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1.1: Introduction to Philosophy and Arguments

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1 Introduction to Philosophy and Arguments

In philosophy and logic, an argument is a series of statements typically used to persuade someone of something or to present reasons for accepting a conclusion. The general form of an argument in a natural language is that of premises (typically in the form of propositions, statements or sentences) in support of a claim: the conclusion. The structure of some arguments can also be set out in a formal language, and formally defined "arguments" can be made independently of natural language arguments, as in math, logic, and computer science.

In a typical deductive argument, the premises guarantee the truth of the conclusion, while in an inductive argument, they are thought to provide reasons supporting the conclusion's probable truth. The standards for evaluating non-deductive arguments may rest on different or additional criteria than truth, for example, the persuasiveness of so-called "indispensability claims" in transcendental arguments, the quality of hypotheses in retroduction, or even the disclosure of new possibilities for thinking and acting.

The standards and criteria used in evaluating arguments and their forms of reasoning are studied in logic. Ways of formulating arguments effectively are studied in rhetoric (see also: argumentation theory). An argument in a formal language shows the logical form of the symbolically represented or natural language arguments obtained by its interpretations.

Formal and informal

Informal arguments as studied in informal logic , are presented in ordinary language and are intended for everyday discourse. Conversely, formal arguments are studied in formal logic (historically called symbolic logic , more commonly referred to as mathematical logic today) and are expressed in a formal language. Informal logic may be said to emphasize the study of argumentation, whereas formal logic emphasizes implication and inference. Informal arguments are sometimes implicit. That is, the rational structure – the relationship of claims, premises, warrants, relations of implication, and conclusion – is not always spelled out and immediately visible and must sometimes be made explicit by analysis.

Standard types

There are several kinds of arguments in logic, the best-known of which are "deductive" and "inductive." An argument has one or more premises but only one conclusion. Each premise and the conclusion are truth bearers or "truth-candidates", each capable of being either true or false (but not both). These truth values bear on the terminology used with arguments.

Deductive arguments

• A deductive argument asserts that the truth of the conclusion is a logical consequence of the premises. Based on the premises, the conclusion follows necessarily (with certainty). For example, given premises that A=B and B=C, then the conclusion follows necessarily that A=C. Deductive arguments are sometimes referred to as "truth-preserving" arguments.
• A deductive argument is said to be valid or invalid. If one assumes the premises to be true (ignoring their actual truth values), would the conclusion follow with certainty? If yes, the argument is valid. Otherwise, it is invalid. In determining validity, the structure of the argument is essential to the determination, not the actual truth values. For example, consider the argument that because bats can fly (premise=true), and all flying creatures are birds (premise=false), therefore bats are birds (conclusion=false). If we assume the premises are true, the conclusion follows necessarily, and thus it is a valid argument.
• If a deductive argument is valid and its premises are all true, then it is also referred to as sound. Otherwise, it is unsound, as in the "bats are birds" example.

Inductive arguments

• An inductive argument, on the other hand, asserts that the truth of the conclusion is supported to some degree of probability by the premises. For example, given that the U.S. military budget is the largest in the world (premise=true), then it is probable that it will remain so for the next 10 years (conclusion=true). Arguments that involve predictions are inductive, as the future is uncertain.
• An inductive argument is said to be strong or weak. If the premises of an inductive argument are assumed true, is it probable the conclusion is also true? If so, the argument is strong. Otherwise, it is weak.
• A strong argument is said to be cogent if it has all true premises. Otherwise, the argument is uncogent. The military budget argument example above is a strong, cogent argument.

A deductive argument is one that, if valid, has a conclusion that is entailed by its premises. In other words, the truth of the conclusion is a logical consequence of the premises—if the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true. It would be self-contradictory to assert the premises and deny the conclusion, because the negation of the conclusion is contradictory to the truth of the premises.

Deductive arguments may be either valid or invalid. If an argument is valid, it is a valid deduction, and if its premises are true, the conclusion must be true: a valid argument cannot have true premises and a false conclusion.

An argument is formally valid if and only if the denial of the conclusion is incompatible with accepting all the premises.

The validity of an argument depends, however, not on the actual truth or falsity of its premises and conclusion, but solely on whether or not the argument has a valid logical form. The validity of an argument is not a guarantee of the truth of its conclusion. Under a given interpretation, a valid argument may have false premises that render it inconclusive: the conclusion of a valid argument with one or more false premises may be either true or false.

Logic seeks to discover the valid forms, the forms that make arguments valid. A form of argument is valid if and only if the conclusion is true under all interpretations of that argument in which the premises are true. Since the validity of an argument depends solely on its form, an argument can be shown to be invalid by showing that its form is invalid. This can be done by giving a counter example of the same form of argument with premises that are true under a given interpretation, but a conclusion that is false under that interpretation. In informal logic this is called a counter argument.

The form of argument can be shown by the use of symbols. For each argument form, there is a corresponding statement form, called a corresponding conditional, and an argument form is valid if and only if its corresponding conditional is a logical truth. A statement form which is logically true is also said to be a valid statement form. A statement form is a logical truth if it is true under all interpretations. A statement form can be shown to be a logical truth by either (a) showing that it is a tautology or (b) by means of a proof procedure.

The corresponding conditional of a valid argument is a necessary truth (true in all possible worlds ) and so the conclusion necessarily follows from the premises, or follows of logical necessity. The conclusion of a valid argument is not necessarily true, it depends on whether the premises are true. If the conclusion, itself, just so happens to be a necessary truth, it is so without regard to the premises.

Some examples:

• All Greeks are human and all humans are mortal; therefore, all Greeks are mortal. : Valid argument; if the premises are true the conclusion must be true.
• Some Greeks are logicians and some logicians are tiresome; therefore, some Greeks are tiresome. Invalid argument: the tiresome logicians might all be Romans (for example).
• Either we are all doomed or we are all saved; we are not all saved; therefore, we are all doomed. Valid argument; the premises entail the conclusion. (Remember that this does not mean the conclusion has to be true; it is only true if the premises are true, which they may not be!)
• Some men are hawkers. Some hawkers are rich. Therefore, some men are rich. Invalid argument. This can be easier seen by giving a counter-example with the same argument form:
• Some people are herbivores. Some herbivores are zebras. Therefore, some people are zebras. Invalid argument, as it is possible that the premises be true and the conclusion false.

In the above second to last case (Some men are hawkers...), the counter-example follows the same logical form as the previous argument, (Premise 1: "Some X are Y ." Premise 2: "Some Y are Z ." Conclusion: "Some X are Z .") in order to demonstrate that whatever hawkers may be, they may or may not be rich, in consideration of the premises as such. (See also, existential import).

The forms of argument that render deductions valid are well-established, however some invalid arguments can also be persuasive depending on their construction (inductive arguments, for example). (See also, formal fallacy and informal fallacy).

A sound argument is a valid argument whose conclusion follows from its premise(s), and the premise(s) of which is/are true.

Non-deductive logic is reasoning using arguments in which the premises support the conclusion but do not entail it. Forms of non-deductive logic include the statistical syllogism, which argues from generalizations true for the most part, and induction, a form of reasoning that makes generalizations based on individual instances. An inductive argument is said to be cogent if and only if the truth of the argument's premises would render the truth of the conclusion probable (i.e., the argument is strong ), and the argument's premises are, in fact, true. Cogency can be considered inductive logic's analogue to deductive logic's "soundness." Despite its name, mathematical induction is not a form of inductive reasoning. The lack of deductive validity is known as the problem of induction.

Defeasible arguments and argumentation schemes

In modern argumentation theories, arguments are regarded as defeasible passages from premises to a conclusion. Defeasibility means that when additional information (new evidence or contrary arguments) is provided, the premises may be no longer lead to the conclusion (non-monotonic reasoning). This type of reasoning is referred to as defeasible reasoning. For instance we consider the famous Tweedy example:

Tweedy is a bird.

Birds generally fly.

Therefore, Tweedy (probably) flies.

This argument is reasonable and the premises support the conclusion unless additional information indicating that the case is an exception comes in. If Tweedy is a penguin, the inference is no longer justified by the premise. Defeasible arguments are based on generalizations that hold only in the majority of cases, but are subject to exceptions and defaults. In order to represent and assess defeasible reasoning, it is necessary to combine the logical rules (governing the acceptance of a conclusion based on the acceptance of its premises) with rules of material inference, governing how a premise can support a given conclusion (whether it is reasonable or not to draw a specific conclusion from a specific description of a state of affairs). Argumentation schemes have been developed to describe and assess the acceptability or the fallaciousness of defeasible arguments. Argumentation schemes are stereotypical patterns of inference, combining semantic-ontological relations with types of reasoning and logical axioms and representing the abstract structure of the most common types of natural arguments. The argumentation schemes provided in (Walton, Reed & Macagno, 2008) describe tentatively the patterns of the most typical arguments. However, the two levels of abstraction are not distinguished. For this reason, under the label of “argumentation schemes” fall indistinctly patterns of reasoning such as the abductive, analogical, or inductive ones, and types of argument such as the ones from classification or cause to effect. A typical example is the argument from expert opinion, which has two premises and a conclusion.

Major Premise: Source E is an expert in subject domain S containing proposition A.

Minor Premise: E asserts that proposition A is true (false).

Conclusion: A is true (false).

Each scheme is associated to a set of critical questions, namely criteria for assessing dialectically the reasonableness and acceptability of an argument. The matching critical questions are the standard ways of casting the argument into doubt.

CQ1: Expertise Question. How credible is E as an expert source?

CQ2: Field Question. Is E an expert in the field that A is in?

CQ3: Opinion Question. What did E assert that implies A?

CQ4: Trustworthiness Question. Is E personally reliable as a source?

CQ5: Consistency Question. Is A consistent with what other experts assert?

CQ6: Backup Evidence Question. Is E's assertion based on evidence?

If an expert says that a proposition is true, this provides a reason for tentatively accepting it, in the absence of stronger reasons to doubt it. But suppose that evidence of financial gain suggests that the expert is biased, for example by evidence showing that he will gain financially from his claim.

Argument by analogy may be thought of as argument from the particular to particular. An argument by analogy may use a particular truth in a premise to argue towards a similar particular truth in the conclusion. For example, if A. Plato was mortal, and B. Socrates was like Plato in other respects, then asserting that C. Socrates was mortal is an example of argument by analogy because the reasoning employed in it proceeds from a particular truth in a premise (Plato was mortal) to a similar particular truth in the conclusion, namely that Socrates was mortal.

Other kinds

Other kinds of arguments may have different or additional standards of validity or justification. For example, Charles Taylor writes that so-called transcendental arguments are made up of a "chain of indispensability claims" that attempt to show why something is necessarily true based on its connection to our experience, while Nikolas Kompridis has suggested that there are two types of "fallible" arguments: one based on truth claims, and the other based on the time-responsive disclosure of possibility (see world disclosure). The late French philosopher Michel Foucault is said to have been a prominent advocate of this latter form of philosophical argument.

In informal logic

Argument is an informal calculus, relating an effort to be performed or sum to be spent, to possible future gain, either economic or moral. In informal logic, an argument is a connexion between

• an individual action
• through which a generally accepted good is obtained.
• You should marry Jane (individual action, individual decision)
• because she has the same temper as you. (generally accepted wisdom that marriage is good in itself, and it is generally accepted that people with the same character get along well).
• You should not smoke (individual action, individual decision)
• because smoking is harmful (generally accepted wisdom that health is good).

The argument is neither a) advice nor b) moral or economical judgement , but the connection between the two. An argument always uses the connective because. An argument is not an explanation. It does not connect two events, cause and effect, which already took place, but a possible individual action and its beneficial outcome. An argument is not a proof. A proof is a logical and cognitive concept; an argument is a praxeologic concept. A proof changes our knowledge; an argument compels us to act. []

Logical status

Argument does not belong to logic, because it is connected to a real person, a real event, and a real effort to be made.

• If you, John, will buy this stock, it will become twice as valuable in a year.
• If you, Mary, study dance, you will become a famous ballet dancer.

The value of the argument is connected to the immediate circumstances of the person spoken to. If, in the first case,(1) John has no money, or will die the next year, he will not be interested in buying the stock. If, in the second case (2) she is too heavy, or too old, she will not be interested in studying and becoming a dancer. The argument is not logical, but profitable.

World-disclosing

World-disclosing arguments are a group of philosophical arguments that are said to employ a disclosive approach, to reveal features of a wider ontological or cultural-linguistic understanding – a "world," in a specifically ontological sense – in order to clarify or transform the background of meaning and "logical space" on which an argument implicitly depends.

Explanations

While arguments attempt to show that something was, is, will be, or should be the case, explanations try to show why or how something is or will be. If Fred and Joe address the issue of whether or not Fred's cat has fleas, Joe may state: "Fred, your cat has fleas. Observe, the cat is scratching right now." Joe has made an argument that the cat has fleas. However, if Joe asks Fred, "Why is your cat scratching itself?" the explanation, "...because it has fleas." provides understanding.

Both the above argument and explanation require knowing the generalities that a) fleas often cause itching, and b) that one often scratches to relieve itching. The difference is in the intent: an argument attempts to settle whether or not some claim is true, and an explanation attempts to provide understanding of the event. Note, that by subsuming the specific event (of Fred's cat scratching) as an instance of the general rule that "animals scratch themselves when they have fleas", Joe will no longer wonder why Fred's cat is scratching itself. Arguments address problems of belief, explanations address problems of understanding. Also note that in the argument above, the statement, "Fred's cat has fleas" is up for debate (i.e. is a claim), but in the explanation, the statement, "Fred's cat has fleas" is assumed to be true (unquestioned at this time) and just needs explaining .

Arguments and explanations largely resemble each other in rhetorical use. This is the cause of much difficulty in thinking critically about claims. There are several reasons for this difficulty.

• People often are not themselves clear on whether they are arguing for or explaining something.
• The same types of words and phrases are used in presenting explanations and arguments.
• The terms 'explain' or 'explanation,' et cetera are frequently used in arguments.
• Explanations are often used within arguments and presented so as to serve as arguments .
• Likewise, "...arguments are essential to the process of justifying the validity of any explanation as there are often multiple explanations for any given phenomenon."

Explanations and arguments are often studied in the field of Information Systems to help explain user acceptance of knowledge-based systems. Certain argument types may fit better with personality traits to enhance acceptance by individuals.

Fallacies and nonarguments

Fallacies are types of argument or expressions which are held to be of an invalid form or contain errors in reasoning. There is not as yet any general theory of fallacy or strong agreement among researchers of their definition or potential for application but the term is broadly applicable as a label to certain examples of error, and also variously applied to ambiguous candidates.

In Logic types of fallacy are firmly described thus: First the premises and the conclusion must be statements, capable of being true or false. Secondly it must be asserted that the conclusion follows from the premises. In English the words therefore , so , because and hence typically separate the premises from the conclusion of an argument, but this is not necessarily so. Thus: Socrates is a man, all men are mortal therefore Socrates is mortal is clearly an argument (a valid one at that), because it is clear it is asserted that Socrates is mortal follows from the preceding statements. However I was thirsty and therefore I drank is NOT an argument, despite its appearance. It is not being claimed that I drank is logically entailed by I was thirsty . The therefore in this sentence indicates for that reason not it follows that .

Elliptical arguments

Often an argument is invalid because there is a missing premise—the supply of which would render it valid. Speakers and writers will often leave out a strictly necessary premise in their reasonings if it is widely accepted and the writer does not wish to state the blindingly obvious. Example: All metals expand when heated, therefore iron will expand when heated. (Missing premise: iron is a metal). On the other hand, a seemingly valid argument may be found to lack a premise – a 'hidden assumption' – which if highlighted can show a fault in reasoning. Example: A witness reasoned: Nobody came out the front door except the milkman; therefore the murderer must have left by the back door. (Hidden assumptions- the milkman was not the murderer, and the murderer has left by the front or back door).

• Corrections

What Is a Good Argument According to Aristotle?

How does Aristotle understand what an argument is, and what are his criteria for a good argument?

What is an argument? How does it differ from a logical demonstration? What makes an argument good? This article addresses Aristotle’s answers to these questions. It begins with an attempt to distinguish Aristotle’s theory of logic from his theory of argument. It then moves on to consider the criterion of acceptance in arguments. The difference between premises and procedures in dialectical argument is discussed, and the relationship between dialectical argument and science is explained. Finally, the relationship between Aristotle’s conception of argument and the picture of philosophy it implies is sketched.

Logic and Argument in Aristotle

One of Aristotle’s most distinctive contributions to philosophy was his logic . Logic in philosophy has many purposes, but one of the overriding points is to offer a basis for understanding language better and for clearing up ambiguities in ordinary speech.

There is a distinction to be drawn between the study of language in this sense—i.e., attempts to formalize it in order to show the structure underpinning it—and an attempt to study language without this formalization. In the context of philosophy, where arguments are very often what we want to assess most of all, the corresponding distinction is that which holds between demonstrative logic and the study of dialectical argument. This is a distinction that Aristotle developed himself.

The distinction between the logical demonstration and the dialectical argument proceeds from their criterion of verification. That is, how we can test them, to know whether or not they are correct. The premises of demonstrations must be true and primary. This means that they must be true prior to their conclusions. Whereas on the other hand, the test for a dialectical argument is whether it is “accepted.” This idea of acceptance in dialectical argument has been the subject of extensive interpretative discussion among Aristotle scholars.

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One prominent view, held by Terence Irwin and Jonathan Barnes, amongst others, holds that the idea of acceptance should be understood as referring to the views held by a certain group of people or by a certain kind of person. Quoting Irwin, we should imagine acceptable views to be the “views of fairly reflective people after some reflection.”

Plato, Aristotle, and Dialogue 

Dialectic constitutes arguments from or among those beliefs that are acceptable. There seems to be a slight ambiguity over whether these views constitute the basic building blocks of dialectical arguments, as the “true and primary premises” do in the context of logical demonstration, or whether the test of acceptability applies not to the atoms of dialectical argument but to their conclusion.

In any case, this conception of dialectical argument demonstrates a notable affinity between the philosophy of Aristotle and that of his teacher and rival Plato .

Plato’s method is strictly dialectical—he presents his arguments by way of a (potentially invented) dialogue and offers us a picture of the kind of reflection which Aristotle might be envisaging here. In any case, Plato establishes the idea that what is true is often (if not always) true within a certain dialectical context. This seems related to the method Aristotle suggests for dialectical argument, which is one of question and answer, as opposed to the logical demonstrations, which proceed by way of assertion.

Of course, this doesn’t necessarily imply a literal dialogue. One can ask questions of oneself, after all. But it is at least arguable that a self-contained dialogue of this kind is an attempt to simulate the existence of another, to construct something analogous to conversation, in a way that the logical demonstration simply does not require.

The idea of a logical demonstration has proven extremely seductive to philosophers throughout history. We might reflect on why that is. Perhaps it has to do with the tendency of philosophers to work alone and to self-conceive as establishing timeless truths that hold for everyone, in every context. The concept of dialectic that Aristotle develops seems, at least in one reading, to preclude this conception of the philosopher as a ‘logical hero.’

Two Elements of Argument

There are two elements of dialectical argument that Aristotle distinguishes. First, there is the discovery of the premises from which a given conclusion follows. Second, there is a determination over which premises an interlocutor would reasonably have to concede.

The first task involves the development of a system for the classification of premises based on their logical structure. What is logical structure? Is Aristotle suggesting that dialectical argument is really a subcategory of, or at least subordinate to, the concepts of logical demonstration? Not really. While it would be foolish, both as an interpreter of Aristotle and as a philosopher simpliciter , to suggest that there is no relation between the logical demonstration and the dialectical argument, the logical structure that Aristotle has in mind here is quite different from that which constitutes his logical theory.

In particular, logical structure in this context is far less systematic. In fact, what this really represents (and here we are indebted to the analysis of Robin Smith, a contemporary interpreter of Aristotle, as we do throughout this article) is Aristotle’s awareness of the limited relationship between a scientific—that is, heavily systematic—approach to logic and real arguments.

Scientific Arguments 

While we’re on the topic, it would be good to say something about the relationship between dialectical argument and science in Aristotle. Of the various purposes to which Aristotle’s dialectic can be put, one of the most important relates to science. Much of Aristotle’s philosophy can be seen as being in the service of science. Aristotle wanted to suggest that the definitive feature of the scientific ideal was developing a body of knowledge that preserved a ‘systematic’ character.

In drawing the distinction between dialectic and logical demonstration, it might be useful to note that although the definitive notion of Aristotle’s logic was deduction, he believed inductive argument to be the basis of reasoning in the sciences. We might draw a connection between this claim and the relationship that Aristotle suggests exists between science and dialectic here:

“It is also useful in connection with the first things concerning each of the sciences. For it is impossible to say anything about the science under consideration on the basis of its own principles, since the principles are first of all, and we must work our way through about these by means of what is generally accepted about each. But this is peculiar, or most proper, to dialectic: for since it is examinative with respect to the principles of all the sciences, it has a way to proceed.”

Argumentative Procedure

As mentioned above, the dialectical argument relies on the lists of premises that would be acceptable to sufficiently reflective interlocutors. It is worth stressing that Aristotle is not envisaging these interlocutors as particular people but as kinds of people. Naturally, to create an argument, we need more than atomized premises. We need dialectical procedures. To be straightforward, we need to find a way to string these premises together and construct an argument out of them.

Aristotle developed a thorough classification of these procedures. They fall into three classes. First, there are ‘opposites,’ which include contraries, contradictions, and possession and privation. Contraries are polar opposites (for instance, freezing and boiling). Contradictions are a term and its negation (hot and not hot). Possession here refers to the possession of a certain capacity, and privation amounts to the existence of a certain incapacity (for instance, sight and blindness, respectively).

Next, there are ‘cases,’ a term that is being used in the grammatical sense to refer to different positions of the same entity and the identity that holds for the same object in those different positions. Third, there are the relations of ‘more,’ ‘less,’ and ‘likewise,’ which can be understood in a fairly natural way.

One way in which dialectical argument is similar to logical demonstration is that its status within philosophy is a matter of dispute. That is, on one conception dialectical argument is a kind of tool, a way of assessing arguments we have come up with, a way of refining things we already know. On a different conception, dialectical argument is more productive than that, and it allows us to generate genuinely novel theories about things.

There is a third conception of dialectic which becomes very important later on in philosophical history—as reflecting a conception of truth that is genuinely changeable, unstable, and tracks with the fortunes of certain argumentative positions. Aristotle’s conception of the test for dialectic as what a certain kind of person will accept allows for this changeability in our conception of truth and knowledge. Many more recent philosophers have found a lot to like about the conception of philosophy which this implies.

Why Aristotle Hated Athenian Democracy

By Luke Dunne BA Philosophy & Theology Luke is a graduate of the University of Oxford's departments of Philosophy and Theology, his main interests include the history of philosophy, the metaphysics of mind, and social theory.

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5.3 Arguments

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Define key components of an argument.
• Categorize components of sample arguments.
• Explain the difference between assessing logic and assessing truth.

As explained at the beginning of the chapter, an argument in philosophy is simply a set of reasons offered in support of some conclusion. So an “arguer” is a person who offers reasons for a specific conclusion. Notice that the definition does not state that the reasons do support a conclusion (and rather states reasons are offered or meant to support a conclusion) because there are bad arguments in which reasons do not support a conclusion.

Arguments have two components: the conclusion and the reasons offered to support it. The conclusion is what an arguer wants people to believe. The reasons offered are called premises . Often philosophers will craft a numbered argument to make clear each individual claim (premise) given in support of the conclusion. Here is an example of a numbered argument:

• If someone lives in San Francisco, then they live in California.
• If someone lives in California, then they live in the United States.
• Hassan lives in San Francisco.
• Therefore, Hassan lives in the United States.

Getting to the Premises

The first step in understanding an argument is to identify the conclusion. Ask yourself what you think the main point or main idea is. Can you identify a thesis? Sometimes identifying the conclusion may involve a little bit of “mind reading.” You may have to ask yourself “What is this person trying to make me accept?” The arguer may use words that indicate a conclusion—for example, “therefore” or “hence” (see Table 5.1 ). After you have identified the conclusion, try to summarize it as well as you can. Then, identify the premises or evidence the arguer offers in support of that conclusion. Once again, identifying reasons can be tricky and might involve more mind reading because arguers don’t always explicitly state all of their reasons. Attempt to identify what you think the arguer wants you to accept as evidence. Sometimes arguers also use words that indicate that reasons or premises are being offered. In presenting evidence, people might use terms such as “ because of” or “since” (see Table 5.1 ). Lastly, if it is difficult to first identify the conclusion of an argument, you may have to begin by parsing the evidence to then figure out the conclusion.

Understanding evidence types can help you identify the premises being advanced for a conclusion. As discussed earlier in the chapter, philosophers will often offer definitions or conceptual claims in their arguments. For example, a premise may contain the conceptual claim that “The idea of God includes perfection.” Arguments can also contain as premises empirical evidence or information about the world gleaned through the senses. Principles are also used as premises in arguments. A principle is a general rule or law. Principles are as varied as fields of study and can exist in any domain. For example, “Do not use people merely as a means to an end” is an ethical principle.

Connections

See the introduction to philosopher chapter to learn more about conceptual analysis.

The Difference between Truth and Logic

Analysis of arguments ought to take place on the levels of both truth and logic. Truth analysis is the determination of whether statements are correct or accurate. On the other hand, logical analysis ascertains whether the premises of an argument support the conclusion.

Often, people focus solely on the truth of an argument, but in philosophy logical analysis is often treated as primary. One reason for this focus is that philosophy deals with subjects in which it is difficult to determine the truth: the nature of reality, the existence of God, or the demands of morality. Philosophers use logic and inference to get closer to the truth on these subjects, and they assume that an inconsistency in a position is evidence against its truth.

Logical Analysis

Because logic is the study of reasoning, logical analysis involves assessing reasoning. Sometimes an argument with a false conclusion uses good reasoning. Similarly, arguments with true conclusions can use terrible reasoning. Consider the following absurd argument:

• The battle of Hastings occurred in 1066.
• Tamaracks are deciduous conifer trees.
• Therefore, Paris is the capital of France.

