Problems from Philosophy

Preface
About the Fifth Edition

1. The Legacy of Socrates
1.1. Why Was Socrates Condemned?
1.2. Why Did Socrates Believe He Had to Die?

2. God and the Origin of the Universe
2.1. Is It Reasonable to Believe in God?
2.2. The Argument from Design
2.3. Evolution and Intelligent Design
2.4. The First Cause Argument
2.5. The Idea That God Is a Necessary Being

3. The Problem of Evil
3.1. Why Do Good People Suffer?
3.2. God and Evil
3.3. Free Will and Moral Character

4. Do We Survive Death?
4.1. The Idea of an Immortal Soul
4.2. Is There Any Credible Evidence of an Afterlife?
4.3. Hume's Argument against Miracles

5. The Problem of Personal Identity
5.1. The Problem
5.2. Personhood at a Time
5.3. Personhood over Time
5.4. Bodily Continuity
5.5. Memory

6. Body and Mind
6.1. Descartes and Elizabeth
6.2. Materialist Theories of the Mind
6.3. Doubts about Materialist Theories

7. Could a Machine Think?
7.1. Brains and Computers
7.2. An Argument That Machines Could Think
7.3. The Turing Test
7.4. From Eliza to LLMs
7.5. Why the Turing Test Fails

8. The Case against Free Will
8.1. Are People Responsible for What They Do?
8.2. Determinism
8.3. Psychology
8.4. Genes and Behavior

9. The Debate over Free Will
9.1. The Experience of Freedom
9.2. The Scientific Challenge to Free Will
9.3. Libertarianism
9.4. Compatibilism
9.5. Does It Matter if We Lack Free Will?

10. Our Knowledge of the World around Us
10.1. Vats and Demons
10.2. Idealism
10.3. What Evidence for These Views Might Be Like
10.4. Descartes' Theological Response
10.5. Direct vs. Indirect Realism
10.6. Vision and the Brain
10.7. Conclusion

11. Ethics and Objectivity
11.1. Thrasymachus' Challenge
11.2. Is Ethics Just a Matter of Social Conventions?
11.3. Ethics and Science
11.4. The Importance of Human Interests

12. Why Should We Be Moral?
12.1. The Ring of Gyges
12.2. Ethics and Religion
12.3. Kant on Rationality and Respect
12.4. The Social Contract
12.5. Morality and Benevolence
12.6. Conclusion

13. Government
13.1 A Parable
13.2. The Problem of Political Authority
13.3. Four Proposed Solutions
13.4. Forms of Government
13.5. Political Philosophies
13.6 The Authoritarian Threat
13.7 Imperfections in American Democracy

14. The Meaning of Life
14.1. The Problem of the Point of View
14.2. Happiness
14.3. Death
14.4. Religion and the Indifferent Universe
14.5. The Meaning of Particular Lives

Appendix: How to Evaluate Arguments

Notes on Sources
Index

About the Authors