Why was Sartre afraid of lobsters? What makes art great? Are the jokes in Kant’s Critique of Judgment funny? Does philosophy actually make philosophers wiser? As this book richly and entertainingly demonstrates, philosophy is as much the search for the right questions as it is a search for the right answers. Robert M. Martin introduces the reader to profound philosophical puzzles and paradoxes, and brings in surprising anecdotes from the history of philosophy, in this irreverent and seriously funny book.

Table of Contents:

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THIS BOOK

CHAPTER I: DIFFERENCES THAT MAKE NO DIFFERENCE

1 . THE UNANSWERABLE

• William James and the Squirrel
  Empty Questions
  More Empties
  Something or Nothing?

2 . YOU CAN NEVER TELL

• Double or Nothing?
  The Right-Handed Universe
  Fake Antiques

3 . SENSATIONAL PROBLEMS

• Mildred’s Peculiar Sensations
  Another Inversion in Mildred
  The Cheezy Puzzle
  Taste-Tests

4 . THE TRUE AND THE USEFUL

• It’s Practically True
  What’s So Good about True Beliefs Anyway?

INTO THE MAINSTREAM OF PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER II: GOD

1 . RELIGIOUS BELIEF

• The Invisible Gardener
  Industrial Prayer
  The Anti-Flu Flight
  I Believe in One Outpouring of Existence Itself
  Religious Truths
• • (1) Divine Geology
    
  • (2) One Hell of a Rainstorm
  Faith
  Brainless Spirituality
  The Philosophy Poll

2 . GOD’S DIFFICULTIES

• God Made Me Do It
  God Knows!
  God the Counterfeiter
  A Proof That Everything Is Hunky-Dory
  God When He Was a Baby
  The Fawn in the Fire

3 . ODDBALL THEORIES OF RELIGION

• How There Got to Be Only One God
  God Is Love?
  Where Heaven Came From

4 . PROVING THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

• God as the Tortoise on the Bottom
  The Miracle on the Expressway
  Unusual Arguments for God’s Existence
  Miraculous Evidence
  I Believe in Love
  God and the Printing-Factory Explosion

5. BETTING ON GOD

• Why Believing in God Is a Good Bet
  Why Believing in God Is Not a Good Bet

6 . WHAT IF THERE ISN’T ANY GOD?

INTO THE MAINSTREAM OF PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER III : TAKING CHANCES

1. SOME PROBABLE FACTS

• Rosencrantz Flips a Coin
  to be or not to xq
  Another Surprising Sequence
  You’re On a Roll!
  Why We’re All Nasty
  Psychic Powers in Your Classroom
  Your Extraordinary Ancestors
  How Many Ancestors Do You Have?
  The Miracle of You

2 . SOME PROBABILITY SURPRISES

• One-Third of Two
  How to Play Russian Roulette
  Happy Birthday Dear You-Two

3 . UNHEALTHY MISTAKES

• Canada’s Colonic Sweetheart
  Hazards to Your Mental Health
  Guess the Percentages
  Sweinfeld: The Epidemic about Nothing

4. YOU’RE WRONG

• The Trouble with Taxis
  The Basketball Blunder
  Better Pay or Worse?
  Why It’s Not Certain That You’ll Be in a Plane Crash
  Predicting Priscilla

INTO THE MAINSTREAM OF PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER IV: MAKING CHOICES : Decision Theory

1 . LOTTERIES AND OTHER GAMBLES

• The Proof That Lots of People Are Crazy or Stupid
  A Good Lottery Strategy
  How to Go Home a Winner

2 . GETTING MONTY’S GOAT

• The Monty Hall Paradox
  In Which I Try to Convince You That I’m Right
  Pigeon Reasoning

3 . MORE PROBABILITY PUZZLES

• The Paradox of the Three Prisoners
  The Other Envelope Is Always Better
  The Sleeping Beauty Conundrum
  Paradoxical Babies

4 . PREFERENCES AND VOTING

• Why You Shouldn’t Vote
  Fred’s Confusing Preferences
  How Not to Choose a Movie
  How to Win at Dice
  Rock, Scissors, Paper

5 . SLIPPING DOWN THE SLOPE

• The Elusive Wine-Bottle
  Why You Should Always Have Another Glass of Beer
  Why Everyone Is Poor

INTO THE MAINSTREAM OF PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER V: LOGIC AND PARADOX

1 . THE ILLOGIC OF ENGLISH

• “Or” Confusions
  Nothing If Not Complicated
  “The” Confusions
  Much Ado about Nothing
  The Messy Counterfactual

2 . THINKING IN CIRCLES

• The Divine Circle
  There’s Always a Catch
  The Münchhausen Trilemma

3 . THE UNSPOKEN IMPLICATION

• It Never Turns Blue Either
  Has the Present King of France Stopped Robbing Banks?

4 . IMPOSSIBLE SURPRISES

• The Surprise Quiz That Never Happens
  Why You Can’t Pick Any Number
  The Surprising Meatloaf
  Why All Numbers Are Interesting

5 . PARADOXES OF SELF - REFERENCE

• The Non-Existent Barber
  The Trouble with Adjectives
  The Troublesome Statement in the Box
  A Silly Proof of God’s Existence
  Self-Referential Jokes
  On Being a Member of Yourself
  This Is Not the Title of This Item
  There Are Two Errors

6 . OH NO! MORE SILLY PROOFS OF GOD’S EXISTENCE!

• The Universal Prover
  God Knows That He Exists

7. ZENO’S PARADOXES

• The Speedy Tortoise
  The Runner Who Never Gets to the Finish
  Supertask: Able to Leap Short Time-Intervals
  How to Finish an Autobiography
  Thinking about Changing? There’s a Lot to Do.

INTO THE MAINSTREAM OF PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER VI : BELIEF, LOGIC, AND INTENTIONS

1 . BELIEVE IT OR NOT

• Why You Should Never Change Your Mind
  The Zen of Chicken-Sexing
  Be Careful What You Believe
  Knowing Nothing about Birds
  The Hobgoblin of Little Minds
  You’ll Believe Just Anything
  Impossible Beliefs

2 . IT HAS TO BE TRUE

• Descartes’s Thought
  The Unexamined Life
  A Guaranteed True Belief

3 . SELF-FULFILLING/SELF-DEFEATING

• The Power of Positive Thinking
  How to Fail at Baseball
  The Pursuit of Happiness
  Fooling Yourself
  Sorry, I’m Not Free Right Now

4 . MENTAL IMPOTENCE

• Believe or I’ll Shoot!
  How to Intend to Kick Your Cat

INTO THE MAINSTREAM OF PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER VII : GOOD AND BAD REASONING

1 . THOUGHT - TRAPS FOR THE UNWARY

• The Price of a Ball
  Splitting Up the Diamonds
  The Disappearing Dollar
  Free Beer
  Nobody Works at All
  The Disappearing Day
  Who’s Looking?
  The Jelly-Bean Peculiarity
  The General Makes Some Bad Choices
  More Math Troubles
  His Father’s Son
  The Card Mistake
  Roses and Mice

2 . THE REASONING OF OTHER CULTURES AND PAST CULTURES

• Azande Witches
  Camels in Germany
  If We Had Three Nostrils, Would There Be Eight Planets?
  Nobody Could Be That Wrong
  Charity for All?
  Warning for Tourists: Watch Out for Extreme Politeness

3 . THINKING IN GROOVES

• Ungroovy Thinking
  (1) The Boy with Two Fathers
  (2) How to Win a Camel Anti-Race
  (3) Thinking Straight about Roman Numerals
  (4) Reducing Speeding Violations
  (5) Smashing a Fly
  (6) The Enormous Tiddly-Wink Tournament
  (7) Notes from the Underground
  Thinking Outside the Box
  Getting Out of the Box
  The the Title of This Book
  The Mushroom Hunt

INTO THE MAINSTREAM OF PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER VIII : LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE

1 . WHAT’S KNOWLEDGE?

• Justification
  Lucy the Baseball Oracle
  Galileo as Scientist
  Kekulé’s Dream

2 . SCEPTICAL DOUBTS AND PUZZLES

• Life Is But a Dream
  The Stuff That Dreams Are Made On
  The Brain in a Vat
  What Pink Socks Tell You about Ravens
  Something Even Worse about Pink Socks
  Ravens in Rutland
  Chicken Induction
  How Long Will This Keep Going On?
  The Inevitability of Scientific Error: Another Circle
  Dunno
  No Future to Know

3 . SCIENTIFIC SURPRISES

• The Depressing Sample
  Your Popular Friends

4 . SCIENTIFIC MISTAKES

• Bad Predictions
  The Board of Miseducation
  True Scotsmen

5 . CAUSE AND EFFECT

• Cause and Correlation
  The Tickle Defence

6 . SCIENCE AND NON -

• Too Good to Be True
  I Dreamed That Would Happen!
  Is It a Boy or a Girl?
  The Wisdom of the Noble Savage
  The Wisdom of the Dumbest Yokel

INTO THE MAINSTREAM OF PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER IX : KNOWING WITHOUT EXPERIENCE

1 . THE A PRIORI AND DEFINITIONS

• Why Your Sisters Are Female
  Truth “By Definition”
  The Dictionary with Very Few Definitions
  Sisters without Language
  Honest Abe and the Sheep
  The Disappearing Planet

2 . CONCEPTUAL TRUTHS

• I Forget What I Saw Before I Was Born
  More on Conceptual Existence

3 . THE SYNTHETIC A PRIORI

• The Incompetent Repairman
  Kant on the Synthetic A Priori
  Nothing Made That Happen
  The Butterfly That Destroyed Oakland
  The Tribe without Arithmetic
  7 + 5 ≠ 12
  The Numbers Made Me Believe That
  Bizarre Triangles Discovered in Space

4 . A PRIORI SCIENCE

• Bad Physics
  The Infinity of Space
  Why It’s Dark at Night
  Thinking about Falling
  The Shadow Knows
  The Mirror Problem
  More Thoughts about Falling

INTO THE MAINSTREAM OF PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER X : THINKING, SAYING, AND MEANING : The Philosophy of Mind and of Language

1 . THINKING MACHINES

• Could a Machine Think?
  Artificial Insanity
  The Turing Test
  How to Think Like a Computer
  Don’t Try This Recipe at Home, Kids!
  A Robot Has Feelings, Too
  The Mystery of Meat
  Let’s Not Get Physical
  What Zombies Tell Us
  Mildred Again
  The Material Girl (and Boy)
  The Astonishing Hypothesis
  Angels and Superman
  Believing in Angels
  Why Picnics Don’t Obey the Laws of Physics

2 . THE THOUGHTS OF ANIMALS

• Dog-Zombies
  Fido’s Logic
  Fido’s Mendacity
  Language Requirements?

3 . MEANING

• What Could They Have Meant?
  Saying What You Don’t Mean
  Thinking about Vienna
  The Incredible Swampman
  Thinking about Santa Claus

INTO THE MAINSTREAM OF PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER XI : HERE AND NOW; YOU NDI

1 . TIME TRAVEL

• Not Killing Grandpa
  Meeting Yourself
  UFOs Contain Visitors from Planet Earth
  Time Travel and the End of Humanity

2 . WHEN , WHERE , AND WHO

• Telling Space Aliens What Day It Is
  I’m Here Now
  Fred Finds Himself in the Library
  What Two Gods Don’t Know

3 . THE IDENTITY OF THINGS

• Two Ways to Be the Same
  The Same Lump
  The Identity of My University
  The Disappearing Boat
  Three Odd Buildings
  (1) The Gold Pavilion Temple
  (2) The Hôtel de Glace
  (3) The Ugly Apartment House
  Puzzling Rivers in Klopstokia

4 . THE IDENTITY OF ANIMALS AND PEOPLE

• My Organism Is Bigger than Yours
  Rover and Clover
  The Adventures of Amoeba-Man
  Getting Someone Else’s Body
  Keeping Your Own Body
  Two Places Are Better than One
  What It Takes to Be in Heaven

5 . IDENTITY AND ESSENCE

• What Makes You You
  What Makes Us Us

INTO THE MAINSTREAM OF PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER XII : WHY SHOULD I BE MORAL?

