This short article looks at a move made by some theists in defence of theism: the suggestion is that because the atheist (e.g. Richard Dawkins) has failed fully to grasp what the theist means by ‘God’ etc. so the atheist's criticisms must miss their target.

Philosophers routinely claim that sceptical arguments are not only intellectually but also emotionally confronting. When students first meet these arguments, though, no fear arises. This article presents aloneness scepticism: you never know that other people are not aiming to deceive you or at least not caring about being truthful. Imagine raising this possibility in a classroom by directing it at a single student. He or she should feel fear.

The concept of Heaven raises innumerable difficulties but is so attractive that many may wish to believe in the idea regardless of any arguments against it. Even though unreasonable, it might play a positive role in some lives.

Artists often emphasize the importance of risk to their work. But this raises a puzzle, as on a standard probabilistic account of risk we are obliged to treat some of these cases as not involving genuine risk at all. It is argued that the way to resolve this puzzle is to recognize a crucial shortcoming in the probabilistic account of risk. With this shortcoming rectified, and hence with a revised modal account of risk in place, we are able to treat the relevant cases of putative aesthetic risk as entirely genuine.

Amid the ongoing political turmoil, symbolized by the recent violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, books and articles abound today to encourage us to re-read anti-totalitarian classics ‘for our times’. But what do we find in this body of work originally written in response to Nazism and Stalinism? Do we find a democratic consensus forged by a shared anti-totalitarian commitment? I doubt it. Considering the cases of Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt, this article highlights discord beneath what may today appear like a post-war democratic consensus. I argue that the anti-totalitarian literature of the last century encompassed multiple political philosophies, which sometimes differed irreconcilably from each other.

In ‘What on Earth is Logic?’, Michael Shenefelt and Heidi White offer this observation about the nature of logic: ‘If one tries to justify logic logically, one ends up arguing in a circle’. From this, they conclude that ‘logic is a horizon beyond which none of our earnest self-reflecting arguments can help us see’. While there is much to appreciate in how they developed this idea, there are several worrying points that could still be raised against their view. In this article, we outline such problems.

One of the hardest problems in philosophy, one that has been around for over two thousand years without generating any significant consensus on its solution, involves the concept of vagueness: a word or concept that doesn't have a perfectly precise meaning. There is an argument that seems to show that the word or concept simply must have a perfectly precise meaning, as violently counterintuitive as that is. Unfortunately, the argument is usually so compressed that it is difficult to see why exactly the problem is so hard to solve. In this article I attempt to explain just why it is that the problem – the sorites paradox – is so intractable.

In general, it is morally wrong to joke about the suffering of a category of people while in front of a person who fits into this category. I argue that, when people play the game Cards Against Humanity, it is likely that they do this very action. Thus, I conclude that it is morally wrong to play Cards Against Humanity.

In this article I argue that although Daniel Dennett is right to hold that moral conversation-stoppers (considerations that tend to bring moral deliberation to an end) are practically helpful, there are also moral and philosophical benefits to be gained from developing a habit of being suspicious of them.

Why do logical truths exist at all, and how can our belief in them be justified? In an earlier article (‘What on Earth is Logic?', THINK 45) we contended that at least some aspects of logic must always be assumed, without argument, and that ‘logic is a horizon beyond which none of our earnest and self-reflecting arguments can help us see’. We also contended that logical truths are independent of physical facts, of social rules, and of the anatomical features of our brains. Nevertheless, in a further article in this volume, Jeremiah Joven Joaquin and Jose Emmanuel Agregado have challenged our view. We respond to their criticisms.

What can examining the introductions to books in philosophy tell us about those books, and about that discipline? This article begins by differentiating ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ perspectives on the discipline of philosophy, questioning the most likely understanding of this division as one between professional and ‘layman’, and emphasizing instead a basic distinction between ‘affirmative’ and ‘non-affirmative’. The introduction, I suggest, is productively symptomatic of the character of contemporary philosophy. Like an owl pellet, it can tell us a lot about the kind of creature that philosophy is and the environment it inhabits.

Christianity and Islam subscribe to a doctrine of salvific exclusivism, according to which only the adherents of the one true religion will escape divine punishment – usually conceived of as an eternity of torment. In this article, I argue that salvific exclusivism is inconsistent with ordinary intuitions about fairness and justice, together with certain facts about belief formation. In particular, I argue that what one believes is sufficiently beyond one's capacity to choose that persons cannot fairly be punished for what they believe. It seems unfair, and inconsistent with God's moral perfection, to base the difference between an eternal reward and an eternal punishment on something that one can't control.

A response to Lataster's article defending Jesus’ agnosticism in Think 43

Given how important colour is to us, it's not surprising that we have learned a great deal about colour over the centuries. However, what is much less well known – almost completely unknown outside philosophy – is the fact that colour remains a mystery: there are some simple facts about colour that lead to paradoxes that no one has been able to solve for centuries.

Most theorists agree that the ability to think critically is distinct from the disposition to do so. Many of us may have the ability to be critical thinkers, but unless we are consistently and internally motivated to think and reason this way, these abilities are effectively redundant. Such dispositions are both intellectual character traits, and dispositions to behave in certain ways. As such, the first step to understanding critical thinking requires us to develop an operationalized taxonomy of critical thinking dispositions. To avoid explicating these dispositions in abstracto, this article draws upon a murder trial in order to demonstrate the central role dispositions play in critical thinking.

What do we mean by ‘countable’?

The ethically significant concept of being confident is analysed as the ability to face the void – an idea perhaps better studied in (Zen) Buddhism than in the West.

This article argues for a shift in our thinking about racism. There are two main philosophical approaches at present: the moral view, which analyses racism in terms of individuals' attitudes, and the political view, which analyses it in terms of institutions. But neither is fully satisfactory. So I propose an alternative, genealogical account, which is better equipped to explain the phenomena associated with racism and is more in line with the historical record.