I presume scientists (consciously or not) use some fundamental assumptions in their work. I can think of 'Our minds are capable of deriving rational theories' and 'There actually are consistent physical laws to be discovered'. I expect there are more than this. Is there a list someone has figured out? It probably applies to more non-scientists as well. Or if there isn't a list, why not? Thanks.

Is philosophy useful? I recently abandoned a course of philosophical study because I became overwhelmed by a sense that all I was doing - all I could ever do - was produce more philosophy. It was fun, it was interesting, I improved my research skills and now have a wider circle of strongly opinionated friends. But I couldn't escape the sense that real ideas were being abandoned in favour of increasingly intricate, but ultimately unhelpful semantic constructs and their counterexamples - for some reason, I am reminded of a paradox involving some ravens.

I was reading a philosophy article, which just talked about "the functions of..." (the subject was law, but that isn't what I'm interested in now). I am not being able to find any introductory philosophy text on "function", not even in Wikipedia (apart from entries on mathematical functions). What is a function?

My English teacher has said that it is important to read an author first, before reading her critics, so that one can form an opinion unpolluted by the arguments of others. Is philosophy like this as well? Should I read Wittgenstein before I read books and articles about Wittgenstein? Should I avoid books which try to summarize the great works of philosophy, in case theirs is a biased interpretation? Philosophy is pretty hard, and I think that few people can be expected to attack _The critique of pure reason_ alone; for the philosophy undergraduate, what should be the role of "secondary" sources?

In the larger epistemological sense, what role does the law of witnesses, e.g. Federal Rules of Evidence (http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/index.html#article_vi), play in our search for knowledge (and truth)? So much of our day-to-day life in modern society is based upon the law or rule of witnesses, e.g. the rule of law, scientific investigations, journalism (print and television news reports), to name just a few. And yet if we take the view of the skeptics -- and to a larger degree, much of philosophy -- nothing is really knowable (with respect to certainty). So how can so much of our daily life rest upon (be founded upon) a principle -- the law or rule of witnesses -- which may be without epistemological foundation? If there are any texts that specifically address this subject, I would appreciate references. Thanks in advance for any and all replies!

What is music? I can recognise music from cultures other than my own as being music, even if I don't enjoy it; but what makes a series of sounds 'music'? Similarly (I assume), when does human vocalising become song?

On the morality of the death penalty: I live in a country (Australia) where the death penalty has long been abolished and is unpopular; particularly mandatory death penalties, say, for example, for people trafficking in illegal drugs over certain quantities. I bring up this example because an Australian citizen was executed in Singapore for exactly that activity. Certainly, I find such laws difficult to justify as consistent, on utilitarian grounds at least. If a person caught in an airport with 0.5 kg of heroin strapped to his body ought to die because that is less-bad than the reasonably presumed consequences to many people would be, were he allowed to live, then surely there is a case for the death penalty for tobacconists or sellers of alcohol. I have no statistics at hand, but I am guessing that the tobacco sold by one tobacconist over several decades would lead to comparable illnesses or numbers of deaths as would the total amount of heroin carried by this particular Australian 'drug mule'. ...

Rawls defines justice as fairness. But it is not clear to me how justice differs from fairness in the first place. Dictionaries do not help because they all indicate both terms as synonyms of each other. Could anyone point me out how the two are distinct? THANKS!!!

This is a follow-up to question 1522 [www.askphilosophers/question/1522). In my language, there is a single word for "justice" and "fairness" ("justiça"). If someone in an English-speaking movie says "That ain't fair!", the translation will probably use our word for "just". So, it is really very difficult for me to understand Rawls's claim that justice is fairness. How could justiça not be justiça?

Can there be such a thing as 'progress' in human history? Does time and circumsance have a more than superficial bearing on our beings? Or are we essentially the same regardless of historical epoch or geographical conditioning? I refer to the so-called 'birth of reason' in 17th century Europe, and its so-said 'dawn of modernity'.