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Writtten in an engaging lecture-style format, this 8th edition of Core Questions in Philosophy shows students how philosophy is best used to evaluate many different kinds of arguments and to construct sound theories. Well-known historical texts are discussed, not as a means to honor the dead or merely to describe what various philosophers have thought but to engage with, criticize, and even improve ideas from the past. In addition—because philosophy cannot function apart from its engagement with the wider society—traditional and contemporary philosophical problems are brought into dialogue with the physical, biological, and social sciences. Text boxes highlight key concepts, and review questions, discussion questions, and a glossary of terms are also included. Core Questions in Philosophy has served as a premier introductory textbook for three decades, with updates to each new edition. Key updates to this 8th edition include: A new chapter, "Probability and Bayes' Theorem" A new explanation of the concept of "soundness," as a useful tool in assessing arguments A clearer explanation, in the chapter on evolution, of the crucial biological idea that the similarities of different species provide evidence of their common ancestry A new discussion of evolutionary altruism in the chapter on psychological egoism A presentation of two interesting arguments from historically important Islamic and Confusian philosophers Improved clarity and updated material from philosophy and empirical research, throughout Revisions to the online list of recommended resources include: Additional recommendations of supplementary readings, with the inclusion of more work from female philosophers New recommended videos and podcasts, all organized by their relevance to each chapter in the book

The fact that human beings are a product of biological evolution has been thought to impinge on the study of ethics in two quite different ways. First, evolutionary ideas may help account for why people have the ethical thoughts and feelings they do. Second, evolutionary ideas may help illuminate which normative ethical claims, if any, are true or right or correct. These twin tasks – explanation and justification – may each be subdivided. Evolutionary considerations may be relevant to explaining elements of morality that are culturally universal; they also may help explain why individuals or societies differ in the ethics they espouse. With respect to the question of justification, evolutionary considerations have sometimes been cited to show that ethics is an elaborate illusion – that is, to defend versions of ethical subjectivism and emotivism. However, evolutionary considerations also have been invoked to justify ethical norms. Although there is no conflict between using evolution both to explain traits that are universal and to explain traits that vary, it is not consistent to claim both that evolution unmasks ethics and justifies particular ethical norms.

If innate knowledge exists, there must be innate beliefs and those beliefs must count as knowledge. In consequence, the problem of clarifying the concept of innate knowledge divides in two: to explain what it is for a belief to be innate and then to connect that account with a characterization of what knowledge is. Modern biology requires changes in traditional philosophical conceptions of innateness; and two quite different theories of knowledge entail that innate beliefs will often fail to count as knowledge.

Ideas from evolutionary theory impinge on the social sciences in two ways. First, there is the research programme of sociobiology, which attempts to demonstrate the impact of biological evolution on important features of human mind and culture. Second, there is the idea that biological evolution provides a suggestive analogy for the processes that drive cultural change. Both research programmes have tended to focus on the idea of natural selection, even though the theory of biological evolution considers processes besides selection. Sociobiology attempts to show that the following conditional helps explain psychological traits just as it applies to traits of morphology and physiology: if a trait varies in a population, makes a difference for the survival and reproduction of individuals, and is influenced by genetic factors, then natural selection will lead the trait to change its frequency in the population. Models of cultural evolution are built on an analogous conditional: if a set of alternative ideas are found in a culture, and people tend to find some of these ideas more attractive than others, then the mix of ideas in the culture will change. Sociobiology and the understanding of cultural change as an evolutionary process are approaches that have a history and both will continue to be explored in the future. Each is a flexible instrument, which may be better suited to some tasks than to others, and may be handled well by some practitioners and poorly by others. As a consequence, neither can be said to be ‘verified’ and ‘falsified’ by their track records to date.

In evaluating which of several competing hypotheses is most plausible, scientists often use simplicity as a guide. This raises three questions: what makes one hypothesis simpler than another? Why should a difference in simplicity make a difference in what we believe? And how much weight should simplicity receive, compared with other considerations, in judging a hypothesis’ plausibility? These may be termed the descriptive, the normative, and the weighting problems, respectively. The aesthetic and pragmatic appeal of more simple theories is transparent; the puzzle is how simplicity can be a guide to truth.