Do cameras and microphones always "capture truth?" Suppose a surveillance camera in a store captures undoctored video of a person stealing. Does this video satisfy all of the correspondence, coherence and epistemic theories of truth that the person did indeed steal? Since the other theories of truth are primarily sentence based, how can a video be turned into "truth by words?"

Is it hypocritical for prostitution to be legal but pimping to be illegal?

Does democracy necessarily assume that the voters are rational and educated? I was always of the opinion that democracy was the best system because there is no way in non-democratic systems to ensure that the state is acting in the best interests of the people. Is this a compelling argument or is there a better counterargument? Do the arguments that "voters are irrational" or "voters are unduly influenced by the media" really defeat democracy? Is it better to have a well-intentioned non-democratic state look after the interests of the people?

If I'm an atheist, does it make sense to criticize the Catholic church for practices such as the exclusion of female priests? Suppose that a Catholic authority replies to such criticism by saying that there is strong Biblical evidence to show that priests must be male. Since I am an atheist, I may be unpersuaded by this argument, and still insist that the church would be more just if it gave women equal status with men. But then, if I reject this Biblical argument it seems that I may as well reject Catholicism itself. In other words, I think there is something strange in the suggestion that Catholics should improve their religious practice by incorporating certain progressive reforms. The justification of these reforms often seems arise of a view that would invalidate, not just the allegedly objectionable practices at issue, but religion altogether. Practices such as the exclusion of female priests may strike me as irrational, but then why should I care if I think that Catholicism quite generally is...

Hello, my question(s) is: could emotions, concepts and physical things that are opposite to each other, exist without each other? For example, if there were no such thing as hot, then could cold exist? What about joy and sorrow? Could we identify one without the other? Do they require our awareness of them, for them to exist? Obviously this isn't the case with some things, like gravity.

Are dimensions exceeding 3 actually comceivable or are they purely intellectual constructs? Is this even debated in philosophy?

Does justice necessarily have to be equality?

I would like to have some non-theistic response from you about the value of life. (I don't know if people asking about the "meaning of life" are asking what I want to ask, but I'll try to be specific.) One thing is the value of other people's lives. I am not concerned about this: I'm pretty sure that homicide is a terrible crime even in the cases I will mention next. A different thing is the value of one's own life (the value of life for the person living it). Of course, many people have good, rewarding, happy lives. Such lives are very valuable. But many other people have no such lives. I would like you to consider two cases. The first case is that of very ill and depressed people, continuously and permanently suffering with their illnesses, or that of incarcerated people, tortured from time to time, without any hope of getting out of their suffering: I mean people who will commit suicide if they have the courage and the chance to. I think that those lives have no value and that, for instance, if we...

What have philosophers said about the idea that sex results in babies so therefor we should look at the meaning of any sexual act in terms of sexual reproduction? It does seem as if we didn't evolve to have sex without reproduction and therefor sex without reproduction is a modern phenomena not attached to our evolutionary nature. So maybe our emotional responses to sex and the feelings of shame that correspond with sex might be because of this evolutionary nature?

Did Hume commit the genetic fallacy when he argued that one of the reasons we should not believe in miracles was because they derived from "ignorant and barbarous nations"?