During free time at my place of work, the faculty often get together for some intense rounds of "Boggle". In case you're not familiar, this is a game where letters are randomly arranged in a square, and then the players are timed as they try to form words using only adjacent letters. Because the scores are often so close, much debate often arises as to what constitutes a fair word. For example, can "er" be added to any verb to make it a noun, such as to "dare" or "err" to make "darer" and "errer", one who dares, and one who errs, respectively? Also, would a word like "beated", which is not in the dictionary, be acceptable if someone had heard it used, say in the following case: "after the eggs are beated...". What about sounds like "purr", or "whizz"? What are the criteria for determining if something is a word? Whose say should be taken as authoritative? Thanks!

Suppose that a fetus is at a stage when it is considered permissible to be aborted. Suppose that the woman bearing the fetus decides, for some reason, that she would prefer that the child be born with no arms. To that end, she takes some kind of potion, and the child is later born with no arms. I think that most people would feel that the woman's action was wrong because it was wrong to deprive the child that was born of his or her arms and their use. But if that's true, why is it permissible to deprive the child that would have been born of his or her body and its use?

Many thought experiments in ethics involve truly bizarre scenarios (Frances Kamm, for instance, talks about putting $500 into a machine which mechanically saves children). Do the panelists think that overly contrived examples, too far removed from ordinary experience, lead us in the wrong direction and should not be used? Or should a rigorous philosophy of ethics account for all scenarios, including ones which almost certainly will never occur?

Do philosophers have an aesthetic appreciation or their work? Do they find certain philosophical works or arguments, not just interesting, but beautiful (as GH Hardy or Einstein did)?

Have professional philosophers come up with a strong response to Peter Singer's argument in "Famine, Affluence and Morality"? I take it that most find Singer's demands excessive, yet they seem irresistibly well-reasoned to me, and I've never been able to think my way around them.

Can the "real world" provide evidence that mathematical knowledge is legitimate? I think its many peoples' intuition that the successful application of math to science and engineering (e.g., that we can use math to build bridges) shows that math is true.

If a woman does not want to support a child, she can choose to have an abortion. Of course, the would-be father ultimately has no say in this decision (he cannot force or prevent an abortion). Presumably, the asymmetry here relates to the fact that pregnancy and childbirth burden the mother to an infinitely greater extent than the father. What I don't understand, though, is why fathers may be forced to support (monetarily) children which they didn't want. If a woman decides to have a child in spite of her partner's disagreement, shouldn't she also assume full responsibility for that child? It seems as though the man has no say at all here. If the man wants the child, the woman may nevertheless abort; if he doesn't want the child (but she does), he nevertheless must support it.

If there is an all-knowing God who knows the future, then he knows I'm going to sneeze in 10 seconds. But if I do something to control my sneeze, then I have just changed the future. Does this mean there is not an all-knowing God who knows the future, because we have control over our future. This would suggest multiple futures and abolish the theory of God. Or is there some way for there to be multiple futures and an all-knowing God?

Concerning our moral obligations to other people, what is the distinction between killing and letting die? For example, if I'm at the beach and there's a child playing in the water, I think I can safely say that everyone would agree that it would be wrong for me to go in to the water and drown the child. But say I see the child drowning, and there's no one else around, and I could easily jump in and save him without risking my own life, would it be wrong for me to stand there and do nothing as he drowns? I'm not so sure what one's moral obligation is in this case. Personally, I would feel awful about letting the child drown and would certainly try to save him, but maybe not everyone would, and I'm hesitant so say they've done something wrong by doing nothing. In other words I don't know if I would support a law punishing such behavior.

My understanding of Plato's dialogues is that, though Plato wrote them, the characters in them were real people. What I've never been clear on is whether the arguments Plato attributes to these individuals were actually their own arguments, or whether it's all just a rhetorical foil, and anything said in dialogues is actually something Plato came up with. E.g., if I want to cite Callicles' argument that might makes right, should I attribute the idea to Callicles, or to Plato?