The premises of the above argument are true, as is the conclusion. However, the argument is illogical because the premises do not support the conclusion. Indeed, the premises are unrelated to each other and to the conclusion. More specifically, the argument does not contain a clear inference or evidence of reasoning. An inference is a reasoning process that leads from one idea to another, through which we formulate conclusions. So in an argument, an inference is the movement from the premises to the conclusion, where the former provide support for the latter. The above argument does not contain a clear inference because it is uncertain how we are supposed to cognitively move from the premises to the conclusion. Neither the truth nor the falsity of the premises helps us reason toward the truth of the conclusion. Here is another absurd argument:

• If the moon is made of cheese, then mice vacation there.
• The moon is made of cheese.
• Therefore, mice vacation on the moon.

The premises of the above argument are false, as is the conclusion. However, the argument has strong reasoning because it contains a good inference. If the premises are true, then the conclusion does follow. Indeed, the argument uses a particular kind of inference—deductive inference—and good a deductive inference guarantees the truth of its conclusion as long as its premises are true.

The important thing to remember is that a good inference involves clear steps by which we can move from premise to premise to reach a conclusion. The basic method for testing the two common types of inferences—deductive and inductive—is to provisionally assume that their premises are true. Assuming a neutral stance in considering an inference is crucial to doing philosophy. You begin by assuming that the premises are true and then ask whether the conclusion logically follows, given the truth of those premises.

Truth Analysis

If the logic in an argument seems good, you next turn to assessing the truth of the premises. If you disagree with the conclusion or think it untrue, you must look for weaknesses (untruths) in the premises. If the evidence is empirical, check the facts. If the evidence is a principle, ask whether there are exceptions to the principle. If the evidence is a conceptual claim, think critically about whether the conceptual claim can be true, which often involves thinking critically about possible counterexamples to the claim.

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Arguments and Philosophical Reasoning

Lesson Plan

Materials needed

• Chalkboard or whiteboard
• Computer and projector or equipment to watch short video clips from the web

Introduction This lesson can be used at any time in a philosophy course, for a meeting of a philosophy club or discussion group, or for a workshop. Because it introduces students or participants to the method of how philosophers approach philosophical questions, it is especially appropriate as a first lesson or experience. It is intended to get students or participants to recognize that philosophical reasoning takes place in the form of argumentation. This lesson, however, stops short of providing tools for evaluating philosophical arguments. Therefore, if you are using this as the first lesson in a class or for a first meeting of a philosophy club or interest group, it would be natural to follow it up with some lessons on critical thinking or logic to provide a more complete foundation in philosophical reasoning. In turn, those lessons could be followed by explorations of philosophical content, in which you would use the method of philosophical reasoning to address specific philosophical questions or topics.

Am I Your Teacher? (10 minutes)

• Begin by writing “I am the teacher of this class” (or whatever would be most appropriate for your setting) at the bottom of the board with a line drawn above it. Ask the students or participants to show by raising hands how many of them think this statement is true. Presumably, all of them will. If so, ask them why they think this. As they give reasons, write the reasons on the board above the line. Once there are a large number of reasons on the board, ask them what everything written on the board together is called. The purpose is to illustrate that an argument is being made.

I told you that I am the teacher.

I am standing at the front of the class.

I am leading this exercise.

I am the only adult in the room.

____________________________

I am the teacher of this class

• Ask the students or participants why they think you had them do this as the first exercise when exploring philosophy. Lead a brief discussion. A few points to try to develop during the discussion include:
• What you have written on the board is an example of an argument
• Arguments are the way we think and reason—when we’re reasoning something out, what we’re doing is forming a series of arguments in our heads
• Philosophy is essentially a process of thinking systematically about difficult and interesting questions, and a primary component of philosophy centers on making and evaluating arguments.

  What Is an Argument? (10 minutes)

• Begin this activity by showing the Monty Python clip, “ The Argument Clinic .”
• After showing the clip, ask:

What are the two different concepts of “argument” presented in the skit?

The two concepts are:

• Mere contradiction or a dispute (Yes it is… No it isn’t… Yes it is… No it isn’t…)
• (Proposed by the customer) “A collected series of statements to establish a definite proposition.”

When we talk about arguments as used by philosophers, we are talking about an argument in the latter sense. Again, doing philosophy is essentially a process of making and evaluating arguments.

Parts of an Argument (10 minutes)

• Return to the “I am the teacher of this class” argument. You’ll use it as an example to illustrate and help explore what arguments are and how they work.
• In a group discussion, explore the parts of an argument. As you do so, it will be helpful to develop the following points and to introduce the following terms:

Ask what parts constitute an argument. What are its basic building blocks? Arguments are composed of sentences. In fact, they are made up of a particular type of sentence, known as a proposition.

Proposition : A declarative sentence that has a truth value. In other words, a proposition is a sentence that can be either true or false. To be precise, propositions express facts about the world that can either be true or false. Examples include “Today is Monday” and “It’s raining outside.”

Question: Are there kinds of sentences that are not propositions? Answer: Yes. Questions, commands, exclamations, etc., are all types of sentences that are not propositions because they lack a truth value. Examples include “Go open the door,” and “What is today’s date?”

Typically, most of the propositions in an argument state facts or provide information which support the claim being made. These propositions are known as premises.

Premise : A proposition serving as a reason for a conclusion.

The claim being made is known as the conclusion of the argument.

Conclusion : A proposition that is supported or entailed by a set of premises.

Arguments always have one conclusion, but the number of premises can vary quite a bit. The “I am the teacher of this class” argument has several premises.

Question: Can there be an argument with only one premise? Answer: Yes. For example, “Bill is an unmarried male. Therefore, Bill is a bachelor.”

Question: Can there be an argument with no premises? Answer: Yes. For example, consider an argument with no premises and the following conclusion: “It is either Monday in Tokyo or it is not Monday in Tokyo.”

It’s worth noting that adding premises doesn’t necessarily add support for a conclusion. For example, the argument above with no premises is in fact a compelling argument, since it always has to either be Monday or not be Monday in Tokyo.

• Now we can say what an argument is in a more precise way:

Argument : An argument is a set (a collection) of propositions in which one proposition, known as the conclusion, is claimed to derive support from the other propositions, known as premises.

• To summarize:
• Arguments are the way we think and reason—when we’ve reasoning something out, what we are really doing is forming a series of arguments in our heads.
• Though “argument” can also mean a dispute in common use, that’s not the sense in which we mean it when doing philosophy.
• Arguments consist of a conclusion and (almost always) some premises.
• The conclusion is what the argument is meant to support as being true; it’s the claim being made.
• The premises provide support for the conclusion.
• There can be any number of premises, from 0 to an infinite number (but having more premises doesn’t necessarily mean there is more support for the conclusion!).
• The premises and conclusion are propositional statements; that is, they are sentences that express facts (propositions) about the world that may be true or false.

Argument Dissection (10 minutes)

The “I am the teacher of this class” argument is in normal form. That’s just a fancy way of saying that the premises have been collected together in a list with the conclusion following them. Often, we separate the conclusion from the premises by drawing a line between them (or by putting in the symbol \, which means “therefore,” before the conclusion) to make it very clear which proposition is the conclusion. Usually arguments written in English prose are not so simply presented. The conclusion may be stated first, or for stylistic reasons it might not be at either the beginning or the end of the prose. Converting an argument from English prose into normal form allows us to clearly pick out the premises and conclusion.

How can we identify the premises and the conclusion of an argument in ordinary prose? It can take some judgment, but we are usually guided by indicator words. The propositions in arguments are often accompanied by words that indicate whether that proposition is a premise or a conclusion.

As a group, brainstorm words or phrases that might indicate that the proposition they introduce is a premise or a conclusion. The following lists provide some of the most common premise and conclusion indicators.

Premise Indicators: since, because, for, in that, as, given that, for the reason that, may be inferred from, owing to, inasmuch as

Conclusion Indicators: therefore, consequently, thus, hence, it follows that, for this reason, we may infer, we may conclude, entails that, implies that

With that background in hand, the next activity will help everyone see that arguments are in fact all around us and help them to identify more easily the structure of those arguments, which is an important first step in evaluating whether we should be convinced by the argument.

• Hand out to each student or participant a couple of arguments you have found in editorials, blogs, philosophy texts, or wherever. Ask them to re-write the arguments in normal form, identifying the premises and the conclusions.
• When done, ask everyone to pair up. Each person should show his or her partner the original arguments and the rewritten arguments in normal form. Each pair should then discuss whether or not the premises and conclusions were correctly identified. Float throughout the room and answer questions.

Evaluating Arguments (10 minutes)

This is a fun activity to help everyone start thinking about how to evaluate whether we should be convinced by an argument. Begin this activity by showing the Monty Python clip, “ She’s a Witch! ”

Begin a discussion about whether people are convinced by the argument provided in the video clip. Try to focus the discussion on whether the premises provide good reasons for believing that the conclusion is correct. Note that until the characters in the video clip actually use the scale, they don’t know whether some of the facts asserted in the premises are true. That’s often the case in exploring philosophical questions. What’s important is the logical relationship between the premises and the conclusion. Hypothetically, if the premises were all to turn out to be true, would they then make it likely that the conclusion would also be true? By asking that question, we can evaluate the reasoning in an argument. Philosophers often focus the most on this step. If the reasoning in an argument is good, then we can go on to ask whether the premises are in fact true. Often that requires empirical investigation (and so may require the aid of scientists or other specialists). If both are the case—the reasoning is good and the premises are true—only then should we assent to the conclusion.

After a few minutes, pause the discussion. Ask the students to write a paragraph defending why they are or are not convinced by the argument in the video clip. Remind everyone that the paragraph should, of course, take the form of an argument!

If this lesson is being used for a one-time event, you can ask some volunteers to read their paragraphs and then resume a discussion about what they learned. If you are using this lesson as part of a class or a series of meetings, you can always ask the students or participants to write the paragraph at home and bring it with them to the next meeting. You can then discuss their paragraphs and what they learned from the exercise. If you are teaching a formal course, you can have the students turn in their paragraphs as an assignment.

Follow-Up and Conclusions

If this lesson is part of a course or a long sequence of meetings, it would be worthwhile to follow up with another lesson or two on how to properly evaluate arguments. How that is done will depend on how formal or informal you want to be in thinking about logic, and also how long you want to spend on an introductory philosophical reasoning unit.

Supplemental Materials

There are a number of excellent textbooks and resources on arguments, critical thinking, and logic. For example, reading the first two chapters of the following logic textbook would prepare you thoroughly for leading this lesson:

Hurley, Patrick. A Concise Introduction to Logic  (Twelfth ed.). Stamford: Cengage Learning, 2015.

(As an aside, reading the third and fourth chapters of the Hurley text would prepare you well for a potential follow-up lesson on distinguishing deductive from non-deductive arguments and evaluating arguments.)

A supplementary text with a more informal discussion of arguments is the following:

Weston, Anthony. A Rulebook for Arguments (4th ed.). Indianapolis: Hackett Publications, 2009.

The following brief magazine article was written by the authors of this lesson and, in a fun way, explores how philosophers investigate philosophical questions:

Gluck, S. and Rodriguez, C. “The Philosopher’s Toolbox,” Imagine 17.4 (2010): 20-21.

( Available online here )

This lesson plan, created by Stuart Gluck and Carlos Rodriguez, is part of a series of lesson plans in Philosophy in Education: Questioning and Dialogue in Schools , by Jana Mohr Lone and Michael D. Burroughs (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016) .

If you would like to change or adapt any of PLATO's work for public use, please feel free to contact us for permission at [email protected] .

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Ontological Arguments

Ontological arguments are arguments, for the conclusion that God exists, from premises which are supposed to derive from some source other than observation of the world—e.g., from reason alone. In other words, ontological arguments are arguments from what are typically alleged to be none but analytic, a priori and necessary premises to the conclusion that God exists.

The first, and best-known, ontological argument was proposed by St. Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century C.E. In his Proslogion , St. Anselm claims to derive the existence of God from the concept of a being than which no greater can be conceived . St. Anselm reasoned that, if such a being fails to exist, then a greater being—namely, a being than which no greater can be conceived, and which exists —can be conceived. But this would be absurd: nothing can be greater than a being than which no greater can be conceived. So a being than which no greater can be conceived—i.e., God—exists.

In the seventeenth century, René Descartes defended a family of similar arguments. For instance, in the Fifth Meditation , Descartes claims to provide a proof demonstrating the existence of God from the idea of a supremely perfect being. Descartes argues that there is no less contradiction in conceiving a supremely perfect being who lacks existence than there is in conceiving a triangle whose interior angles do not sum to 180 degrees. Hence, he supposes, since we do conceive a supremely perfect being—we do have the idea of a supremely perfect being—we must conclude that a supremely perfect being exists.

In the early eighteenth century, Gottfried Leibniz attempted to fill what he took to be a shortcoming in Descartes’ view. According to Leibniz, Descartes’ arguments fail unless one first shows that the idea of a supremely perfect being is coherent, or that it is possible for there to be a supremely perfect being. Leibniz argued that, since perfections are unanalysable, it is impossible to demonstrate that perfections are incompatible—and he concluded from this that all perfections can co-exist together in a single entity.

In more recent times, Kurt Gödel, Charles Hartshorne, Norman Malcolm and Alvin Plantinga have all presented much-discussed ontological arguments which bear interesting connections to the earlier arguments of St. Anselm, Descartes and Leibniz. Of these, the most interesting are those of Gödel and Plantinga; in these cases, however, it is unclear whether we should really say that these authors claim that the arguments are proofs of the existence of God.

Critiques of ontological arguments begin with Gaunilo, a contemporary of St. Anselm. Perhaps the best known criticisms of ontological arguments are due to Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason . Most famously, Kant claims that ontological arguments are vitiated by their reliance upon the implicit assumption that “existence” is a real predicate. However, as Bertrand Russell observed, it is much easier to be persuaded that ontological arguments are no good than it is to say exactly what is wrong with them. This helps to explain why ontological arguments have fascinated philosophers for almost a thousand years.

In various ways, the account provided to this point is rough, and susceptible of improvement. Sections 1–6 in what follows provide some of the requisite embellishments, though—as is usually the case in philosophy—there are many issues taken up here which could be pursued at much greater length. Sections 7–9 take up some of the central questions at a slightly more sophisticated level of discussion. Section 10 is a quick overview of very recent work on ontological arguments:

1. History of Ontological Arguments

2. taxonomy of ontological arguments, 3. characterisation of ontological arguments, 4. uses of ontological arguments, 5. objections to ontological arguments, 6. parodies of ontological arguments, 7. gödel’s ontological argument, 8. a victorious ontological argument, 9. st. anselm’s ontological argument, 10. ontological arguments in the 21st century, primary texts, other texts, other internet resources, related entries.

For a useful discussion of the history of ontological arguments in the modern period, see Harrelson 2009.

According to a modification of the taxonomy of Oppy 1995, there are eight major kinds of ontological arguments, viz:

• definitional ontological arguments;
• conceptual (or hyperintensional) ontological arguments;
• modal ontological arguments;
• Meinongian ontological arguments;
• experiential ontological arguments;
• mereological ontological arguments;
• higher-order ontological arguments; and
• ‘Hegelian’ ontological arguments;

Examples of all but the last follow. These are mostly toy examples. But they serve to highlight the deficiencies which more complex examples also share.

Note: No example is provided of a ‘Hegelian’ ontological argument. There is no extant discussion that states clearly the full set of premises of a ‘Hegelian’ ontological argument. (See Redding and Bubbio 2014 for recent discussion of this point.)

God is a being which has every perfection. (This is true as a matter of definition.) Existence is a perfection. Hence God exists.

I conceive of a being than which no greater can be conceived. If a being than which no greater can be conceived does not exist, then I can conceive of a being greater than a being than which no greater can be conceived—namely, a being than which no greater can be conceived that exists. I cannot conceive of a being greater than a being than which no greater can be conceived. Hence, a being than which no greater can be conceived exists.

It is possible that that God exists. God is not a contingent being, i.e., either it is not possible that God exists, or it is necessary that God exists. Hence, it is necessary that God exists. Hence, God exists. (See Malcolm 1960, Hartshorne 1965, and Plantinga 1974 for closely related arguments.)

[It is analytic, necessary and a priori that] Each instance of the schema “The F G is F ” expresses a truth. Hence the sentence “The existent perfect being is existent” expresses a truth. Hence, the existent perfect being is existent. Hence, God is existent, i.e. God exists. (The last step is justified by the observation that, as a matter of definition, if there is exactly one existent perfect being, then that being is God.)

The word ‘God’ has a meaning that is revealed in religious experience. The word ‘God’ has a meaning only if God exists. Hence, God exists. (See Rescher 1959 for a live version of this argument.)

I exist. Therefore something exists. Whenever a bunch of things exist, their mereological sum also exists. Therefore the sum of all things exists. Therefore God—the sum of all things—exists.

Say that a God-property is a property that is possessed by God in all and only those worlds in which God exists. Not all properties are God properties. Any property entailed by a collection of God-properties is itself a God-property. The God-properties include necessary existence, necessary omnipotence, necessary omniscience, and necessary perfect goodness. Hence, there is a necessarily existent, necessarily omnipotent, necessarily omniscient, and necessarily perfectly good being (namely, God).

Of course, this taxonomy is not exclusive: an argument can belong to several categories at once. Moreover, an argument can be ambiguous between a range of readings, each of which belongs to different categories. This latter fact may help to explain part of the curious fascination of ontological arguments. Finally, the taxonomy can be further specialised: there are, for example, at least four importantly different kinds of modal ontological arguments which should be distinguished. (See, e.g., Ross 1969 for a rather different kind of modal ontological argument.)

It is not easy to give a good characterisation of ontological arguments. The traditional characterisation involves the use of problematic notions—analyticity, necessity, and a priority —and also fails to apply to many arguments to which defenders have affixed the label “ontological”. (Consider, for example, the claim that I conceive of a being than which no greater can be conceived. This claim is clearly not analytic (its truth doesn’t follow immediately from the meanings of the words used to express it), nor necessary (I might never have entertained the concept), nor a priori (except perhaps in my own case, though even this is unclear—perhaps even I don’t know independently of experience that I have this concept.)) However, it is unclear how that traditional characterisation should be improved upon.

Perhaps one might resolve to use the label “ontological argument” for any argument which gets classified as “an ontological argument” by its proponent(s). This procedure would make good sense if one thought that there is a natural kind—ontological arguments—which our practice carves out, but for which is hard to specify defining conditions. Moreover, this procedure can be adapted as a pro tem stop gap: when there is a better definition to hand, that definition will be adopted instead. On the other hand, it seems worthwhile to attempt a more informative definition.

Focus on the case of ontological arguments for the conclusion that God exists. One characteristic feature of these arguments is the use which they make of “referential vocabulary”—names, definite descriptions, indefinite descriptions, quantified noun phrases, etc.—whose ontological commitments—for occurrences of this vocabulary in “referential position”—non-theists do not accept.

Theists and non-theists alike (can) agree that there is spatio-temporal, or causal, or nomic, or modal structure to the world (the basis for cosmological arguments); and that there are certain kinds of complexity of organisation, structure and function in the world (the basis for teleological arguments); and so on. But theists and non-theists are in dispute about whether there are perfect beings, or beings than which no greater can be conceived, or … ; thus, theists and non-theists are in dispute about the indirect subject matter of the premises of ontological arguments.

Of course, the premises of ontological arguments often do not deal directly with perfect beings, beings than which no greater can be conceived, etc.; rather, they deal with descriptions of, or ideas of, or concepts of, or the possibility of the existence of, these things. However, the basic point remains: ontological arguments require the use of vocabulary which non-theists should certainly find problematic when it is used in ontologically committing contexts (i.e not inside the scope of prophylactic operators—such as “according to the story” or “by the lights of theists” or “by the definition”—which can be taken to afford protection against unwanted commitments).

Note that this characterisation does not beg the question against the possibility of the construction of a successful ontological argument—i.e., it does not lead immediately to the conclusion that all ontological arguments are question-begging (in virtue of the ontologically committing vocabulary which they employ). For it may be that the vocabulary in question only gets used in premises under the protection of prophylactic operators (which ward off the unwanted commitments.) Of course, there will then be questions about whether the resulting arguments can possibly be valid—how could the commitments turn up in the conclusion if they are not there in the premises?—but those are further questions, which would remain to be addressed.

Before we turn to assessment of ontological arguments, we need to get clear about what the proper intended goals of ontological arguments can be. Suppose we think of arguments as having advocates and targets: when an advocate presents an argument to a target, the goal of the advocate is to bring about some change in the target. What might be the targets of ontological arguments, and what might be the changes that advocates of these arguments aim to bring about in those targets?

Here are some proposals; no doubt the reader can think of others:

• The targets might be atheists, and the goal might be to turn them into theists.
• The targets might be agnostics, and the goal might be to turn them into theists.
• The targets might be theists, and the goal might be to improve the doxastic position of theists.
• The targets might be professional philosophers, and the goal might be to advance understanding of the consequences of adopting particular logical rules, or treating existence as a real predicate, or allowing definitions to have existential import, or the like.
• The targets might be undergraduate philosophy students, and the goal might be to give them some sufficiently frustrating examples on which to cut their critical teeth.

In the coming discussion, it will be supposed that the targets are atheists and agnostics, and that the goal is to turn them into theists. Suppose that an advocate presents an ontological argument to a target. What conditions must that arguments satisfy if it is fit for its intended purpose? A plausible suggestion is that, minimally, it should make the targets recognise that they have good reason to accept the conclusion of the argument that they did not recognise that they have prior to the presentation of the argument. Adopting this plausible suggestion provides the following criterion: a successful ontological argument is one that should make atheists and agnostics recognise that they have good reason to believe that God exists that they did not recognise that they have prior to the presentation of the argument. Note that this criterion has a normative dimension: it adverts to what atheists and agnostics should do when presented with the argument.

There is an important discussion to be had about whether we should suppose that the targets of ontological arguments are atheists and agnostics, and that the goal is to turn them into theists. However, it is simply beyond the scope of this entry to pursue that discussion here.

Objections to ontological arguments take many forms. Some objections are intended to apply only to particular ontological arguments, or particular forms of ontological arguments; other objections are intended to apply to all ontological arguments. It is a controversial question whether there are any successful general objections to ontological arguments.

One general criticism of ontological arguments which have appeared hitherto is this: none of them is persuasive , i.e., none of them provides those who do not already accept the conclusion that God exists—and who are reasonable, reflective, well-informed, etc.—with either a pro tanto reason or an all-things-considered reason to accept that conclusion. Any reading of any ontological argument which has been produced so far which is sufficiently clearly stated to admit of evaluation yields a result which is invalid, or possesses a set of premises which it is clear in advance that no reasonable, reflective, well-informed, etc. non-theists will accept, or has a benign conclusion which has no religious significance, or else falls prey to more than one of the above failings.

For each of the families of arguments introduced in the earlier taxonomy, we can give general reasons why arguments of that family fall under the general criticism. In what follows, we shall apply these general considerations to the exemplar arguments introduced in section 2.

(1) Definitional arguments: These are arguments in which ontologically committing vocabulary is introduced solely via a definition. An obvious problem is that claims involving that vocabulary cannot then be non-question-beggingly detached from the scope of that definition. (The inference from ‘By definition, God is an existent being’ to ‘God exists’ is patently invalid; while the inference to ‘By definition, God exists’ is valid, but uninteresting. In the example given earlier, the premises license the claim that, as a matter of definition, God possesses the perfection of existence. But, as just noted, there is no valid inference from this claim to the further claim that God exists.)

(2) Conceptual arguments: These are arguments in which ontologically committing vocabulary is introduced solely within the scope of hyperintensional operators (e.g. ‘believes that’, ‘conceives of’, etc.). Often, these operators have two readings, one of which can cancel ontological commitment, and the other of which cannot. On the reading which can give cancellation (as in the most likely reading of ‘John believes in Santa Claus’), the inference to a conclusion in which the ontological commitment is not cancelled will be invalid. On the reading which cannot cancel ontological commitment (as in that reading of ‘John thinks about God’ which can only be true if there is a God to think about), the premises are question-begging: they incur ontological commitments which non-theists reject. In our sample argument, the claim, that I conceive of an existent being than which no greater being can be conceived, admits of the two kinds of readings just distinguished. On the one hand, on the reading which gives cancellation, the inference to the conclusion that there is a being than which no greater can be conceived is plainly invalid. On the other hand, on the reading in which there is no cancellation, it is clear that this claim is one which no reasonable, etc. non-theist will accept: if you doubt that there is a being than which no greater can be conceived, then, of course, you doubt whether you can have thoughts about such a being.

(3) Modal arguments: These are arguments with premises which concern modal claims about God, i.e., claims about the possibility or necessity of God’s attributes and existence. Suppose that we agree to think about possibility and necessity in terms of possible worlds: a claim is possibly true just in case it is true in at least one possible world; a claim is necessarily true just in case it is true in every possible world; and a claim is contingent just in case it is true in some possible worlds and false in others. Some theists hold that God is a necessarily existent being, i.e., that God exists in every possible world; all non-theists reject the claim that God exists in the actual world. The sample argument consists, in effect, of two premises:

• God exists in at least one possible world.
• God exists in all possible worlds if God exists in any.

A minimally rational non-theist cannot accept both of these premises – they entail that God exists in every possible world whereas a minimally rational non-theist maintains that there is at least one possible world in which God does not exist. Given that a minimally rational non-theist says that there is at least one possible world in which God does not exist, such a non-theist can offer a parallel counterargument with the following two premises:

• God fails to exist in at least one possible world.

These premises entail that God exists in no possible world, and hence that God does not exist in the actual world. Considered together, the argument and the counterargument just mentioned plainly do not give anyone a reason to prefer theism to non-theism, and nor do they give anyone a reason to prefer non-theism to theism. So the sample argument is unsuccessful: it doesn’t supply an all-things-considered reason to prefer theism to non-theism (just as the counterargument doesn’t supply an all-things-considered reason to prefer non-theism to theism).

