Giles asked:

Molly asked:

Michael asked:

Do you think the principle of zealous advocacy is morally justifiable for the practicing lawyer? This principle assumes it is always good for people to be aided in exercising their legal rights and that lawyers cannot presume to morally judge the law in deciding how to act. These assumptions do not seem morally right to me. How could yo defend or attack such a principle using various ethical theories?

I think even a murderer has a right to defend himself because the law is punitive and we don't want to punish an innocent man. So the law provides these rights reflecting our moral attitudes. In the eyes of the law, we are innocent until proven guilty.

I don't see what is wrong with this 'zealous advocacy' principle. A lawyer is a professional person and as such his moral judgements should not affect his actions on behalf of his client. He is doing a job and has to uphold the principles of the law. The law keeps a sense of integrity. If a solicitor knows (ie has evidence) that his client is guilty, the law is that he should not continue to defend him. And in good conscience, he shouldn't.

The law is not moral in all its aspects and sometimes reflects aspects of culture that not everyone approves of. The law is about protecting rights and freedoms determined by society. In the culture we live in today people are defended in claims for compensation where there looks like an element of greed. Also the law is failing to recognise that individuals are responsible for some things that happen to them and sometimes blame is misplaced. Take the case of the woman who spilled hot coffee on herself and successfully sued MacDonalds. Lawyers probably did morally judge in this case, but they still have to behave professionally and do their best. If you wanted to exercise your legal rights, wouldn't you expect the lawyer to want to help? On the hand, lawyers might be responsible for this aspect of our culture. I'm inclined to believe it is lawyers who are responsible for encouraging greed and law suits without merit by offering to take on cases on a no win no fee basis.

The main ethical theories which students have to know about are utilitarianism (J S Mill) and deontological theory (Kant). Basically, the former states that the 'good' thing to do is that which will maximise the well-being of greatest number. For the utilitarian, then, it could be suggested that lawyers shouldn't judge the law since they would undermine what they should, professionally, be upholding. You don't seem to have a problem with the law as such, just the zealous principle. On the other hand, lawyers are only professionals who carry out the law. It is Judges and Parliament who make the law, so if lawyers did make moral judgements it probably wouldn't have much effect, except that professional status of lawyers would be lowered which is bad for lawyers and the public because the public wants to rely on professional standards being met. Utilitarianism may or may not support the principle. It is a difficult of weighing up the benefits for everyone of abandoning the zealous advocacy principle.

Barry asked:

Are we living or are we dying?

Yes.

Steven Ravett Brown

Lucy asked:

What are the strengths of the design argument?

First of all, this argument is simple to understand and has merit since humans are designers by nature and it is natural to think in terms of things having purpose.

For theologians, the design argument carries weight because it is consistent with Scripture. The Bible states that we are made in God's image. Therefore, there are certain things that we will resonate to. According the apostle Paul, the creation of the real universe was indeed ex nihilo, from nothing, but by the direct infinite power of the Creator instead of random fluctuations proposed by strong naturalists. Paul declared that the power and planning of the Creator could be understood by the obvious design of the creation. This design should then lead us to the Scriptures, through which the Creator may be personally known. Paul further warned that those who reject such physical evidence are without excuse (Romans 1:20).

Evolutionists have difficulty accounting for apparent design in objects like the eye, the heart, and the brain where many different parts come together to form the whole. These individual parts have no purpose except in the function of the whole. How can evolution account for these detailed congruent occurrences? So far, it can't.

Thus Paley's "watchmaker" is even stronger than before, centuries after its first occurrence. The chief reason is the discovery of "watches" in nature, beautifully constructed and running smoothly. This reference is to hundreds of carefully balanced equations, constants, and properties of matter. It is further realised that if any of these quantities were changed in the slightest way, the result would be catastrophic.

The knife-edged balance of protons and forces is indeed a strong testimony to the Creation. They hardly can be believed being artificial relationships resulting merely from human measurements and constructs. Instead, the intricate physical values have forced themselves upon our senses. Other similar "coincidences" involve such quantities as the fine structure constant, nuclear forces, and the total number of particles in the universe. All seem carefully chosen. Evolutionary change is entirely unable to deal with such permanent properties of nature.

Max Planck, one of the most influential physicists ever, stated: "According to everything taught by the exact sciences about the immense realm of nature, a certain order prevails — one independent of the human mind...this order can be formulated in terms of purposeful activity. There is evidence of an intelligent order of the universe to which both man and nature are subservient."

Altogether, the timeless design argument, valid for the apostle Paul and William Paley, as well as for Max Planck and thousands of present-day scientists can be considered as a strong one.

Michael asked:

Why is it not good for teenagers or people under 18 to view or get involved in anything related to pornography?

A good question. Now tell me, what is pornography? Is it explicit depiction of sex? Then we can't have sex education, can we, if we don't want pornography, if that's what pornography is. Is it depiction of sex as pleasurable? Same problem. Is it the depiction of sex in a "non-educational" context? Well, first, you can see that since I'm putting that in scare quotes I'm having some problems with that concept... what about looking up stuff in libraries, for example? But let's say, for the sake of argument, that an "educational context" is one which is "supervised" by a "qualified adult", ok? Leaving aside the question of the meanings of the latter quoted phrases.

So, then, why is it not good for those under 18 to view, say, explicit depictions of sex in an unsupervised setting? Well, here's the answer I'd give. A child ("person under 18") is very actively engaged in learning about the world, and does not have much experience in evaluating, i.e., in distinguishing good from bad. That's what a child is. Certainly, there are people who are adults at the age of 18, but by-and-large 16-18 seems a good lower boundary for the above abilities.

Depictions of sex are very culturally determined, and unfortunately many of those depictions are violent, degrading, and portray sex as shameful, "dirty", and so forth. Do we want children to learn that sex is some or all of those things? Well, I don't; I want children to understand sex as good, life-fulfilling, pleasurable, interactions between fairly equal adults... etc... and in addition realize the problems that may ensue through sex: jealousy, depression, STDs, and so forth. So I wouldn't want a child to see what I've termed "pornography" above, not because I think explicit depictions of sex are necessarily bad, but because I think that in our culture they definitely tend to be. And I truly don't know a culture in which this is not the case, at least to the extent that there are enough depictions of sex from the above negative viewpoints that a person who could not discriminate, who is still learning, would have a very good chance of learning what I would most definitely feel are the wrong attitudes.

So unless there are clear individual cases in which one knows that a person under 18 is not a child, or until we consistently portray sex as positive (in roughly the manner I outlined above) I will agree — not happily — with those who want to restrict the unsupervised access of children to sexual materials.

Steven Ravett Brown

Stuart asked:

I have a question directed at some of the more "certified" (i.e. with diplomas, professional certificates, et al.) philosophers out there.

Trent asked:

How is the knowledge Husserl obtains in the epoché pertinent to the world outside of the epoché? Is he just examining how we know and then applying that process to how we construct the outside world?

Sorry I missed this one before... anyway, look at it this way. Suppose you wanted to wriggle around Descartes' problem (existence of the world, etc.) and his dualism, ok? Now, one way to do that might be to say, "The 'existence' of the world is just another thought or concept that we have when we look around at 'things', or whatever. What if we just ignored that concept and looked around anyway?" That, in a sort of crude nutshell, is what the epoche is and what it's supposed to do. We look around, and we merely ignore or "bracket", as Husserl liked to call it (and boy oh boy do I have problems with this concept, as an act!) the idea that things "actually" exist. Now, are we looking at the "same" world? Yes, of course we are; no phenomenologist would claim that we're seeing a different world, merely that we're seeing it in a different way, another matter entirely ("radically" different, as they like to put it).

Now, does one obtain "knowledge" this way? Is Husserl examining how we know? Well, yes in a sense he is, in a very abstract way. But he's not so much "constructing" as "deconstructing" the world (And does that latter term sound familiar? Haha, yes, he started that movement... unwittingly.), i.e., showing that when we remove something, that idea above, we see the same world in what he would understand as a more profound and complete manner, one which was not occupied with the question of "existence", but with more important (to him) questions of constitution, i.e., what things are "made of", as experiences. So, yes, that's knowledge... and Husserl and phenomenologists believe it's deeper, in a sense, than mere "empirical" knowledge, since it bypasses (so they hold) that question.

But the main goal, of the epoche, anyway, was to solve, by avoiding, the Cartesian dilemma. To go further, to what he would have considered "real" knowledge, you have to in addition apply the "phenomenological reduction"... and that's yet another level of abstraction, which does, according to Husserl, result in profound knowledge of absolute entities, the philosophical or experiential equivalents of Platonic ideal objects (and Husserl had problems all his life with whether he was an idealist or not... but I'm just not going to go there). One might indeed claim that one does obtain knowledge of "another" world through that reduction... but again, Husserl would have denied that, because it is absolute, indubitable (apodictic) knowledge of the "natural", "pre-scientific" world that he was after.

So the brief answers to your questions, are, first: totally pertinent because it's the same world; and second: sort of.

But my teeny exposition here just cannot do justice to Husserl's work. First, his own ideas changed rather radically as he matured, and second, he wrote literally thousands of pages on this stuff (which the Husserl Archives are still bringing out). With a lot of redundancy, a lot of ranting, and some absolute sheer brilliance, such as, for example, his analysis of "time consciousness". I don't even know where to recommend you start reading... there's always the Ideen, but I actually think that the Logical Investigations are more approachable:

Husserl, E. Logical Investigations. Translated by J.N. Findlay. Vol. I, International Library of Philosophy. New York, NY: Routledge, 2001.

Husserl, E.. Logical Investigations. Translated by J.N. Findlay. Vol. II, International Library of Philosophy. New York, NY: Routledge, 2001.

But again, you just cannot easily compare any of his writings separated by more than a few years, since his ideas were always changing.

Steven Ravett Brown

Vicky asked:

Can a moral person be happy?

The short answer is — Yes!

The longer answer is — it depends on one's moral standards.

If, as many people, you adopt or inherit your moral standards from one of the many religions extant, then you most likely have an "unselfish/ altruistic" foundation for your moral beliefs. You will probably hold that, ceteris paribus, it is the welfare of others that is your primary moral concern. In that event, your own happiness is at the mercy of others — either because you are called upon to make sacrifices in the interests of the common good, or a duty to help others, or a commandment to not be selfish and self centered. And in that case, you will only find yourself happy when someone else makes it their business to make you happy. Making yourself happy is immoral.

But on the other hand, if you adopt your moral standards after a reasoned analysis of the best evidence available and without any preconceived conditions, then you will realize that the welfare of oneself and one's family is your primary moral concern. From this standard of morality, making oneself happy and allowing oneself to be happy is a noble ethical pursuit. And in that case, happiness is the expected self-generated reward for a properly conducted moral life.

You takes your pick, and you reaps the consequences.

Stuart Burns

Ross asked:

What is the rule of recognition, and what role does it play in helping us to understand how legal systems operate?

Isn't there a jurisprudence site?

As far as I understand it, rules of recognition actually are the legal system: This would be rules about contracts and compensation and that the court can make rules itself in certain cases (e.g. in case law when there is no precedent). As such they would seem to be the content of the law as well. The rule of recognition is that those within the system must recognise these rules and that ultimately the court and legal officials create the law. So the source of law is the legal system itself as opposed, for instance, to morality as the source of law. This is also to define the law in terms of it's being a system of rules as opposed to being a system of obedience and punishment or orders and threats. It does, therefore, lead us to look at the nature of the rules and commitment and why they differ from moral rules.

Hart thought that a society must accept primary rules if it is to survive. These primary rules are restrictions on violence, theft and deception. Doubt about the scope of these rules leads to the rules of recognition, or the written law. A sophisticated legal system does seem to be a set of rules rather than a matter of, say, Austin's notion of obedience and punishment: We would find such descriptions of systems barbaric. Perhaps Hart's definition of the legal system is correct but it is certainly open to question and is much argued about. Whether or not it is correct it has led to questions in jurisprudence of greater complexity than those raised by the obedience/ punishment model. See for instance Hart's Postscript: Essays on the Postscript to the Concept of Law edited by Jules Coleman.

To define the law in terms of its being based on our moral norms might help us understand the legal system too, if we followed Dworkin rather than Hart. We could proceed by trying to discover what our moral norms are and whether they are soundly based and then go on to assess whether laws and actions of the courts correctly reflect our norms. This would lead to an understanding of how rules map a possible source.

The role of something as specific as Hart's rule of recognition where this is acceptance of the legal system by its officials in itself doesn't have much of a role in furthering understanding as far as I can see. But in describing the legal system as a system of rules and, as such, reasons for action, further analysis of these concepts is called for. Also that Hart's description or that his overall concept of the law is taken as having a basic source in social conventions both allows competing theories to arise and a further analysis of whether rules are conventions. All theories give rise to dispute and analysis.

As far as furthering understanding of how the legal systems operate, it would seem to me that studying the law of legal systems themselves is the first principle of advancement.

Rachel Browne

Hart in his great text The Concept of Law emphasises the role of rules in any adequate understanding of the nature of law and legal systems. He suggests law is a union of primary and secondary rules. Indeed the move from a pre-legal set up to a legal one is captured by the fact that in the pre-legal set up individual behaviour is guided by primary rules whereas in the legal set up behaviour is guided by primary and secondary rules. Secondary rules allow the overcoming of inevitable problems that arise as a society becomes more complex. Among secondary rules are rules of adjudication and change but absolutely fundamental is the rule of recognition. The rule of recognition is that by reference to which the validity of a rule as law is established and by reference to which legal systems can be identified. A rule is a valid law if and only if it can be traced back the relevant rule of recognition. Laws are laws of a given legal system if they are all valid by reference to the same rule of recognition.

The great debate between (say) Hart and Dworkin in part is a debate about whether an adequate understanding of law demands a rule of recognition or whether among the materials of law are materials that enjoy full legal significance despite not having a pedigree owing anything to a rule of recognition. If Dworkin is right and law is an irredeemably moral enterprise then at least issues to do with rule of recognition are more complicated that a simple reading of Hart's seminal work might suggest. You should read Hart's postscript to the 2nd edition of The Concept of Law.

Ian Gregory

Alana asked:

Are you the real you or are you an image of you?

How about this one: suppose that you could take someone (while they're alive and conscious), strap them into a machine which could scan their brain as completely as you want (down to the electrons or whatever), and project an image of that scan, real-time, three-dimensionally, into the air in, say, another room. Ok? Now... is that image conscious? Why or why not? Well, the classical answer is that it can't be (aside from the science of scanning,etc.) because there's no internal causation involved in any of its processes. You see? The image of one neuron doesn't cause the image of another neuron to fire, or whatever. But then one must ask... so what? If the processes are the same, even as images, why isn't the image conscious? What is causation, that it should "cause" consciousness? Haha, nice one, right? I don't know the answer to this one... I'm just throwing it out to you to chew on for a while. So in answer to your question... maybe it doesn't matter, really...? Or...?

Steven Ravett Brown

Chloe and Joey asked:

Do non-cognitive interpretations of religious language create more problems then they solve?

For this answer I have so far looked at the doctrine of analogy by St. Aquinas as it does not use past experience and it is used to make a statement/ assertion, but I only know of this one variation of a non-cognitive language and I need more so I can answer the above question with as much background knowledge of non-cognitive language as possible.

The traditional view has it that to say that an indicative sentence has a non-cognitive function is not to say anything but to show or express something. So there is a prima facie tension in saying that a non-cognitivist can make an assertion.

Perhaps the best and most well-known background to non-cognitivism about religious language stems from A.J.Ayer's famous book Language, Truth and Logic. Strictly speaking the non-cognitivist holds that when we utter an indicative sentence containing religious terms such as 'God exists' we are not making an assertion or expressing a proposition. That is to say we are not saying that some state of affairs exists which makes the statement or proposition true or false. Ayer's motivation for this is because there is no way that we can verify the statement or proposition. Ayer also went on to claim that the meaning of a proposition resided in its method of verification. This caused almost everyone to start pointing out how any statement of verificationism could not be verified (and hence could not really be a genuine statement/assertion).

Whilst verificationism has come and gone the motivation for non-cognitivism about certain forms of discourse such as religious discourse and ethical discourse has remained. The problem for non-cognitivists has always been to say what the meaning of the indicative sentence consists in.

This is typically an anathema to religious Christian converts but not always. A branch of the Christians who follow Don Cupitt calling themselves 'The Sea of Faith' actually hold that religious language does not function to state facts but instead functions to express emotions and values. This approach rejects what most people profess to believe and thus requires mass self-delusion amongst religious converts about what they believe they are doing when they use language. Many critics of this approach comment that it is supported by people who like dressing up in traditional christian costumes and preaching or telling traditional christian stories but who lack any real conviction that God exists.

The latter development is to collapse the distinction between cognitivism and non-cognitivism and claim that it is impossible to give a theory of meaning for language. This view is influenced by Wittgenstein's later writings and his followers.

