Book Recommendations ♯5: The Logic of Real Arguments

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Another week, another book recommendation.

It’s pretty obvious to anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis that I like analysing arguments. Indeed, my first ever book recommendation was for a book that covered 100 key arguments in Western philosophy. It was essentially a celebration — an encomium if you will — of the formal argument, the centrepiece of modern analytical philosophy.

Today’s book recommendation is similar. It is Alec Fisher’s the Logic of Real Arguments, which I think of as a celebration of arguments in their natural habitat: lurking beneath the sometimes dazzling foliage of an author’s prose. The key insight of Fisher’s book is that persuasive writing contains a lot of unnecessary verbiage. When making a relatively straightforward argument, a writer will often distract the reader from the true nature of their reasoning with decorative phrasings, tangential passages, and rhetorical posturing. And while these might the very things that make a writer worth reading, they can serve to confuse, muddle and obfuscate. We sometimes need to cut through the excess verbiage and focus on the real arguments at play.

Fisher’s book goes well beyond providing that insight, important though it may be. It also provides the reader with a method for first deconstructing a persuasive piece of writing and then reconstructing it in argumentative form. Many of the techniques I employ on this blog, I first learned by reading Fisher’s book. He tells you what an argument is, how to look for premise and conclusion indicators in a piece of writing, and how to diagram the structure of an argument. He also shows how to evaluate an argument and provides some elementary lessons in formal logic.

What’s more, Fisher doesn’t simply discuss these techniques in the abstract; he also shows you how to apply them by examining a number of famous (and not so famous) passages of writing. The case studies he uses are diverse and interesting. They include Mathus’s famously pessimistic population bomb argument, Galileo’s argument for the claim that objects fall at the same rate in a vacuum, Dawkins and Ayer’s arguments for atheism, arguments for nuclear deterrence, mind-body dualism and so on. In each case, Fisher takes you through the piece of writing slowly, showing you exactly how to apply his method.

Personally, I find this hands-on, example-oriented approach to be much more engaging than what is typically found in a book on logic and critical thinking. I also think it’s the ideal way for a student to be introduced to logic and critical thinking since they will have to deal with similar passages of writing both in their own studies and, indeed, when they get out into the big bad world. For these reasons, I highly recommend this book. The only note of caution I will strike is that you need to be aware how limited this book is in its focus. It’s not a comprehensive introduction to logic and critical thinking — for that you will need to go elsewhere — but it is an excellent hand guide to argument analysis in the real world.

Book Recommendations ♯4: Human Enhancement by Savulescu and Bostrom

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I’ve written quite a bit on the theme of human enhancement on this blog. Last summer I did a series on Nicholas Agar’s book Humanity’s End, a couple of posts on Allen Buchanan’s book Beyond Humanity, and more recently I did a series on enhancement in education and sport. All of these posts dealt with the ethics of human enhancement. Is it a good idea to enhance human capacities beyond the current limits? Is this a no-brainer? Are there in principle or in-fact objections to enhancement? And so on. If you’re interested in pursuing these questions, but aren’t quite sure where to begin, then I would recommend checking out the book Human Enhancement, edited by Nick Bostrom and Julian Savulescu, which is today’s book recommendation.

There’s not a whole lot to say about the book itself. It’s an edited collection of essays on the ethics of enhancement; it’s published by Oxford University Press; and it features contributions from some of the leading authors in this area (Bostrom, Harris, Sandel, Caplan, Singer, Hanson, Sandberg to name but a few). As with all edited collections, the quality can be patchy, with some essays being more thoughtful and better written than others.

The particular highlights for me were John Harris’s “Enhancements are a Moral Obligation”, which is a good summary of Harris’s basic case in favour of enhancement (as well as being a response to another author within the same volume); Sandel’s “The Case Against Perfection”, which is a good summary of his (I think odd) argument against enhancement; and Savulescu’s “The Human Prejudice and the Moral Status of Enhanced Beings”, which is a representative sampling of Savulescu’s thinking on these matters.

The lowlights were not particularly low, but present nonetheless. Frances Kamm’s essay “What is and is not wrong with Enhancement?” being a particularly annoying entry. While Kamm has many strengths as a philosopher — a relentless commitment to an intuition-led method of moral philosophy being one of them — I’ve never found it pleasurable to read anything she has written. Maybe some day that will change, but her contribution to this volume was, alas, too much of a drudge for my liking.

Although I do recommend this book, I am aware that there may be a better edited collection, dealing with the same topic, in existence by now. Savulescu, Meulen and Kahane last year released Enhancing Human Capacities which looks to be a more comprehensive tome. But since I haven’t had a chance to peruse a copy of that tome yet, I’m not in a position to recommend it.

