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A course in symbolic logic belongs as a requirement in the undergraduate philosophy major. In this paper, which started life as a letter to my departmental colleagues, I consider and respond to several reasons one might have for excluding Logic from the core requirements. I then give several arguments in favor of keeping Logic. The central--and most important--argument is that the lack of a proper background in logic makes it very difficult to approach many relatively straightforward philosophical arguments, let alone the more technical subliteratures of philosophy. In developing this argument, I consider a few core texts and arguments (e.g., Gettier's classic paper on the analysis of knowledge) and bring out how a student with some background in formal logic would be able to approach the texts and arguments with much greater ease than a student who lacks such a background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If human motivation is "enactive" rather than merely a series of passive reactions to external stimuli, then a correspondingly "enactive" approach to education should be taken seriously. This paper argues that recent research on the emotional brain by such neuropsychologists as Jaak Panksepp, combined with a self-organizational approach to the concept of action, and the importance of the questioning process in human understanding of information, suggests that treating humanities education as intrinsically valuable, and not just as means toward other ends, is crucially important. The questioning process that appeals to students' natural exploratory tendencies, or what Hume called a "love of truth," is fostered by an approach that, rather than dumbing down, actually appeals to the "glamour of the complex." The glamour of the complex cannot stop with interesting application of memorized information; it must go all the way down to basic epistemology and the basic questioning of human nature itself that are encouraged by taking the humanities seriously and for their own sake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue that there is an important problem with framing the value of a liberal arts education through a contrast between intrinsic and instrumental value. The paper breaks down into three sections. First, I argue that the traditional divide between intrinsic and instrumental value conflates two pairs of related concepts and that distinguishing those concepts frees us from an important impasse found in contemporary discussions about the liberal arts. Second, I argue that a liberal arts education is only intelligible as a practice if we value it for its own sake. Third, I explain how we can value a liberal arts education as an end even if we reject the possibility of intrinsic value. I conclude with a brief statement of the practical implications my account has for the way we approach the liberal arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the question of whether there is a proper analogy of being according to both meaning and being. I disagree with Ralph Mclnerny's understanding of how things are named through concepts and argue that Mclnerny's account does not allow for the thing represented by the name to be known in itself. In his understanding of analogy, only ideas of things may be known. This results in a wholesale inability to name things at all and thereby forces Mclnerny to relegate naming to a purely logical concern. As a consequence, for Mclnerny, since naming becomes only a logical concern, being itself cannot be known as analogous according to being and meaning since naming only involves the naming of ideas, not of things. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]