Try Ayer first. Then read some of his critics such as Church. You could then try searching for Crispin Wright's "The verification theory another puncture another patch" which was a journal article (but i have forgotten which) but he is difficult to read so leave it till last.

Cupitt is easy to read and gives an historical overview of the non-cognitivist tradition and motivations for taking this view from a more continental perspective. Try his works in chronological order.

Julian Bennett

Zero asked:

Compare and contrast the Socratic conception of the soul with that of the atman in the Bhagavad Gita and the self of the Tao Te Ching. Are these similar or different?

I've been looking for questions of this kind for a long time, I don't Know about Socrates so I will be speaking of the atman and the tao only.

Atman in Hinduism is the real self of someone. 'I' In Hinduism is not my body, nor my shape, nor even my thoughts and personality, there is something in me that is far deeper, this is the true self, that doesn't change in my reincarnations. This is the atman. The Brahman is the universal self. If the atman expresses the innermost depth of me, the Brahman does the same for all being.

And in the most mystical of all Hindu traditions, The advaita Vedanta, a golden rule is well known stating that 'Atman = Brahman'. This means that My true innermost essence is the true innermost essence of the whole universe, that the universe of opposites, or plurality, of pain and strife, is only an illusion 'Maya' as a result for the ignorance 'Advida' of reality. The ultimate wisdom in advaita Vedanta is the Atman/ Brahman realization, experiencing the atman, that is the Brahman.

It is to be noted that this realization is not intellectual. You don't gain the ultimate wisdom if you'd shout 'I am the Atman and this is the Brahman, my essence is the essence of all that is' you have to 'EXPERIENCE' this. Just like mirage, if you'd say to yourself 'This is an illusion' you will still see water in the desert. When one practically realizes the atman/Brahman non-duality, all dualities and pluralities in the world will fall, thus the world itself will fall and the duality between himself and the world will fall,

Taoism, offers some metaphysical stuff as well, the Tao, roughly translated as the way is the ultimate origin of all that is. From within the Tao, both yin and yang arise. Yin and yang are pairs of opposites that interact forming the whole world. This is exactly what Rudolf Otto stated, "Black does not cease to be black, nor white white. But black is white and white is black. The opposites coincide without ceasing to be what they are in themselves." This is a logical paradox, but lets bring in mind all this Taoist metaphysics (and the advaita Vedanta metaphysics as well) was constructed upon mystical states of consciousness, and mental thoughts and emotions are quite often paradoxical, you may love and hate a person at the same time, also, a mystic feels all things are one, although still seeing them in a plural manner.

Hindus expressed their thoughts in the atman/Brahman non-duality. Lao tzu expressed them in the yin and yang both opposites flowing from within and into the one, the Tao.

Unsurprisingly, there are quite a handful of other words that express the same thing that the Tao and the atman express. We have Meister Eckhart's desert, the Gnostic Pleroma, the one of Plotinus, The natura naturans of Spinoza, the Platonic 'good', and maybe also Hegel's Absolute.

Walter T. Stace, A philosopher who I think was unfairly ignored by the philosophical society, spent quite an effort convincing people that religions are paths to the same goal, his books Religion and the modern mind, Mysticism and philosophy and The teachings of the mystics are indeed recommended if you are looking for a serious study of this stuff.

I'd be quite glad to share opinions with anyone regarding such mystical issues.

Arthur Brown

D-ster asked:

Can good exist without evil? or is evil a necessary condition to distinguish good from evil?

So tell me, what is "good"? Is it feeling good? If so, then clearly you can feel good without, say, feeling bad (or indeed without ever feeling bad; surely, for example, sugar tastes sweet, and you enjoy that, whether you can taste anything else). Is it performing a good deed, like, say, saving someone from drowning, or giving someone money? Well, again, you can do this without knowing about "evil", or doing something evil, right? Is it something like generally and abstractly deciding to help others? If so I still don't see why there needs to be evil to somehow make us aware that we're doing something desirable, something that should be done. Is it knowing that we're doing "good"? Well... you might be able to argue this one, but I think you'd have to push it. Surely we are aware of having choices, always, and that there are better and worse ones, in a variety of ways. And the better ones, in, for example, modes of helping others will simply be "good", in my opinion.

Steven Ravett Brown

Ray asked:

Are you a brain in a vat? Does it matter?

Am I a brain in a vat? Impossible to prove either way. Does it matter? Depends on how you mean the question. In terms of my day-to-day doings, no, it doesn't matter. How could it, if I don't actually know one way or the other? I would still behave in the same way and would perceive everything around me in the same way.

My year 11 students have been looking at this question and found the discussion in Stephen Law's Philosophy Gym interesting. The film 'The Matrix' also takes this as its basic premiss.

Lyn Renwood

In 'The Matrix' the question is raised whether it 'matters' whether I am a brain in a vat (or, rather, a body in a vat) but the film doesn't give the answer. It asks, 'Would you take the red pill or the blue pill'? Take the red pill, wake up to reality and fight for the revolution, or take the blue pill and forget that you were ever asked to make the decision.

Would I still bother to post these questions and answers, if I suspected that I was a body in a vat? Yes, because the activity would still be what I believe it to be — human subjects conversing about philosophy. Would I still bother to keep fit? Yes, because that has important practical consequences for me in my virtual world.

But if I had the choice to take the red pill and discover the awful truth or take the blue pill and continue living a contented lie? In my answer to Dian in the early days of Ask a Philosopher (Answers 5 23) I wrote "I would take the red pill, without hesitation. As a philosopher, I have to say that." Why? Because the philosopher's ultimate concern is with 'the truth' — at any price.

However, as Ray's question shows, there is a third possible alternative. Take the red pill, discover how bad things really are (a world turned into a post-apocalyptic hell) then ask to be put back in the vat but NOT have your memories erased.

Geoffrey Klempner

I thought it would be worth mentioning an alternative response to this question because it is rarely represented on these answer pages and this gives the impression that philosophers are all in agreement over the impossibility of knowing whether we are brains in vats. This alternative response comes from the tradition in philosophy which questions the assumption that fallible knowledge is impossible.

The first response to this question would be to look at the context in which it is asked. For instance a philosophy student may ask the teacher 'am I a brain in a vat?' to which the answer could very plausibly be 'No' (given that you are unlikely to have a brain in a vat asking such questions in your philosophy class). On the other hand you could say along with the other philosophers on this list 'I don't know'. Although I think that it would strike most people as a decidedly odd thing to say. In the same way if someone asked you whether you were awake or not and you said 'I don't know' it would cause some puzzlement.

The philosopher who holds that they don't know whether someone in their class is a brain in a vat or not is assuming that they cannot know what it is possible for them to be mistaken about.

They are relying on their experiences being a reliable guide to what exists and yet they are aware that it is possible for their experiences to be systematically deceiving them. On this view I cannot know anything because knowledge has to be infallible.

The alternative view to the above is to say I can know things without being infallible and to point to how the term 'know' is actually used in everyday life (where claims do not require infallibility). According to this view the source of puzzlement is due to the philosopher taking terms out of their ordinary context where they have a use and placing them in another context where they cease to function.

There is no easy way to settle this question over what you can know. However as an indicator of which position to adopt you could try the following test to see what your intuitions tell you is the more plausible.

Do your intuitions tell you that you can tell the difference between a brain in a vat and a person?

or,

Do your intuitions tell you that you cannot know something unless it is impossible for you to be mistaken about it?

As to the second part of the question 'does it matter' — Well ask yourself whether you would trade places with a brain in a vat. If your answer is no then ask what reasons you would not trade places with a brain in a vat. This will indicate what sort of factors 'matter'.

Julian Bennett

Paul asked:

Hypothetical question on present evolutionary theories.

1. Would all present theories of evolution be at risk if NASA embarked on a genesis project? or if some of Earth's plant seeds were released into outer space?

2. Everything on Earth is directly or indirectly involved in a reproduction cycle. So why should space be any different?

1) There would be absolutely no effect on the "theory" of evolution (if you want call it that; that's the common term for most scientific bodies of work, because they haven't been absolutely proven... which nothing empirical can be. The "theory" of relativity, to take just one example, is probably less certain than the "theory" of evolution). Why should there be? DNA would still be DNA, subject to mutation, etc., etc.

2) Yessss... depending on what you mean, I guess. First, you must be referring to life on earth rather than just everything, and second, I'm not quite sure what you mean by "involved". Living things pretty much have to reproduce, because otherwise, given accidents, entropy, etc., they'd eventually be killed or die. So the ones that didn't aren't around any more. Is that what you mean?

As for "space"... I assume you mean something like "creatures living in other places in the galaxy" or something like that, right? And, given my reasoning above, sure, why not?

Now, what's the point? Are you asking whether hypothetical creatures on other planets evolved? Hey, why not? Evolution isn't something mystical or weird or whatever, it's just a consequence of noise in a genetic system giving rise, occasionally, to superior genes. Like the classic example of putting 100 monkeys in a room, typing away madly... and sooner or later typing out the works of Shakespeare. Except for one thing. Every time a monkey types out a sensible sentence, that gets saved, while the garbage gets thrown out. So the sensible sentences accumulate. Ok? Well... DNA has lots more than 100 thingies fiddling with it at any given time, and it's been a looong time, as in billions of years, that it's been fiddled with. So a lot of sensible sentences have accumulated. What makes them accumulate? Come on, you can see the answer to that... they're read out into various chemicals or structures or whatever, and the bad ones kill the organism, the good ones keep it going.

Steven Ravett Brown

No. 1: Not at all. Your idea of evolution seems in need of sharpening. What is `evolution?` It is a common mistake to think of evolution as something that `happens`. But in fact it's a human concept, an observer's history of the adaptation and proliferation of life forms on Earth. If life were to arise anywhere else in the universe, the same struggle for adaptation would commence; but to the degree that conditions on another planet might differ, the history would run another course. That's all.

No. 2: Keep asking. When you find the answer, line up for a Nobel!

Jürgen Lawrenz
Sydney

Abdulhamid asked:

Does God really exist??

We have to begin by agreeing upon a definition of divinity. I will take the liberty of assuming that you have in mind a monotheism, that you envisage divinity in terms of a single omniscient omnipotent universe-creating entity.

I happen to believe that there is no such entity. My atheism is motivated primarily by Ockam's Razor Principle, whose basic claim is that the best explanation for any puzzle or phenomenon is almost always the one involving the least complexity.

Regarding God (assuming I can refer successfully to a non-existent!), a universe with a God is more complex than a universe without one. So the Razor Principle, at least this application of it, invites us to believe that there is no God.

Nevertheless, this is not a knockdown proof that there is no God; more an argument that, other things being equal, reason constrains us to believe that there is no God.

Two counter-arguments spring to mind. The first of these is that nothing can self-create, therefore there must be a God, if only to supply this lack in the case of the universe as a whole. The problem with this line of argument is that, notoriously, it carries over to God him/herself. Theologians tend to be wary of the idea of an infinite regress of metacreators.

Secondly, St Anselm's Ontological Argument:

1. We can conceive of a God (see above), one of whose attributes is perfection. 2. An existing entity is more perfect than a merely conceptual one. 3. Therefore God exists.

Very tricky. People are still arguing about it a thousand years later. What it's saying is that perfection implies necessary existence. Personally, I think that if perfection is understood that way, it follows that we can't conceive of a godless universe. But this is absurd. I certainly can conceive of a godless universe. So I turn the whole argument, rather question-beggingly I admit, on its head. Instead it becomes a sort of Reverse Ontological Argument:

1 We can conceive of a godless universe 2 If God was perfect there could be no godless universe 3 Therefore there is no God, at least not one with perfection as one of its attributes in St Anselm's sense.

Of course, it's quite in order to believe that although reason constrains you not to believe in God, nevertheless you have faith in his/her existence. The reason/faith distinction has a venerable pedigree, and there is simply no intellectual basis on which an atheist can question a theist's faith. Nevertheless, I really don't think there is a God!

Richard Craven

Shen asked:

Who are the philosophers who define killing? Or, are there any philosophies regarding killing?

As far as I know philosophers don't define killing. Perhaps they think we know what it means and surely we do.

There are philosophies about the difference between killing animals and killing humans and there are philosophical issues about euthanasia. As to killing animals, our preciousness has led us to disguise this in the term 'culling'. Euthanasia is probably a euphemism for killing too. Maybe we have to kill to survive and have to perform mercy killings out of compassion but don't like to admit to it as 'killing', because that shows us how brutal we can be. Although I'm not sure euthanasia is brutal if it is supposed to be merciful. The idea of humans killing is something we skim over. We don't like to look at it much as it shows how appalling we are. In war 'deaths' are spoken of. No mention of 'killings' no mention that someone actually DID it.

In analytical philosophy, killing normally figures in the problem of a sum: Should we kill the one to save the many? This is getting even further from the brutal truth of killing. And who ever has this problem? Surely we can consider morality without looking at abstract problems that don't actually arise.

This being said, killing has been spoken of by Levinas (deceased continental philosopher) and Raimond Gaita (current analytical philosopher) and in the same vein. Killing is described as something we cannot do to another person. To kill another person requires that we don't perceive them as such. If we could see the humanity we couldn't do it. I think this idea comes from Socrates. It would follow that the further away an animal is to us the more killing is possible. We wouldn't be able to kill our pets as we know them as our family. A mercy killing is all that we could perform.

So why are we so squeamish that we have to use the word 'culling' when it comes to animals who are not pets? And why use 'deaths' rather than 'killings' in the case of war?

I'm sorry I don't have any philosophers to lead you to, but there are lots of questions that you can consider yourself.

Rachel Browne

Tataiat asked:

What is the difference between "Epoche" and "Reduction" in Husserl's Phenomenology?

Yes, this can be confusing at first. I don't want to go into the whole background here... for a nice introduction you can look through: Ihde, D. (1977). Experimental Phenomenology: An Introduction. New York, NY, G. P. Putnam's Sons. Take a look at my answers to Trent also. I'm just going to skim through this rather complex issue very quickly.

But basically they are two very different things. The epoche is the first step in getting around the Cartesian doubt: what can we be certain of, and why can't we have certainty about the world. Husserl sort of cuts the Gordian knot here by simply having one suspend belief in the world and, in that mind-set, looking at all experiences as leveled, so to speak, on that dimension. So there is no "privileging" of "real-world" experiences; everything is equal, and we don't even bring Cartesian doubt into the picture.

But we still want certainty, and there's the problem of particulars, for one thing: things keep changing. So how do we get to apodictic, absolute thingies, "essences"? Well, we go through the second step, the reduction. This consists of varying what we experience (read Ihde on the techniques here), and "extracting", so to speak, the essence, the unchanging core (or, from another point of view, apprehending the essence which spontaneously appears, as a result of "abstraction" — of some sort; Husserl is totally unclear on this — from the particulars).

And so we have, first, eliminated the question of the world vs. the "mental" with the epoche, and second, found, in all our experiences, those which are essential, certain, apprehended without doubt: apodictic. You see? The end, problem solved. Haha, according to Husserl, anyway. As you might expect there are just a few people who have problems with all this, including me. But until you can wade through some of the Logical Investigations and the Ideen, you simply do not have the background to read the critiques of Husserl.

Steven Ravett Brown

David asked:

How do I know that what I perceive as the color red is the same color that you perceive as being red?

There are a couple of ways of approaching an answer to this question, depending on just how the question was intended — as a question about knowledge, or as a question about perception.

You know that you are using the label "red" correctly if you have adequate evidentiary justification for a belief that you are calling "red" the same suite of things in world that others call "red". This is the process of learning what the symbol "red" means. And it is the process of learning the English language.

To know more specifically that you are labelling as "red" the same things that I label as "red", you need to compare your list of "red" things with my list of "red" things. If the two lists correspond sufficiently, then we are both using the label in a similar manner. The match between our respective lists of "red" things need not be exact. It merely needs to be sufficiently similar to avoid confusion in most cases.

To know that you are perceiving the color red the same way that I do is a separate question. And you may be surprised to find that it is largely irrelevant. It makes absolutely no difference to anyone (other than a scientist curious about that specific aspect of perception) whether we each perceive red in the same way or not. One of us could be color blind, or wearing color transposing glasses. Or it may be natural for "red" things to appear differently to each perceiver. Makes no difference. All that matters is that we each respectively call "red" (roughly) the same things in the world.

It is only if we find different things in the world that we each label as "red" that we can explore the differences in how we perceive "red". And aside from those clear cases of color blindness, we will almost always find that such differences in our respective lists of "red" things is due to a difference in our vocabularies. My wife, for example, has a much richer vocabulary of "red-like" color names (crimson, raspberry, candy cane, garnet, rose, wine, etc.). So I label as "red" many more things in the world than she does. Does she perceive "red" differently? Doesn't make any difference. And barring more scientific investigation with specific light frequencies, there is no way to tell.

