Logics - Analysis of an Article by Peter Kreeft - Essay Example

Apart from many articles, he has written many books such as The Snakebite Letters, The Philosophy of Jesus, The Journey: A Spiritual Roadmap for Modern Pilgrims, Prayer: The Great Conversation: Straight Answers to Tough Questions About Prayer etc. The major idea behind this article “The Apple Argument Against Abortion” is to educate people about the consequences of performing abortion. Peter Kreeft argues against abortion in a philosophical manner throughout this article. He is making in depth analysis of the abortion issue with the help of answering certain questions like Who human are, what are the rights of human, why abortion is wrong etc and topics such as basis of morality, differences between the rights of all people and the rights of some people, arguments from skepticism etc.

He also tries to analyze different cases with respect to abortion by taking different combinations such as; The fetus is a person, and we know that The fetus is a person, but we don't know that The fetus isn't a person, but we don't know that The fetus isn't a person, and we know that (Kreeft, 2000) Approach This article is mainly analytical in nature. The author tries to avoid the use of any instinctive methods in this article. He has analyzed abortion from various angles. Different dimensions of abortion were beautifully explained in this article.

For example, the author took the example of an apple and the understanding of ordinary people about it, to attract the attention of the readers towards the topic. Since the author is a philosopher, a philosophical approach can be visible throughout this article. He explains various dimensions of abortion with the help of comparisons, analogies etc. It is difficult for ordinary people to understand the problems associated with abortion, especially the moral issues. The author tries to explain all those issues in a simple, but comprehensive manner so that anybody who decide to perform abortion may think twice or thrice before doing so, after reading this article.

In short, the author succeeded in persuading the readers of this article to argue against abortion. Different kinds of reasoning in the article Inductive, deductive, causal and analogical reasoning techniques were used throughout this article. The following paragraph is an example of an inductive argument present in this article. I have heard it argued that we do not treat any other species in the traditional way — that is, we do not assign equal rights to all mice. Some we kill (those that get into our houses and prove to be pests); others we take good care of and preserve (those that we find useful in laboratory experiments or those we adopt as pets); still others we simply ignore (mice in the wild).

The argument concludes that therefore, it is only sentiment or tradition (the two are often confused, as if nothing rational could be passed down by tradition) that assigns rights to all members of our own species (Kreeft, 2000). The above argument is an example of inductive reasoning. It is not necessary that the argument needs to be 100% right to make it as an example of inductive reasoning. It should be noted that cultures like Buddhism or Jainism treats any type of killing - killing of animal or killing of human - as a sin.

But cultures like Islam or Christianity do not treat killing of animals as a sin. In short, the above argument may not be conclusive or correct everywhere, but it helps the author to strengthen his arguments