Exercise 4-7

For each of the following, first determine if the passage contains an argument. If it does, underline premises, circle conclusions, and box off any premise or conclusion indicators; or number the statements and diagram the argument. If the passage does not contain an argument, put a check in the margin and indicate whether or not it contains a conditional statement.

*1. "Since [beauty] is no creature of our reason...[and] since it strikes us without reference to use...we must conclude that beauty is, for the greater part, some quality in bodies acting mechanically upon the human mind by the intervention of the senses."
2. Nothing can have value without being an object of utility. Therefore, only labor which is useful has any value.
3. "For over two thousand years mathematicians have been making correct inferences of a systematic and intricate sort, and logicians and philosophers have been analyzing the character of valid arguments."
--Patrick Suppes, Introduction to Logic
4. "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophes." --Albert Einstein
5. "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish." --David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
*6. "We are an intelligent species and the use of our intelligence quite properly gives us pleasure. In this respect the brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous." --Carl Sagan
*7. "Women are directly fitted for acting as the nurses and teachers of our early childhood by the fact that they are themselves childish, frivolous and short-sighted; in a word, they are big children all their life long...." --Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism, "Of Women"
8. "Surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak. But experience more than sufficiently teaches that men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues." --Spinoza, Ethics, pt. III, proposition 2, note.
9. "If happiness is activity in accordance with excellence, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest excellence." --Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bk. X, ch. 17.
10. "He whose honor depends on the opinion of the mob must day by day strive with the greatest anxiety, act and scheme in order to retain his reputation. For the mob is varied and inconstant, and therefore if a reputation is not carefully preserved it dies quickly." --Spinoza, Ethics, pt. IV, proposition 58, note.
11. "No violation of justice among citizens may be justified...by appeal to the ideal of equality, for that ideal is logically dependent upon the notion of justice. Reverse discrimination, then, which attempts no other justification than an appeal to equality, is wrong." --Lisa H. Newton, Reverse Discrimination as Unjustified
*12. "No educated man stating plainly the elementary notions that every educated man holds about the matters that principally concern government could be elected to office in a democratic state, save perhaps by a miracle. His frankness would arouse fear, and those fears would run against him; it is his business to arouse fears that will run in favor of him." ??H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy
13. "The figure of the tyrant-monster is known to the mythologies, folk traditions, legends, and even nightmares, of the world; and his characteristics are everywhere essentially the same. He is the hoarder of the general benefit. He is the monster avid for the greedy rights of 'my and mine.'"--The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell
14. "Affirmation of life is the spiritual act by which man ceases to live unreflectively and begins to devote himself to his life with reverence in order to raise it to its true value. To affirm life is to deepen, to make more inward, and to exalt the will to live." --Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought
15. "If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind." --John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
16. Psychiatry is a fraud because it decides what is or is not a mental illness by democratic vote of its members: that's what it did with homosexuality. Before the vote was taken, homosexuality was a treatable mental illness; after the vote, homosexuality was no longer a mental illness.
17. "Two things fill the mind with ever?increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." --Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason
18. "I refer those actions which work out the good of the agent to courage, and those which work out the good of others to nobility. Therefore temperance, sobriety, and presence of mind in danger, etc., are species of courage; but modesty, clemency, etc., are species of nobility." --Spinoza, Ethics, pt. III, proposition 59, note.
*19. I just don't see why multi-cultural education is so popular or why people think it is value-free. Multi-cultural education is not value-free, despite what its proponents say. It teaches children to respect and accept the evil values and practices of other cultures such as genital mutilation of young girls in Africa and handing out death sentences for blasphemy in Iran.
20. "The majority of men, I maintain, are dominated by a high opinion of their own skill and accomplishments, especially the perfection of their intellects for distinguishing true from false and sure guidance from misleading suggestion. It is therefore necessary, I maintain, to shut the gate so as to keep the general public from reading the books of the misguided as far as possible." --Algazali, The Deliverance from Error
21. "...[H]owever much health may contribute to that flow of good spirits which is so essential to our happiness, good spirits do not entirely depend upon health; for a man may be perfectly sound in his physique and still possess a melancholy temperament and be generally given up to sad thoughts." --Arthur Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life, "Personality, or What a Man Is"
22. "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness." --George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
*23. Restitution, rather than imprisonment should be required in those cases where property damage is the issue; for, sending a person to prison ought to be avoided whenever possible and the victim of a property crime is likely to be much more satisfied with our criminal justice system if he or she is repaid. If a criminal goes to prison, he is not going to be able to make restitution.
24. "Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth." --Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
25. "A celebrated author and divine has written to me that 'he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.'" --The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
26. "Homosexual pornography features an inordinate amount of sadomasochism....It is a striking fact that homosexuals seldom (to my knowledge, never) object to homosexual pornography on similar grounds; from which it would seem that the homosexual subculture makes no value distinctions among kinds of sexual relations but is, in principle, promiscuous." --Joseph Sobran, Bogus Sex: Reflections on Homosexual Claims
27. "Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils--no, nor the human race, as I believe--and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day." -- Plato The Republic, V, 473?C.
*28. "To protect the workers in their inalienable rights to a higher and better life; to protect them, not only as equals before the law, but also in their health, their homes, their firesides, their liberties as men, as workers, and as citizens; to overcome and conquer prejudices and antagonism; to secure to them the right to life, and the opportunity to maintain that life; the right to be full sharers in the abundance which is the result of their brain and brawn, and the civilization of which they are the founders and the mainstay.¼The attainment of these is the glorious mission of the trade unions." -- Samuel Gompers
29. "Since I do not foresee that atomic energy is to be a great boon for a long time, I have to say that for the present it is a menace. Perhaps it is well that it should be. It may intimidate the human race into bringing order into its international affairs, which, without the pressure of fear, it would not do." --Albert Einstein, Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1945.
30. "Philosophy is written in this grand book - I mean the universe - which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth." --Galileo Galilei, Il Saggiatore
31. "Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.¼Freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected. These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us, and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and the blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment." --Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address.