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Aquinas
God and Action
David B. Burrell C.S.C.
University of Scranton Press, 2008
First published 30 years ago and long out of print, Aquinas: God and Action appears here for the first time in paperback. This classic volume by eminent philosopher and theologian David Burrell argues that Aquinas’s is not the god of Greek metaphysics, but a god of both being and activity. Aquinas’s plan in the Summa Theologiae, according to Burrell, is to instruct humans how to find eternal happiness through acts of knowing and loving. Featuring a new foreword by the author, this edition will be welcomed by philosophers and theologians alike.
 
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Evidence for God from Physics and Philosophy
Extending the Legacy of Monsignor George Lemaître and St. Thomas Aquinas
Robert J. Spitzer, S.J.
St. Augustine's Press, 2015

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History, Rhetoric, and Proof
Carlo Ginzburg
Brandeis University Press, 1999
Historian Carlo Ginzburg uses the occasion of his Menachem Stern Lectureship to present a provocative and characteristically brilliant examination of the relation between rhetoric and historiography. In four lectures, based on a wide range of texts -- Aristotle's Poetics; humanist Lorenzo Valla's tract exposing the Donation of Constantine as a forgery; an early 18th-century Jesuit historical account purporting to record the diatribe of a Mariana Island native against Spanish rule; and Proust's commentary on Flaubert's style -- he demonstrates that rhetoric, if properly understood, is related not only to ornament but to historical understanding and truth. Ginzburg discovers a middle ground between the empiricist or positivist view of history, and the current postmodern tendency to regard any historical account as just one among an infinity of possible narratives, distinguished or measured not by the standard of truth, but by rhetorical skill. As a whole, these lectures stake out a position that both mediates and transcends warring factions in the current historiographical debate.
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Language, Proof, and Logic
Second Edition
Dave Barker-Plummer, Jon Barwise, and John Etchemendy
CSLI, 2011

Language Proof and Logic is available as a physical book with the software included and as a downloadable package of software plus the book in PDF format. The all-electronic version is available from Openproof at gradegrinder.net.

The textbook/software package covers first-order language in a method appropriate for first and second courses in logic. An on-line grading services instantly grades solutions to hundred of computer exercises. It is designed to be used by philosophy instructors teaching a logic course to undergraduates in philosophy, computer science, mathematics, and linguistics.

Introductory material is presented in a systematic and accessible fashion. Advanced chapters include proofs of soundness and completeness for propositional and predicate logic, as well as an accessible sketch of Godel's first incompleteness theorem. The book is appropriate for a wide range of courses, from first logic courses for undergraduates (philosophy, mathematics, and computer science) to a first graduate logic course.

The software package includes four programs:

Tarski's World, a new version of the popular program that teaches the basic first-order language and its semantics;

Fitch, a natural deduction proof environment for giving and checking first-order proofs;

Boole, a program that facilitates the construction and checking of truth tables and related notions (tautology, tautological consequence, etc.);

Submit, a program that allows students to submit exercises done with the above programs to the Grade Grinder, the automatic grading service.

Grade reports are returned to the student and, if requested, to the student's instructor, eliminating the need for tedious checking of homework. All programs are available for Windows and Macintosh systems. Instructors do not need to use the programs themselves in order to be able to take advantage of their pedagogical value. More about the software can be found at gradegrinder.net.

The price of a new text/software package includes one Registration ID, which must be used each time work is submitted to the grading service. Once activated, the Registration ID is not transferable.

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Last Works
Moses Mendelssohn. Translated by Bruce Rosenstock
University of Illinois Press, 2012
Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) was the central figure in the emancipation of European Jewry. His intellect, judgment, and tact won the admiration and friendship of contemporaries as illustrious as Johann Gottfried Herder, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Immanuel Kant. His enormously influential Jerusalem (1783) made the case for religious tolerance, a cause he worked for all his life.
 
Last Works includes, for the first time complete and in a single volume, the English translation of Morning Hours: Lectures on the Existence of God (1785) and To the Friends of Lessing (1786). Bruce Rosenstock has also provided an historical introduction and an extensive philosophical commentary to both texts.
 
At the center of Mendelssohn's last works is his friendship with Lessing. Mendelssohn hoped to show that he, a Torah-observant Jew, and Lessing, Germany's leading dramatist, had forged a life-long friendship that held out the promise of a tolerant and enlightened culture in which religious strife would be a thing of the past.
 
Lessing's death in 1781 was a severe blow to Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn wrote his last two works to commemorate Lessing and to carry on the work to which they had dedicated much of their lives. Morning Hours treats a range of major philosophical topics: the nature of truth, the foundations of human knowledge, the basis of our moral and aesthetic powers of judgment, the reality of the external world, and the grounds for a rational faith in a providential deity. It is also a key text for Mendelssohn's readings of Spinoza. In To the Friends of Lessing, Mendelssohn attempts to unmask the individual whom he believes to be the real enemy of the enlightened state: the Schwärmer, the religious fanatic who rejects reason in favor of belief in suprarational revelation.
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Nature and Nature's God
A Philosophical and Scientific Defense of Aquinas' Unmoved Mover Argument
Daniel Shields
Catholic University of America Press, 2023
Aquinas’ first proof for God’s existence is usually interpreted as a metaphysical argument immune to any objections coming from empirical science. Connections to Aquinas’ own historical understanding of physics and cosmology are ignored or downplayed. Nature and Nature's God proposes a natural philosophical interpretation of Aquinas’ argument more sensitive to the broader context of Aquinas’ work and yielding a more historically accurate account of the argument. Paradoxically, the book also shows that, on such an interpretation, Aquinas’ argument is not only consistent with modern science, but actually confirmed by the history of science, from classical mechanics through 19th century thermodynamics to contemporary cosmology. The first part of the book considers Aquinas’ argument in its historical context, exploring the key principles that everything in motion is moved by something else and that an infinite regress of causes is impossible. The structure of the First Way is analyzed and the argument is connected both with Aquinas’ Third Way—a new interpretation of which is also proposed—and Aquinas’ second proof from motion in the Summa contra Gentiles. To complete the account of what natural philosophy—prior to metaphysics—can demonstrate about God, a chapter on Aquinas’ teleological argument (the Fifth Way) is also included. The second part of the book tracks the history of modern science from Copernicus to today, showing how Aquinas’ argument fared at each major turn. The first chapter shows how Newton’s understanding of inertia and conservation of momentum supports the idea that motion cannot continue forever without God’s causality, and integrates a modern understanding of inertia and gravity with the principles of Thomistic natural philosophy. The second chapter considers the first and second laws of thermodynamics, showing how they too support Aquinas’ contention that motion cannot continue forever without God’s causality. This chapter also discusses statistical mechanics and contemporary cosmology, demonstrating that science continues to support Aquinas’ unmoved mover argument. The final chapter turns to modern biology as well as cosmological fine-tuning to show that modern science also continues to support Aquinas’ teleological argument. The result is not only a satisfying defense of Aquinas’ natural philosophical proofs for God’s existence, but a primer on the broader project of integrating Thomistic natural philosophy with modern science.
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Presumptions and Burdens of Proof
An Anthology of Argumentation and the Law
Edited by Hans V. Hansen, Fred J. Kauffeld, James B. Freeman, and Lilian Bermejo-Luque
University of Alabama Press, 2019
An anthology of the most important historical sources, classical and modern, on the subjects of presumptions and burdens of proof

In the last fifty years, the study of argumentation has become one of the most exciting intellectual crossroads in the modern academy. Two of the most central concepts of argumentation theory are presumptions and burdens of proof. Their functions have been explicitly recognized in legal theory since the middle ages, but their pervasive presence in all forms of argumentation and in inquiries beyond the law—including politics, science, religion, philosophy, and interpersonal communication—have been the object of study since the nineteenth century.

However, the documents and essays central to any discussion of presumptions and burdens of proof as devices of argumentation are scattered across a variety of remote sources in rhetoric, law, and philosophy. Presumptions and Burdens of Proof: An Anthology of Argumentation and the Law brings together for the first time key texts relating to the history of the theory of presumptions along with contemporary studies that identify and give insight into the issues facing students and scholars today.

The collection’s first half contains historical sources and begins with excerpts from Aristotle’s Topics and goes on to include the locus classicus chapter from Bishop Whately’s crucial Elements of Rhetoric as well as later reactions to Whately’s views. The second half of the collection contains contemporary essays by contributors from the fields of law, philosophy, rhetoric, and argumentation and communication theory. These essays explore contemporary understandings of presumptions and burdens of proof and their role in numerous contexts today. This anthology is the definitive resource on the subject of these crucial rhetorical modes and will be a vital resource to all scholars of communication and rhetoric, as well as legal scholars and practicing jurists.
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Proof
Photographs from Four Generations of a Texas Family
Byrd M. Williams IV
University of North Texas Press, 2016

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The Proof
Uses of Evidence in Law, Politics, and Everything Else
Frederick Schauer
Harvard University Press, 2022

Winner of the Scribes Book Award

“Displays a level of intellectual honesty one rarely encounters these days…This is delightful stuff.”
—Barton Swaim, Wall Street Journal

“At a time when the concept of truth itself is in trouble, this lively and accessible account provides vivid and deep analysis of the practices addressing what is reliably true in law, science, history, and ordinary life. The Proof offers both timely and enduring insights.”
—Martha Minow, former Dean of Harvard Law School

“His essential argument is that in assessing evidence, we need, first of all, to recognize that evidence comes in degrees…and that probability, the likelihood that the evidence or testimony is accurate, matters.”
—Steven Mintz, Inside Higher Education

“I would make Proof one of a handful of books that all incoming law students should read…Essential and timely.”
—Emily R. D. Murphy, Law and Society Review

In the age of fake news, trust and truth are hard to come by. Blatantly and shamelessly, public figures deceive us by abusing what sounds like evidence. To help us navigate this polarized world awash in misinformation, preeminent legal theorist Frederick Schauer proposes a much-needed corrective.

How we know what we think we know is largely a matter of how we weigh the evidence. But evidence is no simple thing. Law, science, public and private decision making—all rely on different standards of evidence. From vaccine and food safety to claims of election fraud, the reliability of experts and eyewitnesses to climate science, The Proof develops fresh insights into the challenge of reaching the truth. Schauer reveals how to reason more effectively in everyday life, shows why people often reason poorly, and makes the case that evidence is not just a matter of legal rules, it is the cornerstone of judgment.

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Questions of Evidence
Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines
Edited by James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry D. Harootunian
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Biologists, historians, lawyers, art historians, and literary critics all voice arguments in the critical dialogue about what constitutes evidence in research and scholarship. They examine not only the constitution and "blurring" of disciplinary boundaries, but also the configuration of the fact-evidence distinctions made in different disciplines and historical moments; the relative function of such concepts as "self-evidence," "experience," "test," "testimony," and "textuality" in varied academic discourses; and the way "rules of evidence" are themselves products of historical developments.

The essays and rejoinders are by Terry Castle, Lorraine Daston, Carlo Ginzburg, Ian Hacking, Mark Kelman, R. C. Lewontin, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Mary Poovey, Donald Preziosi, Simon Schaffer, Joan W. Scott, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith.

The critical responses are by Lauren Berlant, James Chandler, Jean Comaroff, Arnold I. Davidson, Harry D. harootunian, Elizabeth Helsinger, Thomas C. Holt, Francoise Meltzer, Robert J. Richards, Lawrence Rothfield, Joel Snyder, Cass R. Sunstein, and William Wimsatt.
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Stoic Theology
Proof for the Existence of the Cosmic God and of the Traditional Gods
P. A. Meijer
Eburon Academic Publishers, 2008
The ancient Stoics constructed an elaborate set of proofs for the existence of the Greek gods which proved highly influential for later theological and philosophical proofs. P. A. Meijer’s Stoic Theology, the first book on the subject in almost thirty years,analyzes these proofs from a fresh perspective. This valuable resource features a thorough examination of pre-Christian theological argumentation as well as new insights on the relationship between God and the deities in ancient Greek thought, in a book sure to interest scholars of philosophy and religion.
 
 
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Torture and the Law of Proof
Europe and England in the Ancien Régime
John H. Langbein
University of Chicago Press, 1977
In Torture and the Law of Proof John H. Langbein explores the world of the thumbscrew and the rack, engines of torture authorized for investigating crime in European legal systems from medieval times until well into the eighteenth century. Drawing on juristic literature and legal records, Langbein's book, first published in 1977, remains the definitive account of how European legal systems became dependent on the use of torture in their routine criminal procedures, and how they eventually worked themselves free of it.

The book has recently taken on an eerie relevance as a consequence of controversial American and British interrogation practices in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In a new introduction, Langbein contrasts the "new" law of torture with the older European law and offers some pointed lessons about the difficulty of reconciling coercion with accurate investigation. Embellished with fascinating illustrations of torture devices taken from an eighteenth-century criminal code, this crisply written account will engage all those interested in torture's remarkable grip on European legal history.
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