Stuart Burns

This is actually still a hotly debated question. The short answer, in my very strong opinion, is that you don't. But there are various caveats to this, aside from the several schools that will claim I'm simply wrong. The first caveat is that if you mean something like: could I be seeing green when you see red, and vice-versa, then you've got problems because of various asymmetries in the color absorption patterns of our retinas and the way we process color in the cortex. If you look at some of Palmer's work, you'll see detailed arguments to this effect (e.g.: Palmer, S. E. (1999). Vision science: photons to phenomenology. Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press.). There are only certain color substitutions that will preserve the symmetries in the "color wheel" of color relationships that humans see. So if you stick to known colors you might be able to make a very restricted claim of this sort, but that's about all.

But if you're asking whether when you see red you're seeing something that I cannot experience at all, because in the same circumstances I see (i.e., have the conscious experience of) a completely different color, call it "bred", then we're in another area entirely. Then all the human color relationships can be preserved, and all the physical characteristics; the only difference is in our experiences of color, and mine and yours are simply different across the board. Then we're stuck (and note that I'm still giving you my viewpoint on this), at this point in our knowledge of the brain and of consciousness. This is an aspect of what's termed the "hard problem", i.e., how to know what's going on experientially for other people, to put it roughly. You can see that there will be no practical differences, as far as we can tell (and zowie, if there was one, whoever found it would win the Nobel) between us. I'd still cross at bgreen lights, while you'd cross at green lights; I'd drink borange juice while you'd drink orange juice.

Ine asked:

Can a person decide about an other person if he's guilty or not?

Certainly: but whether the decision is right or wrong is quite another thing. Although I have never in my life entered a court of law, other than to view the furniture or discuss its history, I have always been critical of the events taking place therein. The number of innocent people sent to prison or the gallows over the years is incredible, and these are only the ones we know about! It always seems to me that in court proceedings the issue is not whether the alleged wrong-doer is guilty or not guilty, but which barrister produces the more convincing argument! These arguments are presented to a jury, the members of which are chosen at random from the general public, (although the term random could be in question, considering the parameters obtaining in the range of choice). Whether we like it or not, a juror is no different to any other person when it comes to making snap decisions based on preconceived ideas of what a guilty or innocent person may look like, or how they may behave under interrogation.

Looking at the question from a philosophical angle, unless the perpetrator of crime has been caught red-handed, then all judgements in court are subject to false interpretation. Courts present examples of the differing views of 'empiricists' and 'rationalists'. Empiricists might claim that participants in a trial would have to be present at the scene of the crime when it was actually perpetrated to make a true judgement, they claim that all knowledge is derived through the senses. The witnesses they rely on in court could be good liars, or have misinterpreted what they witnessed, or they could have been got at. Rationalists, on the other hand, may argue that judgements can be made by reason and intuition from the evidence provided. Ask yourself which of the two options you would choose if you were an innocent person whose life depended on the verdict of the jury!!

Most of us are prone to making judgements about people almost everyday of our lives, no doubt we often condemn the innocent as guilty.

John Brandon

Anthony asked:

Philosophy is all in the mind of the individual. One does not go to school to learn about how to be a philosopher, one goes to study how others used their own ability. One cannot learn how to do philosophy; One just does. One can learn about others thoughts and then build on the idea.

I am a freshman art student and iowa state university in the US...just found this website while trying to find some answers.

Philosophy, as I see it, starts with appreciating and understanding the arguments of the great thinkers of the past and present.

Are you going to come up with all the issues on your own? Going it alone, might you not be an amateur? For all I know you might be a genius, but it doesn't really show in your question.

In England we study one subject for three years to get a degree and I felt that even after three years of the study of philosophy there was room for improvement and had to go on to a graduate course. For a BA you learn to understand the issues and write philosophy and then you go on and learn to think, more confidently, for yourself.

You can't criticise from outside because you don't know what you are criticising.

If you were to go on a philosophy degree course, you would see that there is plenty to learn.

At London University it was said that English Literature students were always in a dream world in contrast to Philosophy students who were always highly anxious because they were in a constant state of feeling that they didn't understand.

I don't know why people denigrate philosophy. After philosophy I studied law as a post-graduate and that is much easier than philosophy. Revising for law exams you get bored and go to bed early, in my experience, but you still pass. Philosophy, on the other hand, is really hard work and you stay up into the early morning before exams.

Don't know what you have read. If you are an art student and haven't read Sartre's trilogy, Roads to Freedom, which is literature, then this might start to get you interested in his philosophy, and you can move on from there.

Otherwise, get the Complete Works of Aristotle and see what you think. It is really amazing.

Rachel Browne

I want to question two assumptions in your question.

Firstly, philosophy is not all in the mind of the individual, as your later comment on learning about the thoughts of others indicates. Philosophy is in the public, intersubjective space between people. It is a communal activity par excellence. Only derivatively can it take place in an individual's mind.

Secondly, one does have to learn how to be a philosopher, and we learn that, too, in the same shared intellectual space. We are not born with intellectual ability (although we are born with its underpinnings) — we must develop intellectually through engagement with others. We become philosophers by taking part — at first, very hesitantly and poorly, later more confidently and skillfully — in philosophical inquiry with others. [I point out that this is not restricted to philosophy, but applies to all disciplines — indeed, it applies to being a person at all.]

Tim Sprod

Dennis asked:

I am a school principal. I teach some education courses at a local college. I've been assigned a new class, Philosophical Basis of Education. I always try to make my course very relevant to my students, whether they are under-grads/ student teachers or teachers in a grad program. The new class is made up of present teachers who aspire to become administrators. Do you have any suggestions on how to tie in philosophies/ philosophers into present issues in education?. How can I relate administrative responsibilities such as curriculum, budget, supervision of instruction, special programs, et al, to historical figures and "isms" in philosophy? I'm looking for a creative twist on teaching this content.

I've been frustrated in not really being able to answer this... but the problem is this: first, you ask how to tie philosophy into "present issues" in education. Well, that's pretty do-able, from Plato through Aristotle through Dewey, and so forth... there are a reasonable number of philosophers writing about education. But then you want to know about administrative details: budgets and philosophy? Supervision of instruction and philosophy? Like it or not, philosophers usually aren't too concerned with budgets and details of supervision. None I know of, anyway; and it seems from the lack of answers here that I'm not alone.

Here's one sort of off-the-wall suggestion: try looking at Lakoff, G. (2002). Moral Politics. Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, and his "nurturing parent" vs. "strict parent" metaphors. That might give you ideas about styles for some of the above things.

Steven Ravett Brown

I'm sorry to have taken so long to getting around to answering this question, which I find very interesting. I am afraid that I can't offer you a direct link to the historical figures (philosophers), but I would take a different tack in any case. I think that a review of the history of ideas is a great way to kill the study of philosophy, unless the students are already fired up with philosophical enthusiasm.

Here's the approach I would take. Look at the issues you mention and then search for the underlying big questions. Indeed, ask your students to discover the big questions that they find underlying these issues. Then enter a dialogue to try to find some answers — of-course, you would need to be prepared with some possible lines of inquiry and some ideas to inject into the discussion. From this, a link to philosophers and "isms" may follow.

Let me give a few examples. Curriculum: What criteria should we use for deciding which subjects need to be taught in schools? Ought we to teach solely from what the children are interested in now (child centered), or should we be equipping them with knowledge and skills they will need in the future (knowledge centered/inoculation theory of education)? Or should it be a mixture? What is the best balance between learning the knowledge of the past and preparing for the challenges of the future?

Supervision of instruction: What is the relationship between the knowledge/abilities we wish to convey and the pedagogical techniques we use? What is the relationship between content and process? Is good teaching a universal approach (i.e. we just have to find best practice and then get all teachers to teach in that way), or is good teaching something that depends on the individual teacher, and may differ from person to person and context to context?

Special programs: Does the provision of special programs clash with the concept of equality (= equal treatment)? Or is it entailed by the concept of equality (= equalization of abilities)? Even if unequal treatment is justified by the concept of equality, what criteria can we use to decide the relative allocation of resources?

In other words, start with the sorts of questions that administrators (or at least, reflective administrators) ask themselves. These are the questions these people will have to (or ought to have to) grapple with when they are doing their future job, and you are showing them how they can harness philosophical thinking and insights to do that job better.

Tim Sprod

Jess asked:

Do we have a mind in addition to our brains? If not then how do we explain conscious thoughts?

The answer to your first question depends, of course, of just what you conceive "mind" to be. Some people (philosophers included) conceive "mind" to be some sort of non-material "spirit" that animates the human animal. In which case, naturally, the answer to your question would be "yes". Others are more materialistic, and consider that all there is is the brain, so the answer to your question would be "no".

Me, however, I consider the "mind" to be the product of the brain in action. Somewhat akin to the majesty of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony being the product of an orchestra in action. Materially, all that exists is the orchestra. But the majestic harmony produced can be regarded (and studied) as something entirely different.

As to your second question, I would highly recommend Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett. I found it an eminently readable and very entertaining exploration of your very question. I feel sure you will enjoy it.

Stuart Burns

Bearing in mind that we call many things by names of which we do not know what they are — for example, God, but Mind will do as well — it's a pretty tall order to give a positive response. However, a very simple argument is that several hundred thousand species on earth possess a brain, but only humans seem to command a mind in addition. In my view, this is a perfectly conclusive basis from which to argue for a mind as an autonomous agency. This need not imply that it's a thing — in fact, it is also pretty conclusively established that the mind is not a physical structure, but a process by which the brain self-organizes its internal dynamics. How it achieves this self-organisation is a million-dollar question; and the only clue we seem to have to date is the complexity of signalling required for thought processes and the like, as compared to the routine of somatic functionality. There are, of course, hundreds of books and papers available for you to chase up this issue; but the worst you could do is to plunge head first into this wasp's nest. This area is the more contentious because we know so little that can be called factual. So you find books like Dennett's popular Consciousness Explained, which doesn't explain consciousness at all, but only his toy model of a pretty weird mechanical contraption he calls a "Joycean machine", or Crick's Astonishing Hypothesis, which simply gets stuck on visual perception and moves no further; or Eccles Evolution of the Brain, which after presenting all the latest findings goes back to Descartes to offer a replacement for the pineal gland; and so on and so forth. If you want a sane perspective aimed at the ordinary reader, I suggest you consult Gerald Edelman's Bright Air, Brilliant Fire and/ or Walter Freeman's How Brains make up their Mind. Then you can make up your own mind on what you want to believe; but at least you'll be informed on what we know — from the horse's mouth.

Jürgen Lawrenz
Sydney

Demarcus asked:

What the world may be like if we do not protect the environment and what will it be like if we do?

The environment does not need protecting, Demarcus. It's we who need to protect ourselves from ourselves and our careless and greedy `management` of the planet's resources, biological and fossil. If we don't protect the environment we simply impair the conditions under which human life is possible (not mentioning comfortable). An environment without humans would repair itself. That's the grim truth.

Jürgen Lawrenz
Sydney

Kate asked:

What is eudaimonia?

Danni asked:

Do you think that heaven is just an interim state, a place where our souls are stored much like a filing system until they are ready to be transferred to a different body? Also do you think that our souls are fully cleansed once they enter a new body or do they retain parts of old memories and former selves and that is why certain people can remember things about the past and of past people even though they might know nothing about them at all? Is the idea of life after death a coherent concept or is it something we use to comfort the sick and dying?

Ok... why don't you read a guy named Philip Jose Farmer. He's a science fiction writer, and is fascinated by questions like these, and attempts to create scenarios which answer them reasonably coherently; much more coherently, in my opinion, than do conventional religions. Try the Riverworld series; try Inside Outside and Night of Light.

Steven Ravett Brown

Matthew asked:

Does behaviour reveal the 'mind'?

Can you think of anything else we have to rely on, given that we're not telepathic?

Steven Ravett Brown

In philosophy the view known as Behaviourism reduces the mind to behaviour. It doesn't say that behaviour reveals the mind; it says the mind equals behaviour, in the sense that the meaning of any mental state term (such as "fear" or "pain") is the public behaviour associated with that term. This means that I do not have a special first-person access to my mental states. They are not internal states that I "perceive" through introspection or subjective, direct experiences. In fact, you could correct me when I say "I'm afraid of spiders" by pointing out that I never scream or run away when I see one.

I think most people would agree that behaviourism goes too far. However, we might wish to maintain that appropriate behaviour is relevant to the meaning of at least some mental states. An alternative theory, Functionalism, retains behaviour as the output, when it defines the mind in terms of functional descriptions. Both Behaviourism and Functionalism accept that there are internal processes involved but they maintain that these are not relevant to the meaning of the terms.

One of the problems that gave rise to Behaviourism was the problem of how we could ever learn the meaning, or the applicability, of mental state terms if they are purely private phenomena. This is a problem associated with the later philosophy of Wittgenstein.

The most famous Behaviourist philosophy was Gilbert Ryle, a professor at Oxford university in the 1940s and 50s. In response to your question, Matthew, he would have said that you were making a "category mistake": the mind is not the sort of thing that can be revealed. It's not the mechanism behind the behaviour (the soul or the brain). But Ryle's theory, in my view, could not cope with the kind of mental experience that seems to be most like private,internal perception, such as visualising something in your "mind's eye". Nevertheless, his book The Concept of MInd is worth reading.

Graham Nutbrown

Unfortunately our concepts of behaviour and mind have suffered pretty severe damage by Skinnerism and associated doctrines through the middle of the last century, and I would say we're not yet fully recovered: your very question is proof of it. But inasmuch as a worm's behaviour reveals nothing we would call 'mind', it is hard to maintain that human behaviour should. On the contrary, I'm inclined to state, as dogmatically as any behaviourist, that most of our behaviour in day to day life is pretty much the result of rote and habit and of semi-automatic navigation. When "exceptional" behaviour occurs, such as premeditated murder, you might get a little closer to the mind, but only in consideration that such an act requires a certain amount of planning.

Accordingly I would respond that the mind is revealed only in those departments of our behaviour where we perform acts which go beyond our animal capacities: thinking and speaking; designing and planning; making poetry and music; doing science and philosophy; and so on. But these are not what we commonly mean when we speak of "behaviour" without any adjectival condition. And thus my answer to your question is "no": for when you read a line of poetry, what you detect in there might be the work of a mind, but certainly nothing that could be brought under the classification of "behaviour".

Jürgen Lawrenz
Sydney

Elia asked:

Demonstrate how Democrats and Republicans might disagree on how to understand some aspect of American society using inference to the best explanation.

This is my (somewhat cynical) view:

'There's no such thing as love, there's only hurt and selfishness, and the pain that goes along with it.'

Can this really be rationally criticised, in the face of human 'love' being reduced to a mere biological and physiological mechanism? Or would any criticism of this view be merely an emotive (but irrational) reaction?

Isn't the conception of 'true love' merely a myth, a 'figment of the imagination', a nice but ultimately misleading concept? Note that the question isn't restricted to sexual love, or 'eros', love (in other forms) has strong religious connotations ("God is love", "Love God with your whole soul, and your neighbour as yourself").

If we can rationally say that God does not exist, can it be equally rational to say that love has no real existence, either?

If that 'grand feeling' of love (for God, the world, and fellow humans) is nothing more than a pathetic physiological state of arousal brought on by base chemical reactions in the brain and body, which evolved in order to lull humans into acting in the interest of others to promote the survival of their species, doesn't that imply that is not so grand at all, just a somewhat pleasant 'feelgood' illusion?

Can a truly rational person really avoid such a cynical conclusion, other than by succumbing to that same emotion which is expressly designed to delude the mind by overriding reason and logic?

I'd appreciate any contributions on this issue!

Given that we have the concept of love which is quite contrary to hurt and selfishness and pain, then this isn't a possible reduction. This isn't cynical but conceptually false. Love simply isn't about hurt, selfishness and pain.

The biological and physiological descriptions are already reductive descriptions of love. They are descriptions of the non-emotional. But love is consciously engaging with the love object.

I don't think we can consciously engage lovingly with God, but could be wrong about this. It just isn't what I think love is.

Why are you going on about rationality? What is that? According to Kant we can logically argue for God and against, so no-one comes out wiser. That we can argue logically for the existence of God doesn't mean it is rational to do so, or sound and sensible. For sure, it doesn't seem sound and sensible to say that love doesn't exist.

Surely we are more sophisticated than all that 'survival and evolution thing'.

Reason and logic figure large in philosophy, but not in ordinary life. And I don't think it is a matter of chemical reactions in brain and body that have led me to stay with my husband for 20 years, for instance. From my point of view (!) it is conscious experience, and not all rational at that. I have two dogs I'm allergic to and chemical reactions and rationality (whatever that is) would lead me to get rid of them, but I love them because of the individuals they are. That can't be reduced to anything. And there is no larger principle.

There is no truly rational person. If you think you find one, run.

Rachel Browne

Ashley asked:

Through time, there have been at least hundreds of thousands of UFO sightings. Do you think that even with the most proof, that the majority of these "sightings" are the real thing?

Breann asked:

I've learned so much about all the different kinds of philosophers but never have I come across one that believes in a little bit of everything. Is it possible that the determinists have some things right, the skeptics have some things right, and the rationalists have some things right, and what were are searching for, in fact, is the middle ground in which all theses ideas cross to form the absolute truth. Is it possible that unless you can take the small truths from each one and combine them to form a new thought process, that we may never reach truth at all?

You might be interested that one of the great philosophers put forward the same thought. Leibniz in one of his letters once wrote that in his reading, he always learnt something; and the more he observed the cantankerousness of authors in respect of each other, the more he realised that where they agreed all were probably right, but where they disputed with each other, all were probably wrong. Take this pronouncement with the grain of salt which is intended. So there is one philosopher who qualifies for your category of one who accepted a little bit of everything. I'm inclined to agree with you and him as well. I'm sure that all philosophers have their ways in which they hit on a little bit of the truth, each according to the shape of their mind.

However, there is a problem with the other assumption you're putting forth. One can't make a philosophy from such bits and pieces. While you can learn from them, the most important aspect to understand is that the truth is not in the bits, but the bits are in the truth. And although such great thinkers as Aristotle and Confucius advocated what they called "The Golden Mean" as the most probable way to approach the truth, I think they were really talking about the way to achieve happiness and personal contentment, not the Truth with a capital 'T'. In fact Nietzsche once said (I believe he was right in this) that the Truth is so elusive that only those who dared to approach it in the most extreme fashion had any chance of actually touching it. So again you are right in saying that we may never actually reach it. Leibniz is probably a very good instance of this: because in spite of his acknowledgement above, he then went on to develop a philosophy of his own which is one of those 'extreme' paths to the truth that few people have been prepared to follow to the end.

You probably have heard it said many times that the Truth, for instance about ourselves, is usually a bitter pill to swallow and that's why we resist it with all our might. This is an aspect to ponder. How true! How hard it is to face up to ourselves, how hard we defend our own views and opinion and dig our heels in when someone points out that we may be wrong about the beliefs we cherish most. You might indeed say that this striving for the most bitter truths we must discover within ourselves is the real beginning of a Philosophy of Truth, and this is one reason why thinkers who were obsessed by it, such as Nietzsche, were loners, exaggerating everything, crying Wolf non-stop and eventually snapping over. Truth is a dangerous thing!

Jürgen Lawrenz
Sydney

Sarah asked:

Do we exist?

You know, people keep asking this, and philosophers here keep replying:

YES, BECAUSE HOW COULD WE DOUBT WHETHER WE EXIST IF WE DIDN'T EXIST??

Now, at least, instead of answering in the future, I'll just refer to this answer page.

Steven Ravett Brown

Lisa asked:

Where can I find out about St. Thomas Aquinas' view on faith and reason, his metaphysics, theory of knowledge, ethics, political theory?

Imagine Koko the gorilla were able to read print and was browsing the list of questions. She then comes upon the present 'question'. She reads through it, curious to find out...what? Read through it yourself. Or, not. If I had my preferences, I would not even bother to write it. You'll see why, I hope, once you read it.

All that follows is a question, yet not a question. I prefer the latter: it is not a question, it is living. But, some will want to answer it, so I write it. Perhaps it could be translated for a Koko. Perhaps a Koko would want to answer it.

"I prefer traipsing in the woods to philosophy. Good stuff. Following wild rivers. Sleeping to the sound of creeks. I love rivers. The clear ones. Sleeping high in the trees, or near the ground. All two minutes of sleep I get each night, I enjoy. To watch the animals. One does not need to be rational. Not in the end.

"That is where God is."

Humans are an anomaly. We know of none like us, in the concrete sense, although the SETI program hopes. Only for want are we ever compelled to ask the 'big' questions (I speak for myself, anyway). I don't think animals do. I wonder what we could ask Koko about that? Would she understand the question? This would be worthwhile field work in philosophy. Ok, so I'll ask the question. Would Koko understand that I have already asked it? Did you?

Are animals able to understand the idea of God?

Would Koko realize what it would mean to us if she understood?

It is not a question. At least not a pointed one. Not for me. But, answer it if you wish. Did I really have to spell it out for you? No, it is not a question. Not at all. It is bigger than that. It's an answer.

What is the question, really? This, I think, Koko would understand.

You may not like my answer, especially when you read what I want to say first. Beware of shallow, sentimental denials of what is extraordinary about humans in order to preach a 'back to nature' doctrine that is altogether unsustainable — not just in terms of philosophy, but as a result of the evolutionary passage. Note in particular that I said 'extraordinary' in place of the 'anomaly' of your question. Humans are not removed from nature; we have simply been endowed with a power which (on the whole) we do not understand, for which no user manual has been written, which in consequence we tend to mismanage and for which philosophy tries, as best it can within its own human limitations, to make amends.

In the last analysis, we are so much a part of nature that if we carry on as we have in (say) the last 200 years, the worst that will happen is the removal of homo sapiens from the scene: there are anthropologists and evolutionists who promote the view that we represent an overspecialised branch of the chimpanzee genus. It may be true. But that's no excuse to shut our eyes to the problems which this overspecialisation creates for us. Consider that Koko herself is such an 'anomaly': she too, is far too overdeveloped for her own good, too big, too cumbersome, too reliant on an exceptional and probably short-lived congenial habitat (regarded on the geological time scale). Above all, she does not have enough intelligence to defend herself against the dangers which threaten her survival if the earth's climate or environment changes rapidly. As a species, apes are not much older than humans.

But I'm not going to overstate the case for 'brains'. After all, I've already put the 'contra' case, which is of elementary simplicity. We either make the grade or we fail. Stuffing around with nuclear technology and plundering the earth of its hoard of fossil fuel is a fine way of running the gauntlet. But this problem is not cured by pretending that we have the option of dismantling civilisation and joining Koko in her 'natural' estate. That is the way to accepting defeat, to pretending that we aren't what we are. Since I can't go on to write a book about this, I'll put my case in a nutshell, which is: that the only way for humans is to recognise (which we have not yet) that our intelligence is not merely a gift which enables us to overcome the innumerable adversities and inconveniences which attend to creature life, especially for creature as big as ourselves, but also confers on us the responsibility to put those achievements into the context of the evolutionary stream from which they emerged.

The theory of evolution has, to my mind, no other rationale. That's why I'm dismayed about the idiotic tinkering with genes that is presently going on. Instead of spending huge sums on this and other projects based on idle curiosity, we should be looking at ourselves as products of evolution and find some way of organising our societies which is not destructive. But try selling this to industry, commerce and military! This is where the problem lies. We are still, according to our instincts and genetic inheritance, fundamentally arboreal simians — greedy, wasteful, aggressive, competitive, dominated by our lusts. We have made very little effort to understand this very unambiguous legacy from our physical past.

To return, however, to your initial statement. I recently read a book by Rudolf Pannwitz who wrote something like: We keep asking the same questions of Nature: may its time to consider that the answers have been given, moreover that they have always been the same. Maybe with our ingrained prejudices, we simply have not listened properly, our own inner voice deafening the voice of Nature. And so we keep going over the old ground, time and again. Unfortunately I don't know if the book has been translated into English, but you can chase it up on your own. Its title in German is Der Aufbau der Natur, which reads in English, "The Order (Structure/Architecture) of Nature". With some luck you might find a congenial philosophy in there.

Jürgen Lawrenz
Sydney

Maria asked:

How can the philosophy of Buddhism such as The Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path be compared to other schools of philosophical thought?

For example, how can the whole concept of the eightfold path be related to Plato's or Aristotle's philosophies?

I'll tell you what, take a look at the Introduction and first and second chapters in the following: Solomon, R.C., and C.W. Martin. Morality and the Good Life: An Introduction to Ethics through Classical Sources. Fourth ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2004.

They do a good introductory job of relating a variety of religions and philosophies.

Steven Ravett Brown

Andrew asked:

Is time an object or is it a perspective?

More likely the latter. Consider that time is not an observable: it is something we inject into our experience. Even Newton, who believed that time was absolute, could do no more than put a 't' into his equations to stand for time. Unlike gravity, which, though we don't know what it is, can at least be observed, time cannot.

Nevertheless there are many ingenious theories, both philosophical and scientific, which attempt somehow to account for time. The two which loom largest on our horizons are Kant's (time is an a priori matrix of experience) and Einstein (time is a coordinate in the spacetime manifold). In this context, there is an interesting book by Adolf Grunbaum you might like to chase up: Philosophical Principles of Time and Space, where the author tries to give a causal theory of time.

A radically divergent point of view was proposed centuries ago by Leibniz. You can read about it in the Correspondence between Leibniz and Clarke, which was underestimated for the whole time that Newton's theories held sway. Today the temper is changing; Leibniz is on the way to being rehabilitated. His idea is that time does not exist at all, and again there is a fascinating book on this subject by Julian Barbour, The End of Time. Barbour goes into considerable detail from a physicist's point of view (relativity, quantum theory etc.), but was deeply influenced by Leibniz in the elaboration of his theory.

For what its' worth, however, I might give you an analogy of the kind of thing that Leibniz might have used in illustration of his theory: a highly intuitive explanation. Movies are made up of frames, each of which is one picture. In order for us to see this reel as a movie and be deluded into accepting it as 'flowing' in real time, it must be run at 24 frames per second. Accordingly each of the frames is 1/24th second of time: a time capsule. Now take the reel and cut it up into all its single frames, then shuffle them like a pack of cards. You now have (say) 10,000 stills, each of them a 'slice' of time in the adventure that was, previously, a movie. You can pick up one frame and in a vague sort of way (by memory) make an effort to recall where, roughly, it fitted into the sequence. But the point is, of course, that no time is 'in' or 'flowing through' this picture. The picture just represents an instant, 1/24th second, of some story. So do all the others. Therefore the only way to look at each still in the context of time is to say that each belongs somewhere in that whole story when contemplated as a story: that each of these stills is, somehow, related to all the others by the idea of a sequence in which, properly, they should be arranged. Now you understand from this that you could say the same of the photos in your picture album. They too are stills from a life; and they too are related to an underlying idea of sequence. But there is no 'object' which you might call time at their back — strictly regarded, there is only the idea of sequence which relies on your memory to assure you that, somehow, each can be placed in a particular order in relation to every other.

Now let's say that your photos, or the frames in the movie, were numbered so that you can put them in their exact order. What have you achieved? The recreation of time? Hardly! Time does not begin to 'flow' just because you put the pics in order, does it? In fact, not even Kant's a priori experience of time can be said to apply to this. Putting them in order is nothing other than correlating the pictures or stills. And this, precisely is Leibniz's (and Barbour's) theory of time. That there is nothing like 'real' time; it is just an order of succession which we, using a perceptual technique which evolution bestowed on us, impose on this succession. Ultimately, for each moment that we live, our perception does the same thing with the 'snapshots' of which our adventures are comprised: our brain interprets these as a continuum, and hence we have the impression of a flow where in fact there is none. Real life impressions are probably much faster than 1/24 second, but still finite. The impression of a time flow is created by all these 'moments' being instantaneously sorted into memory slots. And now you need nothing more than to acknowledge that all of us gradually lose that sense of time as our memories age, that sooner or later our memory loses its hold on the exact sequence. And once you realise this, you may come to acceptance that Leibniz and Barbour are probably right: for the more our memories fade, the more these 'movies' become 'stills'. In memory the 'sense of time' disappears and becomes a mere order of succession, which we remember as best we can. Where did time disappear to?

Jürgen Lawrenz
Sydney

Jo asked:

I'm interested in the issues about value judgements and objectivity in social research and would be grateful if you could give me some ideas as to where I might be able to find any useful information regarding this subject.

Well this isn't really my field, but here are a couple of refs. The articles by Lynn and Shaffer might be the most interesting to you.

Evans, J. St. B. T. Bias in Human Reasoning: Causes and Consequences. Hove, UK: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Ltd., 1989.

Harrison, L.E., and S.P. Huntington, eds. Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000.

Lynn, F. M. "The Interplay of Science and Values in Assessing and Regulating Environmental Risks." Science Technology and Human Values 11, no. 1, Spring (1986): 40-50. Shaffer, N.E. "Understanding Bias in Scientific Practice." Paper presented at the Philosophy of Science Association: proceedings of the biennial meeting 1996.

Steven Ravett Brown

JKS asked:

My question revolves around the relationship between science and philosophy. Lately, I have heard a few professional philosophers endorse a view that insists upon philosophy's subservience to science. I have heard some of them maintain not only that there are there "no distinctly philosophical issues," but also that all philosophical ideas should line up with the scientific worldview. Now, to me, this seems unbelievable. Has philosophy become so devalued in our time that its existence depends on the findings of science? I would like to hear some philosophers share their thoughts concerning this matter.

An interesting question. In my opinion philosophy could never be subservient to science, seeing that science is actually a branch of materialist philosophy. Something scientists are unlikely to accept. In the past there was no division of science from philosophy, both were contained in what was generally known as "natural science", a mish-mash of religion, basic science and philosophy; religion being the dominant facet. Scientific theories were not accepted unless they conformed to religious bias.

To say that science plays no part in philosophical debate would be ridiculous, and we must bear in mind that there is a branch of philosophy devoted specifically to science. Overall, philosophy spends a great deal of its time and energy in debating

and often criticizing the alleged discoveries and theories of science. Also, philosophy has the advantage of being able to bring to bear moral and ethical issues on many of the proposals of science. Particularly where science is being influenced by politics and big business.

Science receives more popularity than other branches of philosophy because of its involvement and influence on the everyday lives of the general public. Most people can recognise the influence of science in medicine, food, transport, leisure activities, military concerns, etc., but most would rapidly find an excuse to be elsewhere if you tried to talk to them about metaphysics, dualism, existentialism, monism, cause and effect, time and space, etc.. This leads to the mistaken view in society that science is concerned with the 'real' world, whilst philosophy is seen as little more than some sort of contemplative exercise concerned with abstractions and alternative theories. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Since ancient times there has been a progressive selection of items called 'scientific subjects' from the great collection of philosophical and religious knowledge, so that most people have become indoctrinated to believe that biology, chemistry, physics and astronomy are the domains of science, and any comments by philosophers pertinent to these 'spin-offs' is commonly regarded as an intrusion. However, to the more discerning the fallacy in this thinking is readily revealed. The act of science trying to divorce itself from philosophy leads to the creation of the most intricate complexities. Do the theories that attempt to explain the origins of the universe and the origins of life belong to science, philosophy or religion? The study of cause and effect — science or philosophy? The study of cosmology — science or philosophy? The study of mind — science or philosophy? The study of 'matter' — science or philosophy? The study of language — science or philosophy? I am sure you can think of others.

By believing it can divorce itself from philosophy science has made a rod for its own back, it has cocooned itself firmly in the 'matter myth' and left itself no alternative in the search for "what there is". Philosophy on the other hand has a far more open-minded approach and is willing to consider and analyse all possibilities. Even philosophers themselves often overlook the fact that philosophy is a great analyser of both the received concepts and personal concepts that make up our world.

Much as science attempts to portray itself as the 'Oracle', and that what it does not know now will eventually be revealed, much of its boasted knowledge is based on theories and not fact. The 'Big Bang', 'Relativity' and 'Evolution' are all theories. Science has a dreadful record of putting forward theories as facts long before the evidence is available; a case of here is a fact, the evidence will come later. Having preconceived the evidence required to prove the alleged fact, they then proceed to establish the case on the most flimsy evidence. Evolutionists are still seeking the "missing link" over one hundred years after the theory was proposed, no one seems prepared to admit that what we see in nature is straight forward adaptation to a changing environment. If the change is gradual enough the life form involved will adapt to meet the conditions, if the change is too fast the life form in question becomes extinct, it does not mutate into something else. Evidence of this appears throughout the Geological record.

I have pointed out why I believe philosophy can never be subservient to science. I could say much more, being educated as a scientist as well as a philosopher, however, before it appears that I have set out to denigrate science, let me say that I have aimed at alleged weaknesses in science simply for the purpose of dealing with this question. The world, as we all appreciate, owes a great deal to science, but discussing this would be answering another question. By the way, philosophers and religious leaders also make mistakes and come to premature conclusions.

John Brandon

This is a question that deserves a serious and well-considered answer. Unfortunately, it also demands a book length answer; but while a few books have been written on the subject, it is perhaps inevitable that their authors are prejudiced in favour of one or the other and argue accordingly. Objectivity in this subject is hard to come by. Let me, however, within the scope of five minutes' reading, outline a perspective for you from which you might draw some conclusions of your own.