Book Recommendations ♯3: The Art of Strategy

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Game theory is something that has long fascinated me. I suspect there are several reasons for this, two of which spring readily to mind. The first is that the central ideas of game theory are often presented in story-based form. Take the classic prisoners’ dilemma for example. We are introduced to a cast of characters (two prisoners), we are told about some sequence of events in their lives (the crime and subsequent arrest), and how these events force them make strategic decisions (the dilemma). The fact that game theory has room for such stories makes it interesting and creative. The second reason I like game theory is its use of formal models. The stories are the bait, they’re what lure you in initially; the formal models are the hook, they’re what keep you there for the long term. Learning the skills of formal modelling is something that is useful in a number of domains.

For all its fascinating features, game theory can be daunting to the uninitiated. Pick up a standard textbook on game theory, and you are likely to see a bewildering array of symbols, mathematical models, charts, decision trees, and other mathematical paraphernalia. Since math phobia is so common, that’s likely to scare off a lot of people. That’s where today’s book recommendation comes in. The Art of Strategy by Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff provides the most comprehensive, reader-friendly introduction to game theory there is. Certainly other introductory books, aimed at a popular audience, exist, but none of the others I have read — and I have read several — come close to this one.

What Dixit and Nalebuff manage to do in this 400-plus page volume is to be commended. They tell you why game theory is interesting, they cover all the basic concepts of game theory (the nature of strategic interactions, simple modeling of such interactions, the Nash equilibrium concept and mixed strategies), and they provide decent introductions to several of the most interesting applications of game theory (voting, auctions, bargaining, mechanism design). They do this by using interesting examples — both real and fictional — and with a minimal amount of math.

Now, if you want to get more serious about game theory, you’ll have to go elsewhere, but this is definitely a good place to begin. If I have a complaint, it has to do with the general authorial tone that is present throughout the book. It’s hard to put my finger on it exactly, but it feels like the authors are being a little bit too self-satisfied, smug and all-knowing in their explanatory style. As a result, I find they talk down to the reader and make things out to be more simplistic than they really are. That said, I’m willing to tolerate this stylistic foible on the grounds that the content is still interesting, and I definitely think you'll learn a lot by reading this book.

If you want to step up from this book, I'd recommend Dixit's textbook Games of Strategy. I think it's the most straightforward textbook level treatment of the topic, although it's not my personal favourite. I'll talk about that some other time.

Book Recommendations ♯2: Contemporary Theories of Liberalism

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(Series Index)

It’s been a slow week on the blogging front (busy on other fronts though), so the best I can do to fill the gap is to come up with another book recommendation. If you have any book recommendations you’d like to share, please do so in the comments section.

Gerald Gaus is one of my favourite political philosophers. His work on the theory of justificatory liberalism, in his 1996 book Justificatory Liberalism and his more recent magnum opus The Order of Public Reason, is provocative, original and rigorous. Admittedly, one of my chief reasons for liking his work is that his opinions seem to chime well with my own, so I’m definitely biased here. But I can only speak from the perspective of my web of beliefs and from that perspective his characterisation of the structural problems of liberal democracy, and his attempted resolution of same seems about right to me.

There are three main virtues to Gaus’s writing. First, he has a gift for conceptual clarification, rendering the often heated and fuzzy terminology of political theorists more perspicuous and stable. Second, he has gift for explanation, helping the reader to understand difficult and often diverse ideas and concepts in depth, not just in abstract. And third, he is rigorous and formal when evaluating the arguments of others and when developing his own.

All three virtues are on display in his book Contemporary Theories of Liberalism, which is today's book recommendation. It provides an excellent introduction to and survey of what Gaus calls “post-Enlightenment” theories of liberalism. This a term that deserves some unpacking. All liberal theories are, to some extent, premised on the idea that government should respect human freedom and enhance human welfare (whatever these things might be). In his opening chapter, Gaus divides such theories into two camps: the Enlightenment theories and the post-Enlightenment theories. In the first camp, there are those theories that believe the use of reason will allow us to achieve a convergence in moral and political views. Thus, all rational adults will agree upon the preferred shape and form of political organisation and the preferred content of public policy. In the second camp, there are those theories that believe human reason is unlikely to lead to a convergence in moral and political views, and that the job of political theorists is to work around these differences.

Following this opening chapter, Gaus proceeds to describe and evaluate seven different post-Enlightenment theories of liberalism. These are:

1. Berlin’s Pluralism: This is the view that values are plural, intransitive, and incommensurate. As a result, it is impossible to identify preferred forms of existence or government.

2. Hobbesian Modus Vivendi: This is the view (associated with the work of John Gray but with its origins in Hobbes) that politics is simply a matter of discovering a working compromise (modus vivendi) between the radically divergent worldviews of rational individuals.

3. Collective Reasoning Theories: This is a family of views that propose there is a distinct form of reasoning (“collective” as opposed to “private/individual”) for dealing with social coordination problems such as those inherent in the post-Enlightenment view.

4. Deliberative Democracy Theories: This is the view that the essence of a liberal democratic society is that it provides a set of processes and mechanisms for public deliberation. This view is most closely associated with the work of Jurgen Habermas.

