Lance Flowerree

Joseph asked:

Please describe the difference between a chance and a miracle (except that the latter is based on supernatural influence).

In terms of of ordinary language a miracle is an event or thing we cannot explain and chance only exists when we are non-determinists. As we humans seem to want to explain everything and also make everything predictable, and there are many different ways to do this, a more profound answer to this question will very much depend on your worldview.

If you for example asked a pantheist, he/she would simply answer that God is identical with everything, that therefore there are no supernatural events and hence it doesn't make sense to talk about miracles. If you add strong determinism to this view, then also nothing will happen by chance.

In the worldview of "classical physics" events are determined by cause and effect. Every event can be described by laws of nature. A miracle, then is a violation of a law of nature and there are two ways to explain away this violence:

a. Whenever we encounter a miracle we are hallucinating.
b. Every miracle can be explained, when our understanding of the laws of nature is sufficient.

Development psychology supports view b: To a new born baby everything is a miracle and happens by chance. Step by step he/she learns to explain things or at least to develop a model how things could be. As we grow older the number of miracles decreases while our knowledge increases. Some anthropologists apply this view of development on the whole mankind.

Many people feel that this more or less mechanical assumption is wrong and there really are miracles. To evade the strong opposition between describable event and miracle, between certainty and possibility/ chance, we nowadays tend to give the term miracle a weaker definition with a dash of chance. For example, Merriam Webster defines miracle as "an extremely outstanding or unusual event", which is similar to saying something happens by chance.

In terms of quantum physics strange things happen for the same reason that anything else happens — everything follows the same rules. Due to quantum mechanical effects, there is an inherent randomness, "chance", in everything. Everything has a certain probability of happening. When you roll a die, there is approximately a one in six chance of rolling any particular number between 1 and 6 and there is a very little chance for it to stop on an edge. Air molecules move around a room randomly. There is a small chance, that all of the air molecules move to the one side of the room. If this happened, it would not be good for anyone in the room at the time: the effect would be that people in the room suddenly exploded! As this would have happened for no obvious reason we would talk of a miracle. Hopefully this drastic example never will happen!

Rani asked:

Could you please explain the two main traditions: Jerusalem and Athens that prevailed until the Enlightenment Era? I can't find anything on the Jerusalem tradition but it was based on faith and was a response to questions such as "why are we here".

That's a great question. Start reading the first chapter of Erich Auerbach's Book Mimesis (ISBN: 0691012695), "The Scar of Odysseus". The Greek ("Athens") are "eye-people", they are seeing the world. Theo-ria means "seeing the gods of the township". One of the greatest inventions of the Greeks has been geometry. They posted statues on every corner, they advised their youth to shine in public, to present themselves, to be proud and ambitious. That all appeals to the eye. They were real show-masters and practically invented tragedy and comedy as we know them. And so the cosmos appeared as a wonderful order of moving parts in a necessary equilibrium like a wonderful great machinery. That's why Plato wrote over the entry of his academy: "Maedeis a-geometraitos eis-ito" — "No-one not loving geometry shall enter here!" The world was order to be looked at with the eyes of the body and with the eyes of the spirit and in-sight (!) of reason likewise. For the Greek beauty and truth and the good were but three aspects of reality and could not be inconsistent.

The jewish ("Jerusalem") understanding of the world is totally different. The fundamental experience of the Jew had been the Pharaoh of Egypt and the God-King of Babylon. People had not to argue, they had to obey. It didn't matter what they thought the world to be like if only they obeyed to the God-King. In German the word "Gehorsam" (obedience) is derived from "hoeren" (to hear). The whole Bible ist strewn on almost every page with "So says the Lord" and "Now hearken Israel!" and similar sentences. So the Jews didn't study nature, they studied texts, they studied "The Law" (The Torah) and they became great jurists, because jurists have to understand sentences and arguments and not geometrical figures. And "sin" is not a deviance from a timeless order of a "cosmos", but it's a deviance from a contract with God, it is a violation not of laws of nature or reason but it is a violation of love and trust and mutual respect between two contracting parties — God and Man or God and the Jewish People.

And then the Jew had, what the Greek had not: The concept of personal responsibility to a responsive person — God. The latin word "respondere" means "to answer". The Greek knew of nobody to answer to save their own reason and sense of beauty and what is proper and fitting.

Now combine these two strings starting from "Athens" and "Jerusalem" with the ability of the Romans to govern an empire that spanned the world from the Indus to the border of Scotland (Hadrian's wall). Then you see what the "History of the Occident" is all about. And you see why this singular combination of the Greek sense for rational order (to be seen in nature and mathematics) and the Jewish sense for interpersonal relations of love and trust and mutual respect surpassed the Orient with his eternal traditions. Of course this doesn't mean that the people of the Orient have been or are less bright than those of the Occident. But if you don't learn mathematics, you simply don't know mathematics, and if you don't look into the mechanics of nature, you don't know the mechanics of nature either, be as bright as you may. And if you know of no god you feel personally responsible to, then you behave in another way than when you do know one. That has nothing to do with intelligence or with personal superiority of any sort, and so any racists claim of western superiority is pure nonsense. But the combined forces of "Athens", "Jerusalem" and "Rome" have created — unintentionally of course — a singular form of culture that is now taken over by the rest of the world for it's efficiency.

Don't be scared by the word "efficiency" here: As Toynbee said in a Darwinian mood "History is the study of challenge and response of cultures to their environments". But then of course some people are saying that mankind is about to founder altogether in the "Titanic of Western Culture" on the iceberg of natural and human constraints. That you may think over for yourself.

Hubertus Fremerey

Jodi asked:

I have a interest in photography and I have an interest for learning more about philosophy. Through examining the ask a philosopher website I wanted to take a closer look into photography and philosophy.

My question to you is: Do you feel that photographs can or can not engender understanding? I mean many people debate whether photographs can be understood or have meaning like text can. Like Susan Sontag stated in her book On Photography that photographs can't engender understanding and by looking at a picture you can not get a complete understanding of the subjects involved like you can with a text. I was wondering how you felt about this subject?

I know this is not a simple question. But what true philosophy question is?

I have formed many opinions concerning this topic and just wanted someone else's point of view.

As you have no doubt seen on the Ask a Philosopher website, I lay no claim to being an expert on photography, though I enjoy taking photographs. Your question is rather more complex than it appears at face value. Can photographs engender understanding? In some cases the answer is yes, in others the answer is no. Consider a picture deliberately produced to instruct us to do something, say, scissors on a dotted line; this requires no language, the instruction is self evident. Historic pictures, if we know our history, can show us how things were in the past, we could work out the period and the event, or we could make a very good guess at what is going on. However, the more complex the picture, the more things happening, and the more in need we may be of words to describe the total scene. Therefore, the picture might give us a general, overall, view, but may fall short in coming to terms with specific conclusions. Hence, we are, in general, using our pre-conceived knowledge to interpret overall views, but for specific events within the overall view we often need some assistance from word description.

There is no doubt that a photographer by skillful use of the medium can compose pictures that say a great deal, and often a photograph without a caption can press home the point and leave no doubt in the mind what the photograph is telling us. but, again, there can be specifics within the picture which leave us wondering, e.g. Is the man on the sidewalk involved in what is going on? Why is the little girl running away? etc.. Unless the photographer fully describes what is going on we are bound to be dependent on imagination and guesswork in some instances.

So, to deal with your question of whether one can get a complete understanding of the subjects involved in a picture, I would say that it depends upon the simplicity of the subject content, the more complex the subject matter the more vague our understanding. I am, of course, referring to pictures which set out to describe an event, or, in other words, to make a statement about reality. However, as I have said elsewhere, a photographer is an artist in his/her own right, quite capable of constructing a photograph with form and meaning which is a genuine work of art, such a photograph would be open to interpretation ; whether we could properly interpret the photographer's subjective impressions would depend on confirmation by the artist. However, works of art are there to give pleasure or to encourage the observer to think. Photographs of natural scenery, photographs of gardens, could, without captions, say something to us, but if we were curious to know the location we would need a caption.

During the Second World War two of the finest illustrated magazines were Picture Post and War Illustrated. The photography was superb, and some would claim that the impact they produced required no captions. However, it was war, and in wars ships catch fire, bombs explode, guns fire missiles, soldiers are killed, aircraft crash in flames, people lose their homes, etc.. All these things are self evident, the question to be asked is, Where is it happening? During the war we would have been forced to ask, Is it in Warsaw? Is it in Paris? Is it in the Atlantic? Is it in the Pacific? and so on. This I believe usefully describes what I mean by the seeming vague answer to your question — Can photographs engender understanding? In some cases the answer is yes, in others the answer is no.

John Brandon

I do not know very much about photography as a craft; but I do have an opinion about the statement you attribute to Sontag, above. Now, I must also offer the disclaimer that I do not have Sontag's book, so I cannot check the context of that statement; thus, I will be responding only to you, and not, perhaps, to Sontag's argument... unless that does happen to correspond to what you say above.

Ok. How does text have meaning? A good question, and one which has occupied people for centuries. "Deconstruction" is only the latest aspect of the hermeneutics tradition. That tradition started, more or less, in Medieval times as the analysis of the interpretation of religious texts. Hermeneutics has been broadened to include anything termed "text" these days, which, if you are Derrida, at least, does indeed include paintings and photographs (e.g., see his Memoirs of the Blind). The literature on hermeneutics is quite extensive, and it's a field I'm only peripherally interested in... but given all my disclaimers, here's my position on your question: text, as the written word, is just as metaphorical (and I'm using the term "metaphorical" in the general sense that Lakoff et al — see below — use it), undefinable, vague, and infinitely dense as are photographs. My position comes from consideration of Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Mark Turner, and Fauconnier's writings, and others (including Derrida). Now, as far as formal languages go, that text is about as non-metaphorical, i.e., as literal and interpretable as text can be. That is, formal logic, mathematics, computer programming languages, and similar formal languages are indeed completely understandable (or as understandable as we can get... Lakoff actually disagrees with this, and I think he may be right). That's all very fine, but in natural languages like English, we are immersed in an enormous web of metaphorical words, phrases, meanings, and so forth. The result of this is that we must to some extent agree with Quine, at least, as to the web of relationships which define linguistic terms (and the people above go much further than he does). Given that, we do not in any sense understand text more "completely" than we do, say, photography.

There are many counterarguments I could bring up to my own points, e.g., photography is not a language as natural languages are, and thus has no general description (grammar and syntax)... etc, etc... but I could argue against that one pretty easily in terms of visual gestalts and cultural assumptions. And on and on. The upshot is that to defend a position such as that which you attribute to Sontag requires a particular understanding of language which is at this point quite controversial, and which has been strongly argued against.

Steven Ravett Brown

Cathi asked:

What is morally objectionable about murder? and is killing the same as murder?

The crucial difference between murder and killing seems to be that killing is socially approved but murder is not. Killing of animals or killing of enemies or killing under death penalty are culturally approved actions. Therefore most people would not agree that "soldiers are murderers". Even "The Sixth Commandment" in the recent translations does not state "Thou shalt not kill" but "Thou shalt not murder" — consistent with the fact, that there is lots of killing even of children, women and elderly under God's approval in the Old Testament. And even the killing of Jesus has been ordered by the High Priest with approval from the Synhedrion (Council of Priests).