A couple of thousand years ago, a branch of philosophy sprang up known as the Sceptics. In its extreme form, known as 'Pyrrhonian Scepticism', these thinkers produced rules and criteria for philosophical investigation which put in doubt almost everything you could possibly claim to know. Human cognition, they claimed, was so limited that you put up almost any argument you pleased and they would shoot it down in flames. This kind of scepticism is not dead; it undergoes resurgence every so often, and one might well claim Hume as its most prominent recent expositor. For anyone who accepts these premises, 'there are no distinctly philosophical issues left'.

Now for the converse. Just before 1900, the German scientist and philosopher of science, Ernst Haeckel, pronounced in the full flush of his unbounded confidence in the efficacy of scientific explanation of the universe that barely a dozen scientific question were genuinely unresolved. He expected that within two or three generations the universe would be cleared of all its mysteries. Science would glory in the triumph of its success and the human race would settle down and die of boredom. Well, he didn't put that last thought forward, it is my addition. But you get the drift of it. Under this criterion, 'there were no distinctly scientific issues left'; once everything is discovered, what do you need science for?

Just recently, Stephen Jay Gould wrote a book (The Grandeur of Life) in which he sought to demonstrate that this dreaded dilemma was in fact waiting on our doorsteps. The gist of his argument is that we are living in an age where new discoveries are diminishing rapidly; we already know so much that we must knock at the door of ultimate particles to have anything new to ask of Nature at all. For everything else, discovery is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Discovery requires enormous expenditure (witness the genome project) for very little knowledge, and he expected this process to continue through to exhaustion.

Again, however, the diagnosis reads: 'There are no distinctly scientific issues left'. Rather, according to Gould, the remaining issues were technological. However he wrote, I believe, before chaos and complexity theories took off their nappies and started walking.

These three examples ought to tell you something about how much we really know. Next to nothing, in fact. Expect the unexpected. But to address the specific issues of philosophy in this context:

Philosophical issues are not measurable in scientific terms. What and whom you choose to believe is your decision. Scientists may on the whole prefer to cast their votes in favour of their colleagues in any confrontation with philosophy; and the prestige of science in our day its such that most ordinary people would do the same. But this says nothing about philosophy itself, nor about its issues. The truth is that distinctly philosophical issues have not been exhausted but pushed aside. Philosophy deals (for example in metaphysics) with such basic issues as life and death, beauty and love, justice and honour: are these issues really passé or is it not simply a (societal) prejudice that we prefer to glut ourselves on use-once-and-throw-away products, on instant gratification, on unreflective absorption of information via electronic media, on here-today-gone-tomorrow fads and gimmicks, on big noise, big pollution, devastation of resources, famines, non-stop wars, what have you? You can't be serious!

No-one could seriously maintain there no philosophical issues remaining. At the very bottom of the human presence on this planet you find a concept of value, a philosophical concept. Now science does not (cannot under its own terms) acknowledge this concept into its methodology, but the very fact of its existence is based on this philosophical concept. No value, no science. Ergo: remove philosophy and science becomes instantly meaningless. — Why bother with particles? For what possible purpose if not to affirm or dispute the philosophical conception of a fundamental particle? Why evolution? Just to satisfy an idle curiosity? No: because even against our most inane striving for a valueless science, it is the value we place on human life that makes us enquire about evolution: because we want and need to know what we are here for.

Thus the great danger facing us: that ignorance about philosophy serves to throw a cloak over this fundamental fact and depict for us a mere research project as the means and end of civilised existence. I regret to add that many philosophers have allowed themselves to be bulldozed into shame for being just philosophers, and now they rush around seeking niches for themselves where science can't reach, e.g. language philosophy and sundry other abstruse subterfuges. But this is not essentially philosophy: the agenda of philosophy is concerned with the fundamental facts of human life, all centred on the concept of value. Abandon it, and then ask yourself: why am I doing all this — all this science, working, holidaying, gambling, playing, studying, loving, marrying, procreating? And when you're through, the realisation might suddenly dawn on you that in all this there is some purpose. Maybe you don't know what it is, but then without philosophy, you haven't a hope in Hades of ever finding out.

Jürgen Lawrenz
Sydney

Joel asked:

What does 'Phenomenology of Death' mean to you?

What does 'Freedom' mean to you?

I would question whether, strictly, there could be a phenomenology of death, that is of death as such, the essence of death, death itself rather than the secondary effects death has.

This is because I can know nothing about death, it is refractory to knowing, death as such cannot be represented in thought or consciousness or rather death as such exceeds any thoughts. Death itself is a pure question mark, a stumbling block that shows us the limits of our relation to the world. And yet at the same time it points us beyond those limits: Death shows me that existence is not my own, there is this 'something other' than I cannot grasp. The world is not just my world any longer, the fact of death shows me that something absolutely alien, foreign can invade the world, shattering whatever secure and comfortable hold (theoretical or otherwise) I thought I had, In this sense the supreme uncertainty and mysteriousness of death points me to the realization that reality is bigger than me, bigger but unknowable. (When we consider that phenomenology as a philosophical method is often criticised for being inescapably solipsistic, to have found a way out of the enclosure of my own consciousness at the very point where this consciousness comes to an end [literally] offers an interesting possibility for a re-examination of phenomenology.)

Of course it is not just my own death that concerns us; Other people also die. Here death is just as mysterious, but another aspect also reveals itself, the death of another person calls my freedom in to question, if the realization of my own death shows that the world is not my own the other person's death shows that my freedom is not my own. A dying person calls to us for help, for us to be there for her, not to let her die alone, to keep her company, to stop doing what ever it is we are doing and to be responsible, this is not just some theoretical hypothesis designed to justify some view, but I believe an everyday occurrence. It is there in the person's eyes, a silent and yet unmistakable appeal... According to Levinas (a philosopher who spent most of his time dealing with these issues) "The death of the other who dies affects me in my very identity as a responsible 'me' ". My freedom, my life, before the death of an Other, is at the disposal of the Other.

This may sound a little excessive to some, but remember we are dealing here with excessive subjects. Of course it may very rarely happen that we give up our time perhaps our life for another, maybe that is because in the face of the pure question mark of death we become to scared to look, and yet I am pretty sure than when we do encounter an other person's call for help the connection between death and freedom becomes apparent.

Brian Tee

Daniel asked:

This is from Daniel Flores and Mario Caballero. We're in high school here in Monterrey, Mexico, and we want to know an answer of this question:

Is there something at the edge of the universe?

Diana asked:

I am a doctorate nursing student at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. I found your website through my journeys on the web. I have a question and I seem to be having some difficulty getting it answered. Perhaps you could answer this.

Where did the term "Positivism" come from, as in Comte's work and the later Logical Positivists? Is is synonomous with Empiricism?

I would really appreciate any insight you could shed on this matter. I am eager to find this out and share it with my Philosophy class.

There are two main stream of positivism, both with a somewhat unfortunate history. The first was actually inaugurated by Auguste Comte, who was a contemporary of Schopenhauer, Balzac, Byron. His philosophy comprised, roughly, an evolutionary argument for philosophy: the oldest and most primitive stage is theology, the second metaphysics and the third, last and pinnacle, science. His special scientific interest, remarkably, was sociology, from which he expected great things for the future of mankind. Now the term 'positive', by which he identified his philosophy, was intended to convey the notion that philosophy must take proper account of experience, and to this extent there is an unquestioned affinity to empiricism. The difference may be seen in the approach he preferred, which is essentially descriptive rather than conceptual or analytic. It would be nice to say something deep and meaningful about Comte now, but his philosophy never gained much of a foothold even in his native France.

The positivist movement was revived under changed auspices in the 1920s by Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap and a few like-minded thinkers, whose 'place of business' was Vienna, on which account they are collectively known as the 'Vienna Circle', even though they themselves preferred the designation 'Logical Positivists'. Their principles were rather more radical than Comte's and pretty aggressive too. They condemned all metaphysics as stupid and demanded that philosophy admit only propositions which can be incontrovertibly 'proved'. An outgrowth of this is verificationism, the idea that test and experiment, sufficiently repeated with similar results, yield philosophically acceptable propositions. This too, was an eminently optimistic philosophy; but unbeknownst to them, Hume had already disproved the tenets which they used for their foundation stone 200 years before the Viennese ever met.

An important issue arises out of 'positivism', pretty much the only genuine philosophical value that can still be attributed to it. It is the recognition that we humans cannot 'in principle' have positive knowledge. We can enjoy the positive aspects of our science for the fruits which it yields, but these are strictly 'subject to change without notice' at any moment. All theories have a 'use by' date written on them, except that we never know what that date is. The only positive logical certainties given to us are false theories. What has been proved false, is truly so. Coda: what has been said above has application to a critical appreciation of much of the verbiage produced these days in favour of science. Every time you read a sentence containing the word, 'Science has proved x', examine it for its contents: if the claim is for positive proof, you can safely dismiss it. This is especially the case in the field of medical science, where certain medicines may be pronounced 'safe' on the basis of experimentation, but I'm sure you are aware that every one of these carries the indispensable disclaimer. (I sometimes wonder how advertisers get away with claiming that 'science' has proved the efficacy of one brand of shampoo over another!).

Jürgen Lawrenz
Sydney

Stephen asked:

A friend once asked me if we can know whether or not our lives are actually real, or if we are merely living in a dream.

I replied that there must be some reality to our lives. Why? Because we are able to ask the question.

Surely if our lives were actually no more than a dream, we would not be able to suspect anything different. But, given that we are capable of asking this question, our consciousness must be sufficient enough for our life to be more than 'a mere dream'.

I'm now trying to work out if there are any flaws in this argument.

In addition, although people in their dreams at night (and while awake, for some people) often 'reality check' (i.e. pinch themselves) to determine if they are awake or asleep, surely to ask if their waking life is itself a dream makes little sense. The concept of 'dreaming' (to most people) is surely derived from reflecting on the dream state when awake (to contrast that state to their waking condition) — and unless the person is actually aware of a waking state in contrast to a dreaming state, there can be no conception of 'dreaming'. Hence, no 'dreaming' without a real life.

Thus, for a person to ask if their 'real life' is itself a dream seems like nonsense, as they have no 'higher reality' to compare it with. They would merely be using the analogy of dreaming (as contrasted with everyday life), and applying it to everyday life (as contrasted with "X" — but with no corresponding concept "X" at all).

My conclusion is that the question "Is everyday life just a dream?" is basically nonsense, and the answer to it (if it can actually have an answer) is thus necessarily false.

Are there any objections to this line of reasoning?

(Of course, it is another question entirely to ask whether or not you are dreaming right now. In theory, it is not possible to prove absolutely that you are not dreaming. In practice, however, most (sane) people can distinguish between waking reality and dreaming in general, it seems, except under the most unusual circumstances. It is also possible for people to learn how to dream lucidly, so they are aware they are dreaming when in a dream. Surely this would lower the probability that a person is actually dreaming without realising it. Philosophers seem to be far more concerned with the theoretical possibility, however — however improbable this may be).

On a related point, I once heard of a philosophy student who had a mental breakdown and ended up in a mental institution after hearing Descartes' "dreaming argument". He could no longer accept that anything is real anymore, and so his reality simply fell apart. Perhaps this subject should carry some form of 'health warning'? Just a suggestion.

I think your reasoning above is good. You have some good criticisms of the sceptics' claim that 'we are always dreaming.' The only point of criticism I would make is that you say that what the sceptic says is necessarily false and yet admit that the philosopher (who in this case is the philosophical sceptic I take it) is concerned with improbable theoretical possibility. Now if the sceptic is saying something that is theoretically possible then what they are saying cannot be necessarily false. That is, what the sceptic is saying cannot be logically impossible. What the sceptic is saying may be plain vanilla false though.

The sceptic may adjust the claim to 'we never know on any particular occasion whether we are dreaming or not.' However, I think you could argue a case for being able tell the difference on any particular occasion by using similar (everyday) considerations like the ones you mentioned above.

You note that the sceptic (philosophical sceptic that is as opposed to ordinary sceptic) is far more concerned with theoretical possibility however improbable that may be, than most. This is because the philosophical sceptic (Descartes was presenting the arguments of the philosophical sceptics in Meditation I) want to claim that knowledge requires 'infallible' beliefs. Thus if there is any room for the possibility of error then we cannot have knowledge. The ordinary sceptic claims, by contrast, that knowledge does not require infallible beliefs.

If you want to take your reasoning a little further you might consider whether there is a difference between what is possible and what makes sense to say. In considering what it makes sense to say you would need to look at Wittgenstein's works especially On Certainty. You might also like to consider whether things that make no sense to say i.e., are nonsense, are capable of being true or false.

Finally, there is a remote danger of insanity arising out of reading Descartes but not one that warrants a health warning. The best antidote to scepticism was found by David Hume — go out with your mates and enjoy yourselves.

Julian Bennett

Well, take a look at the "brain in a vat" argument:

Brueckner, A.L. "Brains in a Vat." The Journal of Philosophy 83, no. 3 (1986): 148-67.

Putnam, H. "Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses: An Inquiry into the Powers of the Human Mind." The Journal of Philosophy 91, no. 9 (1994): 445-517.

Then look at these:

Blakemore, S.-J., D.A. Oakley, and C. Frith. "Delusions of Alien Control in the Normal Brain." Neuropsychologia 41 (2003): 1058-67.

Spence, S.A. "Alien Control: From Phenomenology to Cognitive Neurobiology." Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology 8, no. 2-3 (2001): 163-72.

There are dreams in which we are aware that we're dreaming. In addition, there are dreams in which we dream we are asleep. To put it explicitly, what you're touching on here is what is termed the "skeptical" argument in philosophy, and you might take a look at Descartes' Meditations on whether we know that there's a world out there. This is not exactly a question that philosophers have been unaware of, over the last few millennia, but Descartes probably was the first to really get people upset about it. There are many, many responses to Descartes. I'm not even going to give you references... there are literally libraries of stuff on this question. Just go look him up, read him, then keep going. Have fun!

Steven Ravett Brown

Your key argument looks suspiciously like the argument from polar concepts which enjoyed a brief spell of popularity among Oxford philosophers in the 50's.

The form of the argument is this:

The concept of X implies a contrast with the concept of Y. (The concept of dreaming implies a contrast with the concept of being awake.) Therefore, it is impossible that every case that occurs is in fact a case of X and not of Y.

Here's a counterexample to that argument. Suppose some clever counterfeiters have managed to pass a large number of counterfeit banknotes into circulation without detection. There is in fact no way of telling by looking at a bank note whether it is counterfeit or genuine. Over a period of time, the genuine notes go out of circulation until eventually all the bank notes in circulation are counterfeit.

What we can learn from this is that there is more to understanding the alternatives dreaming/ awake or counterfeit/ genuine than simply appreciating the polarity or contrast. Genuine bank notes are notes which have been printed and distributed by the government. That is a historical fact about each bank note, even if there is no way of deciding one way or the other by looking at the note itself. (Faced with the alarming situation I have described the government could decide to 'make' the counterfeit notes 'genuine' by an act of Parliament. But that would not alter the historical facts.)

Similarly (as Descartes believed) the fact that my present experience corresponds to an external, material reality is a fact about its ultimate source which cannot be discovered by looking at the character of the experience itself. There are arguments which one can use against this claim, but not the argument from polar concepts.

Geoffrey Klempner

David asked:

I just got finished watching a movie called 'Waking Life' where a young man while dreaming explores basic philosophical questions.

My question is this If you believe that by thinking you exist, then isn't it possible that a dream could actually exist? I mean couldn't a dream itself think and have dreams of its own? Is existence just a series of mutually accepted experiences?

This is an answer to David's question, and Stephen's question, above.

This is a common confusion of pretty ordinary facts. Dreams are not "real" in the sense presupposed by your question. We know pretty well where dreams come from and what role they play. In a nutshell, the hypothalamus is a kind of perpetually active "driver". While you're awake it happily purrs along, directing all the myriads of information generated by your sensory modalities to their proper destination, although on a busy day it can get pretty congested and cause the occasional hiccup in transmissions. Now you may be aware that complex electronic equipment is sometimes very costly to switch off and on again, so it's better just to keep it running nonstop. It' s like that with the hypothalamus. It must be kept "on" because it always has to be on the ready for emergencies. But when you're peacefully asleep, nothing much happen to keep it going, so the next best thing is to reach for bundles of information that can be piped through again just for the sake of piping it through. Hence dreams. (People in solitary confinement suffer hallucinations from the same cause.)

This is more or less the normal picture and one reason why most dreams are pretty nonsensical. The signals now feeding through the hypothalamus don't belong to any particular order of events; and when you sometimes get the feeling that you're running standing still, it is because the signals being sent to your muscles and your cortex are at loggerheads with each other: although the cortex produces running images, the legs can't move along. Exceptional circumstances may prevail, however, when you're still excited even though you've fallen asleep. Your memory may still be working and trying to access your waking brain while "you" are asleep. It is reliably establish that some people have solved (say) difficult mathematical problems in their sleep. But that's got nothing to do with dreaming per se. It's your memory transgressing union rules.