(4) Meinongian arguments: These are arguments which depend somehow or other on Meinongian theories of objects. Consider the schema ‘The F G is F ’. Naive Meinongians will suppose that if F is instantiated with any property, then the result is true (and, quite likely, necessary, analytic and a priori). So, for example, the round square is round; the bald current King of France is bald; and so on. However, more sophisticated Meinongians will insist that there must be some restriction on the substitution instances for F, in order to allow one to draw the obvious and important ontological distinction between the following two groups: {Bill Clinton, the sun, the Eiffel Tower} and {Santa Claus, Mickey Mouse, the round square}. Choice of vocabulary here is controversial: Let us suppose (for the sake of example) that the right thing to say is that the former things exist and the latter do not. Under this supposition, ‘existent’ will not be a suitable substitution instance for F—obviously, since we all agree that there is no existent round square. Of course, nothing hangs on the choice of ‘existent’ as the crucial piece of vocabulary. The point is that non-theists are not prepared to include god(s) in the former group of objects—and hence will be unpersuaded by any argument which tries to use whatever vocabulary is used to discriminate between the two classes as the basis for an argument that god(s) belong to the former group. (Cognoscenti will recognise that the crucial point is that Meinongian ontological arguments fail to respect the distinction between nuclear (assumptible, characterising) properties and non-nuclear (non-assumptible, non-characterising) properties. It should, of course, be noted that neither Meinong, nor any of his well-known modern supporters—e.g. Terence Parsons, Richard Sylvan—ever endorses a Meinongian ontological argument; and it should also be noted that most motivate the distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear properties in part by a need to avoid Meinongian ontological arguments. The reason for calling these arguments “Meinongian” is that they rely on quantification over—or reference to—non-existent objects; there is no pejorative intent in the use of this label.)

(5) Experiential arguments: These are arguments which try to make use of ‘externalist’ or ‘object-involving’ accounts of content. It should not be surprising that they fail. After all, those accounts of content need to have something to say about expressions which fail to refer (‘Santa Claus’, ‘phlogiston’, etc.). But, however the account goes, non-theists will insist that expressions which purport to refer to god(s) should be given exactly the same kind of treatment.

(6) Mereological arguments: Those who dislike mereology will not be impressed by these arguments. However, even those who accept principles of unrestricted composition—i.e., who accept principles which claim, e.g., that, whenever there are some things, there is something which is the sum or fusion of all of those things—need not be perturbed by them: for it is plausible to think that the conclusions of these arguments have no religious significance whatsoever—they are merely arguments for, e.g., the existence of the physical universe.

(7) Higher-Order arguments: The key to these arguments is the observation that any collection of properties, that (a) does not include all properties and (b) is closed under entailment, is possibly jointly instantiated. If it is impossible that God exists — as all who deny that God exists suppose, on the further assumption that, were God to exist, God would exist of necessity — then it cannot be true both that the God-properties are closed under entailment and that there are properties that are not God-properties. Those who take themselves to have good independent reason to deny that there are any gods will take themselves to have good independent reason to deny that there are God-properties that form a non-trivial collection that is closed under entailment.

Even if the forgoing analyses are correct, it is important to note that no argument has been given for the conclusion that no ontological argument can be successful. Even if all of the kinds of arguments produced to date are pretty clearly unsuccessful—i.e., not such as ought to give non-theists reason to accept the conclusion that God exists—it remains an open question whether there is some other kind of hitherto undiscovered ontological argument which does succeed. (Perhaps it is worth adding here that there is fairly widespread consensus, even amongst theists, that no known ontological arguments for the existence of God are persuasive. Most categories of ontological argument have some actual defenders; but none has a large following.)

Many other objections to (some) ontological arguments have been proposed. All of the following have been alleged to be the key to the explanation of the failure of (at least some) ontological arguments: (1) existence is not a predicate (see, e.g., Kant, Smart 1955, Alston 1960); (2) the concept of god is meaningless/incoherent/ inconsistent (see, e.g., Findlay 1949); (3) ontological arguments are ruled out by “the missing explanation argument” (see Johnston 1992; (4) ontological arguments all trade on mistaken uses of singular terms (see, e.g., Barnes 1972; (5) existence is not a perfection (see almost any textbook in philosophy of religion); (6) ontological arguments presuppose a Meinongian approach to ontology (see, e.g., Dummett 1993); and (7) ontological arguments are question-begging, i.e., presuppose what they set out to prove (see, e.g., Rowe 1989). There are many things to say about these objections: the most important point is that almost all of them require far more controversial assumptions than non-theists require in order to be able to reject ontological arguments with good conscience. Trying to support most of these claims merely in order to beat up on ontological arguments is like using a steamroller to crack a nut (in circumstances in which one is unsure that one can get the steamroller to move!).

Of course, all of the above discussion is directed merely to the claim that ontological arguments are not dialectically efficacious—i.e., they give reasonable non-theists no reason to change their views. It might be wondered whether there is some other use which ontological arguments have—e.g., as Plantinga claims, in establishing the reasonableness of theism. This seems unlikely. After all, at best these arguments show that certain sets of sentences (beliefs, etc.) are inconsistent—one cannot reject the conclusions of these arguments while accepting their premises. But the arguments themselves say nothing about the reasonableness of accepting the premisses. So the arguments themselves say nothing about the (unconditional) reasonableness of accepting the conclusions of these arguments. Those who are disposed to think that theism is irrational need find nothing in ontological arguments to make them change their minds (and those who are disposed to think that theism is true should take no comfort from them either).

Positive ontological arguments—i.e., arguments FOR the existence of god(s)—invariably admit of various kinds of parodies, i.e., parallel arguments which seem at least equally acceptable to non-theists, but which establish absurd or contradictory conclusions. For many positive ontological arguments, there are parodies which purport to establish the non-existence of god(s); and for many positive ontological arguments there are lots (usually a large infinity!) of similar arguments which purport to establish the existence of lots (usually a large infinity) of distinct god-like beings. Here are some modest examples:

(1) By definition, God is a non-existent being who has every (other) perfection. Hence God does not exist.

(2) I conceive of a being than which no greater can be conceived except that it only ever creates n universes. If such a being does not exist, then we can conceive of a greater being—namely, one exactly like it which does exist. But I cannot conceive of a being which is greater in this way. Hence, a being than which no greater can be conceived except that it only ever creates n universes exists.

(3) It is possible that God does not exist. God is not a contingent being, i.e., either it is not possible that God exists, or it is necessary that God exists. Hence it is not possible that God exists. Hence God does not exist.

(4) It is analytic, necessary, and a priori that the F G is F . Hence, the existent perfect being who creates exactly n universes is existent. Hence the perfect being who creates exactly n universes exists.

There are many kinds of parodies of Ontological Arguments. The aim is to construct arguments which non-theists can reasonably claim to have no more reason to accept than the original Ontological Arguments themselves. Of course, theists may well be able to hold that the originals are sound, and the parodies not—but that is an entirely unrelated issue. (All theists—and no non-theists—should grant that the following argument is sound, given that the connectives are to be interpreted classically: “Either 2+2=5, or God exists. Not 2+2=5. Hence God exists.” This argument contributes nothing positive to any case for theism, just as the argument “Either 2+2=5, or God does not exist. Not 2+2=5. Hence God does not exist.” contributes nothing positive to the case for non-theism.)

There are many parodic discussions of Ontological Arguments in the literature. See, for example, the parody provided by Raymond Smullyan (1984), in which the argument is attributed to “the unknown Dutch theologian van Dollard”. A relatively recent addition to the genre is described in Grey 2000, though the date of its construction is uncertain. It is the work of Douglas Gasking, one-time Professor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne (with emendations by William Grey and Denis Robinson):

• The creation of the world is the most marvellous achievement imaginable.
• The merit of an achievement is the product of (a) its intrinsic quality, and (b) the ability of its creator.
• The greater the disability or handicap of the creator, the more impressive the achievement.
• The most formidable handicap for a creator would be non-existence.
• Therefore, if we suppose that the universe is the product of an existent creator, we can conceive a greater being—namely, one who created everything while not existing.
• An existing God, therefore, would not be a being than which a greater cannot be conceived, because an even more formidable and incredible creator would be a God which did not exist.
• (Hence) God does not exist.

This parody—at least in its current state—is inferior to other parodies in the literature, including the early parodies of Gaunilo and Caterus. To mention but one difficulty, while we might suppose that it would be a greater achievement to create something if one did not exist than if one did exist, it doesn’t follow from this that a non-existent creator is greater ( qua being) than an existent creator. Perhaps it might be replied that this objection fails to take the first premise into account: if the creation of the world really is “the most marvellous achievement imaginable”, then surely there is some plausibility to the claim that the creator must have been non-existent (since that would make the achievement more marvellous than it would otherwise have been). But what reason is there to believe that the creation of the world is “the most marvellous achievement imaginable”, in the sense which is required for this argument? Surely it is quite easy to imagine even more marvellous achievements—e.g., the creation of many worlds at least as good as this one! (Of course, one might also want to say that, in fact, one cannot conceive of a non-existent being’s actually creating something: that is literally inconceivable. Etc.)

Chambers 2000 and Siegwart 2014 provide interesting recent discussions of Gaunilo’s parody of the Proslogion II argument.

There is a small, but steadily growing, literature on the ontological arguments which Gödel developed in his notebooks, but which did not appear in print until well after his death. These arguments have been discussed, annotated and amended by various leading logicians: the upshot is a family of arguments with impeccable logical credentials. (Interested readers are referred to Sobel 1987, Anderson 1990, Adams 1995b, and Hazen 1999 for the history of these arguments, and for the scholarly annotations and emendations.) Here, we give a brief presentation of the version of the argument which is developed by Anderson, and then make some comments on that version. This discussion follows the presentation and discussion in Oppy 1996, 2000.

Definition 1: x is God-like if and only if x has as essential properties those and only those properties which are positive Definition 2: A is an essence of x if and only if for every property B , x has B necessarily if and only if A entails B Definition 3: x necessarily exists if and only if every essence of x is necessarily exemplified Axiom 1: If a property is positive, then its negation is not positive. Axiom 2: Any property entailed by—i.e., strictly implied by—a positive property is positive Axiom 3: The property of being God-like is positive Axiom 4: If a property is positive, then it is necessarily positive Axiom 5: Necessary existence is positive Axiom 6: For any property P , if P is positive, then being necessarily P is positive. Theorem 1: If a property is positive, then it is consistent, i.e., possibly exemplified. Corollary 1: The property of being God-like is consistent. Theorem 2: If something is God-like, then the property of being God-like is an essence of that thing. Theorem 3: Necessarily, the property of being God-like is exemplified.

Given a sufficiently generous conception of properties, and granted the acceptability of the underlying modal logic, the listed theorems do follow from the axioms. (This point was argued in detail by Dana Scott, in lecture notes which circulated for many years and which were transcribed in Sobel 1987 and published in Sobel 2004. It is also made by Sobel, Anderson, and Adams.) So, criticisms of the argument are bound to focus on the axioms, or on the other assumptions which are required in order to construct the proof.

Some philosophers have denied the acceptability of the underlying modal logic. And some philosophers have rejected generous conceptions of properties in favour of sparse conceptions according to which only some predicates express properties. But suppose that we adopt neither of these avenues of potential criticism of the proof. What else might we say against it?

One important point to note is that no definition of the notion of “positive property” is supplied with the proof. At most, the various axioms which involve this concept can be taken to provide a partial implicit definition. If we suppose that the “positive properties” form a set, then the axioms provide us with the following information about this set:

• If a property belongs to the set, then its negation does not belong to the set.
• The set is closed under entailment.
• The property of having as essential properties just those properties which are in the set is itself a member of the set.
• The set has exactly the same members in all possible worlds.
• The property of necessary existence is in the set.
• If a property is in the set, then the property of having that property necessarily is also in the set.

On Gödel’s theoretical assumptions, we can show that any set which conforms to (1)–(6) is such that the property of having as essential properties just those properties which are in that set is exemplified. Gödel wants us to conclude that there is just one intuitive, theologically interesting set of properties which is such that the property of having as essential properties just the properties in that set is exemplified. But, on the one hand, what reason do we have to think that there is any theologically interesting set of properties which conforms to the Gödelian specification? And, on the other hand, what reason do we have to deny that, if there is one set of theologically interesting set of properties which conforms to the Gödelian specification, then there are many theologically threatening sets of properties which also conform to that specification?

In particular, there is some reason to think that the Gödelian ontological argument goes through just as well—or just as badly—with respect to other sets of properties (and in ways which are damaging to the original argument). Suppose that there is some set of independent properties { I , G 1 , G 2 , …} which can be used to generate the set of positive properties by closure under entailment and “necessitation”. (“Independence” means: no one of the properties in the set is entailed by all the rest. “Necessitation” means: if P is in the set, then so is necessarily having P . I is the property of having as essential properties just those properties which are in the set. G 1 , G 2 , … are further properties, of which we require at least two.) Consider any proper subset of the set { G 1 , G 2 , …}—{ H 1 , H 2 , …}, say—and define a new generating set { I *, H 1 , H 2 , …}, where I * is the property of having as essential properties just those properties which are in the newly generated set. A “proof” parallel to that offered by Gödel “establishes” that there is a being which has as essential properties just those properties in this new set. If there are as few as 7 independent properties in the original generating set, then we shall be able to establish the existence of 720 distinct“God-like” creatures by the kind of argument which Gödel offers. (The creatures are distinct because each has a different set of essential properties.)

Even if the above considerations are sufficient to cast doubt on the credentials of Gödel’s “proof”, they do not pinpoint where the “proof” goes wrong. If we accept that the role of Axioms 1, 2, 4, and 6 is really just to constrain the notion of “positive property” in the right way—or, in other words, if we suppose that Axioms 1, 2, 4, and 6 are “analytic truths” about “positive properties”—then there is good reason for opponents of the “proof” to be sceptical about Axioms 3 and 5. Kant would not have been happy with Axiom 5; and there is at least some reason to think that whether the property of being God-like is “positive” ought to depend upon whether or not there is a God-like being.

For detailed recent discussion of Gödel’s argument, see Kovac (2003), Pruss (2009) (2018), and Swietorzecka (2016).

The “victorious” modal ontological argument of Plantinga 1974 goes roughly as follows: Say that an entity possesses “maximal excellence” if and only if it is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect. Say, further, that an entity possesses “maximal greatness” if and only if it possesses maximal excellence in every possible world—that is, if and only if it is necessarily existent and necessarily maximally excellent. Then consider the following argument:

• There is a possible world in which there is an entity which possesses maximal greatness.
• (Hence) There is an entity which possesses maximal greatness.

Under suitable assumptions about the nature of accessibility relations between possible worlds, this argument is valid: from it is possible that it is necessary that p , one can infer that it is necessary that p . Setting aside the possibility that one might challenge this widely accepted modal principle, it seems that opponents of the argument are bound to challenge the acceptability of the premise.

And, of course, they do. Let’s just run the argument in reverse.

• There is no entity which possesses maximal greatness.
• (Hence) There is no possible world in which there is an entity which possesses maximal greatness.

Plainly enough, if you do not already accept the claim that there is an entity which possesses maximal greatness, then you won’t agree that the first of these arguments is more acceptable than the second. So, as a proof of the existence of a being which possesses maximal greatness, Plantinga’s argument seems to be a non-starter.

Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Plantinga himself agrees: the “victorious” modal ontological argument is not a proof of the existence of a being which possesses maximal greatness. But how, then, is it “victorious”? Plantinga writes: “Our verdict on these reformulated versions of St. Anselm’s argument must be as follows. They cannot, perhaps, be said to prove or establish their conclusion. But since it is rational to accept their central premise, they do show that it is rational to accept that conclusion” (Plantinga 1974, 221).

It is clear that Plantinga’s argument does not show what he claims that it shows. Consider, again, the argument: “Either God exists, or 2+2=5. It is not the case that 2+2=5. So God exists.” It is a mistake for a theist to say: “Since the premise is true (and the argument is valid), this argument shows that the conclusion of the argument is true ”, just as it is a mistake for a non-theist to say that the argument “Either God does not exist, or 2+2=5. It is not the case that 2+2=5. So God does not exist.” shows that God does not exist. Similarly, it is a mistake for a theist to say: “Since it is rational to accept the premises (and the argument is valid), this argument shows that it is rational to accept the claim that God exists”, just as it is a mistake for the non-theist to say: “Since it is rational to accept the premises of the non-theistic argument (and that argument is valid), the non-theistic argument shows that it is rational to accept the claim that God does not exist”. While there is room for dispute about exactly why all of this is so, it is plausible to say that, in each case, any even minimally rational person who has doubts about the claimed status of the conclusion of the argument will have exactly the same doubts about the claimed status of the premise. If, for example, I doubt that it is rational to accept the claim that God exists, then you can be quite sure that I will doubt that it is rational to accept the claim that either 2+2=5 or God exists. But the very same point can be made about Plantinga’s argument: anyone with even minimal rationality who understands the premise and the conclusion of the argument, and who has doubts about the claim that it is rationally permissible to believe that there is an entity which possesses maximal greatness, will have exactly the same doubts about the claim that it is rationally permissible to believe that there is a possible world in which there is an entity which possesses maximal greatness.

For further discussion of Plantinga’s argument, see—for example—Adams 1988, Chandler 1993, Oppy 1995 (70–78, 248–259), Rasmussen (2018), Tooley 1981, and van Inwagen 1977).

There is an enormous literature on the material in Proslogion II-III . Some commentators deny that St. Anselm tried to put forward any proofs of the existence of God. Even among commentators who agree that St. Anselm intended to prove the existence of God, there is disagreement about where the proof is located. Some commentators claim that the main proof is in Proslogion II , and that the rest of the work draws out corollaries of that proof (see, e.g., Charlesworth 1965). Other commentators claim that the main proof is in Prologion III , and that the proof in Proslogion II is merely an inferior first attempt (see, e.g., Malcolm 1960). Yet other commentators claim that there is a single proof which spans at least Proslogion II-III —see, e.g., Campbell 1976 and, perhaps, the entire work—see, e.g., La Croix 1972. In what follows, we ignore this aspect of the controversy about the Proslogion . Instead, we focus just on the question of the analysis of the material in Proslogion II on the assumption that there is an independent argument for the existence of God which is given therein.

Here is one translation of the crucial part of Proslogion II (due to William Mann (1972, 260–1); alternative translations can be found in Barnes 1972, Campbell 1976, Charlesworth 1965, and elsewhere):

Thus even the fool is convinced that something than which nothing greater can be conceived is in the understanding, since when he hears this, he understands it; and whatever is understood is in the understanding. And certainly that than which a greater cannot be conceived cannot be in the understanding alone. For if it is even in the understanding alone, it can be conceived to exist in reality also, which is greater. Thus if that than which a greater cannot be conceived is in the understanding alone, then that than which a greater cannot be conceived is itself that than which a greater can be conceived. But surely this cannot be. Thus without doubt something than which a greater cannot be conceived exists, both in the understanding and in reality.

There have been many ingenious attempts to find an argument which can be expressed in modern logical formalism, which is logically valid, and which might plausibly be claimed to be the argument which is expressed in this passage. To take a few prime examples, Adams 1971, Barnes 1972 and Oppenheimer and Zalta 1991 have all produced formally valid analyses of the argument in this passage. We begin with a brief presentation of each of these analyses, preceded by a presentation of the formulation of the argument given by Plantinga 1967, and including a presentation of some of the formulations of Lewis 1970. (Chambers 2000 works with the analysis of Adams 1971.)

9.1 Formulation 1

God exists in the understanding but not in reality. (Assumption for reductio )

Existence in reality is greater than existence in the understanding alone. (Premise)

A being having all of God’s properties plus existence in reality can be conceived. (Premise)

A being having all of God’s properties plus existence in reality is greater than God. (From (1) and (2).)

A being greater than God can be conceived. (From (3) and (4).)

It is false that a being greater than God can be conceived. (From definition of “God”.)

Hence, it is false that God exists in the understanding but not in reality. (From (1), (5), (6).)

God exists in the understanding. (Premise, to which even the Fool agrees.)

Hence God exists in reality. (From (7), (8).)

See Plantinga 1967.

9.2 Formulation 2

The Fool understands the expression “the being than which no greater can be conceived”. (Premise)

If a person understands an expression “ b ”, then b is in that person’s understanding. (Premise)

If a thing is in a person’s understanding, then the person can conceive of that thing’s existing in reality. (Premise)

Each thing which exists in reality is greater than any thing which exists only in the understanding. (Premise)

If a person can conceive of something, and that thing entails something else, then the person can also conceive of that other thing. (Premise)

If a person can conceive that a specified object has a given property, then that person can conceive that something or other has that property. (Premise)

Hence the being than which no greater can be conceived exists in reality. (From (1)-(6), by a complex series of steps here omitted.)

See Barnes 1972.

9.3 Formulation 3

There is a thing x , and a magnitude m , such that x exists in the understanding, m is the magnitude of x , and it it not possible that there is a thing y and a magnitude n such that n is the magnitude of y and n > m . (Premise)

For any thing x and magnitude m , if x exists in the understanding, m is the magnitude of x , and it is not possible that there is a thing y and magnitude n such that n is the magnitude of y and n > m , then it is possible that x exists in reality. (Premise)

For any thing x and magnitude m , if m is the magnitude of x , and it it not possible that there is a thing y and a magnitude n such that n is the magnitude of y and n > m , and x does not exist in reality, then it is not possible that if x exists in reality then there is a magnitude n such that n is greater than m and n is the magnitude of x . (Premise)

(Hence) There is a thing x and a magnitude m such that x exist in the understanding, and x exists in reality, and m is the magnitude of x , and it it not possible that there is a thing y and a magnitude n such that n is the magnitude of y and n > m . (From 1, 2, 3)

See Adams 1971.

9.4 Formulation 4

For any understandable being x , there is a world w such that x exists in w . (Premise)

For any understandable being x , and for any worlds w and v , if x exists in w , but x does not exist in v , then the greatness of x in w exceeds the greatness of x in v . (Premise)

There is an understandable being x such that for no world w and being y does the greatness of y in w exceed the greatness of x in the actual world. (Premise)

(Hence) There is a being x existing in the actual world such that for no world w and being y does the greatness of y in w exceed the greatness of x in the actual world. (From (1)-(3).)

See Lewis 1970.

Lewis also suggests an alternative to (3) which yields a valid argument:

(3′) There is an understandable being x such that for no worlds v and w and being y does the greatness of y in w exceed the greatness of x in v .

and two alternatives to (3)—not presented here—which yield invalid arguments. (Of course, these further two alternatives are crucial to Lewis’ overall analysis of the passage: essentially, Lewis suggests that Anselm equivocates between an invalid argument with plausible premises and a valid argument with question-begging premises. In this respect, Lewis’ analysis is quite different from the other analyses currently under discussion.)

9.5 Formulation 5

There is (in the understanding) something than which there is no greater. (Premise)

(Hence) There is (in the understanding) a unique thing than which there is no greater. (From (1), assuming that the “greater-than” relation is connected.)

(Hence) There is (in the understanding) something which is the thing than which there is no greater. (From (2), by a theorem about descriptions.)

(Hence) There is (in the understanding) nothing which is greater than the thing than which there is no greater. (From (3), by another theorem about descriptions.)

If that thing than which there is no greater does not exist (in reality), then there is (in the understanding) something which is greater than that thing than which there is no greater. (Premise)

(Hence) That thing than which there is no greater exists (in reality). (From (4) and (5).)

(Hence) God exists. (From (6).)

See Oppenheimer and Zalta 1991.

Oppenheimer and Zalta 2011 provides a “simplified” version of this argument, in which the number of controversial assumptions is reduced. Since they also provide a clear reason for thinking that this new version of the argument is not persuasive, it won't be considered further here.

9.6 Critical Appraisal

Considered as interpretations of the argument presented in the Proslogion , these formulations are subject to various kinds of criticisms.

First , the modal interpretations of Lewis 1970 and Adams 1971 don’t square very well with the rest of the Proslogion : the claim that “being than which no greater can be conceived” should be read as “being than which no greater is possible” would have us render the claim of Proslogion 15 to be that God is a being greater than any which is possible. And that is surely a bad result.

Second , the Meinongian interpretations of Barnes 1972, Adams 1971 and Oppenheimer and Zalta 1991 produce arguments which, given the principles involved, could easily be much simplified, and which are obviously vulnerable to Gaunilo-type objections.

Consider, for example, the case of Oppenheimer and Zalta. They have Anselm committed to the claim that if anyone can understand the phrase “that than which F ”, then there is something in the understanding such that F (see their footnote 25); and they also have him committed to the claim that if there is something which is the F -thing, then it—i.e., the F -thing—has the property F (see page 7). Plainly though, if Anselm is really committed to these principles, then he could hardly fail to be committed to the more general principles: (1) if anyone can understand the phrase “an F ”, then there is at least one F -thing in the understanding; and (2) if there are some things which are the F -things, then they—i.e., the F -things—must have the property F . (It would surely be absurd to claim that Anselm is only committed to the less general principles: what could possibly have justified the restrictions to the special cases?)

But, then, mark the consequences. We all understand the expression “an existent perfect being”. So, by the first claim, there is at least one existent perfect being in the understanding. And, by the second claim, any existent perfect being is existent. So, from these two claims combined, there is—in reality—at least one existent perfect being.

This argument gives Anselm everything that he wants, and very much more briefly. (The Proslogion goes on and on, trying to establish the properties of that than which no greater can be conceived. How much easier if we can just explicitly build all of the properties which want to “derive” into the initial description.) So, if Anselm really were committed to the principles which Oppenheimer and Zalta appear to attribute to him, it is hard to understand why he didn’t give the simpler argument. And, of course, it is also hard to understand why he didn’t take Gaunilo’s criticism. After all, when it is set out in this way, it is obvious that the argument proves far too much.

Third , some of the arguments have Anselm committed to claims about greatness which do not seem to correspond with what he actually says. The natural reading of the text is that, if two beings are identical save that one exists only in the understanding and the other exists in reality as well, then the latter is greater than the former. But Barnes 1971, for example, has Anselm committed to the much stronger claim that any existing thing is greater than every non-existent thing.

Given these kinds of considerations, it is natural to wonder whether there are better interpretations of Proslogion II according to which the argument in question turns out NOT to be logically valid. Here is a modest attempt to provide such an analysis:

We start with the claim that the Fool understands the expression “being than which no greater can be conceived”, i.e., even the Fool can entertain the idea or possess the concept of a being than which no greater can be conceived. Now, entertaining this idea or possessing this concept requires the entertainer or possessor to recognise certain relationships which hold between given properties and the idea or concept in question. For example, given that you possess the concept of, or entertain the idea of, a smallest really existent Martian, it follows that you must recognise some kind of connection between the properties of being a Martian, really existing, and being smaller than other really existing Martians, and the concept or idea in question.