Murder is socially objectionable because it is a private deed without consent of the society and it's institutions by law. That cannot be accepted. It's the same difference as between a sworn in surgeon who is maiming you in your hopefully best interest and anybody else maiming you with bad intentions.

There is left a very deep question, posed by Sophocles in his drama Antigone and by many dramatists and writers — and philosophers — afterwards: Is there a difference between what is "morally" objectionable and what is "socially" objectionable" — and if that is the case (as it surely is), then where's the line to be drawn, and why. In part, this marks the division between "law" and "custom" — as in blood-feud or in duelling or in bride-kidnapping, which all have been socially accepted somewhere sometimes, as have been terrible forms of death-penalty. But that leads into the history and philosophy of law and is another question.

Hubertus Fremerey

Murder is, not simply killing, not even unjustified intentional killing, but the unjustified intentional killing of a person. To wantonly kill a cat may be morally objectionable, but one cannot murder a cat because a cat is not a person. Murder is morally objectionable because (a) objectionability varies with the value of that which may be harmed or destroyed by a prospective action (i.e., the greater the value, the more objectionable is any prospective action taken against it) and (b) persons are the highest moral values there are.

Tony Flood

In terms of moral principle, we object to murder on the ground that if it were to be found acceptable, society would be a dangerous place. Murder and killing do differ. Legally, murder is defined as having a mens rea which is the possession of an intention to kill. Without this intention, where killing is in some way accidental, an act of causing the death of another is not murder. In times of war, there is an intention to kill, but this intention is brought about by instructions of a body which is legally empowered to order killing whether we like it or not. But it is not (arguably) as abhorrent as the evil which is present in an individual murder. David Hume thought that there is nothing that we can point to in a murder which makes it objectionable. We just don't like it. I think this is wrong. There was evil in the mind of the person and even if we can't see into the mind of the person, evil was there. And really, it is not just a moral principle regulating a safe society that makes murder wrong.

We might say that manslaughter, or accidental death, and killing in war are "evils", as many things that occur in the world are, such as death caused by volcanic eruption. These are events or features of the world. This is a way of describing the facts in the world. When we say a murder is evil, we are describing a fact, but also the state of mind of a person. It is not just that the fact is evil, but that the man embodies evil which makes it morally abhorrent.

Rachel Browne

Richard asked:

Is it possible to articulate an object or rationale for the telos of being a human?

You seem to be asking this in the context of Aristotle and Plato... if that's your approach, you have, I assume, read Heidegger and his followers on this (if not, he's the one to go on for a modern treatment of this). There's also the strictly religious point of view: de Chardin, for example. But you might also try Dewey; he has some interesting things to say on this subject from a rather different perspective. Modern positions on naturalized ethics also attempt to answer this question... I'm not too familiar with this area, however. There's Johnson's Moral Imagination, but that's only one of many.

So in answer to your question, there are very many people who believe that it is possible to articulate the telos of being human, ranging from the religious to the phenomenological to the postmodern to the naturalized; just pick your poison. I'm certainly not going to try to summarize all those positions here.

Steven Ravett Brown

First ask yourself if you want to be called a robot or an "intelligent animal". Then think of what may be the difference to being "a human". The idea of Aristotle's was to bring out the best possibilities of any being, and that he called "virtue". So his question was: what are the virtues that make the difference between "man-kind" and (for instance) "ape-kind" or "horse-kind". But of course, nobody can hinder you if you are satisfied being a happy ape. You must find out for yourself if that is "a rationale for the telos of being a human".

The next question would be, what exactly does it come to "being a human". That is one of the deepest questions of philosophy, that neither Aristotle nor Aquinas nor Kant could answer convincingly. It's one of the great open questions of the philosophia perennis. The greatest danger in our time is to mistake man for an "intelligent ape" or a "smart robot". Perhaps you should read F.R. Leavis The Great Tradition or C.S. Lewis, but all the best philosophy and poetry has been and is concerned with this question.

Hubertus Fremerey

Arthur asked:

A problem arose to my mind while reading about the 2nd law of thermodynamics, it says that "the overall disturbance in a closed system must increase or at least remain constant but never decrease" but the problem here is that the "disturbance" is something to humans, WE think that scattered billiard balls are disturbance and think that when they take the shape of a triangle (at the beginning of the game) they are not disturbed, so how can something related to humans take place in an impersonal physical law?

Entropy measures the disorder of a system. This term is not a term expressing approval or disapproval it just refers to the fact that e.g. molecules in ice are tighter packed than in liquid water, which in turn has a higher level of organisation compared to gas molecules in steam. This difference in the organisation of matter can be objectively measured (e.g. via the energy levels and the properties of the system) i.e. is not dependent on human beings. The 2nd law simply says that the entropy (disorder) of the universe overall increases. [If the volume and energy of a system are constant, then every change to the system increases the energy].Things get broken, living beings die and decay ... Whenever you want to create order out of disorder you need to put energy into it (e.g. it is easy to break a cup but difficult to put it back together), and part of that energy is irretrievably lost as heat, thus increasing the overall disorder of the system.

Helene Dumitriu

This is actually sort of an interesting point. The term "disturbance" is indeed an odd one, to me at least. I would have said something like "smoothness", "randomness", or "uniformity". But aside from that, one could still object that we perceive certain patterns or types of patterns as order, and certain other patterns as disorder, and so this distinction is a purely human one.

There are a couple of ways around this, however. First, there are only a small number of ways that billiard balls can be put into a triangle, and many hundreds or thousands of ways they can be scattered over the table. One could say, then, that what we are actually comparing is the probability of them being in the relatively small number of distributions we term "ordered" versus the huge number we term "disordered", and so that probability governs the frequency of those distributions actually seen. Not unreasonable, but we can still ask why some subset of the "disordered" set is not perceived as a distinct subset, as the "ordered" sets are, i.e., whether there is any real difference between what we perceive as ordered and what we perceive as disordered.

I wondered this myself for quite a while, until I saw the results of the work of G. Chaitin. What he did was to show that there is a difference in the minimum length of formulas which describe various states of affairs, mostly in formal systems. But this is an interesting result in this context, because we can see that symmetrical groupings will have smaller descriptions (because of the identity of rotations) than asymmetrical and chaotic groupings. Those latter will have to be described by larger formulations, because we can't abbreviate for the symmetry in them. Now, no matter who is doing the describing: us, aliens, mother nature, or whatever, that's going to be true. So that is, I think, a nice way to relate more and less random distributions in some reasonably absolute way, and leads to the same types of classifications that our intuitions do, which is rather heartening metaphysically, when you think about it. The interesting implication is that description has to do with composition, a very strange result for me, at any rate... but consistent with the Second Law, it seems.

Steven Ravett Brown

I am not a physicist, but it seems to me that you are too bothered by the term "disturbance" which may just be used in a technical way by physicists.

Ken Stern

Jeremy asked:

What is faith, in the context of our life-view? If our actions are based on what we believe (about God, our nature, the afterlife, etc.), then what is the basis of our belief? It seems that faith goes beyond knowledge. To know and to believe are quite different, although they affect each other. Is faith merely empirical, or is it based on more than evidence?

If you sit down on a chair — is it by "faith" or is it by "knowledge"? What then is knowledge and evidence? You cannot in earnest "suppose" God to be, like you cannot in earnest "suppose" the chair to be — that would make you crazy. Of course you can say, as Laplace said to Napoleon when asked why God didn't show up in his great work on astronomy: "I didn't need this hypothesis". That's what most people in practice think on the existence of God — they don't need this hypothesis. But you cannot build cathedrals and you cannot roast martyrs on hypotheses. For the true believer God is not a hypothesis but an experience (as I myself know "by experience") like trusting in your mother or in your best friend. "If you cannot trust then you have to bust" — there's no choice.

Note a twist logic in this: You cannot "have to" believe. If you "have to" trust, then you are not trusting anymore. If you "have to" believe, then you don't believe anymore. You never "have to" believe that the chair you are sitting on is real. If you cannot accept the reality of God in the same way as the reality of the chair, you are not believing in God. That's the content of "you cannot build cathedrals on hypotheses." The whole of Christian culture could not have been built on a God taken merely to be a hypothesis. But of course that doesn't exclude the possibility that God is just that — a hypothesis and not more. For Othello to strangle his wife it is not relevant if she is indeed deceiving him. It suffices that he thinks so. In this sense "faith goes beyond knowledge".

But what then is "knowledge"? Ask Sir Karl Popper.

Hubertus Fremerey

Philosophically (that is, theology aside), faith is the fundamental belief underlying and underpinning the formation of all of one's other beliefs. It is a belief about the ultimate intelligibility of the world, which is always more unknown than known, such that our effort to understand it is not an exercise in futility. Even to ask seriously whether it is such an exercise is already to presuppose that it is not. Faith that the world is ultimately intelligible is not a blind faith: it simply has no coherent alternative. Having no coherent alternative, it is rational, but not empirical: it is not discovered empirically, but all empirical inquiry presupposes it. It is known a priori. On the basis of this faith, we judge as reliable sources of information that we do not, cannot, verify for ourselves (e.g., a newspaper, or a calculator). We can, for example, personally verify that we read the newspaper this morning, but not what it reports. The latter we judge to be probably true because we made a prior judgment about the newspaper's reliability. We act on the basis of such judgments, sometimes verifying what we had only believed, and we report our experience to others, who do not verify it but regard us as a reliable source of information. The progress of human knowledge rests on this collaboration, the mutual "affecting" of knowing and believing that Jeremy refers to, the support that value judgments and factual judgments provide each other.

Tony Flood

Jim asked:

Does the existence or non-existence of a god have an effect on our morality? That is, if today god exists, and I do wrong, and bad, and then tomorrow god does not exist, and I do wrong, and bad...do the actions of today become more wrong/ right with god existing; and do the actions of tomorrow become less wrong/ right with god not existing?

The law has an answer. As the Romans said "nulla poene sine lege" — if it is not forbidden by law it cannot justifiably be punished. And it should not either, because then the world would be a world of arbitrariness and despotism. But there's another principle stating that "Ignorance of the law does not prevent punishment (if you have violated the law)".

The very core of your question is: What do you mean by "doing wrong"? Are you acting against written law — then see above. Are you acting against your conscience, then the existence of God is irrelevant here, because your conscience is yours, you must come to terms with it. If you are bleeding, then stop it, but don't ask if God is looking on. That's simple. But if it really matters if God exists or doesn't for to do what you think is right, then you have a bad character and are trapped in a false logic.

What the better among the theologians mean (there are bigots too) is not that you should act out of fear and trembling, but that you should act out of love and a sense of honour as one of God's children — if ever God means anything to you. Then some ways of acting, that are not forbidden by law or custom may be forbidden by love and honour with respect to God or to the very fact of being a thinking human and not a dumb animal — and not a coward.