There's more to it yet, because at times the "excitement" I referred to can be long standing. Jung and Freud published interesting theories on this, but again neither of them (or any other psychologist) would wish to be read as promoting a separate reality for your dream life. And although I just admitted what apparently your movie proposed, nevertheless it is an exceptional state, a less than one in a million possibility. So if it came down to me buying a lottery ticket or trusting a dream to give me a Nobel Prize calibre inspiration, I think I would take the ticket.

Jürgen Lawrenz
Sydney

Gonzalo asked:

I would like to know if you could comment on the influence, or, lack of, that Wittgenstein had on cognitive psychology. I am trying to pursue independent studies on philosophy and psychology and I thought that it would be interesting if there were a correlation between the two.

Undoubtedly there is, but aside from Dennett's clear and explicit indebtedness to Wittgenstein, that's quite a bit to unravel. I certainly recommend you check out: Dennett, D. C. Consciousness Explained. 1st ed. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1991, for the connection, which he mentions in the Appendix. But private language considerations aside (and I've got to say I don't agree with W's nor D's position on that), Wittgenstein's influence was huge but I believe rather indirect. Thus, his general abandonment of the analytic position espoused in the Tractatus reverberated throughout the community attempting to apply those techniques to analyzing the mental. AI would seem to be an exception, oddly, but Dennett took another tack, as I mentioned. Anyway, you might check these out:

Wittgenstein, L. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. Vol. 1. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Vol. I. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Wittgenstein, L. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. Vol. 2. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Vol. II. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1988.

They make quite interesting reading, very Blue-and-Brown booklike.

Steven Ravett Brown

Taneisha asked:

Are humans born with the tendency to be violent or are we born totally innocent of violent tendencies and our environments cause us to violent?

Unfortunately the truth is: we are born with a tendency to be violent. It is inscribed in our genes, for the very good reason that once upon a time, when these genes were fashioned, violent behaviour of a certain kind was a survival necessity and therefore part of our species profile. The conditions under which that behaviour was appropriate have long since disappeared, but the instincts which cause it remain as dormant triggers.

This is the evolutionary answer to your question. I happen to believe it is the only way to understand the depth of the problem. Psychology is a great help too, of course, but it doesn't and can't tackle the underlying aetiology, so no matter how much psychology you apply, you won't get to the bottom of it. To explain:

1. Species profile: Simian, arboreal.

We are primates. As such, we are related to the group of animals called simians, which also includes apes and monkeys. Arboreal means that our distant ancestors lived in the trees. Instincts generally reflect the needs imposed by a habitat. Accordingly monkeys, as arboreal creatures, have instincts formed to cope with that kind of life. For example, you might have also asked, why do we have stereoscopic vision? It relates to the same question, because it relates to the same genes and instincts. The answer is, that monkeys need such vision for the purpose of brachiation, swinging from tree to tree, sometimes in a great hurry. You need to be able to judge the whereabouts of the next branch very precisely or pay the penalty of a broken neck. This kind of vision is our legacy from the arboreal days.

I assume you know that evolution only ever builds up, never down. Somatic remnants of our simian days are too obvious to need stressing, including the stump of a monkey's tail we all retain at the base of our spine. Whatever changes occurred to our species profile since then — genetic, instinctual — is also additional. We are monkeys plus. Monkeys were Lemurs plus. And so on.

Monkeys live on the fruits of the trees. They live largely in trees and sleep there. Moreover they live as small communities. As such they developed excellent communication skills, including devices such as warning cries if a predator approached. Let me give you a characteristic vignette of what would be observed if a leopard looked like wanting to climb a tree to get its dinner. The monkeys would gang up and produce a lot of noise (crying, screeching, banging) hoping to frighten the aggressor away. They also know how to grab hold of loose branches and fling them at the animal. This is an instance of a well-developed instinct of 'pseudo violence'.

Monkeys do not have the 'tooth and claw' to defend themselves physically against predators (neither do we!). Their skills are primarily of the kind I have just described, although in addition of course they can hop quickly from one tree to another and scatter. But let's focus on the 'display, screeching and flinging'. It is a good 'show' and with a bit of luck a leopard might thus be discouraged from pursuing its prey, because being less intelligent than monkeys, it may not always 'see through' this harmless exhibitionism.

2. Human evolution: the descent

It is a fairly well accepted version of human evolution that we descended from the trees. In general, animals don't change their habitat voluntary; hence there must have been a strong compulsion on that group of monkeys whose lineage we still represent. We suppose the forested savannahs in Africa might have shrunk at some stage, and suddenly these groups found themselves having to adjust to a life in flatland, with many wrong instincts.

Let me leap over a lot of intervening eras; but roughly 2 million years ago, there were hominids still almost indistinguishable from monkeys and apes, and these would, as I said, still circulate the same or nearly the same genes as their distant arboreal cousins. As mentioned, any changes would have been plus. Thus hominids were distinguished by a larger and more complex brain.

One outcome of this, eventually, was a much greater resource of intelligence, in particular the skill to make implements, and among these (most noteworthy) weapons. Planned hunting is another benefit of complex brains, and the two go together. You can't hunt without weapons.

But you can also turn a lance at your neighbour. And thereby hangs the tale of real, lethal violence.

3. Instincts plus

One can easily live with the idea that a simian in high alarm, about to launch a noisy display-and-aggression show, would do so in a state of high emotion and amid a rush of adrenalin. Exactly how our bodies react to danger and unexpected situations. Hence there is no qualitative difference to this when it occurs intraspecifically. Monkeys fight among each other as we do. But we often do it with weapons (or we use our intelligence for even more insidious schemes for harming others such as economic deprivation). The difference to monkey behaviour is that weapons kill.

So there you have an answer, not complete, but enough to explain the basis of violence and why it is correct to identify it as innate. It boils down to an argument that our instincts to aggression were originally the self-protection mechanisms of an inadequately endowed species having to cope with dangerous predators; but the form this defence took is distinguishable from violent aggression only because monkey do not on the whole have the means of inflicting lethal violence. Whereas we, with our brains and still the same instincts, when 'turned on' to behave violently, have those means and use them, often directly contravening our own interests. But with animals, and hence with us, the body always has first priority. It takes more than just intelligence to avert a person bent on violent behaviour. In fact, if you consider how much of our thought and teaching and science we expend on containing our tendency to do violence, you can hardly doubt that it arises from instincts plus, of which the plus part did very little.

One last comment: Someone else asked recently about pollution, why we produce so much and seem so poorly equipped to dispose of it. Same reason. Arboreal creatures drop their garbage on the ground. There's plenty of fauna on site to recycle it. But we let our imaginations and invention dominate; we don't remember that the rubbish involved in our billions-of-tonnes worth of unwanted goods exceeds the capacity of the cartage firms on the ground and in the sea. So we have to take care of it ourselves. I think you might agree that so far we've shown ourselves pretty inept at the job.

Jürgen Lawrenz
Sydney

John asked:

What is the meaning of life? (seriously)

I believe this is a question that can be answered, without dodging or making excuses. The first step is to define meaning. I define meaning as precisely "the interpretation of something by an intelligence." Thus, the meaning of my life is precisely what I think it is plus what everyone I've met thinks it is. By understanding something, we give it meaning.

Unfortunately, this question is often usually asked with the intention of asking "what is the purpose of life?" This question does not have the same simple response.

So, you need to ask yourself the following things :

1) Do you believe in God? If so, everything changes. The meaning of your life continues to be how other people understand it, but there's the additional meaning given to your life by God.

2) Do you really mean what is the purpose of life? If so, you must look at other areas. Many people have proposed 'purposes'. Again, the religious crowd have a host of options to choose from here — everything from an explicit list of the things you should do in life through to just accepting life's inscrutable nature and accepting its rightness on faith.

3) Do you really mean what is the impact of my life? Again, this is a different question. Does Hitler's life have more meaning that your own? How about Einstein? How about Pope John Paul? Well, you could argue that in some respects Hitler's life does have more meaning — Hitler is understood at some level by many more people. Sure, it's a meaning pregnant with cruelty, unhappiness and psychological damage — but nonetheless many people have given significant thought to the matter.

Anyway, I hope these short comments help.

Tennessee Leeuwenburg

Your question is a very simple one, and a very common one — especially to those new to the subject of philosophy. In fact, in my own very limited experience, it is the question that most frequently starts an individual on the road to a deeper investigation into the various subjects of philosophy.

On further investigation, one will usually find that this very simple question is also a very complex one. In fact, one will quickly discover that one has to be more specific about just what one means by "meaning", "life", and "meaning of life". It turns out there are a number of ways to interpret this seemingly very simple question.

Here is a small sampling of the ways that I have found this question actually intended. By "What is the meaning of life?" do you mean:

i. What is "life"? In the sense of how or why is "life" different from "non-life"?
ii. What is the purpose (or function or intent) of life? In the sense of "why does life exist at all?
iii. What is the significance of life (to the Earth or to the Universe)? In the sense of does it matter to the rest of the Earth or the Universe whether there is life or not?
iv. What is the purpose (or function or intent) of the human species?
v. What is the significance of the existence of the human species (to the Earth or to the Universe)?
vi. What is the purpose (or function or intent) of my life? A much more specifically intended question usually posed by someone struggling to find some anchor to their daily struggles.
vii. What is the significance of my life (to the Earth or to the Universe)? Also a very specifically intended question posed by someone feeling overwhelmed by the apparently insignificant role allotted to the individual by "Science" (We each are one of six billion humans living on a tiny speck of dirt circling a run of the mill star at the outer edge of a run of the mill galaxy that is one of trillions in the Universe — how insignificant can you get?)

I am going to try to provide a brief answer to your question from the point of view of (vi) above. And along the way hopefully approach a response to some of the other possible interpretations of your question.

First, an important disclaimer. I am a realist/ materialist. I am not an idealist or a dualist. So my answer to your question will exclude any reference to religious or spiritual concepts. For answers from those perspectives, you will have to seek guidance from your friendly priest, minister, or spiritual advisor.

The first step in answering your question, is to acknowledge that you are a member of the species Homo sapiens. As such, you are a primate, a mammal, an animal, and a living organism with a 3 to 4 billion year evolutionary history behind you.

The second step is to acknowledge that the "thing" that has been evolving over the myriad of generations that have lived since the dawn of life on Earth, is the genetic code and not the individual. You, yourself, are but a bio-chemical machine. You were constructed by the fertilised cell that was the result of the union of your mother's ovum and your father's sperm. And you were constructed in accordance with the recipe encoded in your genes. You are a survival machine for the genes in your DNA. (I refer you to the works of Richard Dawkins for further argument on this point.)

That then, is your answer. The meaning of your life, your function, your purpose, the reason you exist, is to ensure that your genes get transmitted to the next generation.

This is a general principle of all life. So the general answer to the question "What is the meaning of life?" is quite simply — for each individual organism to ensure that the genes that are encapsulated in each organism get transmitted to the next generation. Or, in a more general wording — the meaning of life is to ensure that life continues.

Many people will object to this answer, including many professional philosophers. But any alternative they offer to my answer will come either from their religious or spiritual premises (which I have specifically disavowed), or from out of thin air. As humans we are gifted with the ability to choose alternative goals in life. And you are free to pursue whatever ends tickle your fancy.

However, regardless of what other goals may be offered instead, if you are not successful at fulfilling this evolutionary meaning of your life, then your genetic codes (and their 3 to 4 billion years of ancestry) will vanish from the future. The future will be populated by individuals whose ancestors were successful at this evolutionary purpose.

Stuart Burns

Ayman asked:

What's the meaning of life? I mean...even I've lost the sense of life...it doesn't even have any sense. Please answer me back.

I have been thinking about this myself lately, it is a question that comes up on these pages a number of times and I have several attempts at answering it in the past. Here is my position to date: What's the meaning of life is the wrong question to ask. It's the wrong question to ask because it is based on a mistaken view of our life. The mistaken view says that our lives have a structure, a narrative, like that of a story or a film, that our lives have a beginning middle and end that we think has to make sense to have some direction or story arc to it, and in the same way that when we see a film or read a book that plays with this traditional narrative structure we think that the film makes no sense, when we look at our lives and see that the seemingly narrative structure as no focus we tend to ask what is the meaning of it all. If in fact our lives are not so structured then, we need to rethink what we are asking. The down side is that I don't know what these new questions are yet.

It seems to me that in our lives time has a more playful role, it stops and starts, loops around, reverses repeats, in other words it does not follow a simple straight trajectory. Our lives are much too complicated and intricate to ever be able to fit into any pigeonhole of meaning any one all embracing explanation. This is not to say that what we do is meaningless, just that if we change the way we view our lives we need then to change the question we ask about it, maybe if we pay more attention to the weird little time trips we go on we would find that these contain there own significance? Unfortunately this idea only occurred to me a few days ago I haven't had the time to explore the roles all these different times play!! But I'll let you know when I do.

Brian Tee

Cara asked:

Who was the philosopher who discussed the topic of wearing different "masks" for different occasions or for the people we are around?

Try these:

Goffman, E. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Pittsburg, PA: University of Pennsylvania, 1975.

Goffman, E.. "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life." In Down to Earth Sociology: Introductory Readings, edited by J.M. Henslin, 113-23: Free Press, 2001.

Steven Ravett Brown

Nietzsche.

See esp. The Gay Science and Beyond Good and Evil.

Alya Diarova

Richard asked:

1. Is it logically possible to travel backward in time and live in a former era? why or why not?

2. Is it logically possible to make a robot (a mechanical device composed of inorganic materials) that can think, feel, and act like we do? Is it physically possible? why or why not?

3. In his book The bible and UFOs Larry Downing claims that the miraculous events recounted in the bible were actually caused by space aliens. is his claim as reasonable or more or less reasonable than the claim that god caused them? why or why not?

The answer to Questions No. 1 and 2 is 'no'. The answer to Question No. 3 is: science fiction is not science.

Let me pursue No. 3 first. God is not science fiction. It is a metaphysical concept. Whether or not you believe in it, is your business, but you might like to consider the following: There are four ontological proofs, at which various highly educated and sharp-witted thinkers have tried their hand, including Anselm, Descartes and Leibniz. Kant thought he disproved them all. Perhaps. But of the essence to Kant's disproof is the further recognition that certain matters of human cognition are simply not provable: there is room for doubt. For example, if such a concept as God is describable in a logically coherent form and (say) a computer program written with all possible variables does not hang up, then the concept is sound. Kant's disproof in effect boils down simply to stating what earlier philosophers had (maybe deliberately) overlooked: that a proof (or a computer programme) does not necessarily confer existence. Big difference.

So the belief in an all-powerful God as the source of our universe is not an irrational belief, just unfashionable. Some scientists like to put 'infallible' arguments abroad, and in particular all manner of proofs based on materialistic considerations, but these fall necessarily into the same bracket as Kant's disproof. You can't prove that God exists; but from the puny evidence we possess of how the universe actually functions, it is not possible to construct a waterproof argument for the contrary supposition. As Leibniz truly said: the necessary (logically unimpeachable) truths are so few you can count them on the fingers of your hands. Everything else is contingent. But anything you know only contingently is at best a reasonable assumption. Just as Kant said.

Now where does this leave Mr Downing? I would say in Fairy Land. I'm pretty well read in this kind of literature myself; it fascinates me. But when you close such a book, your brain should come back to life. The fact is that not a single shred of evidence has ever been produced, nor a single cogent argument ever been proposed, why any stories or artefacts from ancient days could not be explained by the presence on Earth of a higher civilisation of, say, the Sumerian type. Maybe Atlantis was real? I'd be willing to consider it. At least you don't have to go fossicking into outer space.

Question 1 is difficult; probably more difficult than most of us realise. We are so brainwashed these days by the copulation of light with time that we forget what kind of human artefact time actually is. Again: there is no incontestable proof that time exists. Photons may be emitted in a quantum experiment and observed to be travelling backwards in time. But this is theory: and in the theories which apply to this situation time is either 'renormalised' or the particle admitted to be more than one. Either way, you cannot hitch a ride. More importantly, the only logical argument for time travel ever produced that has any merit at all was Godel's. Einstein was horror-struck by it and repudiated without stopping to think. However, Godel's point was: in a universe where this is possible you would have to leave nearly all your current cosmological theories at home and most of the advanced scientific experiments we perform routinely nowadays wouldn't work.

You realise, I hope, that this is a huge domain, where everyone has different opinion. But I think everyone who argues for, if they were prodded really hard, would have to admit that, in the end, none of the knowledge we possess today permits time travel. It relies totally on extrapolations of unproved extensions of relativity and quantum cosmology. Indeed you ought, perhaps, to read Julian Barbour's book on The End of Time. He makes a good case that time is a fiction. Point blank.

