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Timothy J. McGrew

 

What's New

Saturday, January 22, 2005. Here is an Adobe PDF file of the paper “Has Plantinga Refuted the Historical Argument?” which was a keynote address to the Pacific Division meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers in Los Angeles, February 2004 and appeared in Philosophia Christi 6 (2004): 7-26.

[The PDF format is necessary to preserve a few diagrams. The Adobe Acrobat Reader is free for downloading on the web.]

Sunday, January 04, 2004. Here is a more or less final draft of "Confirmation, Heuristics, and Explanatory Reasoning," which appeared in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 54 (2003): 553-67.

Monday, September 17, 2001. The most recent version of "Toward a Rational Reconstruction of Design Inferences" is now available.

Tuesday, May 8, 2001. An almost typo-free version of "Direct Inference and the Problem of Induction" is now available. This is roughly the same paper as the version in The Monist 84 (2001).

Monday, May 7, 2001. "A Defense of Strong Foundationalism" appears here with a small correction from the version found in Louis Pojman’s anthology The Theory of Knowledge: Classical and Contemporary Readings, 2nd ed. (1998).

Annotated Bibliographies

A number of people have told me that they have found the following brief bibliographies useful, so I am leaving them online. They are not research bibliographies but rather suggestions for those who are just beginning to enter the literature on a given topic.

Abductive Inference and Inference to the Best Explanation

Bayesian Reasoning

Confirmation Theory

Past Course Pages

Philosophy 6320: Epistemology Seminar (Fall 2008)

Philosophy 5700: Philosophical Applications of Probability Theory (Spring 2008)

Honors 470 / Philosophy 470: History and Philosophy of Science, part 1: from Aristotle through Galileo (2006)

Teaching Links

James Morrison's Astrolabe page

Retrograde Motion Simulator

Solar System Simulator

Homepages of Friends

Lydia McGrew

Dangerous Idea

Fides Quaerens Intellectum

Maverick Philosopher

Sloan Lee’s Virtual Office

The Constructive Curmudgeon

Memory Links

The Memory Page

Online Memory Improvement Course

Chess Links

Chess Cafe

ChessBase

Internet Chess Club

The Week in Chess

West Michigan Chess

Current Course Pages

Philosophy 5200: Philosophical Applications of Symbolic Logic (Spring 2009)

In the twentieth century, symbolic logic has become the philosopher’s analytical tool par excellence. The aim of this course is to give students a firm understanding of elementary symbolic logic through the first order predicate calculus and to explore extensions of elementary logic such as modal logic, deontic logic, epistemic logic, and tense logic, as well as variants like many-valued logics and probability logic and even more exotic systems like protothetic. Along the way we will give considerable attention to philosophical issues involving the interpretation of logical notions, the interplay between logic and the history of philosophy, and some central questions in the epistemology of logic. By the end of the course, students should have a clear sense of the scope of elementary logic, facility in its use, an understanding of the relations between elementary logic and some of its more prominent extensions and variants, and an understanding of the implications of the basic metatheoretical results.