I find George Berkley an insightful philosopher in many ways. One puzzle I have is over his view of time as 'the succession of ideas'. Would he contend that our calendar and daily clock times are due to both God's direct imprinting of sensory ideas according to regular natural laws on our minds, and making the structure of human minds similar in their receiving of those perceptions/ideas? (We all receive ideas at the same basic rate). Also, when we dream or people are in a coma, do perceptions somehow continue unabated in our minds?

Hello. How do you prove that a certain logical fallacy is a fallacy indeed? Are there "fallacies" about which there is a controversy if it is a fallacy or not? And if in the future, a new fallacy will be discovered, what will be the outline of the proof that one will have to use to prove that it exists? (Just an application of the first question.)

I think that in cases of horrific crimes, the death penalty is acceptable, or even required by retributive justice. However, I think this only applies to cases where there is absolutely no room for doubt. I also think that there really are such cases where there is 100% certainty e.g. the perpetrator was seen by many witnesses and confesses, plus as much additional evidence as you need. Unfortunately, if we only make convictions where we have the luxury of this certainty, we set the bar too high, and many guilty people escape conviction. Inevitably, under any reasonable judicial system there will be people charged for crimes they didn’t commit. But when you are charged with a crime, you are thereby unequivocally guilty, and there’s no way of charging someone with being guilty with the qualification, “he might not have done it” and another “he’s guilty of the crime and there’s no doubt”. In the eyes of the law, a guilty verdict is definitive; you did it, end of story. Is there a problem with this either...

Do animals have morals and ethics? Otherwise, are ethics natural or is it something humans made up?

It's becoming increasingly clear that democratic societies are incapable of solving long-range, diffuse ecological problems such as climate change and peak oil, which, although indistinct and nebulous, pose what are potentially existential threats to whole populations. How serious a threat does this pose to the legitimacy of democracy? A related question, or perhaps the same question in different language: the inter-generational transfer of resources which democracies permit is clearly immoral, and profoundly so. At what point does this immorality trump the morality inherent in democratic institutions?

Who are some philosophers who wrote about the value and conditions of work, other than Marx?

To what extent is it acceptable for someone to present an opinion on something of which they have no first hand knowledge? Specifically, if someone has an opinion about an author without having read any of their books and only having heard others speak about them, are they still entitled not only to an opinion about said author, but also for their opinion to be taken seriously? Alongside this, if we can have an opinion about something for which we cannot have first hand knowledge (e.g. the French Revolution) but only through information we have read in historical accounts, does this imply that we do not need first hand knowledge at all?

This question is just a few days out of season, but is it ethical to celebrate christmas (Christmas?) if you are an atheist?

Can we make sense of claims to the effect that language X is "harder" than language Y?

Hi. Take the following syllogism : John believes that green people should be killed. Mushmush is a green person, a neighbour of John. ====================== Thus, John believes that Mushmush should be killed. Formally, the argument seems valid. However, in reality it doesn't work. A persona can believe that all people with quality X should be killed, but not think it about a specific person he knows. So is there a logical contradiction here? What happens? Thank you, Sam