Other than this, the same question is often asked and the Pathways contains a good database which you should check out. There's even a discussion by myself, where I produce more arguments against it, from a different perspective, in the middle of other people arguing for it. So a very democratic database, worth reading.

Finally No. 2. Keep asking for proof. Anyone who tells you 'yeah', shift the burden of proof onto their shoulders. Because there is a short answer. The only thinking+feeling+acting that occurs anywhere in the universe, as far as we know, is connected to biological fibres. There are good reasons for this stress on 'biological': feelings are obviously connected to nerve fibres; but in fact it is no different with thinking. So the whole idea of a robot with feeling+thinking+etc. is at bottom nothing more than a pretence: the 'Frankenstein syndrome', as I like to call it, humans fancying themselves at 'playing God'. It is also the pretence, not backed up by any sufficient scientific reason, that the products of thinking+feeling+etc. are portable, e.g. that you can take them, like the contents of your CD and copy them as data to another.

Jürgen Lawrenz
Sydney

Leslie asked:

This has made me crazy trying to find the author . Can you help?

"Chance favors the prepared mind"

I am hoping to smuggle in two unrelated questions.

Question 1: This question is about logic: Since predicate logic is about individuals, why not simply treat modal terms as predicates such as Nx=is necessary, or Px=is possible, instead of creating a whole new predicate modal logic? (since a 'de re' reading of modal terms is appropriate when they are applied to individuals).

Question 2: Concerning David Lewises analysis of counterfactual conditionals: Is it possible to both utilize his analysis of counterfactual conditional without presupposing his realist view of possible worlds? More precisely, could you be an actualist or a possibilist and still use possible worlds as truth-grounders for counterfactual conditionals?

This is not the kind of stuff I'm usually interested in... but you got me intrigued. So, I'll give you some sort of off-the-cuff answers...

Jean asked:

Could we consider Epicureanism as a kind of "bourgeois" Buddhism? Could Epicureanism lighten the sufferings of an Sudanese farmer or of a mutilated Sierra Leonean?

You were saying about the sufferings of a Sudanese farmer and Sierra Leonese person. These people have obviously been exposed to great suffering and by that I mean pain.

Epicureanism is just saying the aim is to have happiness (a considered happiness however). Pain is the complete opposite of that.

Epicureanism can offer nothing to the man who is being mutilated except a possible path in a future when he not about to be exposed to pain. In fact it can lead to great despair when you realise the life of pleasure that you marked out is not open to you.

It is no different to any other idea that humans have come up with their history. What help is an idea when you are about to have pain inflicted on you. There are plenty examples to the opposite but these all require an element of faith. A love of democracy can override some pain levels and religion more but ultimately the human will collapse before great enough pain.

The answer to your question may be then it can offer no hope except in self-delusion. Religion though promises some epiphany beyond the way we exist. And in this way we have to believe and take the leap of faith that Kierkegaard talked about. To some degree there is a separation of mind and soul and this is shown in out of body experiences and near death experiences. We can leap with our soul yearning for the salvation and the help and love of God, but the mind is well and truly rooted into the body.

If the mind suffers enough then all that the soul has endeared itself to burns away. Unfortunately there is no way out of pain, we can delude our self in this moment that the next moment wont contain any pain if we this or that. But that is all that it is, a self-deception of the mind.

Perhaps I was a little too negative there and taking the volume to 35 and a idea can cross some levels of pain. But we cant ignore the fact that the mind is the most sensitive of our senses and anything such as great pain is all that we can know when it is with us. We just have to hope, I can advocate nothing else, I do believe in God.

As for what lies beyond this world I can't prove it one way or the other, the same way with god. no conscious effort on our part can prove it one way or another (god is another matter if he decides then we get to see the proof take for example Jesus).

I think Hamlet's speech in Hamlet sums it up a bit, but you can take more hope in the story of Jesus' passion.

In the garden he prays rigorously to avoid the cup of suffering that he is about to have. He then gets the strength from god that overcomes that. I speak from the outside I have never had that, but I said earlier you can only hope. But then the hope is really just looking forward to the same old [  ].

In that long ramble I said a lot but it did not come to much, the dice lay with the reader about were to take it. That's quite ironic taking the subject into consideration.

- Reply if you could. I hope I don't sound mad; its good to hear other people's points of view on the subject. People convey better what they mean in writing and you can ask your friends to write to you about just whatever you're thinking about.

Rudabaga

Tom asked:

Should the citizens of a country have to have an official passport to be able to roam the world freely?

It seems to me that a passport would destroy the notion of free travel, since it would burden one with the contingent label of 'being from ...' to the exclusion of everywhere else. This is a costly situation since then we are confronted with borders, inside's and outside's, interiors and exteriors. Travel, movement is then not a freedom, but a courtesy, granted or not by those who stand guard at these borders. Think back to the diversion between East and West Germany, or the road stops in Israel/ Palestine. With 'official' papers, passports, visas were citizens of a country able to roam freely? Is not this freedom a suspicious, curtailed freedom? It is a not very welcoming freedom, perhaps not a freedom at all but gratitude a favour done by those on the inside to those on the outside.

Derrida talks about Hospitality, an unconditional openness to whoever comes along. Of course this has risks we can never be sure just who will arrive at our door step, and yet this risk seems to be what is demanded by the ethical. Of course international movements of citizens is not merely an ethical matter, it is political and economic, yet the same demands apply. See Derrida's essay 'On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness'. Passports seem to grant freedoms, yet this is the illusion of freedoms; what passports serve is the continuation, enforcement and protection of boarders, of exclusion and segregation. Witness the world wide political minefield of asylum and refugee issues (a basic human right under the Universal Declaration of 1948). A true freedom to roam the world would have to see the elimination of passports and of borders, of courtesy giving way to hospitality.

Brian Tee

Alchymia asked:

What is the Philosopher's Stone?

Nice name you've got — is it a coincidence? The philosopher's stone is not a real stone (although some people thought is was), but a concept of the ultimate truth. At different times in human history, people had different ideas on what this concept ought to mean. The alchemists, for example, believed it related to the secret of human and cosmic harmony; and many thought that the Sun (the life giving star), being symbolised by gold, implied that this harmony was achievable through the transmutation of base substances into gold (a.k.a the philosopher's stone). Part of the same lore pertains to the 'elixir of life'. Now as Jung pointed out, this was really a philosophical concept, used in the purification rites of adepts on a purely symbolical level. The alchemists studied chemistry seriously because the substances and liquids of the body have an enormous influence not just on the body, but on the mind as well. But there were many simple souls around who took this chemical symbology literally.

In 'normal' philosophy, however, the expression is nothing more than a facon de parler, in the vein noted above. Thus, when Schopenhauer conceived his book on Will and Imagination, he announced in his Preface that he had found the philosopher's stone, meaning: the ultimate truth about human beings. The term is not used any more, of course, because we are so sceptical (not to say, cynical) today about such 'metaphysical' ideas. But then we go ahead and invent such surrogate metaphysical notions as the 'big bang', a philosopher's stone if ever there was one. And so heavy, you would need all the cranes on earth to carry it from place a to b — always providing you could find it (it's very, very small)!

Jürgen Lawrenz
Sydney

Sherry asked:

I often ponder questions, as many before me have done, and many will continue to do. However, when someone feels that they may have an idea or theory that is new, it may be assumed that it has been previously addressed as there are many minds thinking, and publishing (I do not want to use someone's ideas without permission). I do not know where to begin to see if my idea has any merit as my own, and I understand philosophy is generally built upon the theories of others, however I remain untrusting of explaining my idea to anyone else. It evolves around the probability and explanation of other planes of existence. I am not an expert, in fact just someone who enjoys philosophy as a choice over doing other things in my spare time. I know it is very complex, and I don't know how to approach this subject to investigate the merit of my ideas, or how to establish if my theory is my own, as I am writing a novel and would like to incorporate it somehow.

Well, look. You're almost certainly correct: probably many others have had this idea. Let's assume that. Then, why not talk about it? Unless you're scared of people making fun of you; not unreasonable, but I'm afraid you're going to have to bite the bullet on this one.

Now, let's assume that you actually have an original idea. First, is it any good? I could have the idea that there are other universes made of ice cream, and probably that's original, but so what? Again, a reason to bite the bullet and put it out there. Second, let's assume it's a good idea. Ok... now, if you get it out, you will have subjected it to others' scrutiny. And just what in this are you "untrusting" of? They will make fun of you? They will steal it? As to the first, yes, probably some people will. And, so? That happens to everyone. As to the second, yes, some people will. And, so? That also happens to everyone.

So you can sit on it and wonder, or you can put it out there and get some feedback, some bad and some good. Well, look at what's going on in the world... that's what's happening. People with good ideas get them out. Mostly, the people who sit on their ideas are crackpots. Yes, sorry, but it's true. Gregory Benford, for example, the science fiction writer who is also a practicing and respected physicist, says that he's approached all the time by people with various ideas. And he can tell who the crackpots are because they're the ones who get paranoid, hide their ideas, fear that he or someone will "reveal" the "truths" or "insights" or whatever that they have found.

If you have an idea, get it out into the world. Whatever happens then, happens... but if it's good, you have the satisfaction of having improved things, just a bit, one way or another. And if it's not... then try again with another idea.

Steven Ravett Brown

K-Ci asked:

Why is the moral disposition of (the Christian) God in the Old Testament of the Bible different from that of Jesus' in the New Testament? God in the Old Testament allowed killing (for instance, Moses killing the Egyptians) while Jesus won't even lift a hand to any sinner. God gave Moses "thou shall not kill" as one of the Ten commandments yet He himself allowed such acts.

For this reason, isn't "good" higher than God? Is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good?

K-Ci leads with a literary question that poses a problem for any theology that takes the literary literally. It is, however, no more a philosophical question than is, for example, 'Why is Peter O'Toole's portrayal of Henry II in the 1964 film Becket different from his portrayal of that monarch four years later in A Lion in Winter?'

K-Ci's next question is philosophical, but it requires parsing. 'Higher' implies comparison, which implies commensurability. If God is an actual being (something that can act) and 'good' is a term of judgment (which cannot act), neither can be 'higher' than the other, because an actual entity and a term of judgment are incommensurable.

In K-Ci's second paragraph, the classic conundrum finally surfaces. One's metaphysics will determine how one resolves it. Partly following Brand Blanshard (Reason and Ethics), I apply the judgment 'good' only to an actual being that both satisfies a desire and fulfills an impulse of a subject (also actual). Neither desire-satisfaction nor impulse-fulfillment alone meets the conditions of our judging something 'good.' The subject's nature and the wider (ultimately cosmic) causal context within which it is situated determine what is possibly good for it.

Embedded in the conundrum is another metaphysical question. It asks whether God is unilaterally responsible for the metaphysical situation. In classical theism, God apparently is so responsible. That is, classical theists are disinclined to suggest, for example, that God 'finds' Godself in the metaphysical situation, which God has no choice but to exemplify. Such a suggestion would grate against their religious sensibility with its notion of God's majesty. They say that God never violates the laws of logic, but only because logic is not other than God's nature. Logic, they say, is not something 'external' to God. They use such locutions as 'God does not look outside himself' to ascertain what is intelligible, rational, or good — as if 'looking inside himself' would give God any more discretionary control over the intelligible, the rational, or the good.

I would appreciate learning of one text of classical theism that states or implies that God's nature is as much under God's sovereign control as is the cosmos. If it is not — if God is 'stuck,' so to speak,' with God's nature as we are with ours — then God is not responsible for the metaphysical situation. Indeed, according to classical theism as I understand it, before God exnihilates the cosmos God is the whole metaphysical situation. Before God can do anything in accordance with God's nature, that nature must be a datum (a 'given') for God. God's nature is therefore not under God's sovereign control. Not even God can alter God's nature or annihilate its sole instance ('commit suicide').

With that foot in the door, we can now consider whether God might be 'forced,' as it were, to consult other data that God did not unilaterally decree. This will lead us at once to our resolution of the conundrum.

Classical theism holds that God is the unilateral 'exnihilator' (bringer-out-of-nothing) of the cosmos (the widest possible context of all moral decision-making). This entails that God has settled what is good for any possible subject. God's commands (leaving wholly aside how they might be known as God's commands) merely explicate an aspect of that arrangement. For if God the exnihilator unilaterally foreordained and then caused-to-be the whole scheme of subjects with desires to be met and impulses to be fulfilled, it is hard to see how 'something' could be good — or better, why an injunction must be performed — except that God sovereignly decrees or commands it. After all, God willed or commanded into existence the whole context of injunction-performance. God's moral relationship to the cosmos as commander to commanded mirrors perfectly his (alleged) metaphysical relationship of exnihilator to exnihilated.

Perhaps, however, God is not at all in the injunction-commanding business just because, contrary to the advertisement of God's public relations firm, he's not in the cosmos-exnihilating business. Perhaps God is in the business of luring subjects into experiences of greater and greater interest (contrast and intensity), which God consequently enjoys with them. The motive here is love. In a relationship characterized by love, neither lover utterly controls (or would want to control) the other or the situation both find themselves in.

Of course, modern science's imperative to expunge all aim from the universe rules out any cosmic evolutionary hypothesis wherein an end-envisaging and end-coordinating agency plays an indispensable role. Whatever else that imperative may have going for it, however, it is not itself a discovery of science. It expresses a philosophic choice that precedes empirical inquiry. Modern science's effort to explain aim in terms of exhaustive, and aimless, determination by the past has been a failure. For to explain aim in terms of the aimless is to explain it away. That failure justifies subjecting the aforementioned choice to critical scrutiny. On a view of evolution alternative to the modern, final causality and efficient causality are irreducible to each other and equally indispensable to our understanding of actual things and the cosmos they comprise.

The atheist has no greater (if unwitting) philosophical ally than the theist who poses the false alternative, 'Either classical theism or atheism.' God's envisagement of possible goodness (desire-satisfaction plus impulse-fulfillment) guides God's present provision of initial aims for all other decision-makers. Each of them responds with (at least some degree of) self-determination, and the result is the creative advance of the cosmos.

So if we are forced to choose between the alternatives of K-Ci's question, I would choose 'God commands it because it is good,' but I would reformulate the question by substituting a metaphysics of love for that of unilateral imposition and command.

Anthony Flood

Willy asked:

Why are many of the doctoral degrees called 'philosophical' (as suggested by the abbreviation of 'Ph.' in 'PhD') when they do not seem to have anything to do with philosophy at all?

Old habits die hard. Let me remind you that Galileo demanded to be put on the payroll of Duke Gonzaga as the 'Court Philosopher' (not scientist); that Newton's book on his cosmology is graced by the title Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (not Principles of Science) and that in Kepler's Epitome of the Copernican System, all questions and answers are framed in terms of their philosophical (not scientific) content. If you were a poet or a writer, then similarly the highest rung to which you might aspire in the academic world would be a PhD. Ditto with music (though this is usually conferred honoris causa, because few universities have a music department). You want to be taken seriously? Then aim for acknowledgement as a philosopher. It relates to the prestige of Philosophy as the Queen of all Sciences. This little piece of vanity has retained its immortality to this hour.

Jürgen Lawrenz
Sydney

David asked:

I am a first year philosophy student and me and my friends where discussing this, but I was wondering could you take a stab at it for me. The question is, 'Can you describe nothing?'

Oh dear. Well, take a look here: Casati, R., and A. C. Varzi. Holes and Other Superficialities. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995. That might help.

Steven Ravett Brown

Rachel asked:

How do our conceptions of meaning, truth and knowledge relate us to the external world? What does 'external world' mean?

Most of humanity, including some philosophers, postulate from their everyday experiences the existence of an 'external world'. Most people, excluding some philosophers called 'Idealists', and some called 'Rationalists', believe that all experience is generated in a solid (material) world, and fed to our brain (mind) by way of the five senses. Philosophers who claim that all knowledge comes to us through the senses are called 'Empiricists'. Some empiricists claim that our senses interpret an external material world as it really is, a tree is a tree, a house is a house, a stone is a stone, etc.: we simply see, hear, feel, taste and scent 'what there is', the only mental link is language, by which we make our identifications and exercise our communication skills. Most of those who believe in an external material world are also 'reductionists', any material object reduces down to smaller material objects, descending finally to atomic particles.

Those who hold the belief that there is an external world which coincides directly with what we could call the popular or naive notion of reality, hold that this world is controlled by physical laws, which humans ignore or defy at their peril. The mind, though important, has a limited input within the bounds of natural law. On the other hand, those who are called idealists and rationalists believe that the mind plays the major role in establishing reality in the world. There are though some very intricate complexities and some distinctive variations within the metaphysics of both idealism and rationalism which cannot be entered into here. Suffice it to say for the purpose of answering your question that within this complexity is a general notion that there can be no real proof available of an external world, because we do not have direct access to such a world; all we do have access to are our own mental interpretations of what is given to us by our senses.

