Core Questions in Philosophy

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

• 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