Hubertus Fremerey

It should first be noted that Jim did not ask the traditional question, "Does God's command or prohibition make an action right or wrong, or is its being right or wrong the reason for God's command or prohibition?" I'm not sure what Jim means by "today god exists . . . and then tomorrow god does not exist", but I do know what it means for someone to affirm God's existence and deny it the next. If one believes, for example, that adultery is wrong, he will probably still think it's wrong whether he went from theism to atheism or from atheism to theism. The answer to Jim's question depends how reflective a given person chooses to be. Any worldview, theistic or atheistic, will ultimately have implications for how we think about morality, and vice versa. Our particular moral judgments may survive our conversion from one worldview to another; they may even be the motivating reason for converting. Many people seem more tenacious about their moral judgments (e.g., for or against capital punishment, for or against abortion) than about the set of consciously held judgments that is their worldview. The more reflective among them will therefore be vitally interested in ascertaining how well any proposed worldview supports their moral intuitions. But the latter tend to survive whether or not a suitable worldview home is found for them.

Tony Flood

Reg asked:

I try to keep any philosophical thinking I do as simple as possible. So I'm not convinced that the brain 'thinks'. Matter or extension or any physical object can do but one thing viz. move; all the rest is done by a mind which of course is non-physical. I'm not convinced that the relationship can be solved by 'going and looking' which, on analysis, is what scientists do is it not?

Simplicity is certainly a virtue, but not when it is too simple for the facts.

Your argument that the mind is non-physical seems to be to beg the question in that it assumes what needs to be proved, namely that "matter or extension or any physical objects can do but one thing viz. move. For instance, here is a counter-example: the mind is a physical object and it can do more than move, for it can think. For as the philosopher Thomas Hobbes asked Descartes, "Why cannot a physical thing think?"

You are simply intuiting a certain concept of mind, and then arguing, on the basis of that concept, that it is not a physical object. That is an instance of what the philosopher Antony Flew calls "an ostensibly counter-evidential intuition" for all our evidence is that the mind is a physical thing.

Ken Stern

You are right in identifying one of the great puzzles of philosophy — how mind and matter interact. However there seems to be an inconsistency: You want to keep it 'simple' yet you assume (if I understand correctly) two 'substances' i.e. 'mind' and 'matter' (the physical brain). That is less simple than idealism (everything is 'mind stuff') or materialism (there is only matter). Also if you really are a dualist you have a problem: how to explain the interaction between mind and brain/ body and vice versa? In other words how can something of an immaterial nature interact with something material? Also how to explain that various types of physical brain damage can rob you e.g. of your sense of smell, your memory, your emotions etc.? How to explain that drugs can make you happy, sad, indifferent, psychotic etc.? How to explain that when you have certain thoughts certain brain areas are active? How to explain that you can learn to relax by watching the wave patterns of your brain on screen?

Many philosophers today think that the 'inside' or first-person view of 'mind' and the 'outside' or third-person view of 'brain-functions' are like two stories we tell about the same thing.

Helene Dumitriu

Suyen asked:

What is personhood? What is the definition of human life? What is the value of life? Do the neonate and infant have personhood? How about the disabled neonate and infant, are they not as valuable as the normal neonate and infant?

What do you mean by "as valuable as the normal neonate and infant"? We should be loyal to all humankind by the Golden Rule. But for an employer the value of an employee is in his abilities. In our output-driven culture there is an conflict then: People should follow the image of being strong and fit and active and youthful, they should be winners. But then what to do with those 90% of mankind, that definitely are not winners? Since there never will be a clear cut definition of what is a real winner, one always has this relation of 10%: 90% winners — or maybe 1%: 99% — as you like. Therefore socialism tried to get rid of this altogether. That's the core of stressing equality.

This conflict translates to the neonates: What do you expect them to be — lovable humans or failed winners from the start? You can't evade that question. That's the core of the quarrel over PID (pre-implantation-diagnostics), the question, if foetuses should be screened after conception to select and remove those with handicaps.

There is one more large aspect to this: We live in the epoch of "reflected enlightenment". Reflected, since the naive enlightenment has been destroyed by people like Hitler or Stalin. But even the "reflected enlightenment" clings to the idea of improving all things using science and technology. But why not improve men? Every teacher and coach claims to do just that. So why not improve men using genetics and selection? There you are again at "not as valuable as the normal neonate and infant". You never can't evade that aspect of life as a contest if you speak of "improvements".

Now you understand why the churches have been against "Enlightenment": If men don't accept good and evil as coming from god, disabled neonate and infant as valuable as the normal ones, if everything is looked at as "to be improved by science and technology", then the disabled are in a lost position. You have to make up your mind on that, no philosopher will free you from that dilemma.

The other questions are (1) What is personhood? (2) What is the definition of human life? (3) What is the value of life? (4) Do the neonate and infant have personhood?

They all have spawned meters of bookshelves already and continue doing so. Maybe I will answer to those questions another time — or somebody else will.

Hubertus Fremerey

Ronald asked:

Assuming God is omniscient and omnipotent, what did he sacrifice by allowing his son to be crucified?

God's having a son, etc., seems to be as much an assumption as is God's being omniscient and omnipotent, but Ronald's question treats it as a fact. The assumption that God is omniscient and omnipotent is purely conceptual and can be considered apart from theological interpretations of alleged historical events. That is not the case for the assumption that God had a son and sacrificed him. The philosopher, as such, has no special competence to ascertain historical events or assess their theological significance.

Tony Flood

Bill asked:

I am perplexed by the field of economics, because the conclusions drawn by economists seem to depend on whether they have an "R" or a "D" after their names (i.e., what political party they belong to).

Is economics really "science" — or is it politics in disguise?

As individuals, economists can favor one economic policy over another without compromising their scientific credentials if they keep their public and private roles distinct. Economists will say that if you want economic result ER, then you ought to implement (or dismantle) economic policy EP. As economists, however, they have nothing at all to say about the short- or long-term desirability of ER. When, for example, Milton Friedman says, "We ought to have a more libertarian society," or if John Kenneth Galbraith says, "We ought to have a more egalitarian society," neither is wearing his economist cap.

This also holds for the political scientist with regard to political result PR or for the military scientist with regard to military result MR. (There is, for example, no basis for imputing pro-Nazi sentiment to a military game enthusiast simply because he can show how Germany might have won World War II had its military forces implemented a different strategy or different tactics.) All three sciences presuppose that human beings use means in order to achieve goals, but they prescind from evaluating those goals.

Taking early-20th-century physics as the paradigm of science, however, the dominant philosophy of science regards economics, military science, political science and other "social studies" as sciences only by courtesy. According to that paradigm, "real" science presupposes materialism, mechanism, and determinism and, as we all know, human action notoriously resists deterministic, mechanistic, or materialistic interpretation. Sciences of human action can therefore be, at best, "soft," the insinuation being that they're not really sciences. It may be, however, that some degree of self-determination occurs, not only at the human level, but also at the organic, chemical, molecular, and even quantum levels. It may be that the apparently deterministic laws of one level are in fact habit-like expressions of a lower level's indeterministic, nonmechanistic, nonmaterial processes. If those things are so, and there is evidence that they are, then that paradigm's days are numbered. It has been decomposing over most of the last century, and one of the consequences may be the revelation of the so-called "soft" sciences as holding the key to the unification of science.

Anthony Flood

Matthew asked:

Would Hume agree with Descartes that God must be the cause of my idea of a perfect being? why or why not?

No. Because Hume would not have agreed that anything must be the cause of anything. (In fact Hume wrote that so far as we can know a priori (without any evidence) anything might be the cause of anything else.) And, of course, all of our evidence tells us that it is man who is the cause of all his ideas including that of God.

Ken Stern

Damon asked:

What are the main objections the Kant's categorical imperative?

I don't know how to answer this. "The" objections? From whom? Well... I'll give you a couple of my own. First, as Kant acknowledged, the general rule, "act as if you would will the maxim of your action to be a universal law", does not, purposely, relate to any specific situation, i.e., has no "content" (a technical term in Kant). But then all you're left with is a general rule... now what? In other words, how do you apply the categorical imperative to, say, the assembly line in Ford Motors? Whoops... nothing said about that in Kant.

Second, Kant arrives at this rule by explicitly accepting societal norms as the basis for ethics, and then abstracting from them. Well, why do that? He says that since they're widely accepted, they must have some truth to them. Ugh. I hate that kind of reasoning. The world had to be flat, by that reasoning... the sun went around the earth, etc. So that's an even more general objection than the above. I mean, for someone who called, early in his career, for "reformation" based on rationality to then use the above reasoning as a principle for deriving an ethical rule just seems very strange to me... not to mention being basically, as I see it, unjustifiable.

So, even given that you can get around the first objection, the second seems much more severe anyway, and I don't see a way around that one, except for the obvious: "gee, you have to start somewhere...". Well, sorry, but I think there are better ways to start. I'm in favor of naturalized ethics, myself.

You might take a look at M. Johnson's Moral Imagination for more on this.

Steven Ravett Brown

Simon asked:

Hello, I'm 15 and there is an unanswerable question on which I would like a philosopher's view. If an object were to fall to the ground, where the object started would be "1", and where the ground is would be "0". Starting at "1", the object falls half of the way... then one fourth of the way... then one eighth of the way... then one sixteenth of the way, and so on as the number doubles. The question comes down to, when is the fraction so small to call "0"? if as learned in school there is an infinite number of fractions, if this is true the object never becomes "0" and never hits the ground. Please explain this.

Simon's (and, before him, Zeno's) puzzle falsely presupposes that the finite distance to be traversed is a continuum of extensionless points. The potential to double the denominator of a fraction may be infinite — you can double that number forever — but the number of places to be traversed by a moving object is not infinite, and so the falling object does hit the ground. To put it another way, no falling object can reach the ground if it must traverse an infinite number of places to get to its resting place. It can't even leave the place it is supposed to be falling from. Fortunately, a moving object traverses a finite number of discrete (separate) places, not an infinity of points on a continuum.

Tony Flood

Well this is a neato version of Zeno's paradox; look that up. There is no fraction so small to call "0", that is the formulation of the paradox. As you can see, when you drop an object it can never reach the ground. It's the same for reaching any destination, and that's why when you shoot an arrow or a bullet at someone, you never can quite hit them.

Whoops... there's a problem here, isn't there.

So should I tell you the answer? No... that would spoil the fun. Just go look up Zeno's paradox, and you'll find tons of stuff written about this. But I'll say this; there are different types of series of fractions: convergent and divergent. If you add 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8... etc., you get, after an infinite number of additions, the sum of 1. But if you add 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4... you get, after an infinite number, the sum of infinity. Something else for you to play with.

Steven Ravett Brown

Rick asked:

What is the connection between Nietzsche and Social Darwinism, Nazism, and eugenics? What did Nietzsche have to say about the principles these topics embody?

Nietzsche's working life spans the 15 years from 1873-1888. This was a time of a great boom in Germany, after German troops had won the wars against Austria (1866) and France (1870) and Bismarck had founded "The Reich" (1871). So Nietzsche could have been contend with those achievements as were most of his fellow Germans. But Nietzsche despised this gold rush in a similar mood as did Marcuse 90 years later: There was much gold around, but this was devils-gold, since the soul of men has not been freed but hardened and disabled for the true life of love and joy. This was the core of Nietzsche's critique.