You may now appreciate that meaning, truth and knowledge are very much dependent on your world view. With regard to truth, the general view for those believing in an external world, is that for a proposition to be true it must correspond to a fact in the world. When we are concerned with observing the external world, we talk about 'perceiving' things, in other words the information coming to us by way of our senses are 'percepts'. To build up an understanding of the external world we are obliged to bring to bear mental processes on these percepts to form what we call 'concepts'. Without going too deeply into the ramifications of concept formation, I shall say that contained in what is referred to as knowledge of the world is the formation and association of concepts.

Meaning, truth and knowledge are, therefore, embodied within the concepts which constitute our world view. Because the senses cannot always be trusted we sometimes form false or mistaken concepts; meaning, truth and knowledge can be distorted by false percepts leading to errors in our understanding, such errors often lead to conflict between individuals and even nations. Also some concepts can mean different things to different people, and when reflected back into the world will lead to different views of the same subject or event. This leads us back into reflections on truth and reality. Is there a fundamental truth, and what do we mean by reality? Questions that will probably fascinate philosophers for many years yet.

John Brandon

Xiomara asked:

Is it possible that there could be a parallel universe according to the laws of atoms, protons and neutrons?

And if in fact, it does exists, are we the ones in the "real" universe or are we just the fake ones?

And is there just one parallel universe? Could there be millions of them?

Very interesting question, Xiomara, and one that exercises many philosophers and scientists today. In consequence there are many books and papers written on the topic. Because there are so many, I'm going to give you a very small answer; if you want to know more you might just have to do some research on your own. I'll give you a couple of references at the end.

Now, firstly, the idea of many possible worlds occurs at least twice in the history of philosophy before our time. Once in ancient Greece, when Anaximander and Democritus allowed the possibility; but they did not enlarge on it. Then again in the 15th century when Nicholas of Cusa raised the same question again, namely whether God would be content with having created just one world. Again, however, he just speculated on it. With the onset of the modern age, however, we find the German philosopher Leibniz speculating seriously on the possibility and outlining some theoretical principles. Much of what Leibniz wrote serves as a philosophical foundation for contemporary theories, so this is the point at which my outline might proceed.

Now the main issue addressed by Leibniz is 'compossibility'. His thought was: God could create any world he might like, but being the rational Being par excellence, he would of course create the richest possible world. Thereby he would impose automatic limitations. For example: noxious gas and human lungs are obviously not compossible (can't exist side by side): one has to go. But in another world, noxious gases may well find their place. So God may well have created an innumerable range of universes, just for entertainment. Would we know? Of course not. But in principle, many worlds are conceivable with the collection of atoms that make up the world.

Now this idea is seriously entertained in quantum cosmology. When a human observer watches a quantum event, there occurs what's called a state vector collapse. It means that a swarm of billions of particles moved forward like a cloud, and this implies billions of possible outcomes to the experiment. Then, as you watch, an outcome results. One of billions that might have. What happened to the others? Well, normally we would say, they vanished. But some theorists maintain the one we see is only the one we see. The other possibilities continue on their merry way to make up another possible world. And so on and so forth. This is, in effect, like saying that of these billions of possibilities, only those that are compossible with us are actually experienced by us; meanwhile our universe unfolds in parallel with all the others, side by side, so to speak.

Another theory, also originating with Leibniz, says that time is an illusion: 'just an order which relates one event to another.' Therefore our world, the world in which we perceive time, is the only world we can personally experience. In this world, all events are stacked like packs of cards, and each microsecond we kind of 'pick a card' that is ours and that's how we advance in 'time'. Actually there is no time; the stacks are sitting perfectly still and we just happen to draw one after another which represents our experience. In this picture, there is not just one universe, but billions of them, all interlocked, though we can know only the one which happens to be inscribed in the one card we draw. Sounds crazy, but of course I'm simplifying very much here. The point about the cards is that all stacks together represents the sum total of events possible in that billionfold universe, but there is only one path through all the stacks for the universe which we inhabit.

I could go on forever, but one last possibility will have to do. This one is probably the closest we will ever approach to actually knowing something about a second cosmos. The idea here is connected to the 'chirality' of matter. It's like screws, which you must turn clockwise into a nut. What if you have an anticlockwise screw? Bad luck! So with matter. It interacts and forms structures we can see and measure because atoms etc fit together. Yet certain observations suggest that 'anti' matter also exists. That is, if a matter particle collides with an antimatter particle, mutual annihilation results. Now this is a logical difficulty. It is axiomatic in science as well as philosophy that creation from nothing and destruction into nothing are impossible. If nonetheless it happens, a good assumption is that the matter does not actually disappear, but disappears from sight. How? Because they lose their chirality and then we can't 'see' them any more. So an argument could be put that our's is actually a 'dual universe' of matter and anti-matter.

Two books on this subject are worth looking into if this interests you, and they each have good bibliographies to steer you further along this path. One is The Left Hand of Creation by John Barrow, the other The End of Time by Julian Barbour. See you in the next universe some time!

Jürgen Lawrenz
Sydney

Gessler asked:

In studying epistemology and educational psychology I have found a gap in some of the research done. Dr. Howard Gardner developed a theory of multiple intelligences, or different types of smart (visual, textual, aural, logical-mathematical, etc.) but no-one in the field of epistemology has taken this theory and run with it. I would like to do some research in this area, and cannot find anything that I can start with. Dr. Gardner has been very helpful in answering my e-mails and sending me materials, but I have found nothing on the philosophy side of the issue. Got any ideas?

In general, I think your best bet would be to look into the philosophy/ psychology of the creative process; of art, if you wish. I don't think you'll find specific references to different types of "intelligence" (please be careful with that concept, ok? It's really ugly.)... but you will find references to the creative process in general and to various manifestations of it. People who come to mind immediately are: Goodman and Arnheim (who really is a psychologist, as I'm sure you're aware), but there are many others.

Here are some refs that might lead further:

Arnheim, R. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974.

Dienes, Z., and J. Perner. "A Theory of Implicit and Explicit Knowledge." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22, no. 735-808 (1999).

Gibson, J. J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986.

Kozbelt, A. "Artists as Experts in Visual Cognition." Visual Cognition 8, no. 6 (2001): 705-23.

Lehar, S. "Gestalt Isomorphism and the Primacy of Subjective Conscious Experience: A Gestalt Bubble Model." Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2003).

Tsur, R. "Metaphor and Figure-Ground Relationship: Comparisons from Poetry, Music, and the Visual Arts." PsyART: A Hyperlink Journal for Psychological Study of the Arts 4 (2000).

and:

Goodman, N. Languages of Art. 2nd ed. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1976.

Goodman, N. Ways of Worldmaking. 5th ed. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988.

and:

Deliege, I. "Introduction: Similarity Perception <-> Categorization <-> Cue Abstraction." Music Perception 18, no. 3 (2001): 233-43.

Dissanayake, E. "Antecedents of the Temporal Arts in Early Mother-Infant Interaction." In The Origins of Music, edited by N. L. Wallin, B. Merker and S. Brown, 389-410. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000.

Gasche, R. The Tain of the Mirror. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Gendlin, E. "Words Can Say How They Work." Synthesis Philosophia 10, no. 19-20 (1995): 67-80.

Kosuth, J. Art after Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966-1990. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991.

Levinson, J. Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Mehler, J., and S. Franck, eds. Cognition on Cognition. Edited by J. Mehler, Cognition Special Issues. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995.

and:

BonJour, L. "Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry." British Journal of the Philosophy of Science 52 (2001): 151-58.

Clark, A. Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Parallel Distributed Processing. Edited by M. A. Boden. 4th ed, Explorations in Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993.

Guilford, J. P., and R. Hoepfner. The Analysis of Intelligence, Mcgraw-Hill Series in Psychology. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1971.

Veale, T., and M. T. Keane. "Conceptual Scaffolding: A Spatially Founded Meaning Representation for Metaphor Comprehension." Computational Intelligence 8, no. 3 (1992): 494-519.

That's about what I can come up with, offhand. I'm sure you've encountered much of it... I think what's necessary is a comparative, synthetic, study of this issue. A fascinating question. Of course, if you go back to Aristotle, you'll find in his works all sorts of categorizations of various intellectual activities and types. But I don't know anyone who's really followed through with that in philosophy, in any specific way, aside perhaps from Goodman.

Another perspective on different ways of thinking, if not different types of intelligence, would be the phenomenologists and their contrasting of "scientific" and "natural" kinds of thinking and "being-in-the-world" (which I have many problems with... but that's another issue). Here you'd have to go to Husserl, Heidegger, perhaps Derrida, for example... and Dreyfus might be another source. In fact, Drefus is quite nice, and approachable, and you might ask him about this issue. He wrote, e.g., Dreyfus, H. L. "Samuel Todes's Account of Non-Conceptual Perceptual Knowledge and Its Relation to Thought." Ratio XV, no. 4 (2003): 393-409.

Good hunting.

Steven Ravett Brown

I'm a secondary school teacher with a background in philosophy. perhaps the problem is that gardner's theory has to do with LEARNING whereas epistemology deals with KNOWLEDGE. you might need to look for clearer links between the two — even going so far back as Plato's ideas of an immortal soul, implying we are born knowing everything and a teacher's job is merely to guide us to recognise this. Curly topic — good luck with it.

Lyn Renwood

Gary asked:

Are we ever likely to get to the truth about the nature of mathematics? I guess I mean; decide between the competing views on the nature of the subject (I'm thinking Logicism, Formalism, and Intuitionism, but then I studied back in the 70's and there must be some new 'isms' by now). Actually I'm prompted to write after having read about Greg Chaitin and his view that math is empirical (I used to laugh at John Stuart Mill for holding an empiricist view of the nature of mathematical truth but I'm more inclined to take GC seriously).

So, to sum up:

What are the modern views on the nature of mathematics? (Can you recommend any good reference works?) Will we ever be able to decide between them? Could mathematics be empirically based?

I like the empiricist viewpoint myself. Take a look at these:

Hacking, I. The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas About Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

Lakoff, G., and R.E. Nunez. Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000.

Narens, L. "A Meaningful Justification for the Representational Theory of Measurement." Journal of Mathematical Psychology 46 (2002): 746-68.

Null, G.T., and R.A. Simons. "Aron Gurwitsch's Ordinal Foundation of Mathematics and the Problem of Formalizing Ideational Abstraction." Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 12, no. 2 (1981): 164-74.

Steven Ravett Brown

you might want to look at:

Stewart Shapiro, "Thinking about Mathematics."

Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam (eds) "Readings in the Philosophy of Mathematics."

Gideon Rosen and John Burgess "A Subject with no Object."

Crispin Wright "Frege's Conception of Number as Object."

Crispin Wright and Bob Hale "Reason's Proper Study."

Hartry Field "Science Without Numbers"

Please note that only the first two listed assumes no familarity with the field and the literature, so if you are not au fait with recent developments and theories in phil maths then you should have a look at the Shapiro first, which should give you a good idea of the landscape before diving into the others. The Benacerraf-Putnam collection brings together key papers in phil maths up to about 1975 so might be worth a look too.

Rich Woodward

This is too large a field to debate in the context of a question/ answer format. For whatever satisfaction you may get from it, I recommend Reuben Hersh's What is Mathematics, Really?, where the author defends the viewpoint that it is a social institution. But he goes through every mathematician of note, ancient and modern, to justify his point of view, and he uses historical vignettes, fictional dialogues and practical (real life) working situations in illustration. Since Hersh is a mathematician, he ought to know. A point of view radically different, though in the last resort cognate, was put forth by G.H. Hardy in his book, A Mathematician's Apology. Hardy thought of his work as an art form and demanded that it should have no practical application whatever, nothing other than the production of a beautiful artefact. He was not alone in this. Morris Kline, too, has written on the social and artistic aspects of mathematics; in fact, there is a surprisingly large literature on the metier as art.

And then there is that eloquent and magnificent plea for mathematics as the "saviour" of mankind from the computer by Roger Penrose, called Shadows of the Mind. Problems that are "not computable" are a cinch for us humans, Penrose claims; and this is his warrant for asserting that "in principle" a robot cannot ever be endowed with anything like consciousness. Now here are three books I would consider indispensable. There are many more, of course, but you have to start somewhere; and these titles will at least introduce you to three of the major enquiries on which the subject of "what is mathematics" thrives.

Jürgen Lawrenz
Sydney

Dennis asked:

I'm from a small town and have been in the military since high school graduation. With all this in mind, I am having a hard time with philosophy. My PHIL 101 VCR course is kicking my brain in to overdrive and I usually understand everything that is thrown at me, but this subject is very interesting and also confusing. Basically, I was just wondering if others have initially have this problem and one day will all the reading and intense studying make me click and understand it all? I do not want to give up because many have studied this subject and have found it to be useful and some day I want to use this knowledge in my life too.

In direct answer to your first question: yes. Others have this problem. To your second question: no. You will not understand it all. But hey, no one does, so relax. If someone did, then we'd all read that person and wouldn't have any more questions to think about, right?

Here's one take on it. "Mastery" of various fields, from taxi driving to game playing to learning a science, has been studied (sorry for lack of refs), and what has been found is that it takes human beings 5-10 years to master an area, i.e., to get to where they see patterns in it rather than disconnected precepts. So you can count on a) not understanding it as a set of unities for that long, and b) getting some grasp of it after that long. But mastery does not imply that you understand everything; chess masters, for example, can be beaten.

Here's another take on it. Philosophy, in the West, is roughly 2-3000 years old. To reasonably thoroughly understand it you need some grasp of that much knowledge and thought, because it all interconnects. Is that possible? Yes... after about 5-10 years of study.

Now, what you could do, and what lots and lots of people do, is fasten on one person (Hegel is popular for that sort of thing, for example; so is Schopenhauer) and read him (or her) exhaustively (for, say, 5-10 years), embrace their philosophy, and interpret everything else in those terms. A big mistake, in my opinion. You get an extremely biased and narrow viewpoint on what is an enormous and hugely varied area of human thought.

Take a look at some basic sources, and read, read, read. Write extensive comments on what you've read. Show your comments to someone, and welcome their pointing out your inevitable mistakes and misunderstandings. Um... that sounds like going to school, right? Right. A very old tradition in philosophy, starting with Socrates and Plato.

Steven Ravett Brown

Gary asked:

Has evolution stopped, or are cyborgs (and all the other intended man/ machine hybrid species) the next step?

In the future will machines alone be able to exist?

Are we among the last of the human species?

Jay asked:

Do you think this world is an illusion?

I'll give you a short answer on this, because for as long as I don't know what you mean by 'illusion', I can't properly evaluate your thinking. So I'll just assume that when you say 'illusion', you understand this in some fashion analogous to 'fake', 'figment' or 'deception'. Then your worry about whether the world is real or just a product of our imagination can be resolved very easily.

What we see, hear, touch, smell, taste etc. are illusions of a particular kind, namely the calibrated responses of our nervous system to the energy output (or reflection) of objects in the world. Our nervous system, in collaboration with the brain, evaluates that output very much as it impinges, namely as forms of energy (or resistance to penetration etc), but translates it in the auditory, visual and other cortices into something which we can apprehend. Thus a particular spectrum of this very large wave bandwidth is piped through our visual apparatus where the subtle differences in output are 'coloured in', so to speak, to facilitate recognition. Colours that are meaningless to big animals like ourselves, for instance infra red, we cannot differentiate; they remain invisible to us. But bees, which need to recognise such frequences, can see those colours. So you see, our perceptions are evolutionary conditioned.

I would recommend to you that if you are earnestly concerned about the possibility of the world being just an illusory bric-a-brac with no existence other than in our minds, that you look into a good book on the body and especially the nervous system. Rather than allowing the bite of doubt grab hold of you, learn to appreciate the absolute marvels of adaptivity to the terrestrial environment which Nature has produced, especially the human brain. Marvel ought to cure you of doubts. It's like good medicine. Consider finally that unilateral illusion is a contradiction in terms: if everything is illusory, than obviously nothing is. Neither one nor the other can possibly be true.

Jürgen Lawrenz
Sydney

No. It couldn't be because the very idea of an illusion rests on the idea that the world is well enough known by us to distinguish between those experiences that provide us with illusions and those that give us the real dope. For example, you could be reading these lines and because of some brain disease could be seeing a bird wherever the letter "e" appears. But for that to be an illusion, there must also be cases where someone can see what is actually there, namely, the letter "e." Otherwise the question as to whether what you see is an illusion couldn't even arise.

Tibor Machan

Diana asked:

How did life beginning?

In Spanish: 'Como inicio la vida?'

I hope that you know the answer.

No one "knows" the answer to that question. But there are some very good guesses. Go here: