Part I: Introduction
1. What Is Philosophy?
2. Deductive Arguments
3. Inductive and Abductive Arguments
Part II: Philosophy of Religion
4. Aquinas’s First Four Ways
5. The Design Argument
6. Evolution and Creationism
7. Can Science Explain Everything?
8. The Ontological Argument
9. Is the Existence of God Testable?
10. Pascal and Irrationality
11. The Argument from Evil
Part III: Theory of Knowledge
12. What Is Knowledge?
13. Descartes’ Foundationalism
14. The Reliability Theory of Knowledge
15. Justified Belief and Hume’s Problem of Induction
16. Can Hume’s Skepticism Be Refuted?
17. Beyond Foundationalism
18. Locke on the Existence of External Objects
19. Probability and Bayes’s Theorem
Part IV: Philosophy of Mind
20. Dualism and the Mind/Body Problem
21. Logical Behaviorism
22. Methodological Behaviorism
23. The Mind/Brain Identity Theory
24. Functionalism
25. Freedom, Determinism, and Causality
26. A Menu of Positions on Free Will
27. Compatibilism
28. Psychological Egoism
Part V: Ethics
29. Ethics—Normative and Meta
30. The Is/Ought Gap and the Naturalistic Fallacy
31. Observation and Explanation in Ethics
32. Conventionalist Theories
33. Utilitarianism
34. Kant’s Moral Theory
35. Aristotle on the Good Life
36. The Meaning of Life
Biography
Elliott Sober is Hans Reichenbach Professor and William F. Vilas Research Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His most recent book is The Philosophy of Evolutionary Theory (2024).
Joel Velasco is Department Chair and Professor in Philosophy at Texas Tech University. He specializes in the philosophy of biology as well as the more general philosophy of science.
Praise for the previous editions:
"A really excellent introduction to philosophy does the following: meets the student at their level, then takes them up a notch, and approaches traditional topics in unique and interesting ways. This book does those things."
-- Fred Adams, University of Delaware
