That's why it's called the "hard problem".... :-) And perhaps that's why some philosophers take an 'eliminationist' or materialist approach to the subject (eg Dan Dennett, Paul Churchland): the 'problem' itself is so ill-defined because there really is no such phenomena to be analyzed ... Words like "consciousness" are so vague and unclear that they cannot constitute a subject of scientific investigation, which will eventually dispense with them altogether ... That's not very helpful, of course, but then there is no real answer to your question ....! best, ap

good question, but i'm sure it's underdescribed -- there probably are cases of 'yes', cases of 'no', and cases of 'undetermined.' Depends precisely what you mean by justice etc. -- and the complex relationship between (say) justice and the law ... No doubt we have moral obligations to intervene when someone is doing something widely judged to be very unjust -- but when the action is less unjust, or when intervening itself might involve breaking a law or other moral obligation, then those latter constraints might outweigh the original injustice ... The thing to do, I think, is try to generate a number of different examples, and then restate the question in the context of specific examples! best, Andrew

You may be referring (directly or indirectly, intentionally or not) to the infamous Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, in brief the idea that the structure of one's language constrains/determines one's conceptualization of and cognitive approach to the world. (If the Inuit genuinely have more words for snow than ordinary English speakers, then that reflects that they can make (say) visual distinctions between the kinds of snow than we can ....) I'm not particularly familiar with the literature except that I believe this hypothesis is no longer much in fashion at all -- while perhaps in some limited senses different languages (including their different vocabularies, number of words, grammatical structures) are able to express various thoughts differently, etc., far more people accept these days that the 'thoughts' themselves are roughly universally available -- and indeed the fact that languages CAN be translated into each others (even if not always perfectly) suggests that all languages are capable of expressing...

while there is somethign to the 'anglo-american' generalization, i'm not sure i accept the premise of your question -- i find analytic philosophy to have plenty of 'richness of meaning' in it ... (and certainly there's no explicit decision to privilege clarity at the cost of meaning ...) i think, anyway -- but hm, this is provocative. ap

great question. one small part of the answer would rely on how we conceptualize the non-forgotten, stored knowledge itself -- does it exist as propositions or discrete entities somehow tucked away somewhere in the mind (or brain)? if so, then if forgetting means deleting, then such things shouldn't count as known. But more plausibly stored knowledge would be conceived dispositionally -- as a disposition to re-create a given thought (and more generally beliefs shouldn't be conceived as individual units either ...) -- and once beliefs are conceievd that way then it's much easier to think of forgetting as just some (temporary) flaw in the mechanism that triggers the disposition -- in which case the way is more open to treating the 'forgotten' bit as 'really there, if temporarily inaccessible' .... hope that helps -- ap

I've often thought about just this issue, even as I (without fail) always pick out the milk from the back row! But I cannot see what could be wrong with doing this -- unless the store sets out a customer policy forbidding it, the store has allowed it (even if it would prefer we take the milk in front) -- so we're not wronging the store in any way, which, in effect, has to accept the possibility of spoiled milk as one of the costs of doing business -- which it then, no doubt, passes on to the customer .... The deeper question here would be a kind of prisoner dilemma: if every customer agreed to take the milk from the front, thus reducing spoilage, the overall cost of milk might well go down, which would be good for everyone -- but if only *I* take it from the front then I increase my personal risk of spoilage without getting any benefit .... :-) best, ap

Good question. But why can't it be both scientific and philosophical? Much of the philosophy of time -- dating back long before serious scientific investigation on time (which I'll arbitrarily date to 17th century or so) -- involves reflection on our conscious experience of temporality -- and most of that reflection still is valuable and insightful even as science has progressed to very different understandings of the nature of time ... So there's still plenty of room to philosophize about time, about our experience of time, even INDEPENDENT of whatever's going on in science .... best, ap

A great question, which deserves a longer response than I have time for now! But just a very general response: how could concerns about what we value give us a grounds for determining what's true with respect to determinism? Determinism seems, as you've sketched it, to be a kind of scientific thesis -- it's up to science to figure out whether there are deterministic laws of nature which govern our bodies and brains and behavior, I would think. The fact that we may not like the result -- that determinism might challenge our pre-existing set of values -- hardly seems relevant as to whether the result is correct. Where philosophers step in, of course, is in judging whether in fact the determinism revealed by science WOULD or NEED challenge our values, in the way you've sketched -- but it isn't obvious to me that the philosophical activity would be relevant to the 'scientific' question of whether determinism is true. best, ap

Hm, if you haven't *really* experienced it, then how do you know that what you dreamt was accurate? Moreover, even if you haven't had such a kiss exactly, isn't it possible that the specific sensory components of the kiss ARE all things you've experienced, if not exactly in that combination? (Why couldn't the mind rearrange sensory components to creat new overall arrangements -- as it does when we use our imaginations, say?) Most importantly, your question presumes we could never dream about something we haven't experienced while awake -- but why believe that, esp. when this very dream might well refute it? (No doubt your sensory organs have the capacity to detect far more tastes and smells and feels etc. than they ever in fact meet with during waking life; why can't the brain fire, during dreaming, so as to reflect those preivously unactivated capacities?) best, ap

good question. I might rephrase it slightly: which concepts are concepts of abstract things? then we offer one kind of definition of an abstract thing: a thing which (say) isn't located (or isn't the kind of thing to be located) in any one particular time or space. On this definition many concepts would not be of abstract things, such as the concepts of a chair, or a tree, or a building -- for each of these is the kind of thing, of physical material thing, which does enjoy locations. There may also be "mental things", "minds", which fit this definition, but then that depends on just what your concept of "mind" is! (Some philosophers think the mental is ultimately physical in nature, others not, which might affect how to classify it with respect to the 'abstract.') Then lots of other things would fall into the abstract category: concepts of truth, justice, freedom, many mathematical concepts, for example. Or to get very philosophical here: there is much debate whether we can have concepts of ...