Nietzsche was no Social Darwinist, though — and no Nazi either. The Nazis even understood that. Nietzsche admired Schopenhauer for his daring thesis, preceding Freud, that man is driven by his voluptuous desires of all sorts, mainly sexual. Schopenhauer was one of the first philosophers in Europe allowing sex and the theory of the Buddha of the human suffering from greed and longing to enter his philosophy. But while Schopenhauer's world-view got pessimistic, Nietzsche thought, there could be an optimistic equivalent: Where Schopenhauer following the Buddha said "no" to life and advised renunciation from all clinging to its cheating beauties, Nietzsche said (tried to say) "yes", even "a great yes" to life and to "the will to live". That was his programme.

And now you understand why Nietzsche didn't think much of socialisms of all sorts — including the Marxian and christian versions of his day — and would have despised the nationalistic versions of socialism, as Mussolini and Hitler propagated them, likewise. His aim was a society of free men and not a society of happy sheep, as he took the socialists ideal to be. But "free men" for Nietzsche did not mean so much business people and entrepreneurs but a new sort of the Renaissance "uomo universale" exemplified in Leonardo da Vinci. Nietzsche was in Basel as a professor befriended to his colleague Jacob Burckhardt, who had published an up to this day famous book on the Renaissance in Italy, and Nietzsche himself was professor of Greek Antiquity. So Nietzsche's idea of the free man had nothing to do with free entrepreneurship and nearly nothing with Marcusean communes or with Hesse's "Siddharta" either, but with a free and able personality as was the ideal of the Greek and the Renaissance.

I don't think he openly would have spoken in favor of "active" eugenics, but he would have favored "passive" eugenics saying "let the disabled and weak die." There always has been eugenics from the oldest times and with all peoples and mostly passive. But you see that one could understand and defend Nietzsche's position without favouring active eugenics.

Hubertus Fremerey

Roy asked:

What makes a definition correct? Is the contemporary definition (what most people assume the word to mean) a higher priority than a contextual definition? Some people are clueless that words can be defined by the context they are written in. The same people argue that speakers of the language make up the contemporary definitions of a word and that is the final definition.

For example, to most native New Yorkers (where I am from) an 'Argument' is simply a disagreement. When I point out that arguments should be followed by reasons and a conclusion I get criticised — who am I to correct them?

Another example in a college environment. My former speech professor defined and distinguished an 'art' from a 'sport' to his class; he stated that in a sport the consequences are paramount, whereas form is paramount in an art. For example gymnastics is not a sport but an art since form is part of a gymnast's score; a person who falls off of the balance beam scores lower than the one who does not fall. In a sport like basketball form is irrelevant to scoring a basket; one can perform the sloppiest lay up and fall on his face, but if the ball goes in the basket 2 points are scored. Meanwhile, another player might perform a perfect layup or the world's greatest slam dunk in history and also receive 2 points. The distinction makes sense, but is still rejected by many people — at least in New York City — who know what the Olympics are. Many people believe that all Olympic events are definitely sports. When told 'Gymnastics is not a sport' people get upset and argue that whatever the current authorities say is a sport is a sport. How does one solve this kind of problem?

I favor intellectual definitions (extensional, intensional, lexical, range, operational, theoretical, etc); whereas other people appeal to authority — whatever the boss says is right to me.

Going to a dictionary is a good first step to discovering what a term means, and dictionaries are places for authoritative definitions which are based on how native or fluent speakers of a language use a term. It is a "first step" (but still a good one) because there may need to be further explanations refinements and further distinctions not covered by the dictionary but needed for philosophical purposes. The philosopher may, for instance, be interested in distinguishing between believing and knowing is a more elaborate way than could be done by any dictionary. The case you give of your speech professor's distinction between art and sport which had the consequence of gymnastics not being classified as a sport is another illustration of this refinement of ordinary meanings for philosophical purposes. When your professor did this he was pointing out the similarities of gymnastics to something the performance arts like ballet and playing a musical instrument, and suggesting that it was more like those actions than it is like baseball or like football. And this seems true to me, although for other purposes gymnastics is thought of as a sport since it is something which involves a formal competition. The world is more complex than our classifications, and some things can be classified in many different ways. Why not simply say that although for the purposes of the Olympics gymnastics is a sport because it is competitive, it also has stronger similarities to art than most other sports?

You should remember that words may (and often do) have more than just one meaning. Your argument over the word "argument" illustrates this. In most logic texts you will find some mention that the term "argument" as used in that text (and in the context of logic) is not a synonym for "dispute" or "altercation". (I don't think a disagreement is any sort of argument, although disagreements may give rise to arguments in the sense of "altercation.")

Ken Stern

Charlene asked:

How can a great philosopher like Descartes, believe that existence is shared when we don't share the same god in the C20th? He even believes there can only be one god!

Descartes defines God as the supreme Being which possesses all perfections, a Being which cannot be conceived to be more perfect. Now if there was more than one god it would obviously be possible to imagine these gods combined, rolled into one — this one God would be 'more', more perfect than the two gods. Hence Descartes would argue that multiple gods are not God in the sense of the supreme Being. So it seems that if you want to believe in God you have to either give up the claim 'God is perfect' or the claim 'there can be more than one God', you cannot have both since they contradict each other.

Helene Dumitriu

Narendra asked:

What is happiness, joy, pleasure in life how one can get it? as this life is full of sorrow, unhappiness and painful in all ways.

I think you are aware that there are lots of books in your next bookshop or library selling just what you want: "happiness, joy, pleasure in life". One of the bestselling authors is Joe Murphy, but there are really a lot of them.

But then: What did the Buddha offer or what did Jesus offer? They offered the joy of freedom and love, the end of all sorrow, but they didn't talk of "happiness" or of "pleasure in life". So think for yourself what makes the difference. And why do some people vow "poverty, chastity, and obedience" without being forced to do so? There seems to be more to life than just "happiness and pleasure". Why do some people sail around the world or climb the Mount Everest — risking their lives? Why do some people engage in charity and work for others like Florence Nightingale?

Much of sorrow, unhappiness and painful feelings come from all sorts of ego-centrism, of too much interest in ones self and to much neglect of the world and the people and the tasks around. And that was, what the Buddha and Jesus were teaching: open your heart and mind to the world and to the things "here and now" and to your fellow men and to all flowers and animal and stars around you.

That even has a world-historic aspect: First came St. Francis (ca. 1181-1226), preaching to the birds and singing the light of the sun. Then came the gothic cathedrals of Paris and its environment of the 13th century with their new light and grandeur. Then came the Renaissance with a new look on the beauty of landscapes and animals and plants and women and men (Jan van Eyck, Durer, Leonardo). Get a good history of art with many pictures and look for the chapters on Gothic and Renaissance.

"Open heart and mind" — that was the idea behind Athens in the time of Socrates and Pericles, that was the idea behind Rome in the time of Virgil and Augustus, that was the idea behind Paris in the time of the Impressionists and that was the idea behind the USA in the time of the Marcusean Revolt.

Try to revolutionize your life too by having a fresh look on the world.

Hubertus Fremerey

Trevor asked:

I'm afraid that despite all attempts to the contrary, I'm doomed to be a writer, and am currently embroiled neck-deep in a project concerning William Shakespeare. If you have a moment, any and all philosophical insights and advice relating to the man and/or his works would be most welcome and greatly appreciated.

I'm not sure if this counts as a philosophical insight, but it might be interesting to read Hamlet while concentrating on the fact that the play is set during the protestant reformation and specific mention is made of the fact that Hamlet has just returned from studying in Wittenberg. There seems to me to be quite a bit of tension in the play that arises from the Roman Catholic/ Protestant disagreement over the concept of mortal sin. I don't remember ever seeing a commentary that makes mention of this.

Lance Flowerree

Greg asked:

I am currently writing a paper on implications of comparing "cogito ergo sum" and "vollo ergo sum" (i.e. I think therefore I am and I will therefore I am).

There are obvious implications for the concept of Cartesian dualism in that "will" does not allow for separation of mind and body.

Is this right? Are there other possible implications I should take into account?

Focusing on Descartes two comments: The statements 'I think' and 'I will' or 'I desire' both entail 'I am'. In other words any state that I am in entails that I must exist in the first place. For Descartes there is a difference between the two in that my intellectual grasp, my understanding of things is limited since my knowledge is limited (since I am a finite being and not God), but my will is unlimited. In the 'Meditations' he gives examples where the will is strongly inclined and the self assents to a proposition e.g. the cogito, or in the absence of perceiving things clearly and distinctly i.e. in the absence of proper understanding or knowledge there is 'indifference'. Considering his scenario of the self as a 'thinking thing' assenting to propositions or refraining from judgement one could argue that these are instances of 'will' in action that do not necessitate a body.

On the other hand one could argue: Show me the will to sit down without actually sitting down. Also Descartes' concept of will has been questioned e.g. on the grounds that there seem to be cases where we are not free to 'will' to believe something: Can a wife 'will' to believe her husband is faithful, if there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary? Could Descartes' thinker choose not to believe the cogito?

Helene Dumitriu

Tom asked:

What right has Lacan to apply the Hegelian Master/ Slave transcendental pattern to the empirical therapeutic situation?

Peter Dews in Logics of Disintegration says that Lacan was influenced by Alexandre Kojeve's Introduction to Reading Hegel in which Kojeve interprets Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind as being based on the core position that self-consciousness cannot emerge without a relation to another desiring subject and this led Lacan to the idea that what was wrong in Freud's thinking is that he was a victim of psycho-physical parallelism and that his theory of mind characterised man as a solipsistic being who could become self-consciousness alone. Given this, I suppose that in the therapeutic situation the part played by the therapist, who is another determining subject of the patient's consciousness, becomes emphasised. Consciousness is recognised as precarious, there is more to reality than speech, and within this reality there are relationships of dominance, and alienated desire. This is not a matter of "right", but of speculative theory being influential in the empirical situation, which is how psychoanalysis works.

Dews also finds that Lacan was influenced by Hegel's relation between consciousness and history and social conditions and Hegel's view that beliefs do not reveal truths about ourselves. If Hegel is correct, and Lacan is purported to have believed him to be so, then there is justification in bringing philosophy into empirical situations. However, I notice in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis at the end of the paper on alienation, that Lacan appears to deny this influence of Hegel. It is not the thesis that the subject is constituted by that which is external to him whereby Lacan was influenced by Hegel, but in the alienated consciousness of the self, the duality of consciousness and unconsciousness in which Lacan claims Hegel influenced him.

And the nature of an emerged self-consciousness, with the alienation of the self behind a veil, probably doesn't have so much part to play in the empirical therapeutic situation.

Rachel Browne

Luiz asked:

I am teaching a course on Education in a postgraduate program in Music.

My question is: would you please advise me on some texts (and authors) on the subject of Philosophy of education?

As this branch of philosophy overlaps other main branches of philosophy, especially ethics and epistemology, but also logic and even metaphysics, the selection of suitable literature will depend on what special aspects of philosophy of education you are interested. Here are some suggestions:

If A.N. Whitehead is right saying, Western Philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to Plato, then Philosophy of Education maybe described as a special case of a series of footnotes to Plato's dialogue Meno. There you will find all the fundamental issues such as whether virtue can be taught, what virtue is, what knowledge is, what the relation between teaching and knowledge is and how and whether teaching is possible.

Dina asked:

Is there morality among the animal kingdom?
Do animals have morals?

Roger Scruton says in Animals Rights and Wrongs that animals don't have morals in the sense that we have in that they don't belong to our moral community. We invite pets into our moral community, treating them as humans, but they can't reciprocate. For sure, animals don't recognise duty and principle, they don't feel remorse nor (though I'm not so sure about this one) empathy. We treat our pets like persons who have rights, requirements and needs, but they don't treat us like that. On the other hand, I think that we love and honour our pets, and they do reciprocate in this respect. But this is just pets, not animals in general.

The question is, what is fundamental to morality? It could be belonging to a community with a code of behaviour which would mean all animals have a moral code (albeit not explicitly known to them perhaps), or the foundation to morality could be love and honour, and in this case pets might be said to have a basic ethical attitude as well as a code of behaviour proper to their species.

The philosopher, Martin Buber (Between Man and Man) believed that the ethical relation, which he called the "I-Thou" relation could be entered to with all animals, and not just pets. He claimed to have entered into an I-Thou relation with a horse, recognising the otherness of the horse and feeling the horses's approval as he let Buber approach to stroke his mane. Buber also felt in the glance of a cat "the language of anxiety". He said "the eyes of an animal have the capacity of a great language". Communication with animals, the recognition of their approval or anxiety is a reason for us to treat them morally and it is not just a matter of sentimentality about pets. That this communication exists indicates to me that were greater communication possible, i.e. greater understanding on the part of the animal of the nature of humans, we might expect a developed ethical attitude of concern to develop. But for sure we can say that animals do have the fundamental capacity for the ethical attitude towards humans.

A lot of animals care about one another, feeding their young, sticking together in packs, sleeping together for comfort, licking one another's wounds. If the attitude of the mother and the healer, and the ability to live communally indicate a moral kingdom, then yes, in this other sense there is morality within the animal kingdom.

Rachel Browne

What is the meaning of "morals"? What makes the difference between moral and im-moral? Since animals cannot see that difference (why?), their behavior cannot be "moral" — and by the same argument cannot be "im-moral" either. Do babies have "morals"? Do madmen have? In the Middle Ages even an animal could be sentenced for "false behaviour", since it had violated the order of God and nature. But even this we would not call "im-moral" but "im-proper" behaviour in an objective sense. The dragon has to be slain even if he is only displaying his nature as a dragon and could not be in any way "im-moral". Some people look upon mass murderers or upon people raping children as upon dragons or beasts to be slain.

To be moral means to have options to behave this way or that and to be able to justify your choice by some "moral" value you adhere to. So if a child decides to have the lolly offered to him because it tastes sweet, this is no moral decision, but if it deliberates to steal the lolly from a shelf or from another child then it is. The first is only a "preference" by taste, the second is a (false) preference by moral standards. But a standard is something somebody holds it to be. So who is "somebody" in this case? That is "the moral community" or your own conscience, which is in part (not all!) a copy of the former. Your conscience is not completely a copy of the standards of "the moral community", since you may (and should) have your own thoughts on some values. Rebels are rebels because they do not conform in some important points to the standards of the moral community they live in. Sometimes — as in the cases of Socrates and Jesus and Antigone and Morus and Bonhoeffer and many more — this is good for the moral community, but often — as in the case of a murderer or a liar or a thief — it is not.

Brett asked:

Does the theory of natural law offer something to ethics which the divine command theory does not or cannot?

If it could be demonstrated that there are natural moral laws such laws could rationally convince everybody (everybody who is thinking rationally that is), not just followers of one particular belief. Also any theory of divine command has to answer the following questions: Is something morally good because God says so, or does God say so because it is morally good? In the first case this would mean that God could theoretically decide any action to be morally good, so it becomes really a question of power? In the second case the action is morally good whether God agrees or not. So where does this moral goodness come from?

Helene Dumitriu

Damon asked:

In existentialism a main concept is, 'to exist is to be free'. I need confirmation on this. Does this mean to exist in a rational way by combining thought, feeling, and action? This I assume would leave out infants.

Yes of course, infants cannot be free in this "Sartrean" sense to decide where to go from here and now. In every moment you are "here and now" and not determined by your past. If you are wealthy — you can this instant give your wealth to the poor and follow Jesus as he suggested in Matthew19,21. Or you can this moment go to kill somebody. The idea is: Don't ask what has been or what is usual, or what is expected of you, don't be determined by your past or by your habits or by the people surrounding you, but realize that this very moment is a new platform to jump into any possible direction like a flea.

A termination is a stop, a de-termination is a start. But you cannot expect such a de-termination from a child, since a determination includes a decision and not only a childish mood. You could even take this as a means to "define" the point of transition from childhood to manhood or womanhood. A child is called "grown up" if it is able to decide "where to jump or to go" and to accept "responsibility" for this decision.

Most people decide "for the usual" and "the expected", since there is little risk in doing so. But existentialists stress the fact that this decision may be "usual" and "to be expected", but not in any case compelling. They try to remind people that life is always a personal venture and that to decide to behave "as expected" remains a free decision that can be revoked any time.

But then existentialism has been mainly a short-lived philosophical fad after the two World-Wars. Why? Because in principle you can jump in any direction like a flea, but in practice nearly everybody does and plans what is usual and approved by time and reason. It was the "media vita in morte sumus" (In the middle of life we are surrounded by death) experience of the wars that generated this surrealistic "you can do what you want — it doesn't matter" feeling. That explanation fits to the fact that indeed surrealism and existentialism generally come and go together. It is this "we are thrown into this absurd world" rather than a "we are placed into this world of God" that describes the true existentialist feeling. But people can't live in such a state of mind for long — not even philosophers. One student of Heidegger's got sarcastic characterizing a Heidegger lecture of the twenties by the words: "We are wildly determined — if only we knew determined what to do!"

Hubertus Fremerey

James asked:

I've read both that "good" is the final end and the end in itself but I've also read the same for "happiness" as well. So my question is, which of these two is the deeper end?

Well, I may be going off the deep end here, but many philosophers including Plato, Aristotle, and John Stuart Mill have identified good and happiness as being the same things or at least they have said that the only finally good thing is happiness. So your question assumes good and happiness are different and they may not be.

But some philosophers, for instance Immanuel Kant, have held that although happiness may be a good thing, it is certainly not the unconditionally good thing (which Kant held was "the good will" or the motive of duty). So Kant believed that the good was a "deeper end" than happiness.

Ken Stern

Rakamatootoo asked:

Do you believe god is a idea engrained in all of our minds (in some way)? Or is god as John Lennon sang, "A concept by which we measure our pain"? Or do you believe neither? (This really isn't a problem for me, I just want your opinion.)

Why do you think the reality around you is "real" — or don't you think so? Do you think the reality around you is only a dream — like Tschuang-Tzu who woke up after dreaming to be a butterfly — and then asked himself if he was a butterfly dreaming to be a human?

Or if you think somebody loves you — or if you think you are loving somebody: how do you "know" this to be the fact? Maybe you err on both assumptions?

So what does it mean to be "an idea engrained in all of our minds"? Some people simply have the "experience of God" — but they cannot "prove" God to be real like you cannot "prove" your feelings to be "real" — or your surroundings at that. Is "reality" "an idea engrained in all of our minds" — or is love?

Some people have tried to disprove God by experiment. Galton asked a reasonable question: If God is responding to prayers of true believers, there should be significantly more miraculous recoveries from bad illness among those true believers and their relatives. But the statistical data available on the illness and death of ministers and their families didn't show any significant difference from other statistical samples. But then the true believers would say "The ways of the Lord are strange and unsearchable by us dumb humans!" (compare Romans 11:33). Popper calls this the "ultra stability" of an opinion: The argument is formulated in such a way that no counterargument will destroy it. Once a sect predicted the doomsday for a definite day and hour — and nothing happened. One could have thought that the faith of the true believers would be shattered to pieces by this outcome. But they said: "Since we were praying all the day, God spared mankind for another time." So maybe the idea of God is simply the great stabilizer of souls, the one great hope left to make lifes burden bareable like somebody clings to the hope that his true love is really returning his own feelings. Nobody can disprove that. The philosophers Feuerbach and Marx therefore called the belief in God "the opium of the people". But if this opium enabled people to build the great orders and monasteries and cathedrals and to explore nature like Kepler and Newton did then it's a really strong stuff and much better than the sort Hitler or Stalin offered — or maybe even "the American Creed", "the pursuit of happiness". We all are caught in some dream or living under a delusion. May it be a good one!

And then compare what I answered to Jeremy. (Jeremy asked: What is faith, in the context of our life-view? If our actions are based on what we believe (about God, our nature, the afterlife, etc.), then what is the basis of our belief? ...)

Hubertus Fremerey

Mark asked:

If I have been depressed for years and all treatment has resulted only in my being able to perform the most basic functions, i.e. I am unable to have relationships of any consequence; steady employment is out of the question; I have, over the years, tried the following: university education, traditional "therapy", three years at the Carl Jung Institute, rebirthing, Swami Muktananda, ten years at a cloistered Benedictine monastery, ordination to the Roman Catholic priesthood, EST, every anti-depressant known to medical science: the list is really too long for such a forum as this — if all of these things have not worked, nothing is working, I'm just at the end of my rope, don't I have the right, even the responsibility or obligation perhaps, to use suicide as a merciful option? I just think this is a perfectly rational solution. Help me.

Well as you no doubt realize, this is a philosophy forum and not a clinical psychology forum. But I'll say something about this problem anyway. Chronic depression is an extremely bad and sometimes insoluble problem. I see your attempts at solutions as basically going into two categories: religious, and pharmacological. There are other categories of possible solutions.

Category one: physical
Drugs: usually work reasonably well; if they don't for you, then that's not a great sign, but there are always new ones coming out.
Shock therapy, i.e., electroconvulsive therapy. Well, usually I highly disapprove of this, because I think it causes some brain damage. There are recent varieties which are not supposed to; I find that hard to believe, but that's what is claimed. As an absolute last resort, before suicide, I'd try it.
Exercise: good for depression. Take up some intense form of exercise: running, weightlifting (preferably both).

Category two: emotional
Religion: you tried it and it didn't work. However, you might give Buddhism a try... find an old and reputable monastery, NOT some guru.
Traditional therapy: no way this works for chronic depression. Same for EST.
Cognitive and/or philosophical therapy: doesn't sound like a good bet for you, but you might try it.
Group therapy: I'd say this was a reasonably good candidate for you, to get you into something new, and see that there are others in your situation, maybe even to find a relationship. If you can, possibly, get into a good relationship; that goes a long way to help depression.

Category three: situational
Drastically change your location and living situation: i.e., move to another country and get a job. Given the above, it looks like you've tried the equivalent and it didn't work... but I'd be depressed by British winters, myself.
Suicide: always an option, in my very strong opinion. Everyone should have the right to end their life, if they wish. However, this is something I disapprove of, not so much on ethical grounds as on pragmatic ones. That is, the world is vast, possibilities are enormous, and time keeps moving. Things change. Unless you are in truly enormous pain and there is really no other way out (i.e., you're a terminal cancer patient, you're being tortured, etc...), I believe it is better to wait things out.

So where are we? Group therapy; exercise; cognitive therapy; Buddhism; shock therapy; and maybe, hopefully, there's a new drug out that might help. In addition, there is a reasonably good possibility that as you age, you will improve. Wait for that. The fact that you have been able to attempt these solutions, and that you are writing to this forum, indicates that you can take action, and want to change. Go with that.

Here is a book just out which might also help:

Depression is a Choice: Winning the Battle Without Drugs by A. B. Curtiss Hyperion, New York. 2001

Steven Ravett Brown

Mark has my deepest sympathy, but I'm afraid that as a philosopher I am not competent to help him. I wonder, however, if he would consider a relevant philosophical question. He is attempting to find a means to an end, which is relief from depression. He emphatically does not want to try one more thing that fails. My question is: How does Mark know that suicide is not one more such inadequate means to his chosen end? My hope is that this question will induce in him enough agnosticism about "what comes next" to stave off his fateful decision, at least one more day. For after the first suicide, another is not an option, as might be another religious order or another antidepressant. Suicide is the unrepeatable option. (Should one ever find oneself saying, "Well, suicide didn't work. What shall I try now?," one is already in a state beyond any help that I know of.) So to the degree that rationality still commands the allegiance of one who is deeply depressed, to that degree it is rational for him to ensure that he is not about to go from the frying pan into the fire.

Tony Flood

You did all those things! And you haven't given up hope? This is very inspiring. If only more people were driven to find happiness with such perseverance. I suggest you read the philosopher Seneca for wisdom, and Plato's Early Socratic Dialogues for amusement.

Rachel Browne

Krystine asked:

What exactly is a philosopher and is it hard to be one?

The most important virtue of a philosopher is to be serious. And to be serious can be very hard, as at least Socrates and Bruno and Galileo and Spinoza and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Bonhoeffer had to learn — but many others too. When the Elector of the Palatine invited Spinoza to a professorship at Heidelberg University, Spinoza declined, saying that even the authority of the Elector would not protect him from the furor of Lutheran theologians there.

A true philosopher is someone who in ernest wants to know the truth — and then he has everybody against him who thinks to have the truth found already. For the true believer the search for truth is a provocation since it presupposes that truth has not been found. He cannot accept that. And in this sense most "normal" people are true believers of the "common sense truth" too — which may be simply common nonsense. To ask for the truth is to be a freak like Socrates was. Why ask for the truth if mom and pop and the teacher and the pastor know it? That's insulting and a sort of arrogance. Thus Luther has been chided heavily "How do you little monk dare to oppose the most eminent theologians!" But Luther answered like Socrates: "Since it is not good acting against ones conscience, therefore I will not revoke. God help me, Amen!"

A philosopher is like a judge, hearing all arguments while seeking the truth, the whole truth and only the truth — sometimes drawing heat or hate for that from all sides.

Marie-Michelle asked:

Is it possible to ever have a Utopian Society?
Why are we all searching for a Utopian Society?

Strictly speaking you can never find or build a Utopian Society: Utopia literally means 'there is no such place', so to find one or build one would be a contradiction in terms. But that is probably not what you mean. If you mean is it possible to realize concepts for a better society the answer would have to be yes and no, depending on your viewpoint. People have tried to put into practice ideas like for example communism, but the results differed from those expected by the 'believers' in that some good things failed to materialize and negative aspects failed to be eradicated or entirely new problems surfaced etc. I guess whether you are hoping that change will be for the better largely depends on the starting conditions i.e. whether you hope to gain more than you stand to loose. It also depends on personality — it seems that there usually will be some good the conservative character (rightly) wants to retain and some good the progressive character (just as rightly) wants to achieve. Who is right? The only certainty is that as long as there is life there will be change ....

Helene Dumitriu

Malini asked:

I am not a philosophy student but am very fascinated with the chaos theory. It is said that a chaotic system is not a random system. Also, it explains that a small change in the input could produce a huge change in the output, hence it being called the 'butterfly effect'. Correct me if I am wrong. My question is: Every event or action, however small, can produce a specific outcome. Although we're not able to predict it precisely, there is still a cause and effect situation happening. If that's the case, does that mean that there are no such things as coincidences?

Chaotic system not random: that is correct. Butterfly effect: that's correct.

However, when you say "specific outcome", you are not being clear. Specific in what sense? Definite? Definitely known? Observable? Predictable? Strictly speaking, it is not accurate, on the quantum level, at any rate, to say that every action will certainly produce a reaction, because of quantum uncertainty... zero-point energy, if nothing else. But you are going further than that when you say that an action produces a "specific" outcome, if by that you mean one unique to an action. Why should that be true? So when you talk about "cause and effect" situations, you have to be careful. That being said, yes, chaos theory is a deterministic theory, within the purview of Newtonian mechanics (although that doesn't have to be the case), and so is a causal one. But, so what? Newtonian mechanics isn't the last word, right? In other words, chaos theory, a branch of non-linear dynamics, is a subset of mechanics which is concerned with very complex systems, i.e., recursive systems. You can find non-linear, recursive, systems anywhere, and you don't have to be Newtonian to do that, although that's pretty much where it's applied now, as far as I know.

So what does all this have to do with coincidence? Well, I don't have the slightest idea. Perhaps when you can come up with a definition of "coincidence" which is a mathematical treatment applicable to physics you might be able to answer this question. But the normal sense of the term "coincidence" just means something vaguely like a surprising repetition or similarity. Chaos theory has to do with very hard-core mathematical models, not with feelings of surprise. So your question is mixing categories of ideas or concepts, like apples and oranges. Chaos theory is simply not relevant to coincidence, as that latter term is normally employed.

Steven Ravett Brown

That's a brain-twister. Toss a dime or a dice. The outcome of tossing a fair dime is with necessity equal probability of heads and tails. But you cannot tell what the outcome will be in a single toss. So what is it — is it necessity or is it coincidence? That's explains the "butterfly effect": Two or more very large developments are of "nearly exact" equal probability as is a knife standing on it's point: There must be any one outcome, but neither before nor afterwards can anybody prove what outcome there will be, since by sheer logic two or more or an infinity of outcomes are likewise probable, neither having any provable priority. What one has to accept then, is the necessity "by definition" of equal chances of "head or tail", which has nothing to do with the "uncertainty principle" or any physical effect but with "the logic of symmetry". By definition "symmetry of form" includes "symmetry of behaviour and outcomes". You cannot evade that conclusion. So the paradox is: Statistical outcomes are by necessity unpredictable.

Hubertus Fremerey

Erin asked:

I am trying to find information regarding the philosophy of in the area of body art (tattoos and piercings of today). I have been unsuccessful in finding any information and wanted to know if you were aware of any references.

You might seek out the following

The Body Aesthetic from Fine Art to Body Modification edited by Tobin Siebers

Pictures on the Human Skin by Gambier Bolton

The Decorated Body by Robert Brain

Rachel Browne

Mynam asked:

When I study the history of philosophy and try to understand the world I'm thinking and thus living in now, I seem always (no matter which philosopher or which time period I study) to come to the conclusion that we humans are asking the same questions over and over; just in new forms and in new aspects of reality (or non-reality). I do not mean that great thinkers have all been thinking about the same issues; rather that they (and we) have been in the same path just in different points in space-time. In the beginning I felt that we all are just improving and trying to ennoble the same questions that the the ancient Greeks and even human thinkers long before them asked about their surrounding world.

I'm not open minded enough to imagine what the questions complementary to today's (and yesterday's) questions would be, or if those questions even could be defined as "questions" but I do know that this reality we have created through our questions, i.e. our perception, cannot be the whole truth (if there is a "whole" or a "truth").

Why are we not creating instead of recreating?

That's a great question you posed! Perhaps you start looking at the history of art. Maybe that sheds some light on the history of philosophy as you see it.

The Greeks seem to have had a similar concept of art as we had at least up to the middle of the 19th century. But this is not exactly true, since there has been the art of the Middle Ages in between which is totally different from Greek and Roman "classical" art. But from about 1350 to about 1850 the classical ideal prevailed again. And this fading and reappearance of a special way to look at the world had it's parallel in the history of philosophy too: The selection of philosophical problems and the style of arguing has been very different in the Middle Ages from that in "classical" Antiquity and in Renaissance, and Modern philosophical thought.

And then there has been another great revolution likewise in the arts and in philosophical arguments starting from about the 1850s together with the rise of Industrial Society. You can mark two symbolic dates: The first "World Exposition" 1851 in London and the appearance of the "Communist Manifesto" in 1848 opening a year of revolutions swamping Europe. In those years, Turner and Corot and some other painters began to change the traditional way of painting, and this led ultimately to the wave of "impressionism" dominating the art-scene of Paris after the German-French War of 1870/71.

The main trait of Impressionism is a new "subjectivism" replacing the old "objectivism" of academic art. The academic art of the time was still mainly concerned with mythical and historical themes and with landscapes and townscapes and seascapes in a naturalistic fashion. The paintings look like remakes of the Netherlandic art of the 17th century or as remakes of renaissance art or even gothic. Not so the Impressionists: They ignored history and the past as subjects and the traditional way of painting altogether and tried to have a fresh look at the world around them. They painted coffee-shops and backyards with dancing people and "genre" and in this they still resembled the Netherlandish paintings of Hals and Vermeer in a modernized way. It was "painting of the people for the people" — not for the cultivated upper classes with their knowledge of history and mythology. But that still only paved the way for the great revolution that was to come with the work of Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and the Fauves and Cubists.

The revolution consisted in not only giving up the classical "great themes" of history and mythology but the values of "realism" and "naturalism" altogether. A picture is not a copy from nature, is not illustrating anything recent or past, be it important or unimportant, but a picture is a "work", consisting of colours and forms and of nothing else. The world may be "cited" in such an art-work, but it is not "represented" anymore. It simply is not the aim or the task of the artist, to illustrate or to represent anything but his own ideas. The whole concept of "representative" art dominating European art from Antiquity has been abandoned together with the traditional ideal of "beauty". The idea of beauty has changed from Rafael to Luigi Fontana, from naked goddesses arranged in a mythical scene to naked areas of colour arranged in a rectangle.

Now you ask what this has to do with your question concerning a new way of seeing the world with philosophical eyes. The answer is, that exactly what has changed in art has changed in the same years in philosophy. Cezanne said "Let us paint as if nobody ever has painted before!" In the same mood Husserl said "let us think as if nobody ever has thought before!". Cezanne said "Forget all themes, don't copy, don't illustrate, but construct a new world of artificial reality of it's own right!" Husserl and Wittgenstein said "Forget all classical problems and arguments, go back to what people experience and see how they use words to express those experiences!"