Following Anselm, we might say that, since you understand the expression “smallest really existent Martian”, there is, in your understanding, at least one smallest really existent Martian. (Or, apparently following Descartes, one might say that real existence is “part of”—or “contained in”—the idea of a smallest really existent Martian.) However, in saying this, it must be understood that we are not actually predicating properties of anything: we aren’t supposing that there is something which possesses the properties of being a Martian, really existing, and being no larger than any other Martian. (After all, we can safely suppose, we don’t think that any Martians really exist.) In other words, we must be able to have the concept of, or entertain the idea of, a smallest really existing Martian without believing that there really are any smallest Martians. Indeed, more strongly, we must be able to entertain the concept of a smallest really existent Martian—and to recognise that the property of “really existing” is part of this concept—while nonetheless maintaining that there are no smallest existent Martians.

It will be useful to introduce vocabulary to mark the point which is being made here. We could, for instance, distinguish between the properties which are encoded in an idea or concept, and the properties which are attributed in positive atomic beliefs which have that idea or concept as an ingredient. The idea “really existent Santa Claus” encodes the property of real existence; but it is perfectly possible to entertain this idea without attributing real existence to Santa Claus, i.e., without believing that Santa Claus really exists.

We can then apply this distinction to Anselm’s argument. On the one hand, the idea “being than which no greater can be conceived” encodes the property of real existence—this is what the reductio argument establishes (if it establishes anything at all). On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to entertain the idea of a being than which no greater can be conceived—and to recognise that this idea encodes the property of real existence—without attributing real existence to a being than which no greater can be conceived, i.e., without believing that a being than which no greater can be conceived really exists.

Of course, the argument which Anselm actually presents pays no attention to this distinction between encoding and attributing—i.e., between entertaining an idea and holding a belief—and nor does it pay attention to various other niceties. We begin from the point that the Fool entertains the idea of that than which no greater can be conceived (because the Fool understands the words “that than which no greater can be conceived”). From this, we move quickly to the claim that even the Fool is “convinced”—i.e., believes—that that than which no greater can be conceived possesses the property of existing in the understanding. And then the reductio argument is produced to establish that that than which no greater can be conceived cannot exist only in the understanding but must also possess the property of existing in reality as well (and all mention of the Fool, and what it is that the Fool believes, disappears).

As it stands, this is deeply problematic. How are we supposed to regiment the references to the Fool in the argument? Is the reductio argument supposed to tell us something about what even the Fool believes, or ought to believe? Are the earlier references to the Fool supposed to be inessential and eliminable? How are we so much as to understand the claim that even the Fool believes that that than which no greater can be conceived exists in the understanding? And how do we get from the Fool’s understanding the words “that than which no greater can be conceived” to his believing that that than which no greater can be conceived possesses the property of existing in the understanding?

Following the earlier line of thought, it seems that the argument might go something like this:

(Even) the Fool has the concept of that than which no greater can be conceived.

(Hence) (Even) the Fool believes that that than which no greater can be conceived exists in the understanding.

No one who believes that that than which no greater can be conceived exists in the understanding can reasonably believe that that than which no greater can be conceived exists only in the understanding.

(Hence) (Even) the Fool cannot reasonably deny that that than which no greater can be conceived exists in reality

(Hence) That than which no greater can be conceived exists in reality.

While this is not a good argument, it could appear compelling to one who failed to attend to the distinction between entertaining ideas and holding beliefs and who was a bit hazy on the distinction between the vehicles of belief and their contents. When the Fool entertains the concept of that than which no greater can be conceived he recognises that he is entertaining this concept (i.e., he believes that he is entertaining the concept of that than which no greater can be conceived—or, as we might say, that the concept is in his understanding). Conflating the concept with its object, this gives us the belief that than which no greater can be conceived possesses the property of existing in the understanding. Now, suppose as hypothesis for reductio , that we can reasonably believe that that than which no greater can be conceived possesses the property of existing only in the understanding. Ignoring the distinction between entertaining ideas and holding beliefs, this means that we when we entertain the idea of that than which no greater can be conceived, we entertain the idea of a being which exists only in the understanding. But that is absurd: when we entertain the idea of that than which no greater can be conceived, our idea encodes the property of existing in reality. So there is a contradiction, and we can conclude that, in order to be reasonable, we must believe that that than which no greater can be conceived exists in reality. But if any reasonable person must believe that that than which no greater can be conceived exists in reality, then surely it is the case that that than which no greater can be conceived exists in reality. And so we are done.

No doubt this suggestion about the interpretation of Anselm’s argument is deficient in various ways. However, the point of including it is illustrative rather than dogmatic. In the literature, there has been great resistance to the idea that the argument which Anselm gives is one which modern logicians would not hesitate to pronounce invalid. But it is very hard to see why there should be this resistance. (Certainly, it is not something for which there is much argument in the literature.) The text of the Proslogion is so rough, and so much in need of polishing, that we should not be too quick to dismiss the suggestion that Anselm’s argument is rather more like the argument most recently sketched than it is like the logically valid demonstrations provided by commentators such as Barnes, Adams, and Oppenheimer and Zalta. (For a more complex analysis of Proslogion II that has it yielding a valid argument, see Hinst 2014.)

Many recent discussions of ontological arguments are in compendiums, companions, encyclopedias, and the like. So, for example, there are review discussions of ontological arguments in: Leftow 2005, Matthews 2005, Lowe 2007, Oppy 2007, and Maydole 2009. While the ambitions of these review discussions vary, many of them are designed to introduce neophytes to the arguments and their history. Given the current explosion of enthusiasm for compendiums, companions, encyclopedias, and the like, in philosophy of religion, it is likely that many more such discussions will appear in the immediate future.

Some recent discussions of ontological arguments have been placed in more synoptic treatments of arguments about the existence of God. So, for example, there are extended discussions of ontological arguments in Everitt 2004, Sobel 2004, and Oppy 2006. Sobel’s examination of ontological arguments is exemplary. He provides one chapter on ‘classical ontological arguments’: Anselm, Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant’s critique of ontological arguments; one chapter on ‘modern modal ontological arguments’: Hartshorne, Malcolm and Plantinga; and one chapter on Gödel’s ontological argument. His analyses are very careful, and make heavy use of the tools of modern philosophical logic.

There has been one recent monograph devoted exclusively to the analysis of ontological arguments: Dombrowski 2006. Dombrowski is a fan of Hartshorne: the aim of his book is to defend the claim that Hartshorne’s ontological argument is a success. While Dombrowski’s book is a useful addition to the literature because of the scope of its discussion of ontological arguments—for example, it contains a chapter on Rorty on ontological arguments, and another chapter on John Taylor on ontological arguments—even reviewers sympathetic to process theism have not been persuaded that it makes a strong case for its central thesis.

Szatkowski (2012) is a recent collection of papers on ontological arguments. A significant proportion of papers in this collection take up technical questions about logics that support ontological derivations. (Those interested in technical questions may also be interested in the topic taken up in Oppenheimer and Zalta (2011) and Gorbacz (2012).) The most recent collection is Oppy (2018).

Finally, there has been some activity in journals. The most significant of these pieces is Millican 2004, the first article on ontological arguments in recent memory to appear in Mind . Millican argues for a novel interpretation of Anselm’s argument, and for a new critique of ontological arguments deriving from this interpretation. Needless to say, both the interpretation and the critique are controversial, but they are also worthy of attention. Among other journal articles, perhaps the most interesting is Pruss 2010, which provides a novel defence of the key possibility premise in modal ontological arguments. There is also a chain of papers in Analysis initiated by Matthews and Baker (2010)

Relatively recent work on ontological arguments by women includes: Anscombe (1993), Antognazza (2018), Crocker (1972), Diamond (1977), Ferreira (1983), Garcia (2008), [Haight and] Haight (1970), [Matthews and] Baker (2011), Wilson (1978) and Zagzebski (1984).

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• Dombrowski, D., 2006, Rethinking the Ontological Argument: A Neoclassical Theistic Response , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Dummett, M., 1993, “Existence”, in The Seas of Language , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Everitt, N., 2004, The Non-Existence of God , London: Blackwell
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• Findlay, J., 1949, “Can God’s Existence Be Disproved?”, Mind , 57: 176–83.
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• Gorbacz, P., 2012, “PROVER9’s Simplification Explained Away”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 90: 585–96.
• Grey, W., 2000, “Gasking’s Proof”, Analysis , 60: 368–370.
• Haight, D. and Haight, M., 1974, “An Ontological Argument for the Devil”, Monist , 54: 218–20.
• Harrelson, K., 2009, The Ontological Argument from Descartes to Hegel , New York: Humanity Books.
• Hartshorne, C., 1965, Anselm’s Discovery: A Re-Examination of the Ontological Proof for God’s Existence , La Salle, IL: Open Court.
• Hazen, A., 1999, “On Gödel’s Ontological Proof”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 76: 361–377.
• Henle, P., 1961, “Uses of the Ontological Argument”, Philosophical Review , 70: 102–9.
• Hinst, P., 2014, “A Logical Analysis of the Main Argument in Chapter 2 of the Proslogion by Anselm of Canterbury”, Philosophiegeschichte Und Logische Analyse , 17: 22–44.
• Johnston, M., 1992, “Explanation, Response-Dependence, and Judgement-Dependence”, in P. Menzies (ed.), Response-Dependent Concepts , Canberra: ANU/RSSS Working Papers in Philosophy, 123–83.
• Kovacs, S., 2003, “Some Weakened Gödelian Ontological Systems”, Journal of Philosophical Logic , 32: 565–88.
• La Croix, R., 1972, Proslogion II and III: A Third Interpretation of Anselm’s Argument , Leiden: Brill.
• Leftow, B., 2005, “The Ontological Argument”, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion , W. Wainwright (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 80–115.
• Lewis, D., 1970, “Anselm and Actuality”, Noûs , 4: 175–88.
• Lowe, E., 2007, “The Ontological Argument”, in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion , P. Copan and C. Meister (eds.), London: Routledge.
• Malcolm, N., 1960, “Anselm’s Ontological Arguments”, Philosophical Review , 69: 41–62.
• Mann, W., 1972, “The Ontological Presuppositions of the Ontological Argument”, Review of Metaphysics , 26: 260–77.
• Matthews, G., 2005, “The Ontological Argument”, in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Religion , W. Mann (ed.), Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 81–102.
• Matthews, G., and Baker, L., 2010 “The Ontological Argument Simplified”, Analysis , 70: 210–212.
• Maydole, R., 2009, “The Ontological Argument”, in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology , W. Craig and J. Moreland (ed.), Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 553–592.
• Millican, P., 2004, “The One Fatal Flaw in Anselm’s Argument”, Mind , 113: 437–76.
• Oppenheimer, P., and Zalta, E., 1991, “On the Logic of the Ontological Argument”, in J. Tomberlin (ed.) Philosophical Perspectives 5: The Philosophy of Religion , Atascadero: Ridgeview, pp. 509–29 [ Preprint available online ].
• –––, 2011, “A Computationally-Discovered Simplification of the Ontological Argument”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 89: 333–349.
• Oppy, G., 1995, Ontological Arguments and Belief in God , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 1996, “Gödelian Ontological Arguments”, Analysis , 56: 226–230.
• –––, 2000, “Response to Gettings”, Analysis , 60: 363–367.
• –––, 2006, Arguing about Gods , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2007, “The Ontological Argument” in P. Copan and C. Meister (eds.), Philosophy of Religion: Classic and Contemporary Issues , Oxford: Blackwell.
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• Plantinga, A., 1967, God and Other Minds , Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• –––, 1974, The Nature of Necessity , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Priest, G., 2018, “Existence and Necessity”, in G. Oppy (ed.), Ontological Arguments , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 250–69.
• Pruss, A., 2009, “A Gödelian Ontological Argument Improved”, Religious Studies , 45: 347–353.
• –––, 2010,“The Ontological Argument and the Motivational Centres of Lives”, Religious Studies , 46: 233–249.
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• Rasmussen, J., 2018, “Plantinga”, in G. Oppy (ed.), Ontological Arguments , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 276–94.
• Redding, P. and Bubbio, P., 2014 “Hegel and the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God”, Religious Studies , 50: 465–86.
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• Salmon, N., 1987, “Existence”, in J. Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives 1: Metaphysics , Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview: 49–108.
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• Smart, J., 1955, “The Existence of God”, in A. Flew and A. MacIntyre (eds.), New Essays in Philosophical Theology , London: SCM Press: 500–509.
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• Sobel, J., 2004, Logic and Theism , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Smullyan, R., 1984, 5000 BC and Other Philosophical Fantasies , New York: St. Martins Press.
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• Wilson, M., 1978, “Immutable Natures and the Ontological Argument”, in Descartes London: Routledge, 172–6.
• Zagzebski, L., 1984, “Oakes’s New Modal Argument for the Existence of God”, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion , 20: 159–64.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Medieval Sourcebook: Philosophers’ Criticisms of Anslem’s Ontological Argument for the Being of God (Paul Halsell, Fordham University)
• Ontological Argument Revisited by Two Ottoman Muslim Scholars (Umit Dericioglu)
• The Ontological Argument (Kenneth Himma, University of Washington)
• Hegel and Kant on the Ontological Argument (Maria de Lourdes Borges, Federal University of Santa Catarina)
• Ontological Argument (links to papers on ontological arguments)
• “ Formalization, Mechanization and Automation of Gödel’s Proof of God’s Existence ”, unpublished manuscript.
• “ Automating Gödel’s Ontological Proof of God’s Existence with Higher-order Automated Theorem Provers ”, published in ECAI 2014, T. Schaub et al . (eds.), IOS Press.

Anselm of Canterbury [Anselm of Bec] | a priori justification and knowledge | Descartes, René | existence | God: and other ultimates | Gödel, Kurt | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich | Kant, Immanuel | logic: informal | logic: modal | Meinong, Alexius

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9 What is an Argument?

What is an argument.

This is an introductory textbook in logic and critical thinking. Both logic and critical thinking centrally involve the analysis and assessment of arguments. “Argument” is a word that has multiple distinct meanings, so it is important to be clear from the start about the sense of the word that is relevant to the study of logic. In one sense of the word, an argument is a heated exchange of differing views as in the following:

Sally: Abortion is morally wrong and those who think otherwise are seeking to justify murder!

Bob: Abortion is not morally wrong and those who think so are right-wing bigots who are seeking to impose their narrow-minded views on all the rest of us!

Sally and Bob are having an argument in this exchange. That is, they are each expressing conflicting views in a heated manner. However, that is not the sense of “argument” with which logic is concerned. Logic concerns a different sense of the word “argument.” An argument, in this sense, is a reason for thinking that a statement, claim or idea is true . For example:

Sally: Abortion is morally wrong because it is wrong to take the life of an innocent human being, and a fetus is an innocent human being.

In this example Sally has given an argument against the moral permissibility of abortion. That is, she has given us a reason for thinking that abortion is morally wrong. The conclusion of the argument is the first four words, “abortion is morally wrong.” But whereas in the first example Sally was simply asserting that abortion is wrong (and then trying to put down those who support it), in this example she is offering a reason for why abortion is wrong.

We can (and should) be more precise about our definition of an argument. But before we can do that, we need to introduce some further terminology that we will use in our definition. As I’ve already noted, the conclusion of Sally’s argument is that abortion is morally wrong. But the reason for thinking the conclusion is true is what we call the premise . So we have two parts of an argument: the premise and the conclusion. Typically, a conclusion will be supported by two or more premises. Both premises and conclusions are statements. A statement is a type of sentence that can be true or false and corresponds to the grammatical category of a “declarative sentence.” For example, the sentence,

The Nile is a river in northeastern Africa

is a statement. Why? Because it makes sense to inquire whether it is true or false. (In this case, it happens to be true.) But a sentence is still a statement even if it is false. For example, the sentence,

The Yangtze is a river in Japan

is still a statement; it is just a false statement (the Yangtze River is in China). In contrast, none of the following sentences are statements:

Please help yourself to more casserole

Don’t tell your mother about the surprise

Do you like Vietnamese pho?

The reason that none of these sentences are statements is that it doesn’t make sense to ask whether those sentences are true or false (rather, they are requests or commands, and questions, respectively).

So, to reiterate: all arguments are composed of premises and conclusions, which are both types of statements. The premises of the argument provide a reason for thinking that the conclusion is true. And arguments typically involve more than one premise.

A Brief Introduction to Philosophy Copyright © 2021 by Southern Alberta Institution of Technology (SAIT) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Argumentation in Philosophical Controversies

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• Published: 09 September 2022
• Volume 36 , pages 455–479, ( 2022 )

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Anyone interested in philosophical argumentation should be prepared to study philosophical debates and controversies because it is an intensely dialogical, and even contentious, genre of argumentation. There is hardly any other way to do them justice. This is the reason why the present special issue addresses philosophical argumentation within philosophical debates. Of the six articles in this special issue, one deals with a technical aspect, the diagramming of arguments, another contrasts two moments in philosophical argumentation, Antiquity and the twentieth century, focusing on the use of refutation, and the remaining four analyze particular philosophical controversies. The controversies analyzed differ significantly in their characteristics (time, extension, media, audience,…). Hopefully, this varied sample will illuminate some salient aspects of philosophical argumentation, its representation and variations throughout history. We are fully aware that, given the scarcity of previous studies of philosophical debates from the perspective of argumentation theory, the following specimens of analysis must have several shortcomings. But it is a well-known adage that the hardest part is the beginning. That is what we tried to achieve here, no more, but no less either.

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‘Philosophy was born in controversy and thrives on controversy’, says a recent author (Gracia 2004 , x), and we agree. In spite of this fact, disputes among philosophers have not often been subjected to the kind of analysis and evaluation which we are used to in argumentation theory. This special issue has the purpose to make a start by approaching this complex subject from multiple perspectives. The question we started from, suggested to us by the editor-in-chief of this journal, concerns the role of argumentation in philosophical controversies. We put this question to a number of scholars whom we knew to have an interest in the particular kind of dispute that philosophers get involved in; but we did not insist on this apparent implication, nor did we set any limits to the approach to be taken. The only condition was to choose one particular case and to relate their discussion to it. Some of the scholars we invited were sufficiently intrigued to accept to take part in this venture. Reading their work has prompted us to the following reflections.

1 Whence Can We Expect a Theory of Philosophical Argumentation?

Philosophy has the longest continuing history of argumentation and controversy in Western civilization. Footnote 1 Other disciplines or fields—medicine, law, rhetoric, history, mathematics—may be said to be equally old or even older than philosophy, but their practitioners hardly ever seriously consider what their ancestors wrote or thought. The history of philosophy is indeed full of accidents and detours, but it started about two and a half millennia ago and we are still at it; and, although some of its characters and some of its questions have faded away from time to time, they always have a knack for re-entering the philosophical conversation sooner or later.

From the beginning, philosophers have directed their acuity of mind towards the claims and arguments made by other philosophers as well as themselves. Footnote 2 For it was in philosophy that the very concepts of claim and argument were first invented; and it was philosophers who pioneered their analysis and evaluation. In that respect, we could say that philosophers have always had what Peirce called a logica utens —a theory of philosophical argumentation largely implicit in the different ways they have tried to analyze and evaluate philosophical claims and arguments. It is true that a few attempts at establishing the building blocks for a logica docens —an explicit theory of philosophical argumentation—have been made from time to time. Aristotle’s dialectics, Descartes’ celebrated method, Kant’s transcendental logic, Russell’s theory of definite descriptions, are good examples of that. However, none of them amounts to a theory of philosophical argumentation in the sense of the contemporary field of argumentation theory.

On the other hand, we must take into account that contemporary argumentation theory was born from the fear that modern state propaganda, the advertisement industry, and the increasing production of hoaxes, fake news, and conspiracy theories may have deleterious effects on the behaviour of citizens and voters in contemporary democracies. So, it was natural that the main efforts of argumentation theorists have thus far been mainly directed to argumentation in the mass media. Other areas of argumentative activity that have attracted some moderate interest from argumentation theorists are medicine and the law. Footnote 3 Yet philosophy has scarcely been a top priority in the agenda of argumentation theorists, apart from a few exceptions that will be mentioned later on. In any case, the main goal of this special issue is to exemplify some new tools and questions as they may be applied to the task of better understanding how philosophers argue.

2 Philosophy of Argumentation vs Philosophical Argumentation

Regarding the relations between philosophy and argumentation theory, there are two main foci of interest: philosophy of argumentation and philosophical argumentation.

Argumentation, like any other practice (education, technology, religion, sport, etc.), can be a subject for philosophical reflection, thus giving rise to a philosophy of argumentation. This raises the question of what the relationship of the philosophy of argumentation to argumentation theory should be. Wayne Brockriede considers these two labels interchangeable: “one necessary ingredient for developing a theory or philosophy of argument is the arguer himself” (Brockriede 1972 , 1, emphasis added). As is well known, informal logic was introduced in 1978 as a new philosophical discipline, recognized by the International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP) under the rubric of ‘philosophy of argumentation’ (Johnson and Blair 1980 , p 25–26). This identification of informal logic with the philosophy of argumentation has subsequently been insisted upon by authors such as Trudy Govier ( 1999 ) and David Hitchcock ( 2000 ). The philosophy of argumentation, finally, can also be understood as a second-order discipline, which reflects on argumentation theories, as does J. Anthony Blair:

This chapter is an essay in the philosophy of argument. It recommends a way of conceptualizing argument and argumentation. The goal is to construct a framework in terms of which various particular theories of argument can be seen to have their place, and the various controversies in the field of argument studies can be located. I argue that the recommended conceptualizations have the implication that some of the controversies have (Blair 2012a , b [2003], 171).

This special issue is not devoted to the philosophy of argumentation but to philosophical controversies—that is, to philosophical argumentation. Approaching philosophical argumentation from the theory of argumentation implies considering it as an argumentative practice among others, such as legal, political, medical, scientific, artistic, etc. argumentation. The assumption is that the practice of philosophical argumentation has certain characteristics of its own, although neither necessarily exclusive nor invariant over time. This is the focus of most of the contributions in this special issue on philosophical controversies.

The practice of philosophical argumentation can be addressed from a descriptive approach: ‘how do philosophers argue?’, or from a normative approach: ‘how should philosophers argue?’. The normative approach corresponds to what could be called ‘philosophical argumentation theory’. Indeed, for many authors, the adjective ‘philosophical’ is closely associated with the study of normativity:

So understood, Argumentation Theory would be the philosophical task of characterizing the normative activity of arguing and its underlying conception of argumentation goodness; and this transcendental conception of Argumentation Theory would be called to play a central role within epistemology, theories of rationality, and any other field in which normative concepts such as justification, rationality, reasons or reasonableness are pivotal. (Bermejo-Luque 2016 , 2; emphasis added).

All argumentative practices (practices in which asking for, giving, and examining reasons occupy a central position) are typically reflexive and self-regulating, but a feature that is often mentioned as characteristic of philosophical controversies is that they are frequently consciously argumentative. Thus, Shai Frogel insists that philosophical activity is characterized by the absence of unappealable criteria of justification and its simultaneous commitment to justification (2005, 5); Jonathan L. Cohen states that analytic philosophy is the reasoned discussion of what can be a reason for what, and deals with normative problems having to do with the rationality of judgments, attitudes, procedures and actions. (1986, 49); and Bermejo Luque contends that because philosophical practice is conducted, mostly, by arguments, suitable normative models for argumentation are necessary if philosophy is to achieve self-understanding and self-regulation. ( 2011 , 273–274).

What does it mean that philosophical activity is consciously argumentative? Practices are inherently normative, and the description of that internal normativity is part of the description of any practice. But the label 'theory of philosophical argumentation' points to a different claim, since that theory should provide the means to assess and improve the practice of philosophical argumentation (as Bermejo Luque emphasizes in the preceding paragraph). Paula Olmos ( 2019 ) distinguishes three levels of pragmatic explicitness in argumentative practices:

Implicit (tacit) normativity, displayed in argumentative behavior, entails the discursive recognition of tacit reasonable links and can be expressed in the normative use of analogies and counter-analogies that compare arguments. It is the most usual level in everyday argumentative practices, learned or acquired along with language.

Normativity expressed and discussed in the argumentative practice itself entails the explicitness and discussion of warrants , which involve the verbalization of the proposed link between reason and conclusion. Warrants are rules that embody standards of reasonableness in force in a community or in an argumentative practice. It is typical of specialized (even professional) argumentative practices, in which reference can be made to a more conscious regulation of such standards.

Criticism of the current normativity: on a more sophisticated and philosophical level, one can question (and eventually modify) the status quo of a certain current standard of rationality (or the discussion of the very existence of standards of rationality) on the basis of epistemic, ethical, etc . considerations . This implies a type of critical reception that we could call, in a certain sense, ‘meta-argumentative’ and that usually takes the form of addressing the general validity of certain types of argumentative links, trying either to justify or to attack such validity.

Although this issue is not devoted to the theory of philosophical argumentation in the sense explained above, some of Catarina Dutilh Novaes’ statements fall in its field: thus dialectic is especially suitable for the philosophical purpose of questioning the obvious, or the counterexample-based approach to philosophical refutation, can give rise to philosophical theorizing on subtle disputes.

3 Philosophers on Philosophical Argumentation—a Potted History

Although it can be argued that Socrates and Plato—and even Parmenides and Zeno before them—both argued in strikingly innovative ways and reflected deeply about those new and strange ways of arguing which we came to associate with the name of ‘philosophy’, it seems pretty certain that it was Aristotle, as a young man, who first developed an apparatus for the description, analysis, and evaluation of argumentation. At the end of his first tract on the subject, he claims:

That our programme has been adequately completed is clear. But we must not omit to notice what has happened in regard to this inquiry. For in the case of all discoveries the results of previous labours that have been handed down from others have been advanced bit by bit by those who have taken them on, whereas the original discoveries generally make an advance that is small at first though much more useful than the development which later springs out of them. (…) Of the present inquiry, on the other hand, it was not the case that part of the work had been thoroughly done before, while part had not. Nothing existed at all. ( On Sophistical Refutations , 183b15–36; tr. Pickard-Cambridge in Barnes 1984 )

This first tract addresses the practice, by certain skilled people (whom Plato gave the sobriquet of ‘sophists’ or know-it-alls), of making people contradict themselves by setting an argumentative trap for them. Note that people who were entrapped were perfectly aware that they had been tricked; but they did not know how those tricks and traps actually worked. What the young Aristotle provided was an analytic apparatus to do exactly that. From that starting point, he proceeded to develop, in a larger treatise, a general propaedeutic for philosophical dialogue. Here a description of its purposes:

It has three purposes—intellectual training, casual encounters, and the philosophical sciences. That it is useful as a training is obvious on the face of it. The possession of a plan of inquiry will enable us more easily to argue about the subject proposed. For purposes of casual encounters, it is useful because when we have counted up the opinions held by most people, we shall meet them on the ground not of other people’s convictions but of their own, shifting the ground of any argument that they appear to us to state unsoundly. For the study of the philosophical sciences it is useful, because the ability to puzzle on both sides of a subject will make us detect more easily the truth and error about the several points that arise. ( Topics , 101a25–36; tr. W.A. Pickard-Cambridge in Barnes 1984 , very slightly modified)

Aristotle’s model was the Socratic dialogue as depicted in Plato’s dialogue: each one of two interlocutors were assigned one of two roles: questioner or answerer; the questions to be asked could be open (many possible answers) or closed (one answer, yes or no); the range of the questions was fourfold: definition, genus, proprium or accident. To give an example: ‘what is the definition of X?’ would be an open question concerning definition; ‘is Y an accidental attribute of X or not?’ a closed question. Aristotle wanted to train questioners to put forward a sequence of questions such that the answerer would contradict himself; and to train answerers to answer them in such a way as to avoid falling into contradiction.

In a sense, the Topics are a counterpart to the earlier Sophistical Refutations . In fact, the Topics could be called On Socratic Refutations —it would deal with legitimate criticisms of the other’s claims and arguments as much as the earlier work dealt with the illegitimate entrapments of the ‘sophists’. Together, these two works are thus the first theory of philosophical argumentation. As such, its primary interest was practical—to train students to do it well, not to incur in illegitimate argumentation and to overcome the opponent by means of legitimate argumentation. It is important to notice that arguing was done by means of asking and answering questions, Footnote 4 much as experienced lawyers build their legal arguments by the cross-examination of witnesses. In fact, the inventor of the method, Socrates, sometimes refers to it in exactly that way, almost as though he had been inspired by lawyers’ practice.

At some point in his career, Aristotle came to think that, if dialectics, as codified in the above two works, was a useful propaedeutic for the acquisition of proper scientific knowledge, dealing with merely probable or widely shared opinion, then there was room for a different discipline, dealing directly with the form of scientific knowledge itself. Thus was born what he called ‘analytic’ and we call ‘logic’, more precisely ‘syllogistic logic’. Footnote 5 The status of this extraordinary Aristotelian invention is a controversial matter, which we cannot do justice to here. What we can say is that neither syllogistic logic nor its successors—from Stoic propositional logic to modern mathematical logic—can claim to be a theory of argumentation, philosophical or non-philosophical.

As is well known, Christian theology has a long history of disputation concerning the correct interpretation of Scripture. How much this practice owes to the dialectical tradition of the various Greek philosophical schools is difficult to ascertain; but the fact that Boethius did translate all of Aristotle’s ‘logical’ works into Latin and wrote extensive commentaries on them is an indication that such a connection is likely. Footnote 6 However that may be, the Middle Ages inaugurated a new method, the so-called ‘scholastic method’ (Grabmann 1909 ), at whose centre was the quaestio . This was both a research method and a method for the organization of knowledge. It was used in all four faculties: the lower, or philosophical faculty, as well as the three higher ones—theology, law, medicine (Lawn 1993 ). At its core was a closed question, ‘whether something is the case or not’, having only two possible answers, ‘yes, it is the case’ and ‘no, it is not the case’. A master assigned two groups of students the task of finding arguments, one group for the affirmative, another for the negative. Footnote 7 Then a meeting was convened in which the two groups presented their findings. The master then engaged in a usually very sophisticated and often long argumentation chain, weighing up the merits and demerits of each side and deciding which was right or whether the truth was somehow divided between the two positions.

Naturally enough, this argumentation involved drawing a certain number of distinctions, some consecrated by tradition, some new. Good disputations of this kind were attended by a public of students and scholars, many of them travelling from other universities, so that the results of disputations were widely shared in the ‘republic of letters’. Thus, a body of knowledge consisting of these materials slowly accumulated, so that from time to time an adventurous thinker took it upon himself to produce a summa of such ‘questions’, a kind of companion or handbook for use by scholars and students in the whole learned world. An egregious exemplar of this kind of writing, perhaps the most important one, is the Summa Theologiae by Thomas Aquinas (Grabmann 1919 ; McGinn 2014 ). In this extraordinary book we can distinguish the main features of the art of summary: a variable number of closed questions, called articuli , have to be collected together as jointly throwing light on one general problem (say, the ends of man); such a general problem was called a quaestio , which sometimes, but by no means always, can be straightforwardly expressed as an open question. Thus, Aquinas’ Summa contains about 600 quaestiones , which are again grouped together in four unequal parts, sharing a common theme. All in all, the Summa discusses over 2500 closed questions in as many articuli . The art of the summa represents a logic utens , an implicit theory of argumentation whose three main components are: the reduction of general problems to closed questions; the marshalling of arguments in favour of one or the other alternative expressed in those closed questions; and a deployment of concepts, claims, definitions, distinctions, and arguments to decide to which alternative belong the strongest reasons.

What we do not have in a summa or in any other book made up of quaestiones is an explicit theory of argumentation that would describe and support the procedure followed in thus organizing the material.

Early modern Europe may be said to start when Bacon, Hobbes, and Descartes vehemently argued that medieval ‘logic’—as taught explicitly in ‘logical’ treatises or presumably as evinced in the literary genre of quaestiones —was a sterile enterprise, only capable of arranging already known truths but utterly unable to help us find new ones, and in addition full of strange words with dubious meanings. Instead, they started a new project, namely, to identify the sources and limitations of our knowledge, and to spell out the method that we should follow in order to attain new knowledge from those sources without trespassing the limits of what we can know. Footnote 8 This project of modernity has haunted us ever since, giving birth to one philosophical school after another up to the present day. Has this project also managed to produce a theory of philosophical argumentation? At most it can be said to have provided us with pointers in certain directions: the importance of induction as well as its troubles (Bacon, Hume, Whewell, logical positivism), the seductions of mathematical proof (Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Frege, Russell), the need to recognize something like ‘transcendental arguments’ (Kant, Husserl, contemporary analytic and ‘Continental’ philosophy), the occasional attacks on certain forms of argumentation (e.g. the four ‘idols’, the is–ought problem, the ‘naturalistic’ fallacy, the ‘verification’ principle). However, a few swallows do not make a spring; and a few aperçus do not make a theory.

On the other hand, along the twentieth century we can recognize a few adventurous spirits who did try at least to sketch a theory of philosophical argumentation: Leonard Nelson ( 1921 /2016), Robin G. Collingwood ( 1933 , 1939 , 1940 ), Chaïm Perelman ( 1945 , 1949 , 1958 /1969), Henry W. Johnstone, Jr. ( 1959 , 1978 ), Nicholas Rescher ( 1978 , 1987 , 2009 ), Lawrence H. Powers ( 1995 ). However, all of them, as far as we can tell, have failed to attract followers who would develop a proper theory from their valuable insights. Footnote 9 What we do have instead is an entirely new field—argumentation studies and, within it, argumentation theory—that did not emerge from philosophy, nor has it been recognized as part of philosophy. It is to this field that we now turn our attention; but we can perhaps anticipate the main points: argumentation theory is a field on its own that has a clear agenda and a healthy variety of views; philosophers are certainly part of the effort, together with academics of other areas (law, communication, linguistics, rhetoric, debating, critical thinking, cognitive science, social science), but argumentation theory is not a part of philosophy; the theory can and should be applied to all sorts of argumentation, including the philosophical; so, philosophy is just one more area of application of the concepts and methods of argumentation theory; if philosophy, or any other area of application for that matter, has certain special properties, then the application should be carefully adapted to them.

4 The New Field of Argumentation Theory

Argumentation theory was born from a specific theoretical challenge, issued by the Australian logician Charles L. Hamblin in his book Fallacies (1970). Before this book, people interested in the analysis and evaluation of arguments had made a fairly uncritical use of the term ‘fallacy’—unclearly defined and often inconsistent with the actual example of fallacies identified—a congeries of ill-assorted cases that started more or less with a selection from Aristotle’s list in On Sophistical Refutations and adding all kinds of new specimens along the way. Hamblin described what he called ‘the standard treatment’ and showed beyond reasonable doubt that it was theoretically bankrupt. Now, given that the standard treatment of fallacies was the main, if not indeed the sole weapon in separating good from bad arguments (bad arguments being those that committed fallacies), Hamblin’s demonstration was a direct and peremptory challenge to all people interested in evaluating arguments to take thought and come up with something better.

What the decade 1972–1982 brought us was a set of four responses to Hamblin’s challenge. Each response followed a different strategy; and together they created the contemporary field of argumentation theory, which can thus be said to be exactly a half-century old. Footnote 10

Starting in 1972, the Canadian philosophers John Woods and Douglas Walton followed a ‘divide and rule’ strategy, i.e., instead of seeking a general theory of fallacies, they tried to formulate a particular theory for each fallacy, relying either on classical formal logic or on some non-classical system. They pursued this strategy since 1972 and continued to collaborate on it for ten consecutive years. To crown this theoretical activity, they published together a handbook providing methods for the evaluation of arguments according to the logical perspective (Woods and Walton 1982 ). Then each author has gone his own way, Walton moving steadily towards informal logic and artificial argumentation, Woods towards cognitive science and non-classical logics. The very important collection of pioneering articles that emerged from that decade-long collaboration can be conveniently consulted in Woods and Walton ( 1989 ).

The Canadian philosophers Ralph H. Johnson and J. Anthony Blair followed a very different strategy, designing and refining a systematic method of evaluation by means of three new criteria: acceptability (of the premises of an argument), relevance (of the premises relative to the conclusion) and sufficiency (of the premises to affirm the conclusion based on them). With their 1977 book Logical Self-Defense , the project known as ‘informal logic’ was born (more information in Walton and Brinton 1997 ; Puppo 2019 ). Although these three criteria have given rise to a long debate as to their appropriateness and status, the fact of the matter is that one can either redefine fallacies (as argumentative moves that fail to fulfil them) or, alternatively, one can just forego all talk of fallacies and simply use the criteria directly to evaluate the arguments on offer.

In 1978, two young Dutch academics, Frans H. van Eemeren (a linguist specialising in pragmatics), and Rob Grootendorst (a student of communication) started doing research on argumentation. In good old European tradition, they first concentrated on the history of the problems, but they did so only in order patiently to build a systematic inquiry. This culminated, in 1982, in the invention of ‘pragma-dialectics’, a theory that unites two perspectives: ( a ) the study of the speech acts involved in the various operations that arguers carry out during a discussion, ( b ) the identification of the constitutive rules that allow those speech acts to resolve an initial difference of opinion. Within this theoretical framework, traditional fallacies are revealed to be violations of the rules of a critical discussion, and those rules in their turn open the way to define hitherto unidentified types of fallacy. A whole research programme was thus launched that continues to this day. A recent survey is in van Eemeren ( 2018 ).

Finally, in 1979, the Canadian philosopher Michael Gilbert published How to Win an Argument . Note that this blockbuster title is not the author’s own but was devised by the publisher for commercial purposes; it easily misleads the reader into believing that Gilbert’s book belongs to the self-help shelves, while it is in fact a very innovative theoretical proposal; all the same, the title already hints that the target of Gilbert’s theorising is not the logician’s argument—say, a set of premises and conclusions—but rather the argument as a discussion between two interlocutors. In fact, we can summarise Gilbert’s proposal as making three points: ( a ) the most important and frequent discussions—’arguments’—among human beings are the ones we have every day, with other members of our respective families, our fellow students, our colleagues and bosses at work, our close friends, our neighbours; ( b ) those discussions have several dimensions, i.e. they are not exhausted by the orderly and ‘logical’ aspects that tend to absorb the interest of other theorists, but on the contrary they have ‘non-logical’ aspects or dimensions, among which emotions, the physical embodiment, in particular, the use of the body, and the appeal to intuitions and hunches stand out; ( c ) we cannot evaluate arguments if we rest content with the purely logical view, so that, if we are to speak of fallacies, we must extend this concept in non-logical directions.

5 Two Broad Types of Argumentation Theory

This is as good a place as any to distinguish two broad types of argumentation theory. Notice that the first two theoretical strategies described above (Woods-Walton and Johnson-Blair) focus on arguments in the logician’s sense, i.e., they follow the classical tendency to extract them from the argumentative conversations or texts in which we detect their presence and consider them in isolation. Naturally enough, the conversation or text in which such arguments occur always contains much else, which is considered, from both perspectives, as irrelevant and disposable—‘clutter’ in Johnson’s useful terminology (Johnson 2014 , p 64–65, 70, 84, 116). In contrast, the other two theoretical strategies (van Eemeren-Grootendorst and Gilbert) start from complex communicative situations, which we can call ‘discussions’ (or ‘arguments’ in the other sense of the word). Here, we do not consider a priori that there are irrelevant or disposable elements. On the contrary, whatever the arguers say or do can in principle be important for the proper understanding of the whole argumentative process. We can therefore say that the first two founding initiatives of the field of argumentation theory, born respectively in 1972 and 1977, propose theories of arguments in the narrow sense, while the last two initiatives, from 1978 and 1979, propose rather theories of discussion or of the argumentative process. (On the distinction between types of argumentation theory, the interested reader can consult Leal and Marraud 2022 , Chapter 2).

Before going on with our story, it is useful to distinguish between four areas of communicative activity in which argumentation plays a role. First, we have private argumentation, taking place in everyday life among all sorts of people: we argue with our family and friends, but also on occasion with strangers we meet by chance or in the course of our daily activities, such as shopping, asking for directions, riding on public means of transport, and so on. Then, we have public argumentation. This is the realm of democratic discussion, in canvassing, political meetings, or in the mass media or increasingly in the social media. Further, we have professional argumentation, done by lawyers in court or with a client, by physicians among themselves (e.g., in differential diagnosis or ‘doing the rounds’ in a hospital) or with a patient, by architects, engineers, administrators, managers, and so on in construction sites, business meetings, and whatnot. Finally, we have academic argumentation, that takes place in universities, colleges, research institutes, scientific conferences, laboratories, and so on. We can say that these four areas are located along an axis of increasing specialisation in knowledge and jargon, where private argumentation is at the least and academic argumentation at the most specialised pole. In public argumentation we find some amount of specialisation in comparison with private argumentation; and that modest amount comes invariably from the professional and the academic spheres (cf. Goodnight 1982 ). Given that professional have to talk to laypeople all the time, their argumentative activities are less specialised than those of the academics, who only talk among themselves.

Why should this be important? It is because, for a variety of reason having to do with the fact that argumentation theory was born in democratic countries, most theorists have been mainly preoccupied with private and public argumentation, as anybody looking into the books and papers written in half a century of theorising can confirm. It is true that there is an increasing interest in at least two areas of professional argumentation. One is the law, which has its own tradition of thinking about argumentation; and the other is medicine or rather the health care professions in general (including nursing and clinical psychology), especially since the advent of the movements for bioethics and evidence-based clinical practice. As far as we are aware, there is little, if any, work done in relation to other professional fields. This leaves us with academic argumentation, which is practically a virgin field. Academics, of course, are reflective people who have thought harder and written more than anyone on problems having to do with argumentation in their fields. Philosophy is just one patch within this large area; and philosophers have conducted the longest conversation on this topic in the history of the West. This fact probably induces many academics and most philosophers to be sceptical about the contribution that argumentation theory can make to the analysis and evaluation of their argumentative activities. But here, as in all questions of the same sort, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Let us then consider the papers we managed to collect for this special issue.

6 Argumentative Styles in Philosophical Argumentation

Of the six articles that make up this special issue, one deals with a technical aspect, the diagramming of arguments, another contrasts two moments in philosophical argumentation, Antiquity and the twentieth century, focusing on the use of refutation, and the remaining four analyse particular philosophical controversies. The controversies analysed differ significantly in various ways, as set forth in Table 1 .

Hopefully, this variety will go some ways toward representing philosophical argumentation throughout history. Now for the details.

Shai Frogel, in ‘Bramhall versus Hobbes: the Rhetoric of Religion vs. the Rhetoric of Philosophy’, analyzes the debate between Thomas Hobbes and John Bramhall, bishop of Derry, on Liberty and Necessity. Frogel in his well-known The Rhetoric of Philosophy ( 2005 ) had characterized philosophical activity by two main features: the absence of definitive criteria of justification along with a commitment to justification, and the search for truth. These characteristics, which explain the distinctive features of philosophical argumentation, Frogel argued, recommend studying it from a rhetorical perspective, rather than from a logical perspective: “Rhetoric, which dealing with arguments whose validity is not derived from pre-determined criteria, can provide significant tools for an understanding of intellectual activity one of whose two fundamental characteristics is the absence of definitive criteria of justification along with a commitment to justification.” ( o cit ., 5–6).

Frogel had already claimed in the same book that when philosophy is subjected to binding criteria of justification, it stops being philosophy and turns into science or religion ( op. cit. , 7), and the debate between Hobbes and Bramhall, which he presents as a debate between the rhetoric of philosophy (or ‘the rhetoric of The Truth ’) and the rhetoric of religion, provides him with the opportunity to deepen this contrast between two argumentative styles.

Table 2 summarizes the distinguishing characteristics of the rhetoric of philosophy versus the rhetoric of religion, according to Frogel.

As a consequence of these profound divergences, philosophy cannot accept the validity of the arguments of religion, supported on the authority of scripture and not on human understanding. And, conversely, religion cannot accept the validity of the arguments of philosophy, which appeal to human understanding and not on the authority of scripture. We are therefore faced with a non-normal argumentative exchange, in the sense of Fogelin, with a lack of shared procedures for resolving disagreements ( 2005 /1985, 6). What then is the point of Bramhall and Hobbes’ argumentative exchange? Frogel’s response is that the value of controversies that confront incompatible types of rhetoric (or argumentative styles) is that they force opponents to address issues they would not otherwise take into consideration. Thus, Archbishop Bramhall forces Hobbes to contemplate the moral and religious implications of his view, and the philosopher Hobbes forces Bramhall to rethink his most fundamental dogmas more logically and independently. Interestingly enough, in ‘Is Natural Selection in Trouble? When Emotions Run High in a Philosophical Debate’ Fernando Leal also detects, in the controversy between Fodor and other scholars regarding the theory of natural selection, a discussion in which the theoretical question of the truth or falsity of a hypothesis and the practical question of its pernicious consequences for society are intertwined and overlapped.

Many of the features that Frogel identifies as distinctive to philosophical argumentation reappear in ‘Two types of refutation in philosophical argumentation’. Specifically, Catarina Dutilh Novaes points out that philosophical inquiry often consists in questioning the obvious and stresses the significance of refutation in philosophical inquiry. While in most scientific disciplines, empirical testing is the quintessential way to criticize or disprove scientific claims, in philosophy this functional task is primarily fulfilled by argumentative refutations. To these features, she adds that philosophical argumentation draws on more general, all-purpose socio-cognitive skills, than other argumentative practices, and a comparatively low tolerance for exceptions.

To show the significance of practices of refutation in philosophical inquiry Dutilh Novaes examines their place in ancient Greek dialectic and in the twentieth century debate on the analysis of knowledge as it developed after Gettier’s influential critique. Dutilh Novaes argues that the main difference between these two types of refutation is that in ancient dialectic it is primarily a person who is refuted while in analytic philosophy refutation aims primarily at claims and definitions. Dutilh Novaes concludes that, in general, dialectics allows a more fruitful approach to philosophical refutation than the method of counterexamples of analytical philosophy. Footnote 11 Finally, she suggests that Lakatos’s account of proofs and refutations in mathematics offers an appropriate theoretical framework for exploring the dynamics of refutations and counterexamples in philosophical argumentation.

Ancient dialectic consists in conversations following a systematic structure: verbal matches between two interlocutors, a questioner and an answerer, in front of an audience, possibly with a referee or judge. Questioner and answerer are adversaries that cooperate to check the overall coherence of the answerer’s beliefs, to refine and improve her views and positions. This division of labor allows one to refine and improve one’s views and positions through critical scrutiny and produces significant epistemic improvement; either through a re-evaluation of one’s beliefs (in the Socratic dialectic) or through an exploration of what follows from different discursive commitments (in the Aristotelian dialectic).

We thus find in ancient dialectics the main features that Frogel and Dutilh Novaes ascribe to philosophical argumentation:

truth-conduciveness ensured by adversariality and cooperation between questioner and answerer;

questioning as a method for bringing out the commitments of the interlocutor;

systematic use of refutation or elenchus to test of the overall coherence of a person’s beliefs.

As a contrast to ancient dialectics, Dutilh Novaes chooses the controversy over the characterization of knowledge that began in 1963 with the publication of ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’, by Edmund Gettier, and extends to the present day in a torrent of publications facetiously known as ‘Gettierology’ (for recent surveys see Hetherington 2016 , 2019 ). Certainly, this controversy is very different from those of ancient dialectics, which were developed through the oral communication of a small number of participants, over a limited and relatively short period of time. The controversy about the nature of knowledge that Gettier triggers is fundamentally developed in a written medium, over (for the moment) 60 years, and with an indeterminate number of participants. Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it as a network of controversies connected to each other in various ways.

Although refutation continues to play a fundamental role in contemporary philosophical controversies, it now consists of presenting counterexamples, based on our intuitions, to a definition or a statement. This refutation procedure reveals the influence of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy. On the one hand, the use of counterexamples to refute strict generalizations reveals the influence of mathematical logic and mathematical modes of argument, stemming from Bertrand Russell. On the other hand, the role of intuitions is an inheritance of G. E. Moore’s vindication of common sense. In fact, the debate on the nature of knowledge starts with a proposed definition (to know something consists in justifiably believing something true), continues with the formulation of imaginary counterexamples, to which one can reply either by modifying the proposed definition or by trying to show that they are not really counterexamples: “Various iterations of these epicycles ensued, yielding increasingly convoluted new analyses of knowledge, which in turn gave rise to new, often far-fetched counterexamples to the new proposals.”

Dutilh Novaes identifies three weaknesses in the counterexample method:

These extremely implausible scenarios may say very little about notions of knowledge that are relevant to everyday life experiences.

Our intuitions about what should or should not be counted as knowledge in these unlikely scenarios may be less than reliable.

The assumption that an analysis of knowledge must give the exact scope of the concept, allowing no exceptions, alienates philosophical argumentation from more familiar argumentative practices.

While this may be consistent with the idea that philosophy should defy common sense, it also confers on philosophical argumentation characters that distance it from everyday argumentation, with the risk of becoming “hairsplitting disputes over overly abstract, ethereal issues by means of fanciful examples and strange thought experiments”.

In the final part of ‘Two types of refutation in philosophical argumentation’, Dutilh Novaes proposes to draw inspiration from Lakatos’ Proofs and Refutations, conceived to discuss the dynamics of argumentation in mathematics, to have a systematic description of the dynamics between arguments, refutations, and counterexamples in philosophy, or at least in those areas of philosophy significantly influenced by mathematical reasoning. In addition, moving from description to prescription, Proofs and Refutations can provide guidelines for correctly using the counterexample method of analytic philosophy while avoiding its weaknesses.

Dutilh Novaes presents Lakatos’s distinctions, concepts, and rules, and illustrates them with reference to the polemic on the analysis of knowledge. She devotes special attention to the Lakatosian typology of responses to counterexamples: surrender response, monster-barring response, exception-barring response, and lemma-incorporation response . She contends that the occasional use of monster exclusion to dismiss far-fetched counterexamples, which Lakatos discourages in mathematics, would allow philosophical inquiry to remain adequately connected to human experiences while still questioning the obvious.

The conclusion that “Lakatos’ rules for the method of proofs and refutations provide sensible guidance also for philosophical inquiry” is, however, ambiguous. Dutilh Novaes’ starting point was that these rules allowed a good description of the way in which philosophical argumentation actually takes place, but the point of arrival seems to be that these rules would help to improve it and should be followed by philosophers.

7 Three Philosophical Controversies Analyzed

Frogel and Dutilh Novaes’ contributions evoke a starkly rational image of philosophical argumentation: a search for Truth through argument and refutation, which takes nothing for granted. By contrast, the three articles in this issue that analyze particular philosophical controversies highlight their emotional charge, manifested in ironies, biased interpretations, disqualifications and even insults. It seems implausible that this coincidence, in three very different debates, can be explained only by the more or less bilious nature of some of the protagonists. Regardless of their theoretical or metaphilosophical merits, the three papers offer a detailed, almost step-by-step analysis of philosophical controversies, whose rarity is valuable in its own right.

Joaquín Galindo’s article, ‘Primatologists and Philosophers debate on the Question of the Origin of Morality’, is, among other things, a dialectical analysis of the pitfalls of cross-disciplinary disagreement. He analyzes the Tanner Lectures given by Frans de Waal in 2003, the comments by Robert Wright, science journalist, and the philosophers Christine M. Korsgaard, Philip Kitcher and Peter Singer, as well as Frans de Waal’s responses. Galindo is struck by the fact that de Waal does not take the detailed criticism of the philosophers seriously, adopting instead a mocking attitude. Galindo conjectures that this may be a fairly common reaction to some maneuvers that are more frequent in philosophical argumentation than in other fields. Philosophers often argue at length that a point of view or a question is inane, that certain statements are mere “nonsense”, “vacuous”, “uninformative”, “not a real explanation”, or that a certain argument “does not constitute a proof”, “is not a real justification”, etc. This reveals, in Galindo’s opinion, that philosophers’ arguments fulfill strategic functions that go beyond the justification of claims or the assessment of reasons. Galindo labels these additional functions as “strategic uses”. Examples of strategic uses include focusing the discussion on certain problems or refining a thesis to situate and contrast it with another family of theses and questions.

The need to capture this dual function of philosophical argumentation leads to a two-level analysis. On the one hand, it is necessary to pay attention to the macroargument that integrates the arguments of the parts, along the lines of argument dialectics (Leal and Marraud 2022 , 327 and 347), and on the other, to the sequence of connected actions of the participants, conducting a dialogical analysis (Walton and Krabbe 1995 ). The description of this sequence of actions is made in terms of dialectical operations, which Galindo describes in detail, grouping them into four categories: starting and reformulation operations; requests for concatenation and warrant; counterconsiderations and counterargumentations; and structural strategic operations. The successive application of these operations forms “dialectical sequences”, which make it possible to capture the strategic uses of philosophical argumentation.

Thus, according to Galindo, in his comments to De Waal, Korsgaard follows an erotetic strategy, Kitcher an exploratory strategy, and Singer a self-refuting strategy. These strategies, and the corresponding dialectical sequences, can be considered typical of philosophical argumentation. Erotetical strategies dismiss questions that were previously regarded as appropriate to redirect the debate to other questions of greater philosophical interest. Erotetical strategies seek, in general, to change a presumption for or against one question, as it happens with philosophical questions that challenge common sense presumptions.

Kitcher’s exploratory strategy seeks “to focus the position more precisely by articulating a particular version of what de Waal might have in mind” (De Waal, 2006 , 121). Notice that this clarificatory version of the opponent’s argument is distinct from the four versions of an argument distinguished by Joseph Wenzel ( 2006 /1990, 17): the version in the mind of the speaker, the version overtly expressed in discourse, the version formed in the mind of the hearer, and the version reconstructed by the logician for purposes of examination.

Self-refutation strategies are closely connected with Frogel’s ad hominem arguments and the elenchus of ancient dialectics. However, according to Galindo, the type of inconsistency pursued in self-refutation strategies does not consist in showing that the opponent held ‘p’ and ‘not p’ at different times, nor in showing that his claims imply the assertion of a logical contradiction, but that, if the opponent were to apply what he holds to his own thesis, he would find it to be false. It is therefore not a logical inconsistency, but a deontic-praxiologic inconsistency, in the sense of Woods and Walton ( 1989 , 63), as it contravenes the precept that a man must practice what he preaches.

Just as de Waal does not take seriously the detailed criticism of the philosophers, the participants in the debate on Darwin’s theory of natural selection held in The London Review of Books in 2007–2008, analyzed by Fernando Leal, insult the opponent, accuse him of being ignorant, confused and mistaken, patronize him, and ignore relevant parts of his argument. In traditional terms, the debate is riddled with fallacies. However, the participants are high powered academics. This leads Leal to reject an explanation of the behavior of Fodor and his critics in terms of fallacies. Instead, Leal proposes to use Michael Gilbert’s ( 1994 ) concept of ‘emotional argument’: the seemingly fallacious arguments are in fact emotional arguments. Gilbert defined emotional arguments as “arguments that rely more or less heavily on the use and expression of emotion.” (Gilbert 1997 , 83).

Leal’s explanation differs from Galindo’s, although it also involves two levels of discussion. “Behind the highly intellectual question ostensibly being discussed there lurks a different one which is more obviously emotionally charged”. Although what appears to be under discussion is a theoretical issue—viz., whether the theory of natural selection is true or not— behind there is a practical question as to whether the theory of natural selection can, or should, be criticized in a non-specialist environment. On the one hand, it could give ammunition to Christian fundamentalists who want evolution banned from schools; on the other hand, the harmful effects on society of the wild speculations of evolutionary psychologists should not be underestimated. Leal maintains that the emotional argumentation indulged in by critics was the only way in which they could have discussed the practical question behind the theoretical one. It could be understood that the emotional arguments play strategic functions that go beyond the justification of claims or the evaluation of reasons, in which case Galindo’s and Leal’s explanations of the apparently fallacious behavior of the debaters would converge with each other.

We have labeled the question of whether or not the theory of natural selection is true a theoretical question, pertaining to the domain of theoretical reasoning or argumentation, and the question of whether the possible weaknesses of natural selection can, or should, be addressed in non-specialized journals aimed at the general educated public a practical one, pertaining to the realm of practical reasoning or argumentation. But in addition, the discussion about the first question seems to recommend the analyst’s adoption of a logical perspective (cf. Wenzel 2006 /1990, 16: “the ultimate logical question in a particular case is: Shall we accept this claim on the basis of the reasons put forward in support of it?”), while the debate on the second question suggests a dialectical perspective ( ibid .: “On the simplest level, the dialectical perspective may come into play whenever we apply critical concepts like fairness, honesty, and the like to ordinary natural interactions”). It makes perfect sense, then, that in the concluding stage of his reply to the first round of criticisms, Fodor states a series of general morals , concerning certain failures in discussion, that Leal interprets as rules of discussion concerning how to resolve a difference of opinion on the status of the theory of natural selection.

As already mentioned, the discussion on the a fortiori and the universal is a succession of notes published in Mind over 20 years and involved several scholars. To analyze the resulting polylogue, Hubert Marraud, following Kerbrat-Orecchioni ( 2004 , 4–6), distinguishes between turns, which correspond to the successive notes, and moves, which correspond to the argumentative actions performed in each note. In the controversy analyzed by Marraud we find, as in those analyzed by Galindo and Leal, the typical complications and difficulties of polylogues: variability in alternation patterns, general lack of balance in floor-holding, violations of speaker-selection rules, coalitions among participants, crosstalk, …

Although in the controversy about the a fortiori and the universal there are also disqualifications and insults among the participants, in ‘An Unconscious universal in the mind is like an immaterial dinner in the stomach’, Marraud does not aim at explaining their presence through the debate, but rather at measuring in some way the level of interaction among the participants. To do so, he uses the distinction proposed by J. Anthony Blair ( 2012a , b /1998) between engaged dialogues, quasi-engaged dialogues and non-engaged dialogues. When a party in a dialogue is permitted to offer, and in turn support, several lines of argumentation for a standpoint, it is no longer responding to a single question or challenge from the other party. That opens the possibility of quasi-engaged or non-engaged dialogues. In a quasi-engaged dialogue there is no communication between the participants about their respective counterarguments to the other’s case, and in a non-engaged dialogue, the participants conduct a dialogue only in the sense that they defend opposing positions on the same issue, but, except incidentally, they do not argue for or against, or question, each other’s arguments. Marraud’s analysis of the controversy on the a priori and the universal confirms Blair’s hypothesis that journal papers and scholarly monographs can be analyzed as turns in non-engaged or quasi-engaged dialogues. Galindo’s remarks on the pitfalls in the debate on the Question of the Origin of Morality, and Leal’s table on the omissions in criticisms of Fodor’s target paper in the Darwinism controversy also support Blair’s conjecture.

Another aspect of interest of Marraud’s contribution is that the controversy about the a fortiori and the universal, which his protagonists raise as a discussion in logic , is here interpreted as a discussion about particularism and generalism in the theory of argument . Generalism in the theory of argument claims that the very possibility of arguing depends on a suitable supply of general rules that specify what kinds of conclusions can be drawn from what kinds of data, while particularism denies this. The paradigm of such general principles are Toulmin’s warrants. According to Marraud, in the debate on the a fortiori and the universal Mercier and Schiller take the side of particularism, as opposed to Shelton, Pickard-Cambridge, Sidgwick, Turner and Mayo, who defend generalism, the predominant position today and at that time.

8 Representing Philosophical Argumentation

In ‘Representing the Structure of a Debate’ Maralee Harrell discusses, based on her teaching experience, the various tools and methods for graphically representing a debate, illustrating them with passages from the Russell and Copleston debate on the argument from contingency. The result is a good survey paper of argumentation diagramming methods and a well-founded assessment of their merits and demerits. Her conclusion is that “there is not, but needs to be, a good way to represent argumentative debates in a way that neither obscures the essential details of the exchange nor becomes too unwieldy to extract a sense of the overall debate.” To reach that conclusion, Harrell examines three types of diagramming methods: traditional box-and-arrow systems, systems deriving from Dung’s abstract argumentation framework, and mixed systems, with two levels of representation.

Although much has been written about the polysemy of the term ‘argument’, that of related terms such as ‘argumentation’ or ‘debate’ has gone more unnoticed. ‘Argumentation’ can refer either to a succession of connected actions of several agents, who ask questions, respond, ask for clarification, etc. or to a kind of interactively constructed macro-argument that integrates the arguments of the parts. In the first case, what needs to be diagrammed are the relationships between the actions of the participants; in the second, the relationships between the arguments and counterarguments of the participants. The difference is clearly seen in ‘Primatologists and Philosophers debate on the Question of the Origin of Morality’, by Joaquín Galindo, in which two different types of diagrams are used. Harrell is interested in diagramming the macro-argument that emerges from an argumentative exchange or debate.

Harrell first examines the box-and-arrow argumentation diagramming methods. Her criticism of these methods is twofold:

They do not allow to represent complex arguments in a perspicuous way. “After 25 boxes, the usefulness of the diagrams to visualize and understand as a cohesive whole seems to deteriorate.”

Nor do they allow us to account for the relationships between arguments, or as the author puts it, a box and arrow diagrams “doesn’t really capture the essence of the flow of the debate, physically keeping the objections and replies apart.”

The latter criticism is revelatory of the polysemy pointed out in the previous paragraph. Terms such as ‘flow’ or ‘replies’ point to argumentative processes or exchanges between two or more agents, while ‘objection’ points rather to the abstract structure (inter-argumentative relationships) of the complex argument interactively constructed by the participants.

While box and arrow methods of argument diagramming focus on representing inferential relations between statements (intra-argumentative relations), debate diagramming methods focus on representing relations between arguments (inter-argumentative relations). Debate diagramming methods, as Harrell points out, derive from Dung’s abstract argumentation framework (AAF). A characteristic feature of AAF is that it ignores the internal structure of arguments and takes as the only, or at least the basic, relationship between arguments that of attack. The author formulates two criticisms of AAF-like debate diagramming methods:

An argument should not be accepted or rejected depending on whether it has been attacked by some counterargument, but on the truth of its premises and the strength of the support they provide for the conclusion.

AAF-like debate diagramming methods equate “winning” a debate with making the best case for a particular conclusion, an equivalence rejected by the majority of critical thinking textbooks.

The first criticism reveals a disagreement between a qualitative and context-independent conception of logical properties, defended by Harrell and the critical thinking community, and a comparative and context-dependent conception, incorporated by the Dung-style diagramming systems. The second criticism claims the right of the logician to evaluate, from outside the debate, the logical quality of the arguments offered in it.

Robert C. Pinto contends that a distinctive mark of dialectic is the rejection of any rule or standard for argument evaluation external to the argumentative exchange:

One cannot appraise an argument from a position one takes up outside the context of the dialectical interchange in which that argument occurs. One cannot appraise an argument in the role or office of neutral judge. Appraising an argument requires one to step into the dialectical interchange, become party to it, become a participant in it. Informal logic, insofar as it seeks to be an art of argument appraisal, would turn out to be the very art of arguing itself. Plato had a name for it. He called it the art of dialectic ( 2001 , p8-9).

If Pinto is correct, the opposition between the predominant approaches in critical thinking and abstract argumentation frameworks could be understood as an opposition between a logically oriented approach and a dialectically oriented approach.

Harrell concludes that “For using debate to teach critical thinking, it is crucial for students to interrogate both the internal structure of the individual arguments given and the relationship between these arguments in the context of the entire debate.” Consequently, the author favors a mixed system of diagramming, that can represent both intra-argumentative relationships (i.e., between the parts of the argument) and inter-argumentative relationships (i.e., between the arguments that make up the debate).

9 Conclusion

Philosophical argumentation rarely consists of an argumentative piece isolated from other pieces. Perhaps the only real cases of such isolation occur when the philosopher says or writes something that does not manage to interest anyone; and even then that unsuccessful philosopher is herself responding to what another earlier, sometimes much earlier, philosopher said or wrote. Philosophical argumentation is thus intensely dialogical and even contentious. So, if a theorist of argumentation is really interested in philosophical arguments, then she should be prepared to study philosophical debates and controversies. There is hardly any other way to do them justice. This is the reason why the present special issue addresses philosophical argumentation within philosophical debates.

We are fully aware that, given the scarcity of previous studies of philosophical debates from the perspective of argumentation theory, the following specimens of analysis must have several shortcomings. Some of them are painfully clear to us, but we hope that our readers will take the torch and take the analysis, and even the theory, of philosophical argumentation further than we were able to. It is a well-known adage that the hardest part is the beginning. That is what we tried to achieve here, no more, but no less either.

It could be and it has been argued that philosophy, or something very much like philosophy, is to be found in other civilizations. Not having the required competence, we shall not be talking about that question. To avoid boring readers with needless repetition, we beg them to add the phrase ‘in Western civilization’ where appropriate.

Philosophers have always been interested in argumentation produced by non-philosophers; but, when they engage in the analysis or evaluation of non-philosophical argumentation, their own remains philosophical. Philosophers do not turn into physicians or lawyers by studying medical or legal argumentation. Inversely, when argumentation theorists try to analyse or evaluate philosophical argumentation, they do not turn into philosophers.

Of course, there is an abundant production on legal argumentation by philosophers of law , such as Perelman, Viehweg, Wróblewski, Peczenik, Aarnio, Alexy and MacCormick. Again, philosophers of medicine and philosophically inclined physicians have launched ‘bio-ethics’ and ‘evidence-based medicine’ in an attempt to improve the quality of medical argumentation.

In fact, one of the most important technical words in logic, premise , is a translation of Greek πρότασις, which is defined by Aristotle as a kind of question!

In Aristotle’s usage, ‘logic’, ‘logical’ and logically’ are synonymous with ‘dialectics’, ‘dialectical’ and ‘dialectically’ (see Zingano 2017 ).

The literary genre of commentaries (ὑπομνήματα) on Plato and Aristotle, starting around 3C AD (although there is evidence of much earlier commentaries) and going on through the Islamic, Hebrew, and finally Latin Middle Ages, is characterized by an effort to identify and analyse the philosophical arguments expressed or implied in those texts. The most favoured methods used for that purpose are taken from the Organon , as put together by Aristotle’s posthumous editors; such applications amount to an applied theory of argumentation rather than an explicit one.

Connoisseurs will immediately recognise the similarity with the tradition of intercollegiate debating in the United States that developed towards the end of the 19C and persists to this day.

One way of conceptualizing this shift would be to say that it takes us from dialectics , as the art of conversation or, more specifically, of argumentation, to logic , understood as the method of secure reasoning. The fact that the pioneers of early modern philosophy—Bacon, Hobbes, and Descartes—had nothing but contempt for medieval dialectics and logic explains why we find very little logic in the next generation of philosophers, both the empiricists and the rationalists, with the sole exception of Leibniz. Nonetheless, Arnauld and Nicole did attempt a kind of synthesis of medieval logic and the Cartesian search for a method that would allow us to discover new truths. Kant himself, who invented the phrase ‘formal logic’, contrasted it with his ‘transcendental logic’, thereby opening the gates for a bifurcation of the way in which logic came to be conceived after him. On the one hand, we find a series of logic textbooks and treatises, starting with Hegel’s and Mill’s, and on and one until about the 1940s, which in very different ways tried to construct a philosophical logic (conflated with ontology, methodology, epistemology, and even psychology). On the other hand, we find a series of mathematicians or mathematician-philosophers who stick to the idea of formal logic, thereby creating mathematical logic , a discipline whose impressive accumulation of knowledge gave it a prestige that has made it very difficult, especially after WWII, to use the word ‘logic’ in any other way.

Johnstone tried to create an institutional framework for the development of his insights, the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric (established in 1968); but, whatever merits the journal has, it neither served for the theoretical development of Johnstone’s ideas nor did it consolidate itself as a journal on argumentation theory.

According to a widespread legend, argumentation theory was born in 1958, with the almost simultaneous publication of Stephen Toulmin’s The Uses of Argument , and Chaïm Perelman’s and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s Traité de l’argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique (English translation 1969). However, these two works had very little impact for a long while, and they were read mainly by outsiders with a view to practice, mainly in debating and in legal argumentation. Incidentally, each of these two fields has its own literature on argumentation that partly feeds from older fields, debating from rhetoric and composition in the United States, and legal argumentation from sociology, philosophy, traditional logic, rhetoric, and the common law tradition, both in the United States and in Europe. Toulmin and Perelman were incorporated to argumentation theory by van Eemeren and Grootendorst in 1978, and from there they made their way into the work of the other pioneers.

This seems to confirm the early insight of Henry W. Johnstone (1952, 1959, 1978) that the only way to refute a philosopher is ad hominem , i. e., by using her own premises against herself.

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Premise Definition and Examples in Arguments

A Proposition Upon Which an Argument Is Based

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

A premise is a  proposition upon which an argument is based or from which a conclusion is drawn. Put another way, a premise includes the reasons and evidence behind a conclusion, says  Study.com .

A premise may be either the major or the minor proposition of a  syllogism —an argument in which two premises are made and a logical conclusion is drawn from them—in a deductive argument. Merriam-Webster gives this example of a major and minor premise (and conclusion):

"All mammals are warmblooded [ major premise ]; whales are mammals [ minor premise ]; therefore, whales are warmblooded [ conclusion ]."

The term premise comes from medieval Latin, meaning "things mentioned before." In philosophy as well as fiction and nonfiction writing, the premise follows largely the same pattern as that defined in Merriam-Webster. The premise—the thing or things that came before—lead (or fail to lead) to a logical resolution in an argument or story.

Premises in Philosophy

To understand what a premise is in philosophy, it helps to understand how the field defines an argument, says  Joshua May , an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. In philosophy, an argument is not concerned with disputes among people; it is a set of propositions that contain premises offered to support a conclusion, he says, adding:

"A premise is a proposition one offers in support of a conclusion. That is, one offers a premise as evidence for the truth of the conclusion, as justification for or a reason to believe the conclusion."

May offers this example of a major and minor premise, as well as a conclusion, that echoes the example from Merriam-Webster:

• All humans are mortal. [major premise]
• G.W. Bush is a human. [minor premise]
• Therefore, G.W. Bush is mortal. [conclusion]

May notes that the validity of an argument in philosophy (and in general) depends on the accuracy and truth of the premise or premises. For example, May gives this example of a bad (or inaccurate) premise:

• All women are Republican. [major premise: false]
• Hilary Clinton is a woman. [minor premise: true]
• Therefore, Hilary Clinton is a Republican. [conclusion: false]

The  Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy  says that an argument can be valid if it follows logically from its premises, but the conclusion can still be wrong if the premises are incorrect:

"However, if the premises are true, then the conclusion is also true, as a matter of logic."​​

In philosophy, then, the process of creating premises and carrying them through to a conclusion involves logic and deductive reasoning. Other areas provide a similar, but slightly different, take when defining and explaining premises.

Premises in Writing

For nonfiction writing, the term  premise  carries largely the same definition as in philosophy. Purdue OWL notes that a premise or premises are integral parts of constructing an argument. Indeed, says the language website operated by Purdue University, the very definition of an argument is that it is an "assertion of a conclusion based on logical premises."

Nonfiction writing uses the same terminology as in philosophy, such as  syllogism , which Purdue OWL describes as the "simplest sequence of logical premises and conclusions."

Nonfiction writers use a premise or premises as the backbone of a piece such as an editorial, opinion article, or even a letter to the editor of a newspaper. Premises are also useful for developing and writing an outline for a debate. Purdue gives this example:

• Nonrenewable resources do not exist in infinite supply. [premise 1]
• Coal is a nonrenewable resource. [premise 2]
• Coal does not exist in infinite supply. [conclusion]

The only difference in nonfiction writing versus the use of premises in philosophy is that nonfiction writing generally does not distinguish between major and minor premises.

Fiction writing also uses the concept of a premise but in a different way, and not one connected with making an argument. James M. Frey, as quoted on  Writer's Digest , notes:

"The premise is the foundation of your story—that single core statement of what happens to the characters as a result of the actions of a story.”

The writing website gives the example of the story "The Three Little Pigs," noting that the premise is: “Foolishness leads to death, and wisdom leads to happiness.” The well-known story does not seek to create an argument, as is the case in philosophy and nonfiction writing. Instead, the story itself is the argument, showing how and why the premise is accurate, says Writer's Digest:

"If you can establish what your premise is at the beginning of your project, you will have an easier time writing your story. That's because the fundamental concept you create in advance will drive the actions of your characters."

It's the characters—and to some degree, the plot—that prove or disprove the premise of the story.

Other Examples

The use of premises is not limited to philosophy and writing. The concept can also be useful in science, such as in the study of genetics or biology versus environment, which is also known as the nature-versus-nurture debate. In "Logic and Philosophy: A Modern Introduction," Alan Hausman, Howard Kahane, and Paul Tidman give this example:

"Identical twins often have different IQ test scores. Yet such twins inherit the same genes. So environment must play some part in determining IQ."

In this case, the argument consists of three statements:

• Identical twins often have different IQ scores. [premise]
• Identical twins inherit the same genes. [premise]
• The environment must play some part in determining IQ. [conclusion]

The use of the premise even reaches into religion and theological arguments.  Michigan State University  (MSU) gives this example:

• God exists, for the world is an organized system and all organized systems must have a creator. The creator of the world is God.

The statements provide reasons why God exists, says MSU. The argument of the statements can be organized into premises and a conclusion.

• Premise 1: The world is an organized system.
• Premise 2: Every organized system must have a creator.
• Conclusion: The creator of the world is God.

Consider the Conclusion

You can use the concept of the premise in countless areas, so long as each premise is true and relevant to the topic. The key to laying out a premise or premises (in essence, constructing an argument) is to remember that premises are assertions that, when joined together, will lead the reader or listener to a given conclusion, says the San Jose State University Writing Center, adding:

"The most important part of any premise is that your audience will accept it as true. If your audience rejects even one of your premises, they will likely also reject your conclusion, and your entire argument will fall apart.​"

Consider the following assertion: “Because greenhouse gases are causing the atmosphere to warm at a rapid rate...” The San Jose State writing lab notes that whether this is a solid premise depends on your audience:

"If your readers are members of an environmental group, they will accept this premise without qualms. If your readers are oil company executives, they may reject this premise and your conclusions."

When developing one or more premises, consider the rationales and beliefs not just of your audience but also of your opponents, says San Jose State. After all, your whole point in making an argument is not just to preach to a like-minded audience but to convince others of the correctness of your point of view.

Determine what "givens” you accept that your opponents do not, as well as where two sides of an argument can find common ground. That point is where you will find effective premises to reach your conclusion, the writing lab notes.

Hausman, Alan. "Logic and Philosophy: A Modern Introduction." Howard Kahane, Paul Tidman, 12th Edition, Cengage Learning, January 1, 2012.

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Three Types of Philosophy Arguments

The most common type of philosophy argument is the claim-reason complex. An argument can be either valid or invalid. There are different types of argument, including Inductive arguments, Conductive arguments, and Deductive arguments. In the following sections we’ll explore the differences between the two types and describe why they are used. We’ll also discuss the different types of arguments, and what makes them both useful. Here are three examples. You’ll see why these types of arguments are valuable in philosophy .

Valid arguments

A valid philosophy argument must follow certain rules. It cannot contain any false conclusions. The form of the argument must be correct and the conclusion must be true. Otherwise, it is not a valid argument. Here are some guidelines for defining a valid argument. Once you have a correct form, you can move to valid arguments. If you do not understand philosophy, then read this article to get started. Let’s say that you want to know how to write valid philosophy arguments.

The logical vocabulary of an argument is important to understand how a conclusion is reached. The schema of an argument should contain capital letters to denote predicates. Similarly, a valid argument should have the same logical structure. This makes it easier for us to understand the argument. However, if you don’t understand the logical structure of an argument, don’t worry – we have an explanation for that! Here is a simple example: a valid argument has two premises and a logical conclusion. A valid argument can be either true or false.

A valid argument can contain any of these three forms. These forms are common in this course, and they can be combined in any stretch of deductive argumentation. A valid argument must include at least one of the premises. A valid argument should contain at least one premise that is true. If all three premises are true, then the conclusion must follow from the first. Otherwise, the argument will be deemed invalid. Fortunately, there are ways to detect missing premise signs.

A valid argument has all of its premises true. It must also contain a true conclusion, which is what makes it sound. Nevertheless, a valid argument can include a false conclusion. That’s the definition of deductive logic. Some arguments may have all of their premises true, but the conclusion will still be false. Invalid arguments, however, must include at least one false premise. Thus, it’s necessary for a valid argument to have the correct premises and conclusion.

Invalid arguments

There are some common characteristics of invalid philosophy arguments. An invalid argument is one that fails to have any true premises, a contradictory conclusion, or an always true conclusion. Thankfully, there are also ways to identify these common flaws. Read on to find out how to spot invalid arguments. And as always, be sure to subscribe to my blog for more tips ! I look forward to reading your comments! I hope these tips prove helpful!

First, consider whether the argument is based on false premises. This is a common mistake, as there are many false premises in philosophy. While you may think that the conclusion is always false, you can’t be sure. Likewise, a valid argument doesn’t have to have true premises. You can still find a false conclusion without an invalid argument, as long as you can prove the premises to be false. This can be particularly frustrating when you’re trying to explain a philosophical point to a non-believer.

Invalid philosophy arguments are not just bad logically – they’re also counter-intuitive. They contradict deductive logic. By contrast, a valid argument contains a logically true conclusion, whereas an invalid argument doesn’t. Oftentimes, an invalid argument is impossible to prove, because it contradicts itself. If you want to test an argument, you should assume the premises are true but still find the conclusion to be false.

Another common mistake is thinking that an argument is valid if the conclusion follows from the premises. That’s an entirely different story. While a valid argument is one in which the premises are true, it doesn’t follow from the premises that they’re both true. For example, a valid argument can’t be based on a false premise. Similarly, a valid argument can be based on a false premise. This makes it impossible to prove that a statement is valid.

Inductive arguments

Inductive arguments are a common way to reason, but they can be flawed. They are also prone to introducing error because the conclusions they lead to are based on faulty premises. Inductive reasoning is also sometimes called introductory reasoning. John Stuart Mill explored inductive reasoning in his System of Logic. He stated that “every resemblance arouses a probability.”

To make an inductive argument, you first formulate a proposition, such as “everything is made up of matter,” or “the sun moves around the earth,” or “there are no laws of nature,” or “nothing exists but matter,” and then make a conclusion. During the development of the conclusion, you must keep in mind that premises may not be the final conclusion. They can be general or specific statements.

Inductive arguments in philosophy are a good way to begin thinking philosophically . For example, a property P is true for all natural numbers, but does not apply to every single object or person. Mathematicians can prove this property, which makes the argument sound. Inductive arguments are often used to prove theories or to show the limits of the human mind. Theorems can also be formulated from facts. Aristotle, Isaac Newton, and Aristotle all used inductive arguments.

Inductive arguments take many different forms. Inductive arguments rely on evidence collected from a subset of people to support a conclusion. They use evidence, such as evidence from an authority, to draw conclusions. They also rely on causal relationships between facts. For example, a murderer might have been proven guilty based on fingerprint evidence. For a case where evidence is not sufficient, an inductive argument can be derived from the fingerprints on a murder weapon.

Conductive arguments

Conductive arguments in philosophy are those in which each of the premises counts independently toward supporting the conclusion. This means that if any of the premises were removed, the amount of support offered by the remaining ones would not change. As a practical example, consider the following example: There is a 30% chance of rain tomorrow, but the sky is red tonight. Similarly, if a person knows that there is a 30% chance of rain tomorrow, he or she might believe that there is a chance of rain.

Unlike deductive or inductive arguments, conductive arguments have convergent premises. Instead of evaluating individual premises, conductive arguments have convergent premises that support the conclusion. This helps mitigate against treating conductive arguments as a set of subarguments. It also provides a basis for evaluating the conclusion of the argument. Ultimately, this allows us to determine whether an argument is defeasible in light of the evidence presented.

Inductive and conductive arguments are often defined as those which rely on a common inductive standard. Those who make such arguments should have requisite intentions. For example, abduction may be a type of conductive argument. This distinction should be helpful in clarifying what kind of arguments are deductive. For example, the latter argument involves a process called induction. Both processes are useful in different contexts, but the former is more general in nature.

Whether a claim can be made to support a proposition is a question. There are three main types of arguments: deductive, inductive, and conductive. The first is a question-begging argument. If it is true, then the conclusion can be assumed. Alternatively, the conclusion may be assumed in the premises. A question-begging argument is problematic because it is circular. It excludes some people. Therefore, this kind of argument is usually rejected in philosophical debate.

Reductio ad absurdum

The reduction of a claim to absurdity is an effective method of arguing against a claim. The key to this method is to provide an explicit statement of logic. If the claim cannot be supported, the argumenter must either explain it to the listener or argue against it. However, not everyone understands reductio ad absurdum. Hence, if you encounter someone making a claim based on this method, it’s best to avoid them.

Reductio ad absurdum can only be valid if the argument being presented is true, so you can’t use it to argue against a straw man. A perfect example of such a case is a creationist argument, which attempts to make evolution real, but mischaracterizes the theory of evolution. Aristotle and other great philosophers used the same argument to argue against evolution.

In mathematics, Reductio ad absurdum is used to prove a contradiction. In this case, the absurd consequence ‘a’ implied by a thesis ‘p’ is supposed to be a necessary false conclusion, while the contrary ‘not-a’ is an illogical conclusion. The negation of a given thesis ‘p’ is thus considered logically true, and the second mode is deemed a more valid Reductio ad absurdum.

Reductio ad absurdum is a form of logic that aims to reestablish the role of logic in rational thought. By removing implausible theses, it still retains a weakened distinction between the correct and the untrue. In this way, the reduction of absurdity attacks the system of arguments rather than just one of them.

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Against Veganism

Chris belshaw makes the case for rearing animals for their meat and produce..

Vegans want us to think carefully about what we eat. Certainly the bad practices rife in intensive farming generate powerful arguments against meat, dairy, eggs. But it may be harder to build a case against what might be called ‘humane’ farming (though some think there is no such thing). Pain can be reduced or eliminated in the better farming practices. So then the emphasis concerns killing. But is it really clear that we absolutely ought not to kill and then eat animals? There are three main arguments against this: we’re told that the production and consumption of meat is bad for us, bad for the environment, and bad for the animals who get eaten. Here I’ll be interested in the third claim.

Before getting into the argument, there’s some shorthand that needs explaining. I’m going to say that death isn’t bad for animals. Yet this needs clarifying. It certainly is bad for cows to be made into burgers, just as it’s bad for trees to be turned into pencils. But our concern will be with things that are bad in a way that matters , or which give us reasons against that thing. I’m also going to discuss what is permitted, required, or forbidden. Again, this is shorthand. There will usually be some special circumstances in which there might be good reason to do what is in general forbidden; or reasons not to do what is in general permitted, or even required. Even most vegans will allow meat-eating if that is the only way a person can keep themselves, or their family, alive. My concern will be with what is forbidden in general , or forbidden, other things being equal .

Arguments Permitting Animal Killing

Here are three arguments that killing and eating animals is permissible. The first has affinities with anti-natalism , some versions of which say how we shouldn’t start lives that will involve suffering. Even the best lives are temporary and involve pain and grief, so the anti-natalist says that we shouldn’t even have babies. Apply this logic to animals and we shouldn’t breed them. Can we extend that argument to say that we should end the lives of animals already living, on farms or in the wild? There might be good reason to do so, since pain is certainly bad for them, and in their case pain is uncompensated by pleasure, even when it is outweighed by it. For no animal thinks, as we might think, that the present pain – it’s hungry, or caught in a trap, or distressed at losing its young – will soon be over. So, the argument goes, given the inevitability of pain, it’s better for animals overall if their lives are ended. But if we’ve decided now to kill them, it seems there’s no reason then not to eat them, especially if that might alleviate hunger in our own lives.

Not many people will be impressed with this argument. They may prefer, as do I, a second argument, surely less counter-intuitive, which says that even if animals can have overall good lives, such that the pleasure outweighs and compensates for the pain, it is nevertheless not bad for them painlessly to die. Give them a good life; end it with a good, clean death; and then feel free to eat them. But how can I claim that their death isn’t bad? Because, unlike us, animals lack a consciously-formulated desire for survival. In this sense, they don’t want to live on. So it’s not bad that they die prematurely. Maybe we should concede that self-conscious animals such as whales, elephants, chimps, even dogs, are different here. But these are not the animals we eat.

Perhaps, other things equal, we should ensure that animal don’t die prematurely, but rather live on and die of old age. Yet a third argument insists that other things aren’t equal, and so eating meat is permitted. Consider just humane farming, and the animals alive right now. Our options are: continue with business as usual; kill them all now; care for them into their old age and death by natural causes; or finally, set them all free. Given that these animals don’t have a bad life, there is no reason to kill them now. What about the third option, caring for the animals until their natural deaths in old age? It may be easy enough for animal rights activists to steal a new-born lamb and give it a life of bliss in someone’s garden, but it’s less easy to apply this ideal on a global, industrial scale. We can’t choose to breed tens of billions of animals, then give all of them life-time care. So even if we might occasionally act to keep a farm animal from death, we can’t make this into a rule. What then about just setting them free? This last would be the worst option for most farm animals. Domesticated animals generally can’t look after themselves in the wild – especially when the wild is littered with towns and motorways. If this is what animal liberation is about, so much the pity.

What we should think about well-tended farm animals, then, is that even if their lives aren’t the best possible, they are nevertheless worth living, and generally the best lives available for them. A short, good life with a pain-free death; or no life at all. Which would you prefer?

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go there are two kinds of people. Most have lives more or less like ours, but some are clones, created and raised as a source of replacement organs. The clones could live into their eighties or nineties or beyond, as do the others, but instead they are pressured to ‘donate’ organs in early adulthood, and are ‘completed’ at the latest by their early thirties. Horrible? It seems so. But although a melancholy air hangs over their lives, there’s no suggestion that they think it would have been better if they’d never been born. And at the end of the novel, the main character suggests that on reflection their lives are not very different from those of other people. Shorter, yes; but death is pretty much the same for all of us – it’s usually bad that it happens, and it usually happens too soon.

I can’t decide whether we’re supposed to think there’s self-deception here, and that these lives, even if worth living, are in fact much worse than ours. For the clones are aware that death is coming sooner for them than it will for most of the people they see around them. They can think about, imagine, regret the longer life they’ll never have. Melancholy is the least we might expect.

But it’s not at all like this for animals. The sheep on the farms around here appear completely unaware that other animals – the dogs and cats, perhaps the horses – have long and cossetted lives. That they fare less well is no concern to them. So far as we can tell, they don’t think about it at all.

Arguments Requiring Animal Rearing

If killing and eating animals is in some circumstances permissible , and you want to eat meat, then go ahead. But three more ambitious arguments have it that this killing and eating of animals is morally required . The first of these is in certain respects a bad argument. The two that follow are better.

According to the so-called ‘Logic of the Larder’, we actually benefit animals – do them a favour – by bringing them into existence, even if for a short life. As Leslie Stephen put it, no one has more interest in bacon than the pigs who provide it ( Social Rights and Duties , 1896).

Sophistry? Well, there are things wrong here, but not as much as may seem. Any actual pig, it will be said, is harmed rather than benefited by being killed, brined, and sliced. But if it’s good for non-actual pigs to be made actual – to be brought into existence – and this happens only if we’re going eventually to eat them, then indeed our appetites are also working in their favour.

On this view, a short life really is better than no life at all. Yet even if we allow that good lives should be continued, we can still deny that such lives should be started. There’s nothing speciesist about this. Many of us feel more secure with the claim that we should make existing people happy, than that we should bring new people – similarly happy – into existence.

Yet it still might be good – but this time good for us – if certain animals are deliberately brought into existence, quite apart from whether we plan to eat them or not. We regret the threat of extinction that hangs over many rare breeds – Saddleback pigs, Ryeland sheep, Chillingham cattle, to name only three – and would prefer to keep them in existence. We acknowledge our connectedness to the past this way, and preserving these breeds through humane farming allows this connectedness to continue into the future.

A third argument, somewhat similar, focuses on landscape and environment. It reflects a simple but important aesthetic concern. The countryside we like, feel at home in, and want to explore, is very much shaped by farmers and their animals, and has been so for centuries. Remove the animals, and much of what we value in the countryside disappears. There is also a future-facing practical concern to take into account. It’s been recently rediscovered that in various ways the animals we rear can stimulate the regrowth of ancient woodland, increase biodiversity, help mend broken habitats. So these animals also have a more straightforward instrumental value.

This is all presently achieved by farm-rearing animals for meat and produce. Are there vegan-friendly routes to the same ends? We could keep a few examples of rare breeds in animal sanctuaries, charging for admission; and we could, at some cost, manage the landscape so as to preserve its traditional appearance, even without the help of animals. But those objections often raised against zoos and theme parks also apply here. Divorced from their long-standing rationale – and that involves, of course, most aspects of farming – these animals, and these environs, lose in meaning and value.

The Vegan Counter-Attack

Finally, I’ll consider three counter-arguments to the effect that we should believe that eating animals is wrong. There’s no spoiler in my saying now that these arguments fail.

I’ve focused on the alleged badness of death, and assumed that we can eliminate the anxiety, distress, and pain in killing animals. But, it is objected, this is wishful thinking. It’s inevitable that animals will in some ways suffer as they die.

Suppose I concede this. What follows? Is this intended as an across the board reason to keep animals out of existence? Then we’re back to the anti-natalist argument I mentioned earlier, and whose conclusion I said most people will surely view as extreme – that it is better for many farm animals to never have lived. It’s also hard to see how the argument can target just farm animals, as their lives in general, and their deaths in particular, are usually less painful than those of equivalent animals living in the wild.

There are also concerns about a slippery slope. People may say, give the all-clear to free-range chickens, and it’s just a small step to factory-farmed birds, lark pie, and roast albatross. A similar argument suggests that if voluntary euthanasia is permitted, we’ll soon be back with death camps. It’s hard to believe these arguments are ever made sincerely, and are not just rhetorical devices wheeled out to support foregone conclusions. But since they are so hopelessly pessimistic about human nature, such arguments are never made well.

Closely connected is what I’ll call the ‘splitting hairs’ argument. Even allowing that we won’t descend into murder and mayhem, still, ethical meat-eating demands that we busy ourselves with some rather fine distinctions. Mightn’t we instead agree with Peter Singer when he says, “Going vegan is a simpler choice that sets a clearcut example for others to follow”? However there are also suspects practices in tea and coffee production; similarly with avocado and soy; and notoriously so in clothing manufacture. No one suggests that we should therefore go about thirsty, hungry, and naked. My point though is that the requisite responses are not ones we all need to make personally. Surely governments and regulatory authorities can and should do much of the spade work here, as they ought to do with the other industries, determining which animal husbandry procedures should be permitted, which proscribed, and enforcing these decisions by demanding frequent and effective inspections, insisting on clear and useful labelling, and so on. Then, as individuals, we can more easily avoid getting things hopelessly wrong, while still having some choice about what to eat.

Some will say we shouldn’t eat meat whatever the cause of the animal’s death, because in doing so we show a lack of respect. But how is this disrespectful? More detail is needed here. If the suggestion is that there’s fault in eating something just because it was once alive, then it seems we should give up our fruit and vegetables also. Perhaps then synthetic food is the future?

Conclusions

I’ve said there’s no reason, for their sake, to bring animals or indeed people into existence. Nor is there good reason to keep animals (though often there is reason to keep people) in existence. But if we do bring animals into existence, there are good reasons to give them a good life.

The second of these claims is the most controversial. So suppose it’s false, and that there are reasons to keep animals in existence. Farming, I say, is still permitted. It’s not ideal for the animals, but it’s not bad for them either; as indeed it’s not bad for people to have a good but short life.

So I’m against veganism as an absolute principle. But is there nothing, other than the concessions I made at the beginning, to be said for it?

Think about pacifism. We might agree that total and implacable opposition to war in all its forms offered an important and necessary corrective to attitudes prevailing almost everywhere right up to the twentieth century, even while thinking that the complexity of our imperfect world calls for a more nuanced position. It’s the same with veganism. There’s much that needed to be, and has been, learned. All of us who care about animals are indebted to the vegan flag-flyers, even if we disagree with them.

Those who care about food are also indebted to them, for another benefit of veganism is its encouraging the development of good alternatives to a meat-based diet. No longer are the options simply the pretentious but dreary omelette aux fines herbes , or the less pretentious but equally dreary nut roast.

© Dr Chris Belshaw 2021

Chris Belshaw is an honorary Fellow in Philosophy at both the Open University and the University of York.

Question of the Month

Do you think you can do better than these arguments, or counter them? You still may have time to submit an answer to ‘Question of the Month’ for Issue 147. The question is: Can Eating Meat Be Justified? Please justify it, or reveal it as unjustified, in less than 400 words. The prize is a semi-random book from our book mountain. Subject lines should be marked ‘Question of the Month’, and must be received by 18th October 2021. If you want a chance of getting a book, please include your physical address.

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Once we examine the roots of “Buddhaphobia” in philosophical education, we can get easily beyond it.

By Russell P. Johnson | March 29, 2024

“Philosophy is not to be found in the whole Orient.” Immanuel Kant  wrote  that sentence more than two hundred years ago, and thankfully there are few today who would explicitly endorse it. Americans who have not read Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist philosophy are at least dimly aware that it exists. However, if you look at the curriculums of many philosophy departments around the United States, you are likely to find more courses on Kant than on the Eastern traditions he disparaged. Philosophy can be found in Asia, but Asian philosophy remains hard to find in America. This is what Brian Van Norden argues in his book  Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto . Along with fellow philosopher Jay Garfield, Van Norden had co-authored a 2016  article  for  The New York Times  that called for greater diversity of traditions represented in philosophical education. One of their most incendiary claims was that a department that never teaches African, Indian, Native American, or Chinese thinkers should identify itself not as the “Philosophy Department” but as the “Department of European and American Philosophy.” If you’re going to be parochial, you have an obligation to be up-front about it. The debate that emerged in the wake of the op-ed persuaded Van Norden to write a book that is relevant not just for philosophers but for scholars of religion. As Wendy Doniger wrote in her blurb of  Taking Back Philosophy , “It will make some people hopping mad and convert many others to the worthy cause of multiculturalism.” No strangers to conversion, scholars of religion should take note. According to Van Norden, his own specialization of Chinese philosophy deserves more attention in the United States for three reasons. First, the Chinese philosophical tradition provides much-needed context for understanding contemporary China: “Chinese businessmen pay for lessons from Buddhist monks, Daoism appeals both to peasants (for whom it is part of tradition) and to many intellectuals (who look to it for a less authoritarian approach to government), and China’s current president, Xi Jinping, has repeatedly praised Confucius.” Since Chinese politics and culture are vitally important in a globalizing world, understanding the philosophical traditions that continue to shape them is worthwhile. The second argument for diversifying the curriculum is that it helps diversify the faculty and student body. Myeshia Cherry and Eric Schwitzgebel  point out  that doctoral cohorts in philosophy are 86% white, significantly more than most other disciplines. Van Norden explains, “Both my own experience and that of many of my colleagues suggest that part of the reason for homogeneity among philosophers is that students of color are confronted with a curriculum that is almost monolithically white.” Incorporating Chinese philosophers—ancient, medieval, and current—helps to break apart this monolith and encourage more students to join the philosophical conversation. The third reason Van Norden gives is that, quite simply, a lot of non-Western philosophy is  good . The book is at its most persuasive when Van Norden introduces debates, assumptions, and aporias in the Western tradition before outlining how arguments from Mengzi, Nāgasena, Fazang, Zhu Xi, Wang Yingming, and Mozi bring comparative clarity and insight. English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s account of human nature as a war of all against all is even more influential than it is famous, but Cheng Hao’s Neo-Confucian arguments about the interconnectedness of all people challenge Hobbes’s premises. Though Van Norden focuses in this book principally on the contributions of Chinese thought, he maintains an  online bibliography  that includes African, Indigenous, and Islamic resources, among others. Given the rigor and acumen found in these traditions, why have they been sidelined or excluded from many philosophy syllabi? Van Norden offers two historical reasons: racism, and the triumphal rhetoric that lauded Kantian thought as the culmination of philosophy. Compounding these tendencies are a lack of familiarity with the original languages among philosophy professors, and the conservatism built into any established canon. Thus, contemporary American philosophers may fully acknowledge the merits of Indian philosophy but feel ill-equipped to teach it and disinclined to see it as necessary for their departments to cover. Van Norden quotes Schwitzgebel, “Ignorance thus apparently justifies ignorance: Because we don’t know their work, they have little impact on our philosophy; because they have little impact on our philosophy, we are justified in remaining ignorant about their work.” (I report this critique with some self-accusation, as this description identifies a hesitancy I have felt.) Perhaps curiously, the book rarely addresses religion as such. Though Van Norden mentions religious studies departments twice in passing as a place where Chinese philosophy can be studied, he does not explain how the category of religion contributes to what Brook Ziporyn  calls  “Buddhaphobia” among philosophers. Texts and traditions get “coded” as religious in a  biased   way , and this is an additional factor in the Western marginalization of non-Western philosophy. One reason why the Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist traditions are omitted from philosophical conversations is that these are treated as  religious  first and foremost. They are not religious identifiers that are perceived as  neutral  in the West, like “Christian,” “agnostic,” or “atheist.” The fact that Nāgārjuna was Buddhist means we think of him primarily as a religious author, while the fact that Kant was Christian does not. Just as showing a gay couple in a commercial is “political” while showing a straight couple is just advertising, a text like  The Analects  is “religious” while John Locke’s  Second Treatise  is just philosophy. Once we examine the roots of this “Buddhaphobia,” we can get easily beyond it. Contemporary thinkers who are not Buddhists can find Buddhist philosophers’ arguments compelling, just as they can appreciate Hannah Arendt’s ethics without being Jewish, Thomas Aquinas’s epistemology without being Catholic, and Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology without, shall we say, agreeing with all of his views. And if a philosopher finds Buddhist philosophy convincing enough to convert not only to multiculturalism but to Buddhism, then they might become a primary source in this ongoing, vibrant philosophical tradition. On April 8, the University of Chicago Religious Studies program is hosting a panel titled “What Do We Miss If We Only Study Western Philosophy?” Panelists include Kevin Davey from the Philosophy department and Dan Arnold and Brook Ziporyn from the Divinity School. The event will be held at 4:30 in the Swift Hall Common Room. Featured image: Depiction of mountains by Zhang Lu, early 16th century. Image from public domain via Shanghai Museum.

Russell P. Johnson

Columnist, Russell Johnson (PhD’19), is Assistant Director of the Undergraduate Religious Studies Program at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research focuses on antagonism, nonviolence, and the philosophy of communication. 

See All Articles by Russell P. Johnson

What’s at stake in the Supreme Court abortion pill case

Tuesday’s oral argument is focused on whether to overrule the fda and reimpose some restrictions on getting medication to terminate pregnancy.

Less than two years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade , the issue of reproductive rights is returning to the high court on Tuesday as the justices consider whether to limit access to a medication used in more than 60 percent of U.S. abortions .

The Biden administration and the manufacturer of mifepristone are seeking to reverse a lower-court ruling that would make it more difficult to obtain the medication, first approved nearly 25 years ago and shown in multiple studies to be overwhelmingly safe .

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The conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit said the Food and Drug Administration failed to follow proper procedures and thoroughly explain its reasoning when it began loosening regulations. The changes made in 2016 and again in 2021 allowed mifepristone to be taken up to 10 weeks into pregnancy, instead of seven weeks , prescribed by a medical professional other than a doctor, and mailed directly to patients without an in-person medical consultation.

The pharmaceutical industry has warned that second-guessing the FDA’s determinations in this case will more broadly disrupt the nation’s drug-approval process and stymie private investment in research.

A decision should come by the end of June or in early July, putting abortion front and center as Democrats campaign on the issue in the 2024 election .

Here’s a look at what’s at stake:

Abortion access

The case could make it harder to get medication abortions even in states where abortion is legal. Allowing medication abortions to proceed without an ultrasound or in-person medical visit has increased access, particularly for women in rural areas and others who struggle to go to a clinic in person, by allowing them to complete the entire process from home.

The Supreme Court could also further impede abortion access for those living in one of the more than a dozen states with strict abortion bans in place. A few telemedicine clinics have started allowing U.S.-based doctors to prescribe and mail pills into restricted states, relying on new “shield laws” passed in several blue states to protect them from prosecution. The largest of these clinics, Aid Access, now mails approximately 6,000 doses of medication abortion into antiabortion states every month, according to founder Rebecca Gomperts.

Many abortion rights advocates say they will continue to send abortion pills through the mail no matter how the Supreme Court rules. Some are ready to switch to a misoprostol-only protocol, a method of medication abortion that uses only the second drug in the current two-step regimen. That option is also highly effective but causes significantly more cramping and bleeding.

A narrowed time window for accessing abortion pills would have major implications nationwide. In 2021, 56 percent of all abortions occurred beyond seven weeks of pregnancy. Just 20 percent occurred after 10 weeks, the FDA’s current mifepristone limit.

The drug-approval process

For the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry, the legal battle over mifepristone casts a shadow over all drugs, medical devices and diagnostics that the agency approves. If the 5th Circuit’s decision is upheld, industry and former government officials say, it would undercut the FDA’s stature as the global gold standard of regulating medicine — as well as the ability of drugmakers to raise money from investors. That, in turn, could deprive patients of innovative therapies.

Pharmaceutical companies denied approval for a drug could use the courts to reverse the agency’s scientific judgments — or challenge the approval of a competitor’s drug, former FDA commissioners said in a brief to the high court. Advocates for patients who suffer side effects from a drug could ask judges to bar other patients from taking an otherwise safe and effective medication.

A brief signed by hundreds of biotech executives said allowing a court to override the FDA’s process for approving drugs “will create intolerable risks and undermine the incentives for investment regardless of the drug at issue.”

A group of former Trump-era Department of Health and Human Services officials, however, sided with the challengers in a separate brief that says the FDA failed to properly assess the broader effects of lifting restrictions on mifepristone. James R. Lawrence III, an FDA chief counsel under President Donald Trump , said a ruling in favor of the agency could embolden other drugmakers to demand fewer restrictions.

A ruling against the FDA also could broaden who can sue the agency. In the mifepristone case, the four doctors suing the FDA claimed they had legal standing not because their patients were directly harmed by the drug, but because women suffering adverse effects crowding into emergency rooms would take away resources needed to treat other patients.

“Basically, any physician could sue the agency over any drug approval they disagree with,” said Holly Fernandez Lynch, an attorney and assistant professor of medical ethics and health policy at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Supreme Court

When the court’s conservative majority overturned Roe in June 2022 with its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization , Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote that it was time to “return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote separately, saying questions about the basic legality of abortion “will be resolved by the people and their representatives in the democratic process in the states or Congress” — not by the nine members of the Supreme Court.

Instead, the court has two abortion-related cases before it this term, the mifepristone case and one involving whether emergency room physicians must terminate pregnancies in some cases even in states where abortion is banned.

Supreme Court 2024 decisions

This is not the first time the court has considered the FDA’s regulation of mifepristone. During the pandemic, doctors and abortion providers sued the FDA , trying to remove the requirement that patients obtain the drug in person. A lower court judge agreed, saying in-person visits imposed unnecessary health risks due to covid-19.

But the Trump administration appealed, and the Supreme Court’s conservative majority reversed the lower-court decision , reinstating the in-person pickup requirement even though most patients take the medication at home.

The majority has generally been skeptical of the power of federal agencies and is reviewing several other challenges this term to the so-called administrative state, long a target of conservative criticism. But back in 2021, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. sided with the Trump administration because, he said, courts should defer to public health experts.

Roberts’s position will be tested now that the court is being asked by the FDA and the Biden administration to retain full access to mifepristone, including to allow the medication to be sent to patients by mail.

The election

Whatever the Supreme Court decides will further inflame the election-year debate over abortion rights, with Democrats eager to campaign on the issue and Republicans struggling to craft a winning message since the fall of Roe.

President Biden has repeatedly vowed to defend access to mifepristone, part of his broader pledge to protect access to abortion. If the justices side with the White House and allow current regulations for mifepristone to stand, Biden and his allies can claim a legal victory; if the court limits access, Democrats will inevitably use the decision to mobilize voters.

Abortion rights arguably have been Democrats’ strongest advantage this political cycle, with voters repeatedly siding with the party on ballot measures and candidates in states such as Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio. Voters also say they trust Democrats to handle abortion more than Republicans by a 14-point margin, according to a February poll by KFF, a nonpartisan health-care research organization.

Voters also favor access to abortion medication. Two-thirds of Americans said that mifepristone should remain on the market, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll in May 2023. GOP leaders, meanwhile, have continued to stake out opposition to the medication. A proposal released last week by the Republican Study Committee, an influential congressional caucus that represents most House Republicans, called for rolling back access to mifepristone. Conservative policy groups such as the Heritage Foundation have also said that Trump should use executive authority to crack down on the drug if he is elected again.

At stake for the antiabortion movement

The abortion pill has in many ways thwarted the antiabortion movement’s vision for a post- Dobbs America, allowing tens of thousands of abortions to continue in states where abortion is illegal. And while antiabortion advocates have scrambled to imagine new laws that might crack down on the flow of pills through the mail system, any legislation of that kind would be very difficult to get through Congress and hard to enforce at the state level.

Many antiabortion advocates have instead pinned their hopes on changing the culture around abortion pills — hoping to make women skeptical of obtaining the pills through the mail without an ultrasound or a doctor’s visit , even though studies show it is overwhelmingly safe to do so. Antiabortion arguments about the risks of abortion pills are based largely on studies that have recently been retracted by the journal that published them.

A Supreme Court ruling that compels the FDA to reinstate old restrictions would be an important step toward changing how the pills are perceived, antiabortion advocates said.

“Many women … are taking these drugs in unsafe ways because they’re hearing from the FDA that they’re safe to take in this way,” said Christina Francis, chief executive of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists. “The [FDA’s] stamp of approval still carries a lot of weight.”

A large body of research shows mifepristone is safe and effective . The FDA points to published studies of tens of thousands of women showing that serious adverse events after mifepristone use occur in fewer than 1 percent of cases.

Daniel Gilbert, David Ovalle and Dan Diamond contributed to this report .

U.S. abortion access, reproductive rights

Tracking abortion access in the United States: Since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade , the legality of abortion has been left to individual states. The Washington Post is tracking states where abortion is legal, banned or under threat.

Abortion pills: The Supreme Court seemed unlikely to limit access to the abortion pill mifepristone . Here’s what’s at stake in the case and some key moments from oral arguments . For now, full access to mifepristone will remain in place . Here’s how mifepristone is used and where you can legally access the abortion pill .

New study: The number of women using abortion pills to end their pregnancies on their own without the direct involvement of a U.S.-based medical provider rose sharply in the months after the Supreme Court eliminated a constitutional right to abortion , according to new research.

Abortion and the 2024 election: Voters in a dozen states in 2024 could decide the fate of abortion rights with constitutional amendments on the ballot in a pivotal election year. The Biden administration announced new steps intended to ensure access to contraception, abortion medication and emergency abortions at hospitals. Here’s what the moves on reproductive health mean for consumers. See where the 2024 presidential candidates stand on abortion bans .

• The biggest 2024 Supreme Court rulings so far, and what’s still to come March 27, 2024 The biggest 2024 Supreme Court rulings so far, and what’s still to come March 27, 2024
• 5 key moments from Supreme Court arguments on the abortion pill case March 26, 2024 5 key moments from Supreme Court arguments on the abortion pill case March 26, 2024
• What’s at stake in the Supreme Court abortion pill case March 24, 2024 What’s at stake in the Supreme Court abortion pill case March 24, 2024

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Easter Sunday

Supreme Court again confronts the issue of abortion, this time over access to widely used medication

Two years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and paved the way for bans or severe restrictions on abortion in many Republican-led states, the justices are considering a new abortion case that would affect women across the country.

FILE - Boxes of the drug mifepristone sit on a shelf at the West Alabama Women’s Center in Tuscaloosa, Ala., on March 16, 2022. The Supreme Court will again wade into the fractious issue of abortion when it hears arguments Tuesday, March 26, 2024, over mifepristone, a medication used in the most common way to end a pregnancy, for a case with profound implications for millions of women no matter where they live in America and, perhaps, the race for the White House. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed, File)

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File - The Supreme Court is seen on Friday, April 21, 2023, in Washington. The Supreme Court will again wade into the fractious issue of abortion when it hears arguments Tuesday, March 26, 2024, over mifepristone, a medication used in the most common way to end a pregnancy, for a case with profound implications for millions of women no matter where they live in America and, perhaps, the race for the White House. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

FILE - People march through downtown Amarillo to protest a lawsuit to ban the abortion drug mifepristone, Feb. 11, 2023, in Amarillo, Texas. The Supreme Court will again wade into the fractious issue of abortion when it hears arguments Tuesday, March 26, 2024, over mifepristone, a medication used in the most common way to end a pregnancy, for a case with profound implications for millions of women no matter where they live in America and, perhaps, the race for the White House. (AP Photo/Justin Rex, File)

FILE - Erin Hawley, with Alliance Defending Freedom, exits the federal courthouse on March 15, 2023, in Amarillo, Texas. The Supreme Court will again wade into the fractious issue of abortion when it hears arguments Tuesday, March 26, 2024, over mifepristone, a medication used in the most common way to end a pregnancy. Hawley, who is married to Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., is representing the abortion opponents at the Supreme Court. Both Hawleys served as law clerks to Chief Justice John Roberts early in their careers. (AP Photo/David Erickson, File)

FILE - The Supreme Court is seen in Washington, March 7, 2024. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

FILE - The Supreme Court is seen on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 4, 2024. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

FILE - The Supreme Court is photographed, Feb. 28, 2024 in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court will again wade into the fractious issue of abortion this week when it hears arguments over a medication used in the most common way to end a pregnancy , a case with profound implications for millions of women no matter where they live in America and, perhaps, for the race for the White House.

Two years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and cleared the way for bans or severe restrictions on abortion in many Republican-led states, abortion opponents on Tuesday will ask the high court to ratify a ruling from a conservative federal appeals court that would limit access to the medication mifepristone, which was used in nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the United States last year.

That decision to reverse Roe had immediate political consequences, with Democrats making the case that the court had taken away a right that women held for half a century and winning elections as a result. Even conservative-leaning states like Kansas and Ohio voted against abortion restrictions. If the court were to uphold restrictions on medication abortions it could roil the election landscape in races for Congress and the presidency.

By rolling back Food and Drug Administration changes to the use of mifepristone, the ruling would cut off access to the drug through the mail and impose other restrictions, even in states where abortion remains legal. The restrictions would shorten the time when mifepristone can be used in pregnancy, to seven weeks from 10 currently.

Most adults in the U.S., 55%, believe medication abortion pills are very or somewhat safe when taken as directed by a doctor, according to a KFF poll from May 2023, and 65% have “a lot” or “some” confidence in the FDA to ensure that medications sold in the U.S. are safe and effective.

A decision should come by late June. But no matter the outcome, the Supreme Court has not seen its last abortion case. Legal battles are pending over state restrictions, and new federal limits are likely if former President Donald Trump, Republicans’ presumptive nominee for 2024, returns to the White House.

Next month, the justices will hear arguments over whether a federal law on emergency treatment at hospitals must include abortions, even in states that have otherwise banned them.

AP AUDIO: Supreme Court again confronts the issue of abortion, this time over access to widely used medication.

AP correspondent Jackie Quinn reports on a Supreme Court hearing Tuesday surrounding access to an abortion pill.

Mifepristone, made by New York-based Danco Laboratories, is one of two drugs, along with misoprostol, used in medication abortions. Their numbers have been rising for years, and they accounted for 63% of the more than 1 million abortions in the U.S. last year, according to an estimate by the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights. More than 5 million people have used mifepristone since 2000.

Mifepristone is taken first to dilate the cervix and block the hormone progesterone, which is needed to sustain a pregnancy. Misoprostol is taken 24 to 48 hours later, causing the uterus to contract and expel pregnancy tissue.

Health care providers have said that if mifepristone is no longer available or is too hard to obtain, they would switch to using only misoprostol, which is somewhat less effective in ending pregnancies.

Underscoring the importance of the case, the number of medication abortions is rising for several reasons. Taking pills at home to end a pregnancy is less invasive than surgery, more convenient than having to travel to an abortion clinic and more private, allowing women to avoid anti-abortion protesters who picket clinics.

It’s becoming even easier to get the two drugs in some states now that CVS and Walgreens have announced pilot programs to dispense the pills at their pharmacies.

For women living in states with abortion bans or restrictions, mail order delivery may be their only practical option, said Julie F. Kay, executive director of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine.

The medication is sent by providers in states that have laws meant to shield them from any legal trouble for working with people who live in states that don’t permit medication abortions. The pills cost $150 and usually arrive within three to five days, Kay said.

Last year, 85,000 women worked with order-by-mail abortion provider Aid Access to obtain the medication, said Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, the group’s founder. Of those, 50,000 live in states with abortion restrictions, she said.

The current case followed closely the Supreme Court decision in June 2022 that overturned the constitutional right to an abortion. That ruling has led to bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy in 14 states, with some exceptions, and once cardiac activity can be detected, which is around six weeks, in two others.

Abortion opponents filed their challenge to mifepristone the following November and initially won a sweeping ruling six months later from U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk , a Trump nominee in Texas, which would have revoked the drug’s approval entirely. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals left intact the FDA’s initial approval of mifepristone. But it would reverse changes regulators made in 2016 and 2021 that eased some conditions for administering the drug.

The Supreme Court put the appeals court’s modified ruling on hold, then agreed to hear the case, though Justices Samuel Alito, the author of the decision overturning Roe, and Clarence Thomas would have allowed some restrictions to take effect while the case proceeded.

The doctors and groups that initially wanted mifepristone pulled from the market now say, in their main Supreme Court brief, that those recent changes “jeopardize women’s health throughout the nation” and didn’t follow the rigorous procedures required by federal law to alter safety restrictions on drugs.

“The Supreme Court’s got a chance to decide whether some agencies get a pass in decision making,” said Sarah Parshall Perry, a lawyer at the Heritage Foundation who supports the challenge.

Pregnant women who wish to take mifepristone, for example, no longer need an in-person visit with a doctor before getting a prescription, said Erin Hawley, the Alliance Defending Freedom lawyer who is representing the abortion opponents at the Supreme Court.

“Our clients are asking the FDA to put back in place safeguards that were there for nearly 20 years,” Hawley told The Associated Press. She is married to Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo. Both Hawleys served as law clerks to Chief Justice John Roberts early in their careers.

But the administration said the elimination of doctor visits and the other changes were the product of more than 20 years of experience in regulating mifepristone, including evaluating safety data and studies of thousands of women. Its view is shared by several leading medical organizations, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Seven former FDA commissioners said in a court filing that the agency exercised special care in its initial approval of mifepristone because it was dealing with an abortion drug. Subsequent changes were “driven by a straightforward and thorough application of the expert scientific review process that Congress entrusted to FDA,” they wrote.

Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California at Davis who has written extensively about abortion, said rolling back the FDA rules “would render pretty much all the doses of mifepristone on the market potentially misbranded and mislabeled, which could mean, I think, you know, months of disruption in terms of the drug being available.”

More broadly, Ziegler said, the “case has the potential, obviously, to upend how drug approvals function.” The prescription drug industry also has weighed in forcefully on the administration’s side.

The administration and Danco both make extensive arguments, contested by the other side, that the abortion opponents lack the legal right, or standing, to bring the case.

If the court agrees they’re right, it would preserve access for mifepristone without touching on the more politically sensitive issues in the dispute.

Associated Press writer Linley Sanders contributed to this report.

Watch CBS News

Supreme Court seems poised to reject abortion pill challenge after arguments over FDA actions

By Melissa Quinn

Updated on: March 26, 2024 / 8:06 PM EDT / CBS News

Washington — The Supreme Court on Tuesday appeared inclined to side with the Food and Drug Administration in a  case involving a commonly used abortion pill and recent agency actions that made the medication easier to obtain, as the justices raised questions about whether a group of doctors challenging the moves demonstrated they had the proper basis to sue in federal court.

At the center of the legal battle is the pill mifepristone, which is taken along with another drug to terminate an early pregnancy. Approved by the FDA in 2000, more than 5 million patients have taken mifepristone, according to the agency, and studies cited in court filings have shown it is safe and effective.

In 2016 and 2021, the FDA took steps to make mifepristone more accessible, including allowing it to be taken later into a pregnancy and delivered through the mail without an in-person doctor's visit. A group of anti-abortion rights doctors and medical associations challenged those changes, claiming the FDA violated the law.

The Supreme Court is now reviewing a decision from a federal appeals court  that found the agency's actions were unlawful. A ruling in the case, known as FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, that unwinds those changes would threaten to curtail access to mifepristone nationwide, even in states with laws protecting abortion access.

Oral arguments

Rolling back the FDA's actions would "inflict grave harm on women across the nation," Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the court. She reiterated that the ruling from the lower court marks the first time any court has restricted access to a FDA-approved drug by second-guessing its judgment about the conditions required to ensure its safety. 

The justices focused most of their questions on whether the doctors who filed the lawsuit against the FDA had shown that they may be injured by its actions, and whether those alleged injuries could be traced to the FDA's easing of the rules. If the court decides that the doctors do not have legal standing to sue, it could order the case dismissed without deciding whether the FDA acted lawfully when it relaxed the requirements for obtaining mifepristone.

In one exchange with Erin Hawley, a lawyer with the Alliance Defending Freedom who represented the medical associations and doctors, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said there is an "infinitesimally small" chance that a pregnant woman who may need medical attention after taking mifepristone would end up in a hospital where one of the member physicians is working.

Hawley pointed the justices to declarations from two doctors, filed in an earlier stage in the case, that she said showed they had been complicit in terminating a pregnancy for a patient who experienced complications from a medication abortion. But Justice Amy Coney Barrett pushed back, and said it didn't appear that either doctor actually participated in the procedure.

Justice Elena Kagan pressed Hawley to point the court to one individual who could show they would be harmed by the FDA's rules for mifepristone.

"You need a person to be able to come in and meet the court's regular standing requirements," she said. "Who is your person?"

Justices Neil Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown Jackson indicated they struggled with the reach of a decision that would roll back the FDA's 2016 and 2021 changes nationwide. Jackson said there is a "significant mismatch" between the injury claimed by the doctors and the remedy they sought — a nationwide order blocking the FDA's latest actions.

"They're saying because we object to having to be forced to participate in this procedure, we're seeking an order preventing anyone from having access to these drugs at all," she said.

Gorsuch echoed Jackson's point, observing that there recently have been a "rash of universal injunctions."

"This case seems like a prime example of turning what could be a small lawsuit into a nationwide, legislative assembly on an FDA rule," he said.

Chief Justice John Roberts questioned why the courts couldn't provide narrow relief that applied only to the doctors involved in the lawsuit, as opposed to targeting the FDA more broadly.

Access to mifepristone has remained unchanged while legal proceedings in the case have continued, since the high court issued an order last April preserving its availability . That relief will remain in place until the Supreme Court hands down its decision, expected by the end of June.

Arguments in the case are took place less than two years after the Supreme Court ruled in June 2022 to unwind the constitutional right to abortion and return the issue to the states. It also comes on the heels of new findings that medication abortions in the U.S. have risen since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

A study published Monday in the medical journal JAMA found that the number of self-managed abortions obtained using pills grew in the six months after the high court reversed Roe. Research from the Guttmacher Institute, an organization that supports abortion rights, published last week showed that medication abortions accounted for 63% of all abortions that took place within the U.S. health care system in 2023, up from 53% in 2020.

The dispute over mifepristone

The challenge to the FDA's efforts surrounding mifepristone was filed in November 2022 — more than two decades after the drug was made available in the U.S. — by a group of medical associations that oppose abortion rights. Brought in federal district court in Texas, the groups, led by the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, challenged the FDA's initial 2000 approval and its more recent changes in 2016 and 2021.

As part of those actions, the FDA allowed mifepristone to be taken up to 10 weeks into a pregnancy, instead of seven weeks, reduced the number of in-person visits required from three to one, allowed more health care providers to prescribe the drug and lifted a requirement that it be prescribed in-person.

The organizations claimed the FDA did not have the authority to approve mifepristone for sale and failed to adequately consider the drug's safety and effectiveness.

The federal judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, agreed that the FDA's 2000 approval and subsequent actions were likely unlawful. He blocked the FDA's initial action allowing the drug to be sold in the U.S.

But Kacsmaryk put his ruling on hold, and a federal appeals court and the Supreme Court intervened. The high court ultimately  maintained access to mifepristone while legal proceedings continued. 

Months later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld the FDA's 2000 approval of the abortion pill, but said the agency violated the law with its more recent changes. The appeals court's decision, though, is preempted by the Supreme Court's earlier April 2023 order protecting access.

The Justice Department and Danco Laboratories — the maker of Mifeprex, the brand-name version of mifepristone — asked the Supreme Court to review the 5th Circuit's ruling, and it agreed to do so in December. 

The legal issues in the case

In asking the justices to reverse the appeals court's decision, the Biden administration has argued that the medical associations and their physician members do not have legal right to sue. The doctors do not prescribe the drug and haven't identified a single case where a member has been forced to complete an abortion for a woman who shows up at an emergency room with an ongoing pregnancy, Prelogar said.

"They stand at a far distance from the upstream regulatory action they're challenging," she said of the anti-abortion rights physicians, and argued the theories they raise are "too attenuated as a matter of law — the court should say so and put an end to this case." 

Many of the questions the justices asked Prelogar focused on the question of standing. "Shouldn't somebody be able to challenge that in court? Who? Who would have standing to bring that suit?" asked Justice Samuel Alito, who posed the hardest questions to Prelogar and a lawyer for Danco.

He claimed that the argument advanced by the Biden administration indicates that even if the FDA violated the law, nobody has the proper basis to sue.

"There's no remedy, the American people have no remedy for that," said Alito, who authored the Supreme Court's majority opinion overturning Roe and appeared the most sympathetic to the doctors' theories.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh sought to confirm that under federal law, doctors cannot be forced to violate their conscience to perform or assist in an abortion. Prelogar said federal conscience protections, which would allow the doctors to opt out of providing care they morally object to, give broad coverage to doctors in that circumstance.

But Hawley argued that their members object not only to abortion, but also to "being complicit in the process that takes an unborn life."

She told the court that the FDA failed to comply with the basic requirements of federal law when making mifepristone more easily accessible, and failed to consider or explain the cumulative effects of the its more recent actions.

Justice Clarence Thomas raised the Comstock Act, an obscure, 150-year-old law that prohibits the mailing of any drug that can be used for abortions.

The anti-abortion rights doctors claimed that the law prohibited the FDA from lifting the in-person dispensing requirement for mifepristone, but the 5th Circuit did not reach that argument. The Justice Department told the Supreme Court in filings that it should not either, and its Office of Legal Counsel said in December 2022 that the law does not prohibit the mailing of mifepristone and misoprostol, the second drug taken in a medication abortion.

The ripple effects of a decision

If the justices do reach the legal issues raised in the case, the Justice Department and Danco have urged the court to find that the FDA's 2016 and 2021 actions were lawful.

The agency relied on a "voluminous body of medical evidence" on mifepristone's use over decades when it determined that the 2016 changes would be safe, Prelogar wrote in a filing to the court. In any event, the district court was wrong to second-guess the determinations that Congress empowered the FDA to make, she said.

"To the government's knowledge, this case marks the first time any court has restricted access to an FDA-approved drug by second-guessing FDA's expert judgment about the conditions required to assure that drug's safe use," Prelogar wrote.

Pharmaceutical companies and former heads of the FDA have warned the court that a decision upholding the 5th Circuit threatens to undermine the agency's drug-approval process and could lead to persistent legal challenges of its approval decisions.

The lower court's approach, if left intact, "would allow courts to substitute their lay analysis for FDA's scientific expertise and to overturn the agency's approval and conditions of use for drugs — even after they have been on the market for decades," a group of former commissioners and acting commissioners told the court in a brief. 

"The resulting uncertainty would threaten the incentives for drug companies to undertake the time-consuming and costly investment required to develop new drugs and ultimately hinder patients' access to critical remedies that prevent suffering and save lives," they said.

A slew of pharmaceutical companies and executives separately stressed the importance of drug companies being able to rely on the courts to respect the FDA's scientific judgements.

"If a court can overturn those judgments many years later through a process devoid of scientific rigor, the resulting uncertainty will create intolerable risks and undermine the incentives for investment regardless of the drug at issue," they said in a brief . "This, in turn, will ultimately hurt patients."

But lawyers for the medical associations and their members that oppose abortion rights argued that the FDA failed to give a "satisfactory explanation" for its decision to lift the in-person dispensing requirement and called the studies the agency relied on "deeply problematic."

Withdrawing the in-person visit requirement in 2021 eliminated the opportunity for health care workers to screen for ectopic pregnancies and other conditions, the associations argued. In 2016, the FDA removed "interrelated safeguards without studies" that examined the changes as a whole, they continued.

The group Americans United for Life, which is backing the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, claimed that the FDA has promoted access to abortion pills without medical supervision, which have increased health and safety risks to women and interfered with their care.

Melissa Quinn is a politics reporter for CBSNews.com. She has written for outlets including the Washington Examiner, Daily Signal and Alexandria Times. Melissa covers U.S. politics, with a focus on the Supreme Court and federal courts.

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Supreme Court Seems Inclined to Reject Bid to Curtail Abortion Pill Access

A majority of the justices questioned whether a group of anti-abortion doctors and organizations trying to sharply limit availability of the medication could show they suffered harm.

• Share full article

By Abbie VanSickle

Reporting from Washington

• Published March 26, 2024 Updated March 27, 2024

A majority of the Supreme Court appeared deeply skeptical on Tuesday of efforts to severely curtail access to a widely used abortion pill, questioning whether a group of anti-abortion doctors and organizations had a right to challenge the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the medication.

Over nearly two hours of argument, justices across the ideological spectrum seemed likely to side with the federal government, with only two justices, the conservatives Samuel A. Alito Jr. and, possibly, Clarence Thomas, appearing to favor limits on the distribution of the pill.

Describing the case as an effort by “a handful of individuals,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch raised whether it would stand as “a prime example of turning what could be a small lawsuit into a nationwide legislative assembly on an F.D.A. rule or any other federal government action.”

The challenge involves mifepristone, a drug approved by the F.D.A. more than two decades ago that is used in nearly two-thirds of abortions in the country. At issue is whether the agency acted appropriately in expanding access to the drug in 2016 and again in 2021 by allowing doctors to prescribe it through telemedicine and to send the pills by mail.

The Biden administration had asked the Supreme Court to intervene after a three-judge panel of a federal appeals court favored curbing distribution of the drug. Until the justices decide, access to mifepristone remains unchanged, delaying the potential for abrupt limits on its availability.

Even if the court preserves full access to mifepristone, the pills will remain illegal in more than a dozen states that have enacted near-total abortion bans. Those bans do not distinguish between medication and surgical abortion.

The case brought the issue of abortion access back to the Supreme Court, even as the conservative majority had said in the case that overturned Roe v. Wade, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, that it would cede the question “to the people and their elected representatives.”

Justice Gorsuch’s pointed questioning was echoed by other justices, who asked whether any of the doctors involved in the lawsuit could show they were harmed by the federal government’s approval and regulation of the abortion drug.

In one instance, Justice Elena Kagan asked the lawyer for the anti-abortion groups whom they were relying on to show an actual injury.

“You need a person,” Justice Kagan said. “So who’s your person?”

Although the argument contained detailed descriptions of abortion, including questions about placental tissue and bleeding, the focus on whether the challengers were even entitled to sue suggested that the justices could rule for the F.D.A. without addressing the merits of the case.

Since the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade ended a nationwide right in place for nearly a half-century, abortion pills have increasingly become the center of political and legal fights.

The case began in November 2022, when a group of anti-abortion doctors and medical organizations sued the F.D.A., asserting that the agency erred when it approved the drug in 2000.

A federal judge in Texas, Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, issued a preliminary ruling last spring invalidating the F.D.A.’s approval of the drug. In August, a panel of federal appeals judges in New Orleans limited his ruling, determining that mifepristone should remain legal but imposing significant restrictions on access. Those focused on the F.D.A. decisions about telemedicine and pills by mail.

A ruling for the anti-abortion doctors could have implications for the regulatory authority of the F.D.A., potentially calling into question the agency’s ability to approve and distribute other drugs.

Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar, arguing for the government, warned of the far-ranging consequences, both for the pharmaceutical industry and for reproductive rights. “It harms the pharmaceutical industry, which is sounding alarm bells in this case and saying that this would destabilize the system for approving and regulating drugs,” she said. “And it harms women who need access to medication abortion under the conditions that F.D.A. determined were safe and effective.”

To bring the legal challenge, the anti-abortion doctors and groups must show that they will suffer concrete harm if the pill remains widely available. Lawyers call this requirement standing.

Whether anti-abortion groups had met this basic threshold took up much of the questioning.

The argument zeroed in on the declarations by seven anti-abortion doctors in the lawsuit. They said they have suffered moral injuries from the availability of the abortion pill because they may be forced to treat women who come to emergency rooms suffering complications from the pill, including heavy bleeding.

Erin M. Hawley , the lawyer for the anti-abortion doctors, claimed that her clients suffered harm from the abortion pill and were subjected to acting against their conscience. They were forced to treat women in “life-threatening situations in which the choice for a doctor is either to scrub out and try to find someone else or to treat the woman who’s hemorrhaging on the emergency room table,” she said.

Ms. Hawley, who is married to Josh Hawley, a Republican senator from Missouri who has been involved in anti-abortion legislation, added that in an emergency, “it’s a lot to ask” for “doctors to go up to the top floor and litigate this with the general counsel when the federal government’s telling them they don’t have a conscience protection.”

Ms. Prelogar asserted that the claims by the anti-abortion doctors and groups “rest on a long chain of remote contingencies,” with scientific studies showing that medical complications from abortion pills are very rare.

She argued that there was only a slim chance that doctors who oppose abortion would have to treat patients. If those doctors wanted to opt out, they can do so under federal conscience protections, policies that allow doctors and other health workers to refrain from providing care they object to.

The anti-abortion challengers had made generalizations, with no specific example of a doctor who had to provide care against their conscience, Ms. Prelogar said, demonstrating “that the past harm hasn’t happened.”

She urged the justices to “put an end to this case.”

Justice Thomas asked Ms. Prelogar who could bring such a lawsuit, if she was correct that the doctors could not show a direct injury.

When Ms. Prelogar demurred, Justice Alito, who wrote the majority opinion in Dobbs, returned to the point.

“Is there anybody who could challenge in court the lawfulness of what the F.D.A. did here?” he asked.

“In this particular case, I think the answer is no,” Ms. Prelogar responded.

“Well, that wasn’t my question,” Justice Alito said. “Is there anybody who can do that?”

Ms. Prelogar said there was “a profound mismatch here” between the injury claimed by the doctors — that they would be forced to participate in abortion by treating women who had taken an abortion pill — and the remedy they sought, which was to end access to the drug for everyone.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson examined the idea that if the justices chipped away at the F.D.A.’s regulatory powers, it may fall to “judges parsing medical and scientific studies” to determine whether a drug is safe.

Jessica L. Ellsworth, the lawyer for Danco Laboratories, a manufacturer of the drug, agreed that such a system would raise concerns for “pharmaceutical companies who do depend on F.D.A.’s gold standard review process to approve their drugs and then to be able to sell their products in line with that considered judgment.”

Abbie VanSickle covers the United States Supreme Court for The Times. She is a lawyer and has an extensive background in investigative reporting. More about Abbie VanSickle