For many philosophy teachers, the joy of philosophy is the joy of putting forward and defending arguments. However, this paper argues that the core of philosophy consists in a set of problems that are distinctive not because of their logic but because they deal with profound emotions that define the human condition and, as such, manifest an apparent immunity to logical analysis. In putting forward this position, the paper describes the current “thinness” of philosophy, argues that the familiar characterization of philosophy as a subject matter concerned with rigorous argumentation is mistaken, and offers a list of resolutions that aim at teaching the joy of philosophy.

When questioned about what ought to be done in a particular scenario, students often ignore moral considerations and appeal to what is in an individual’s self-interest. This paper shows how an instructor can use a student’s habitual inclination to think in a self-interested fashion to guide them into thinking about moral considerations. Rather than drawing a sharp distinction between self-interested thinking and moral considerations, a more plausible account contends that self-interested thinking does not function independently of moral considerations. That is, self-interested thinking reveals itself to be incomplete without some normative conception of the self. In addition to arguing and responding to objections to this position, the paper offers pedagogical advice on how instructors can use a student’s thinking about self-interest to guide them into moral thought.

While there are a number of genuine philosophical topics that medical and premedical students can get out of a course on medical ethics, being an ethically sensitive health care worker requires more than knowing a variety of philosophically-interesting medical ethics questions and concepts. In addition, two goals of teaching medical ethics should be to ensure that health care workers have a healthy respect for the rights of their patients and to instill in students the importance of gathering as much information as possible before making decisions that affect the lives of their patients. This paper discusses two methods by which this second goal is achieved, namely by using an in-class exercise and a procedure for delivering exams.

It is frequently claimed by critical thinking and logic textbooks that people commonly commit the fallacy of affirming the consequent. This paper argues that if people did commitment this fallacy with any type of regularity, then it would be easy to locate examples from news media. However, a review of the examples cited by critical thinking and logic textbooks show that it is nearly impossible to find a real instance of this logical fallacy since purported instances of the fallacy are not deductive inferences at all but are instead inferences to the best explanation.

This paper points out a recent error that has been occurring in logic and critical thinking textbooks concerning the definition of a deductively valid argument. Namely, a number of authors define a deductively valid argument as one where the conclusion must be true if the premises are true. This definition is mistaken as it attaches necessity to a statement (the conclusion) rather than to the relationship between premises and the conclusion. In addition to detailing this mistake in a number of textbooks, the paper provides three correct definitions of a valid argument.