The years from about 1890 to about 1970 of European cultural history have been one of the greatest cultural epochs in the history of mankind, comparable only to the Golden Era of Pericles or to that of Florentian Renaissance. In this epoch the whole way we are looking at the world has changed fundamentally, not only in the arts, but in literature and music and in mathematics and physics and in the social sciences too — and in philosophy. And that explains in part the trouble some philosophy-students have today with a strange modern "analytic" way of asking questions that seem to ignore all traditional questions and answers concerning God and morals and mankind and what is beauty and what is truth.

Your question is: "Why are we not creating instead of recreating?" As you may have got from the arguments above, we are trying hard to "create". But then people are conservative and resisting change. This must not be bad. The churches have resisted freedom of speech and thought with the argument, that it would lead people astray into the wilderness of strange ideas and far from the truth. The communists said likewise and the Nazis too. There are not too many people seeing in a liberal and multicultural society much more than a social and moral chaos. You have to respect that for a moment and think about it. Ask yourself how much real freedom you can accept and endure. One alway needs a minimum of rule and regularity in life, of reliability, trustability and predictability.

If you change the world by "creating" a new one, this new world too will have it's problems of reliability, trustability and predictability. You have to convince people that your new world is so much more lovable and livable that they dare to give up what they are used to. But then people have been cheated many times by false prophets like Hitler and Stalin and some more of that bunch. Why do you think people are shunning genetic engineering and PID (pre-implantation-diagnostics)? It's not that simple to create a new mankind! What will become of the family? How will we earn a living and pay our rent or get our pensions and social security? All those questions are natural and have to be answered if you want to create a new world.

Jesus has announced a new heaven and a new earth — but what do you see in history? You see the churches and much superstition and bigotry and hypocrisy and moral repression. That was what Voltaire and Nietzsche and Marcuse fought against.

A new society and a new philosophy is like a new house. You can try to build that, but you must be sure that people will like to live there and that it does not collapse.

The philosophical house we are living in today has in part been built by Kant and Hegel on older fundaments laid by Plato and Aristotle and Augustine, but has been modified by Marx and Nietzsche and Freud, by Husserl, Heidegger and Wittgenstein and some more great philosophers of recent time. If you want to build a new philosophical house for mankind, you are not free to build anything fantastical. You always have to see the people living there. Try to see yourself and all those dear to you, and then some more until everybody has a room to live in — and not a cell like a monk or a prisoner or a bee. To devise such a house is no small task but requires the greatest of architects.

What is your time-scale? The pyramids of Gizah were built at about 2600 BC, and the Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens was built during the lifetime of Socrates some 2400 years ago. The gothic cathedrals are some 800 years old and the Eiffel Tower is from 1889. Is that pace of human history fast or is it slow? I think it is explosive! Think back to the year 1902: Who would have thought then of how we are going today? So you can't predict what will be in 2102, one hundred years from now. A new sort of cyborgs having replaced mankind? And you asked for "creating instead of recreating" and you think "that they — the great thinkers — (and we) have been in the same path just in different points in space-time!" Where should they have been? Maybe mankind will swamp the universe during the next 1000 years. There must be some traditions of thought and feeling holding mankind together, some language of mutual understanding and caring and respect. Don't be too impatient then. Things may get out of control otherwise. Be nice to humankind.

Hubertus Fremerey

Sean asked:

What are your philosophical views on the existence of extraterrestrial life? I see it as being both physically possible and highly probable, which makes the odds high that life does exist "out there". I've done a lot of thinking about the origins of life and the theories I've come up with allow, and could possibly prove, the probability of alien life. The thing I can't yet understand is whether or not consciousness would exist among these life forms, mainly because I don't even fully understand consciousness in myself. Maybe I could get some other points of view on consciousness and extraterrestrial life, I mean your own views. This isn't sci-fi, this is the philosophy of existence. Peace.

Sean also asked:

Do I exist? If so, how do you know? Do you exist?

From a philosophical point of view one would have to say at least that the logical possibility of extraterrestrial life cannot be excluded. Scientific thinking today is that it is highly probable that life has existed or exists or will exist other than on planet Earth. Also it seems that consciousness and self-consciousness naturally arise with a certain level of organisation and interaction, so it would seem likely that given favourable conditions and enough time, this would evolve on other planets as well ... If you have a theory that, as you say, could prove the probability of alien life — why not let us know (in short) your argument?

For the question of existence Descartes famously concluded from the fact 'I am thinking' that to think one must exist. In other words — from any state or action the existence of the subject follows. Thus we can conclude from your E-mail to 'ask a philosopher' that you exist (but not who or what or how many you are), and you may conclude that the 'ask a philosopher' list and web site exists ... (i.e. there is at least one X such that X has sent the E-mail signed 'Sean' and at least one Y such that Y has received it and posted it on the website, note that based on this evidence it cannot be excluded that X and Y are the same)

Helene Dumitriu

Kathy asked:

Can you please give me a basic definition for rationalists and empiricists?

A "basic" definition is no problem — but not helpful either. In our context, the terms "rationalist" and "empiricist" are used in relation to philosophers only and not in relation to an everyday approach to life. The typical "rationalists" in the history of philosophy are Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz. Their style of philosophizing is what has later been dubbed "armchair-philosophy": You sit in your chair and think on "first principles" and "necessary conclusions" holding the world together. Then comes the empiricist down the lane and asks, if you ever checked your splendid ideas against the brute facts. How could Newton's "law of gravitation" of 1678 ever have made such an enormous impact on the whole of European thinking, if he had not shown that from his simple formula of gravitational forces sprang the elliptical form of the orbit of planets that Kepler had derived in his famous laws some 70 years previously. And who forced Kepler to formulate those orbits? That was Tycho Brahe with his extremely exact observations of those orbits — which was of course empirical. Since Antiquity the idea has been that the orbits are circles, but Brahe's data excluded this possibility for the orbit of Mars definitely in the same way as Michelson some 300 years later excluded with his extremely exact measurements the possibility of the 'ether'.

Popper's concept of "falsification" sprang from his insight that Einstein's theory of General Relativity could be disproved by the measurements of Eddington in the 1920s, but the theories of the Marxists or the Freudians or the Christians could not. Many people do not even understand the concept of "falsification". It does not mean to show that a proposition or a theory is false, but that there could be devised an experiment (empirical!) that by its outcome conclusively "approves" or disproves the proposition or the theory. Even the word "approves" is correct here, since no experiment can "prove" a theory. Einstein's theories have up to now resisted all attempts to disprove or "falsify" them, but that does not prove them to be right.

In the late 50s Heisenberg devised a "world-formula" for particle-physics from theoretical considerations ("rationalist"), but then came the "quantum-chromo-dynamic" with its "quarks", and to get there one had to build the large colliders costing billions of dollars ("empiricist"). But of course one needs convincing theoretical concepts to make the investment of billions of dollars for the colliders plausible. Even Columbus needed his (false) convictions on the distance to "India" in the west to find support for his endeavour to get there. And the steam-engine of James Watt has not been the outcome of "practical engineering" either: He had to improve a demonstration model of some older type of steam-engine for the physics department of the University of Glasgow — then one of the best universities of the world. There he chatted during the coffee-breaks with some of the most famous physicists and chemists of the time and made use of their hints and suggestions on latent heat etc. for his design of the new steam engine.

Locke and Hume are known as "empiricists" ("nothing is in the mind, what not has been in the senses"), but Kant — who was well acquainted with the work of Descartes and Leibniz — got to his decisive new insights by combining "rationalism" with "empiricism". It was Hume who got him up from his "dogmatic slumber" by the notion, that "consequence" is not and cannot be an "empirical" concept but must be a "postulate" of our thinking that transforms a mere empirical "sequence" into a theoretical "con-sequence". As the examples above with Einstein, Heisenberg, Kepler and Newton have shown, one always has to combine a theory and empirical data to get at useful results.

The rationalist approach had much to do with the remnants of christian Neo-Platonism in Occidental thought. If human intelligence and the laws of nature are both expressions of the creative wisdom of God, then by this common origin the workings of nature and human insight should fit by some sort of inspiration. But Kant didn't need such an assumption. For his christian contemporaries that was shocking, since then the old assumption of a unity of mankind and nature under god was not assured anymore. Nature became a mere object for human technical and economical interests, it changed from a world to live in to a mere resource to be explored and exploited. Since then the principle of "R & D" — research and development — prevails: Theory, experiment and application combined to the modern "instrument of progress" and the antagonism between "rationalists" and "empiricists" of the time from about 1630 to 1780 has become historical.

Rationalism was no sort of stupidity though! The great rationalists have been great mathematicians and logicians. They hoped to get at the core of the machinery of the universe by mere logical and mathematical thinking since they held God himself to be the great "watchmaker" and mathematician of the world. This was a great idea in the neo-platonic tradition. And then they were convinced in the same line of argument of a deep reaching unity of truth, beauty and goodness respectively of reason, sensitiveness and virtue. This unity has been the guiding idea of Spinoza (1632-77) and of Lord Shaftesbury (1671-1713) and their time. This explains why one expected from rationalism much more for the progress of mankind than we can imagine today. Even the slight contempt, with which continental philosophers look on the anglo-saxon "empirical", "pragmatist" and "analytical" tradition of thought springs from this "neo-platonic" and "rationalistic" concept of "the great order of things" (or The Great Chain of Being as Arthur O. Lovejoy has called it in his famous book of 1933, which is still available).

One last remark on the sort of "experience" the English "empiricists" are talking of. This experience is restricted to "sensual data" from which "concepts" and "theories" are derived. It's a strict methodological sort of problem — to explain how "concept-formation from experience" takes place in the human mind. Therefore the sneering remark of a French writer, those tea-sipping English philosophers could not have the slightest idea of "real" experiences with deep love and deep faith and deep mourning, with doubt, despair and commitment, totally misses the point. Philosophy is about arguments, not about feelings.

Hubertus Fremerey

Stone asked:

To what extent is the human perception of dominion over the world similar to that of an animal's natural belief that they are the dominant species, so as to ensure the survival of that species?

Hmm. Is there (as your question seems to suggest) really a 'human perception of dominion over the world'? I would suggest that while this belief may still be held by individuals (and as part of some religions) it is no longer the dominant view (at least not in the Western hemisphere). Also what is meant by dominion over the world? That we are the dominant species? Surely not, there are better candidates e.g. in insects and bacteria, who vastly outnumber human beings. That we have a God-given right to exploit other beings? I have yet to see this properly argued in a philosophical way ... Regarding beliefs it seems to me that most philosophers would claim that animals do not have beliefs. But even if we point to animals forming habits and call those a kind of (very simple) belief (e.g. regarding where an animal expects to find food based on recent experience), we do not have any grounds that animals can think about whether they are a dominant species or worry about survival of the species. They strive for survival, procreation etc. through instinct, as do we by the way.

You might have a point that against the backdrop of what we would do anyway because our instinct drives us, human beings are additionally able to 'rationalise' their actions ascribing them to other motives i.e. for the greater good, because it is God's will etc. etc. However a philosophical approach would be to recognize our instinctive tendencies as well as the need to 'look good' and to think for oneself on which basis rational behaviour of oneself/ human beings should be based, and how to argue for that basis in such a way that it is convincing and acceptable for all rational persons.