1 . WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME?

• Change for a Dollar
  The Ring of Gyges
  Rationality

2 . RELATIVISM AND REALISM

• Finger-Lickin’ Good and Evil
  It’s All Relative
  Can Ethics Be Taught?
  The Gurgling Wave
  When God Tells You to Do Evil
  Biblical Guides to Conduct

3 . THE PRISONER’S DILEMMA

• A Deal for the Prisoners
  The Tragedy of the Commons
  Coca-Cola Morality
  Why We Should Hire a Dictator
  Why People in Small Towns are Nicer
  Toucha Smasha

4 . THE PARADOX OF DETERRENCE

• Bombing the Russians
  When It’s Sane to Be Crazy
  The Swerving Chicken

INTO THE MAINSTREAM OF PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER XIII : HOW TO THINK MORALLY

1 . JUSTICE AND DISTRIBUTION

• Why You Should Give Away Your Shoes
  Sell Whatsoever Thou Hast, and Give to the Rich
  Why You Don’t Have to Give Away Your Shoes
  Your Shoes and Your “Families”
  Supererogatory Acts
  Schadenfreude

2 . PUNISHMENT

• Getting Back at Eichmann
  Making a Statement
  Closure
  The Paradox of Punishment

3 . RIGHTS AND WRONGS

• Push-Pin Anyone?
  When Promise-Breaking Is Obligatory
  Don’t Torture That Baby!
  How to Prevent Crime
  Rights vs. Utility
  Special Today on Life: Only $2199.91/Day
  The Price of Life in Europe

INTO THE MAINSTREAM OF PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER XIV: MORAL CONUNDRUMS

1 . GETTING WHAT YOU WANT

• Past and Future Desires
  Harming and Benefitting the Dead
  What Happens to Somebody Who Is Hardly Me
  How to Get What You Want
  Electronic Pleasure

2 . RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHER PEOPLE

• I’m Gonna Buy a Plastic Doll That I Can Call My Own
  Replaceable People in Literature

3 . YUK

• Hello Dolly!
  Frankensurgery
  Canine Disrespect
  The Yuck Factor

4 . ACTING AND REFRAINING

• Two Ways to Kill Granny
  Moral Technology
  Ten-to-One Dilemmas
  How to Get Organ Donors
  How to Assault a Police Officer by Doing Nothing
  Poor Joshua!
  The Bad Samaritan

INTO THE MAINSTREAM OF PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER XV: LAW, ACTION, AND RESPONSIBILITY

1 . WHY IS THAT ILLEGAL?

• Blackmailing Letterman
  How Not to Sell Ice in Alberta

2 . TWILIGHT - ZONE LEGISLATION

• Legislating π
  Some Unusual Laws

3 . WHEN RULES COLLIDE

• The Immigration Collision
  Trapped in the Airport

4 . PROBLEMS FOR JUDGES

• The Messier Contract
  What Do Judges Do?

5 . PROBLEMS ABOUT ACTIONS

• Why You Don’t Drive When You’re Drunk
  The Lucky Murderer
  A Time and a Place for Murder

6 . CANS AND CAN’TS

• Can Pierre Keep His Promise?
  Ought But Can’t?
  Saving Ought Implies Can
  What You Can’t Do
  The Incapable Golfer
  No Absolution for Pierre

7. FREE WILL

• I Just Had to Do It
  Freedom as Uncaused Action
  An Unfree Ass
  Freedom as Irrationality
  The Unpredictable Dealer
  Compatibilism
  The Evil Physiologist

INTO THE MAINSTREAM OF PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER XVI : DEEP THOUGHTS

• Wisdom
  Cheer
  Sub Specie Aeternitatis
  Doubt

BIBLIOGRAPHY
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