5. Judgment Aggregation Theories: This is a family of views proposing that one way in which to solve the problem of plural values is through aggregating divergent individual votes and using the results of the aggregation as the basis for public policy. This, of course, is the essence of democracy, but it turns out there are a number of complications associated with the method of judgment aggregation.

6. Rawlsian Liberalism: This is the view that, contrary to the radical pluralists, there is a shared liberal conception of justice, which can be arrived at from different starting points. This gives rise to a unique view of the nature and purpose of public reason.

7. Justificatory Liberalism: This is Gaus’s own view. It maintains that the proper function of a liberal government is to justify its coercive policies to morally equal persons. It also proposes how this might be done.

While discussion of each of these theories is excellent, two sections of the book stood out in particular for me. The first was the careful attempt to define and tease out the implications of value pluralism in Chapter 2, and the second was the overview of judgment aggregation theories in Chapter 6. I’ve used both in some of my own writing and in my classes.

Overall, I highly recommend this book. It’s short, but not superficial; fair, but not dispassionate; and rigorous, but not dull. It would serve well as a textbook for a course in contemporary political theory and as general reading for anyone interested in the area. It allows you to see that there is some pretty interesting, and highly sophisticated work being done in political philosophy these days, work that should not be ignored.

Book Recommendations (Index)

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I've decided to do a series of posts giving short book recommendations. Since I usually read far more interesting stuff than I could ever possibly write about in a substantive way, I figure a series of short posts just recommending things I've read might be worthwhile. Also, each post will give readers an opportunity to recommend things that they've read too.

I won't give any ratings or substantive criticisms of the books I recommend here, I'll just provide a couple of reasons for thinking the book is worthwhile. Also, while my main focus will be on philosophy books, I won't limit myself to those.


An Index to Recommended Books


1. Just the Arguments: 100 of the most important arguments in Western Philosophy

2. Contemporary Theories of Liberalism (Gaus)

3. The Art of Strategy (Dixit and Nalebuff)

4. Human Enhancement (Savulescu and Bostrom)

5. The Logic of Real Arguments (Fisher)

6. God in the Age of Science (Philipse)

7. The Ethics of Voting (Brennan)

8. On Politics (Ryan)

9. The Problem of Political Authority (Huemer)

10. Books on Writing (Various)

11. Philosophical Devices (Papineau)

12. Contractualism and the Foundations of Morality (Southwood)

13. Moral Tribes (Greene)

14. Gratuitous Suffering and the Problem of Evil (Frances)

15. The Mind-Body Problem (Goldstein)

Book Recommendations ♯1: Just the Arguments

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(Series Index)

Regular readers of this blog will be aware of my penchant for argument analysis. It is perhaps a sad reflection on my hobbies, but there’s nothing I like more than taking a passage of argumentative writing, breaking it down into its key components (reasons, conclusions etc.), and then reconstructing it in a formal or diagrammatic way.

There’s something beautiful about a well-constructed formal argument. It compresses masses of information, it provides a structure for persuasive and critical thinking, and reveals strengths or weaknesses in someone’s reasoning. When you formalise an argument, you can usually instantly highlight points of disagreement and agreement. What’s more, since philosophy should be a inquisitive, not a persuasive, enterprise, the formalisation of arguments allows you to identify useful areas of future research and inquiry.

Given my love for arguments, it will comes as little surprise to learn that I’m a big fan of Michael Bruce and Steven Barbone’s recent edited collection Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy. The book is definitely one that can be judged by its cover, or, more properly, its title. It features one hundred individual chapters by different authors, albeit with some repeat offenders along the way. Interestingly, this adds up to more than 100 arguments. For example, the opening chapter on Aquinas’s Five Ways contains, unsurprisingly, five separate arguments.

By and large, the content is good. It ranges over the full suite of philosophical topics: religion, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, mind, science and language. The chapters are usually short enough to read through in five to ten minutes, although some of the longer ones will take up more time. The arguments are typically presented at the end of each chapter, and references are provided to primary and secondary sources at the start of the chapter. The arguments themselves vary from being extraordinarily complex to admirably brief. On the complex side of things, check out the chapter on Kant’s categorical imperative which features 27 premises and 14 conclusions; while on the brief side of things, check out the chapter on G.E. Moore’s anti-skeptical arguments which have 2 premises and a conclusion.

I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the book to anyone with an interest in philosophy. The editors pitch the book at students, suggesting it might provide an ideal revision tool since most philosophy courses can be boiled down to a few key arguments. But I think professional philosophers and interested lay people could easily benefit from it too. I can certainly imagine myself dipping into some afternoon, and perhaps squeezing a blog post out of one the chapters.

There are some criticisms to be made though. First, because the chapters are written by different contributors, the quality is somewhat patchy. And while it’s nice to have short chapters for ease of reference, I find the longer chapters with background and context are more enjoyable to read, particularly for topics outside my main areas of research. Also, some contributors are a little too sparing with their bibliographies when compared to others. I think it would be nice to have a reasonably detailed bibliography in each chapter for those who wish to follow things up in more detail.