Unfortunately, I think the only concrete thing I can suggest is that you look for other texts on critical reasoning. (You don't say which two you have, and I'm not familiar with many, so I'm afraid I can't give more specific advice.)

I think this question is one of the most contentious in the field at the moment. Perhaps it has always been this way. For some of us, philosophy, as we practice it, has very little in common with the other disciplines traditionally included among the humanities. (I'm not entirely sure I know what the "humanities" are, to be honest.) Our colleagues in these disciplines are often exceedingly frustrated with us for this reason. They think we should be teaching Indian philosophy, Chinese philosophy, and Islamic philosophy, and we reply to them that we have no more obligation to do so than the physicists have to teach Aristotle and Newton. This is because, as we see it, philosophy is, like physics, centrally concerned with certain problems , and our task is to make some kind of progress on those problems. Of course, it complicates matters that philosophy's relationship to its history is very different from physics' relationship to its. This is in part because philosophy's problems are sometimes (not...

The word "time", in this use, is what we call a "mass term", as opposed to a "count noun". It's like "gold" or "water" rather than like "tree" or "dog". Note that you can't say "I don't have enough dog", unless you're serving dog for dinner. You would have to say, "I don't have enough dogs", perhaps, to run the Iditarod. Similarly, if you say, "I don't have enough times", then you mean something quite different. For example, you might mean there aren't enough appointment slots to see all the students. Exactly how we should understand the behavior of such expressions is a difficult question, but one doesn't suppose that "gold" refers to an object just because one can say, "I don't have enough gold". The other thing to say is that the relation indicated by "have" in such constructions is incredibly various. This point has often been made with respect to the possessive that is indicated by "'s". So, if we speak of "John's bike", the relation between John and the bike can be many things: It may be the...

I don't know that anyone's taken a vote on this, but the view that language is required for thought certainly was once a very popular one, and it is still held by many. Perhaps the most famous defense of this view is in Donald Davidson's paper "Thought and Talk". An even more radical view is that language is a prerequisite for conscious experience . This view has been defended by John McDowell, in his book Mind and World and in later papers. As often in philosophy, this debate often seems to turn on what people mean by certain terms. The key one here is "thought". The claim is not, or need not be, that language is required for any kind of mental state, but rather that it is required for a particular kind of mental state, for which we reserve the term "thought". And once it is clear what "thought" is being used to mean, a good deal of the seemingly radical character of the position evaporates. (That is not true of McDowell's view.) It is perhaps also worth adding that some psychologists have...

I'm not sure that any of us really pretend to have answers to the difficult questions of life. We claim to have thought about them, perhaps more deeply than your average prostitue or politician, and perhaps from a different perspective than your average priest (or minister, or what have you). I don't know that this makes what a philosopher has to say about, say, the ethics of abortion or gay marriage, the meaning of death, or the nature of human sexuality of more value than what someone else might have to say, but I hope very much that it does make it of some value. Part of what I myself would hope this website demonstrates is that it is possible to think hard, rationally, and clearly about difficult and profound issues. And, indeed, thinking about such issues does not have to be separate from whatever it is one might do with priests, politicians, and prostitutes. Thinking can, I would again hope, be integrated with other ways of approaching such questions.

I'm not sure I understand what it is that you really want. Certainly in logic, there are well-established techniques for discussing the language of logic itself. See any good textbook on Goedel's Theorem (say, Boolos, Burgess, and Jeffrey, Computability and Logic ) for more on this. If it's natural language in which you are interested, then you might find the work of Richard Montague interesting. Montague was one of the first to try to extend logical techniques to provide a semantics for natural language. And then, of course, there is contemporary theoretical linguistics more generally.

I don't see how one could reasonably suppose there was an argument here for the existence of God. But belief in God need not be based upon any sort of argument or even be something for which one has reasons in the usual sense in which one has reasons for beliefs. A belief in God might have more in common with aesthetic judgements than with theoretical ones. If so, then perhaps the suggestion would be that such mathematical patterns are part of what constitutes the basis for the aesthetic response in question. Whether that would be "sound" is hard to say. Aesthetic judgements are not beyond criticism (unless you regard aesthetic judgements as not really judgements at all but on a par with mere expressions), but the criticism of aesthetic judgements is slippery territory. The foregoing may well require that belief in God be something very different from belief that God exists. This suggestion—or, rather, a generalization of it—is the subject of an exceptionally interesting paper...

Questions along this line have been asked a few times before: See, for example, 987 and 988 . The answer is that, no, it does not follow: You see the object. That there is an inverted image of the object on your retina is part of how you see the object. You do not see that image. I could see that image, if I looked in your eye, and I suppose you could see it, too, if you looked in a mirror or something. But with what precisely would you see it in the ordinary course of events? The idea that the retinal image has to be "re-oriented" is really quite puzzling and probably a product of the same kind of mistake. To think the image needs to be reoriented is, it seems to me, to suppose that the spatial properties of the representation must be spatial properties of what is represented . There is simply no reason to assume that. If you turn a map sitting on the table around so I can see it, thus changing the spatial properties of the representation , the map does not suddenly represent...

What Alex says here seems right, including the last bit. This (5) I noticed Bob kissing Sue. seems a lot better, perhaps because "Bob kissing Sue" seems to denote an event in this usage, but the absence of the possessive also matters here. On the first, something like (6) I noticed Bob being tall, which involves a stative, is a lot worse, to my ear, anyway. And I get a strong contrast between these two: (7) I saw Bob's kissing Sue. (8) I saw Bob kissing Sue. Indeed, I'd mark the first ungrammatical. I think the questioner is probably interested in something like the following contrast: (9) I heard Bob propose to Sue. (10) I heard Bob proposing to Sue. (11) I heard that Bob proposed to Sue. The first two involve hearing Bob, whereas the latter need not. Similarly, "I noticed that Jill was sick" need not involve noticing Jill: You may have seen a note, or simply observed that she has not been at work lately. On the other hand, "I noticed Jill being sick", in so far as...

Try this question: Could you have been your sister and your sister been you and everything else been pretty much as it is? I find it kind of hard to get my mind around that: In what precisely would it consist that you were her and she were you? There are certain conceptions of the soul that would make sense of that: Your soul would occupy her body and hers would occupy yours. But even those philosophers attracted to a notion of soul have usually thought the soul was more intimately connected to the body than that: If we accept that kind of possibility, who's to say souls aren't switching bodies every time someone falls asleep? So suppose we agree that isn't possible. Now it clearly is possible that she should have existed without you. But could it have happened that you should have existed without her but, so to speak, as her? What on earth is that supposed to mean? Either she exists or she doesn't, and if she doesn't exist, then you can't be her. (Perhaps you could have looked like her and...