Helene Dumitriu

That's an interesting idea — why should mankind not be as egoistic as any sort of plant or animal is by it's very nature? The answer is: Man is as egoistic, but then he is so terribly strong with his smart technology that he is endangering the very precondition of his existence (at least up to now) — nature itself.

Maybe mankind won't need nature any more in another 100 years. Maybe the earth will then look like the moon or the mars today, but with men dwelling in big towers with every comfort of living, the food being generated in biochemical processes and plants and animals being hatched and brought up in glasshouses.

The problem up to most recent times was to protect mankind from nature. Now the problem seems to be how to protect nature from mankind.

Nature is a very big system of open feedback-loops of the wolves-sheep type: If there are too many wolves, then the number of sheep goes back and more wolves starve. Then the number of sheep goes up again and the number of wolves likewise. In principle such could be — and sometimes has been locally or regionally — the fate of men too: If there are too many people in some area and some flood or drought or illness destroys part of the plants and animals men are living on, then people starve like the hungry wolves. So in principle there can be the case that the whole system of nature crashes before mankind got to be independent of it and then the whole of mankind has to starve. But nobody knows for sure what it takes to crash nature. Will the glasshouse-effect do? Will overpopulation do? We don't know.

Hubertus Fremerey

Richard asked:

Q1. Does destiny control or decide one`s future?
If yes does it imply that man has no free will to decide his future?

Q2. Fate and a curse do they coexist to destine man?

Unless proof is provided whether our lifes/ futures are controlled by destiny, to believe in destiny is just a belief, not philosophy. Free will according to some is not incompatible with destiny whereas others see it as a contradiction. If you believe in fate then again it would depend on your belief whether that is compatible with the concept of blessing and cursing someone having effect on that person's life. Some would say that it is incompatible with the concept of an all-good all-powerful God to allow curses to work.

Helene Dumitriu

Joao asked:

What is the explanation of moral behaviour, and our ideas of good and evil?

Seen from an objective point of view our ideas of good and evil are simply regulatory forces. How do you imagine any society where cheating, stealing, destroying and rape are the common behaviour of the people? Such a society could not last. Therefore even little children are advised not to lie, not to steal, not to destroy. That's simple.

Animals cannot be "rational" in this way, but they don't live in anarchy either. They have by nature restrictions to their behavior that are studied by behaviorists and ethologists. Look up any good book on "sociobiology" or on "ethology". But since man has (nearly) no inborn instincts and restrictions any more, culture has to replace nature in this case.

And in the same way a human language is infinitely much more flexible and expressive than any "language" of signs and gestures among animals, so is cultural regulation of human behaviour infinitely more flexible and expressive than any naturally enforced behaviour could be. This includes the fact that culture often leads to "un-natural" behaviour. But this "un-natural" behaviour is nearly the opposite of what some religious fanatics think it to be: Polygamy and homosexuality and suppression of the weak by the strong are very common with apes and other animals. Even murder of relatives has been observed in populations of free living chimpanzees in their natural African habitat (see the books of Jane van Lawick-Goodall). So that all is not "un-natural". But no animal has ever been observed in "mortifying the flesh" or fasting or committing suicide. There are sometimes dogs and cats starving with grief if somebody dear to them is dead or missing. But that is not comparable to "seppuku" ("hara-kiri") or to shooting oneself.

Amber asked:

Is "What it is like to be you" an essential part of you (i.e. your mind)?

Is it possible for a scientist or psychologist to understand who you are? The mind and body problem is difficult to understand. I read Thomas Nagel's 'What is it like to be a Bat?' but I still do not know why, 'what it is like to be me' is an essential part of me.

You can still be a person without much sense of what it is like to be you. Apparently, this is what it is like for schizophrenics, who are quite obviously people with a mind, but it has been found by psychologists that people with such an illness have difficult with recent autobiography and also with the understanding of the mind of others. An understanding of the mind of others, which is really constitutive of an understanding of the mind, is obviously going to disturb any understanding or feeling of what is like to be a person, and, given the autobiographical difficulty, what it is like to be me. Neuroscientists are definitely interested in and researching this problem of continuity and coherence in psychological personal identity

I think that what it is like to be me has to fall with an autobiographical and physical field. Could an amnesiac have an idea of me if there is no continuity, nothing to identify from moment to moment? I don't know. The problem is that philosophers argue in accordance with logical principles and would say that you could have a subjective experience of "me" in one moment without autobiographical or physical experiences being relevant. This is what the "what is like to be me" problem is about: subjectivity: That which is private and cannot be shared. But this pure subjectivity wouldn't determine what it is like to me, because it is purely positional

The question "what is it like to be a bat" is a type problem. We cannot know what it is like to be another species, especially a bat which has very different sense experience. But the question is also intra-species in the sense just described.

Rachel Browne

James asked:

Is the following argument true by definition, false by definition, a comment on my direct experience, or ultimately unknowable?

1. All statements are one of the following:

— true by definition
— false by definition
— a comment on my direct experience
— ultimately unknowable.

2. "A cat is a cat" is true by definition.

3. "A cat is not a cat" is false by definition.

4. "My desk looks brown to me" is a comment on my direct experience.

5. "The planet Jupiter is larger than my hand" is ultimately unknowable, as no matter how strong the evidence is that I use to decide whether the statement is true, there always remains the logical possibility that I will later find even stronger evidence to point to the contrary.

I would say that 'what follows' (that is, the propositions 1 to 5) is not an argument at all, but merely a set of 5 assertions. The first make an assertion that all statements fall into one of the four listed classes, while 2-5 give examples of the classes (though it must be said that within statement 5, there is an argument that the purported example is of the type asserted). My guess is that you are being asked to construct an argument of your own, which will try to establish that the statement 1 is itself of one of the types it proposes.

If it fitted into the second type, it would be useless, so you can rule that out. So you are left with three possibilities: that the compound statement (1) is true in virtue of the meanings of the words that make it up, is based on your experience of statements (and hence might or might not be true), or cannot be known to be true (which makes it merely an educated guess, and could be — you might argue — therefore equivalent to the previous type).

Alternatively, you could try to find a statement that does not fit any of the four types. That would show that compound statement (1) is false.

Tim Sprod

Anand asked:

I am doing my research over the positive aspect of sex: a hidden sin.

So I just want to know about sexual power over mind. Why this sex is so powerful that when a man knows that unsafe sex can led to death but still can't avoid it, because when sex comes into mind then any other thinking activity stops. Why is it so?

Wow, what a question. Offhand, everything you say above looks incorrect. First, sex is not a sin. Second, "sexual power" is one of those phrases that has been beaten to death. Just what, exactly, does it mean? Third, yes, unsafe sex can lead to death; so can driving a car, crossing the street, going swimming, and any number of other activities. So should we stop all those, also? Sex being "unsafe" is not a black-and-white issue, just as most other human activities are not. Fourth, just whom are you talking about when you say that when "sex comes to mind, all other thinking activity stops"? Not me, I hope, because I'd feel both insulted and amused at your naivete. Look at it this way: when one is a young child, and one smiles, what does that smile mean, and how much control does, say, a 4-5 year old have over it? It means pleasure or happiness, and there is very little control. As one ages, smiles become, if one wishes, controlled and imbued with many possible meanings. This is the result of education and experience. Well, it's the same with sex (and anything else). The more education and experience, the more control and the more subtlety in feeling and expression. To have the experience you describe above with sex, as an adult, indicates an appalling lack of education and experience with it, in my opinion.

I don't even know where to start to correct your misconceptions. Try the library; libraries have enormous resources of facts. Try a course in sexuality at a public university. The misconceptions above are some of the primary reasons for problems with sexuality in human cultures, in my opinion. If you doubt what I'm saying, just look at the statistics: the few cultures with good sex education (the Scandinavian countries, mostly), have the lowest rates of disease (STDs) and unwanted pregnancies in the world. The more sex education, the less unwanted pregnancies, disease, and, for that matter, emotional problems with sexuality. Look it up; all sorts of studies have been done on this.

Steven Ravett Brown

If you are doing research into this you have to read Freud. A Freudian account of the power of the sexual would be that the sexual instinct is an originary and primal instinct and as a child comes to develop a sense of self, an ego, and at the same time a relation to reality, the primal instinct towards sexuality is split off from the ego and it's relation to reality. So when a person wants to have unsafe sex, they are really driven by their originary sexual instinct, and not thinking of reality and the consequences. This is still to to be driven by the mind, but by the unconscious rather than the conscious mind. The conscious mind is concerned with reality. The unconscious is rather driven by primal instincts. The coming into being of the rational thinking social person has a repressive function on primal instincts, but the sexual drive, for Freud, is extremely strong since it has its root in our very nature, in the way we were as children before the social force took hold. This difference between the unconscious primal instinct and the conscious relation of thought and reality, given the strength of the sexual instinct, explains why thinking stops when sex comes to mind.

The sexual function is cross-species. But in male, there is perhaps a desire to demonstrate potency and giving and in the female there is desire for submission and receiving (simplifying and generalising here) and safe sex interferes with this. Potency cannot ultimately be shown, and submission is not complete.

But given all this, I would say that, basically, the desire for what you describe as "unsafe sex" comes down to the desire for true intimacy without barrier. And in terms of thought rather than desire, sometimes people have it — in their conscious mind — that certain risks are worth taking for the sake of physical intimacy.

Rachel Browne

Libby asked:

What is a word?

The Oxford dictionary definition is as follows: 1. A sound/ sounds expressing a meaning and forming one of the basic elements of speech 2. this represented by letters or symbols.

What I really want to know is how are language and thought connected? or how philosophers have gone about looking into this matter? Can there be such a thing as 'private language' — are thoughts simply unspoken words strung together in the mind? Where do the limits/ boundaries of language lie? And do words themselves convey meaning i.e. can a proposition be broken down into its individual elements, like building blocks, or must a word be within the context of other words for it to have meaning — just as a thing cannot exist in itself, only within a state of affairs?

Finally, if X is left of Y, is the 'left of Y' arbitrary? Could one mean the same thing by saying 'right of Y'? Why does X have to be the subject, and is syntax as it is because it is or is their some logical relationship between it and reality?

First, I believe Wittgenstein decisively undermined the notion of a private language by his famous thought experiment in Philosophical Investigations. Imagine a person who, every day he experiences a certain sensation, enters a certain squiggle in his diary. But one day he experiences a sensation about which he isn't able to decide whether it is the one he marks by a squiggle or another, slightly similar sensation. How can he now check whether or not the sensation is the same as before? The only thing he can turn to is his own memory, but the whole question arose only because he became doubtful about his own memory.

Second, it seems unclear what it would mean to say that thoughts are words in the mind. If I think of the first movement of Haydn's twenty-second symphony, what are the words I'm talking to myself? They seem more like a sequence of musical notes to me. If I think of a purple parallelogram, what are the words I'm talking to myself? They seem more like a visual image of a purple parallelogram to me.

Third, it is surely not arbitrary that X is left of Y; what is arbitrary is whether or not we happen to be located at a place in three-dimensional space from where X is left of Y and not right of it.

T. P. Uschanov
Research Assistant
Department of Philosophy
University of Helsinki

Michael asked: