It’s not often that a prestigious publisher like the Cambridge University Press recognizes the lifelong achievements of a scholar by publishing a collection of his or her work, but that’s what they did with UNLV Distinguished Professor Maurice Finocchiaro.
Finocchiaro, known particularly for his work on Galileo (see UNLV Magazine, Fall 2005), has also published widely in the field of argument, a subject that drew him away from his original undergraduate major, theoretical physics, and into philosophy.
“As an undergraduate [at MIT], one of the problems I was concerned with was the existence of God,” Finocchiaro says. “I felt the problem to be of vital importance, as important as anything that was a matter of life and death. … I tried to learn all I could about the arguments for the existence of God. I wanted to be sure that I knew them all ... that I understood them properly and did not misinterpret them, and that I could evaluate or assess their correctness, worth, or strength.”
He started asking these kinds of hard questions in his science classes, questions his professors could not or would not answer; questions such as “What is the relationship between the first and second law of motion?”
He found his intellectual need for answers best served by the philosophy department and courses in logic rather than science. He joined UNLV in 1970 and has since become a prolific writer on the subject. Between 1974 and 2003, he produced the 23 articles that comprise this collection.
Finocchiaro’s work stresses, among other things, “the importance of examining objections when arguing in favor of some conclusion, the importance of understanding an argument before one criticizes it, and the importance of practicing what one preaches.”
He concludes that argumentation plays a more important role in science than commonly believed. “Logical fallacies are rare, but fallacious reasoning is common,” he says, adding “that the technique of deriving alternative conclusions from given premises is a very powerful method, but a very difficult one to master.”
