It is generally accepted that certain intervals in music sound "harmonious", i.e. 3rds, 4ths and 5ths. Why is this so? Why do these certain intervals constitute a pleasant sounding harmony, as opposed to jarring, dissonant intervals like 2nds and 7ths? I do not believe it is a matter of taste - most people, even those with no musical training will uniformly identify a harmony as harmonious (or in tune) or dissonant (or out of tune, I suppose). However, I am open to being disproved on this point.

Can you be punished for planning a crime? Say your planned to do forgery and you called up friend who has the 'talent.' The friend say she wouldn't do it. Another person knew about you planning to forge and tells the school authorities. Does the school authority have the right to impose punishment on you for contemplating to do forgery? When you think evil things such as stealing does that already make you immoral? What do philosophers say about planning to do evil?

Are Quine's arguments against the distinction between analytic and synthetic in "Two dogmas of empiricism" really convincing? I have read Grice and Strawson's "In defence of a dogma" and agree that there is consent enough about the situations where the distinction is applied to and about the results of those applications so that we can't say the distinction doesn't really exist. Am I wrong about it? What readings else should I do? André C.

I remember reading some decades ago wile in college, that Plato proposed that humans were originally created as four armed, four legged beings, and that is why we always search for our other half. Is there some book or citation you can direct me to, to re-learn about this? I have been sarching on line and think it's in Timaeus but can't find anything for sure.

The "new" atheist thinkers such as Richard Dawkins tell us that we should dismiss religions and the belief in God, since they are based solely on faith and have no adequate objective evidence for them. If we would follow this line of thought into metaphysics and especially ontology then wouldn't it become also a question of faith. Since there's no objective scientific way to demonstrate any of the arguments about universals or the ultimate building blocks of reality. Is it right to bring this kind of reasoning over from one topic to another and if so does it invalidate something? And if ontology never claimed to be objective in the sense described why anybody even bothered to deal with it.

The 'State of Nature' is often appealed to in order to make systematic the justification of the state and the extent of our political obligations to it. What option does the present day anarachist have if he refuses to accept the force of these arguments and genuinely wishes to live a stateless, obligation-free, apolitical existence ? Surely he didn't 'choose' to be born into a modern state and yet it seems that there is little he can do to live an alternative life. Is this a significant restriction of his freedom ?

Do you believe in the socratic method in the teaching of children?

We all know co-incidences happen. At what point should the person, who discovers one after another, such as numbers/names/colours, which all link together, turn and say: There must be more behind these co-incidences and I shall find out, what it is all about?

Are we born with morality, a distinct human sense of right and wrong, or is our morality merely a product of our environment?

How much of epistemology boils down to semantics? Sometimes it seems as though all we're really doing is trying to decide which situations warrant use of the word "know"; nothing actually changes in practice.