's arguments · Recognise flawed reasoning · Evaluate the material used to support arguments · Apply critical thinking when reading, writing and making notes · Write excellent essays and reports The 4th edition features a new section on argument mapping techniques, which help readers to visualize the structures of an argument. It also contains new and updated examples that link to current affairs, showing the importance of critical thinking as a lifelong skill. Written by internationally renowned author Stella Cottrell, this is an essential resource for students looking to refine their thinking, reading and writing skills.

Endings are not just singular moments in time but the outcomes of a process. And whatever a book’s conclusion, its form has a history. Literary Conclusions presents a new theory of textual endings in eighteenth-century literature and thought. Analyzing essential works by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Heinrich von Kleist, Oliver Simons shows how the emergence of new kinds of literary endings around 1800 is inextricably linked to the history of philosophical and scientific concepts. Simons examines the interrelations of Lessing’s literary endings with modes of logical conclusion; he highlights how Goethe’s narrative closures are forestalled by an uncontrollable vital force that was discussed in the sciences of the time; and he reveals that Kleist conceived of literary genres themselves as forms of reasoning. Kleist’s endings, Simons demonstrates, mark the beginning of modernism. Through close readings of these authors and supplemental analyses of works by Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, he crafts an elegant theory of conclusions that revises established histories of literary genres and forms.

The question arises whether logic was given to us by God or whether it is the result of human evolution. I believe that at least the modus ponens rule ( A and if A then B implies B) is inherent in humans, but probably many other modern systems (e.g., resource logic, non - monotonic logic etc.) are the result of humans adapating to the environment. It is therefore of interest to study and compare the way logic is used in ancient cultures as well as the way logic is going to be used in our 21st century. This welcome book studies and compares the way formation of logic in three cultures: Ancient Greek (4th century B.C.), Judaic (1st century B.C. – 1st century A.D.) and Indo-Buddhist (2nd century A.D.) The book notes that logic became especially popular during the period of late antiquity in countries covered by the international trade of the Silk Road. This study makes a valuable contribution to the history of logic and to the very understanding of the origions and nature of logical thinking. -Prof. Dov Gabbay, King's College London, UK Andrew Schumann in his book demonsrates that logic step-by-step arose in different places and cultural circles. He argues that if we apply a structural-genealogical method, as well as turn to various sources, particularly, religious, philosophical, linguistic, etc., then we can obtain a more general and more adequate picture of emengence and development of logic. This book is a new and very valuable contribution to the history of logic as a manifestation of the human mind. - Prof. Jan Wolenski, Jagiellonian University, Poland The author of the Archaeology of Logic defends the claim, calling it "logic is aftter all", which sees logical competence as a practical skill that people began to learn in antiquity, as soom as they realized that avoiding cognitive biases in their reasoning would make their daily activities more successful. The in-depth reading of the book with its diving into the comparative quotations in the long dead or hardly known to most of us languages like Sumerian-Akkadian, Aramatic, Hebrew and etc, will be rewarded by the response that the logical competence is diverse and it can be trained, despite the inevitabilitiy of the reasoning fallacies; and that critical discussions and agaonal character of the social lide are the necessary tools for that. - Prof. Elena Lisanyuk