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How to Think about Weird Things is a concise and engaging text that offers students a step-by-step process by which to determine when a claim is likely to be true. Schick and Vaughn provide a course on critical thinking, with a focus on neither debunking nor advocating specific claims. Rather, the authors clarify principles of good reasoning that enable students to evaluate any claim, no matter how strange, for themselves. By teaching readers how to distinguish good reasons from bad reasons for believing a claim, this text helps students improve their decision-making abilities and provides them with a powerful weapon against all forms of hucksterism.
List of contents
Chapter 1 Introduction: Close Encounters with the Strange
Chapter 2 The Possibility of the Impossible
Chapter 3 Arguments Good, Bad, and Weird
Chapter 4 Knowledge, Belief, and Evidence
Chapter 5 Looking for Truth in Personal Experience
Chapter 6 Science and Its Pretenders
Chapter 7 Case Studies in the Extraordinary
Chapter 8 Relativism, Truth, and Reality
About the author
Theodore Schick received his B.A. in philosophy from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from Brown University. He is currently professor of philosophy at Muhlenberg College where he has served as Director of Academic Computing, Director of Freshman Seminars, Director of the Muhlenberg Scholars Program, and Chair of the Philosophy Department. He is the author of Doing Philosophy: An Introduction through Thought Experiments, the editor of The Philosophy of Science: From Positivism to Post-modernism, and has published articles in several fields of philosophy including: philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, philosophy of language, meta-philosophy, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. He has also contributed to a number of volumes in Open Court's "Philosophy and Popular Culture" series as well as Blackwell's "Philosophy for Everyone" series.
