I have a question. Years ago me and two friends got into a debate about a riddle. The riddle goes like this: A train starts from point A and is travelling towards point B. A wasp is travelling in the opposite direction at twice the speed of the train, the wasp touches the tip of the train and goes back to point B. How many times does the wasp touch the train? (this may be one version of many, but this is how it was told that faithful evening) So the "correct" answer was, infinte times. (similar to Zeno's paradox with Achilles and the tortoise). I said, well in theory it's infinte times, but if you were to actually do it, the train would hit point B eventually so it can't be infinte times? For it to be infinite times it would have to stop time (or something) So what would happen if you actually tried this? Say we do an experiment with a model train and instead of a wasp we use a laser (for accuracy). First we measure the railway track and only run the train, let's say it takes 10 seconds to go from...

I understand that mathematical induction is deductive reasoning (but why doesn't it have another name?!). But I wonder if there can be true induction based only on reason. Here is an example: I may think about a possible practical problem and think what I would do in many variants of it. I can also ask other people to imagine other variants and I can ask them help about what to do in all those variants. After all this thinking, it is possible that one notices a general rule about what to do with that problem, and come to believe that that rule would be good for every variant of it, even for those variants we didn't check. Wouldn't that be an inductive conclusion? And do you think that this conclusion would be less acceptable than inductive conclusions in the natural sciences?

Why doesn't consciousness defeat the determinism argument? If a person consciously decides to order a hamburger instead of a cheeseburger the next time he goes to a restaurant, what force is controlling him to delude himself?

Everything needs a cause, right, or it couldn't happen, right? But, if everything needs a cause, how could anything happen? Because the thing that would cause it to happen would also need a cause. So does that means the universe can't happen/could never get to now? Or is time a cause in and of itself? And "drags" things as time goes forward, like a replay in a video game? But then time would need a cause too, right?

If we assert that aesthetic experience has no definable cognitive component what makes it an important subject of philosophical interest?

In roles where individuals have a lot of responsibility (e.g. the direct protection of others) how can the idea of a 'learning curve' be tolerated? It seems to me that there are always situations in which people, like doctors or soldiers, must make judgement calls, but if such decisions - though rational and educated - don't achieve the desired outcome (e.g a patient dies, a fellow soldier is put in harm's way), how can the decision makers tolerate having made them? Are there certain roles (like being an emergency room doctor or president) in which the individual filling that role has to accept that despite their best efforts they are very likely to cause others harm or to contribute to it? Is that a risk that just goes with the job?

Does the amount of suffering in the world that is caused by man's misbehavior towards each other indicative of a failure of philosophy to create meaningful solutions or rather an ignorance of philosophy?

Is the only ethical indicator of degrees of moral correctness or wrongness utilitarianism? For instance, how would Kant or Aristotle argue that robbing two people is MORE immoral than robbing one? What if the robber needed that money to feed his family?

Wikipedia has an interesting (for me, at least) definition of question: "A question is a linguistic expression used to make a request for information, or the request made using such an expression." This means that there are two senses of the word "question": one very general and abstract (a question is an abstract sequence of words, even it no one asks it), the other one concrete (a question is a concrete asking for information). In the abstract sense, all persons who have ever asked, say, what's the capital of Portugal, they were asking the same question. But here is my problem: in this abstract sense (or perhaps in another possible abstract sense), a question is not a linguistic expression (although Wikipedia says so...), since the same question can be formulated in any language or in different ways within the same language: many linguistic expressions can formulate the same question. A question is an abstraction, something like a thought (that many people can think). What is special about (abstract)...

Is it unethical to avoid watching or reading the news?