About Philosophy
Seventh Edition

What Do Philosophers Do? The Study of Human Nature.
What Do Philosophers Do? The Study of the Universe.
What Do Philosophers Do? Human Nature and the Universe.
The Limitations of the Western Philosophical Tradition.

The Varieties of Ethical Theory.
Kant and the Commands of Duty.
Three Reasons to Think About Ethics.
Ethical Disagreement and the Categorical Imperative.
Utilitarianism and the Calculation of Pleasures and Pains.
The Theory of the Health Personality.
The Feminist Critique of Ethical Theory.
Contemporary Application: Same- Sex Marriage.
The Ethical Dimensions of Medicine.
The Ethical Dimensions of Medical Decisions. Withholding Food and Water. The Buying and Selling of Human Organs. What Should the Doctor Tell the Patient?
Contemporary Application: Assisted Suicide.

Mill and Classical Laissez-Faire Liberalism.
The Socialist Attack on Capitalism.
Rousseau and the Theory of the Social Contract.
The Pluralist Theory of the State.
The Racial Critique of the Social Contract Theory of the State.
Contemporary Application: Affirmative Action.

Plato's Attack on the Poets.
Aristotle's Defense of the Poets. Romanticism.
Tolstoy's Religious Defense of Art.
Marcuse and the Uses of Negation.
Art for Art's Sake.
Contemporary Application: Pornography and Art.

Kierkegaard's Encounter with Faith.
Can We Prove That God Exists?
William Paley: The Argument from Design.
St. Thomas Aquinas: The Cosmological Argument.
St. Anselm: The Ontological Argument. The Problem of Evil.
Contemporary Application: Creationism vs. Evolution.

Descartes' Method of Doubt.
Rationalism and Empiricism: Two Responses to Cartesian Doubt.
Leibniz and Rationalism. Hume and Empiricism.
Kant's Resolution of the Rationalism/Empiricism Debate.
Contemporary Application: Virtual Reality.

The Place of Science in the Modern World.
Francis Bacon and the Foundations of Scientific Method.
The Relation Between Theory and Observation.
Thomas Kuhn's Theory of Scientific Revolutions.
Science as a Social Institution.
Contemporary Application: Cold Fusion.

What is Metaphysics?
Hobbes' Materialism.
Free Will and Determinism.
The Mind and the Body: Some Puzzles and Odd Cases.
Contemporary Application: Do Computers Think?