Discusses learning right from wrong, stressing such aspects as the difference between rules and principles and the importance of an individual's rights.

Alien abductions, satanic kidnappings, the channelling of spirits, the recall of past lives and other similar bizarre experiences are reported almost daily in the media. Is there a rational explanation for these events? This work uses scientific evidence on memory to dispel many supernatural beliefs.

Here Cavell, who has alluded to Thoreau throughout, takes up the quintessential American philosopher directly, and in relation to Heidegger, he also returns to his great philosophical love, Wittgenstein. His collection of essays ends, appropriately enough, with an essay on collecting.

Reissued with a new preface these famous essays cover a wide range of philosophical issues.

Offers an analysis of psychic abilities. This book examines the claims of parapsychologists such as Russell Targ, Harold Puthoff, and Jessica Utts. It provides an account of what these leading figures think they have discovered and gives explanations of why they are mistaken. It explores the role of skepticism in the progress of genuine science.

Offers detailed critiques of case studies presented by cultural critics as evidence that scientific results tell us more about social context than they do about the natural world. This work identifies numerous crude factual blunders (like that Newton never performed any experiments) and egregious errors of omission.

Truth has always been a central preoccupation of philosophy in all its forms and traditions. This work takes a look at how and why modern thought and culture lost sight of the importance of truth. It is intended for those who have ever been bored, frustrated, bewildered or plain enraged by the worst excesses of the fashionable intelligentsia.

Nearly half of all Americans believe in existence of extraterrestrials, and many are also convinced that aliens have visited Earth at some point in history. This book traces the origins of a belief in these visitors to the work of HP Lovecraft. It also argues that the appeal of such myths is a troubling sign in an age when science is successful.

Through close examination of the major idealists as well as the overlooked figures who influenced their reading of Kant, Franks explores the common ground and divergences between the philosophical problems that motivated Kant and those that, in turn, motivated the idealists.

A collection of essays, which presents the case against belief in God. It rejects the view that moral values and human purpose require divine sanction. It evaluates the arguments for God's existence, the validity of mystical experience, and the importance of the God concept for the development of morality and meaning in life.

Airplane crashes. The AIDS epidemic. Presidential election polls and voting results. Global warming. The latest cancer scare. All these news stories require scientific savvy first, to report, and then - for news consumers - to understand. It Ain't Necessarily So cuts through the miasma surrounding media reporting of scientific studies, surveys, and statistics. Whether the problem is bad science, .

An original and engaging analysis of the decline of religion in the nineteenth century.

Probes ten tantalizing mysteries that, for decades, have defied rational analysis and convinced many people that supernatural events really do happen. This book scrutinizes the evidence for a variety of strange historical, paranormal, and forensic phenomena.

Presents the conflict between creationists and evolutionary scientists. This book examines creationists' claims of scientific evidence for the six-day divine creation of the universe, followed by the catastrophic flood of Noah, as claimed in Genesis . It includes the criteria for distinguishing science from pseudoscience.

With 20 different ways to think better, and an introduction, this work is an examination of contemporary thought or lack of it in our society. It explains the problem of fuzzy thinking in detail, and optimistically proposes necessary remedies to 'dumbth' in the 101 rules for good thinking, reading, writing, speaking, and, reasoning.

This book examines the nature of skeptical arguments and their role in philosophical inquiry.

But why did Descartes think we should take these exaggerated doubts seriously? And if we do take them seriously, how did he think any of our beliefs could ever escape them? This work undertakes a study of Descartes's first three meditations to answer these questions and to present a fresh way of understanding precisely what Descartes was up to.

Features experts in the fields of physical/biological science, psychology, philosophy, social science, and forensic science bringing their perspectives to controversies that affect the way we think and how we perceive reality and the natural world. This book spans the gamut of pseudoscience.

It all began in June 2005 when Bobby Henderson wrote an open letter to the Kansas School Board proposing a third alternative to the teaching of evolution and intelligent design in schools.