Mark Pursley Philosophy 6

Small Group Exercise

Identify the premise(s) and conclusion of the following arguments.

  1. When drugs like nicotine and cocaine are smoked and inhaled deeply, they go from lungs to heart to brain in one pass and undergo less dilution in relatively smaller volumes of arterial blood. Taking drugs by inhalation is one step removed from injecting them directly into the brain. For this reason, drug smoking is associated with the most stubborn forms of addiction. (Dr. Andrew Weil)
  1. All people should have equal political rights, because there is nothing that differentiates people at birth in a way that is relevant to their political rights.
  1. We--the governors in a democracy—must make intelligent decisions when we vote. Without a free flow of information, we cannot make intelligent decisions. Thus there must be freedom of speech in a democracy.
  1. Hypnosis is an unreliable way to refresh memory. It often elicits imagination, fantasy, and play as well as true recollections, with neither patient nor therapist able to distinguish the one from the other. Hypnosis seems to involve, in a central way, a state of heightened suggestibility. Courts have banned its use as evidence or even as a tool for criminal investigation…. So the fact that, when hypnotized, people sometimes relate alien abduction stories carries little weight. (Carl Sagan)
  1. Argumentation cannot suffice for the discovery of new work, since the subtlety of nature is greater many times than the subtlety of argument. (Francis Bacon)
  1. The New Testament gospels were composed during the last quarter of the first century by third-generation authors on the basis of folk memories preserved in stories that had circulated by word of mouth for decades. The oral stories the four evangelists recorded had been shaped, reshaped, augmented, and edited by numerous storytellers for half a century or more before achieving their final written forms. Hence, the four gospels cannot be taken as historically accurate descriptions of the words and deeds of Jesus. (Adapted from Robert Funk)
  1. Evolution is very possibly not, in actual fact, always gradual. But it must be gradual when it is being used to explain the coming in to existence of complicated, apparently designed, objects, like eyes. For if it is not gradual in these cases, it ceases to have any explanatory power at all. (Richard Dawkins)
  1. He who will give himself leave to consider freely, and look into the dark and intricate part of each hypothesis, will scarce find his reason able to determine him fixedly for, or against the soul’s materiality. Since on which side soever he views it, either as an unextended substance, or as thinking extended matter; the difficulty to conceive either, will, whilst either alone in his thoughts, still drive him to the contrary side. (John Locke)