When you see the Moon, which is about 250,000 miles away, does your consciousness extend out of your head, for a distance of 250,000 miles, to the Moon, or do you see an image of the Moon, brought to you by reflected sunlight? If you see an image of it then you do not see the real Moon, while if you see the real Moon then your consciousness somehow has to get out of your head to that distance. So do you see the real Moon, or not? The real Moon and the image cannot be one and the same, because the Moon is made of rock, and the image is not made of rock.

Why is philosophy so difficult?

In the light of the recent sentencing of David Irving, is there still a philosophical - and perhaps general - importance of 'free speech' and the free exchange of ideas, or must we draw limits on what can be said and how it can be said?

Why is it that even though we cannot predict how long a person's life would be, the value of a person's life generally decreases as their age increase? I have in mind an assumption of the measurement of a person's life as what order of priority others would place in trying to save that person's life. For example if person A and person B's lives are both in equal danger and person C decides saving person A's life is of higher priority than saving person B's life, then person A's life is rated as having higher value than person B's life. For example, people would value a 2 years old life more than the life of a 60 year old person, regardless if the 2 year old only have 2 more year to live and the 30 year old have another 20 years. I speculate that the reason why the value of a person's life is inversely proportional to their age is because as a person age they have been able to experience and enjoy more of life. However, I disagree that a person's age can be an accurate measure of how much of life they...

Can counterfactuals ever provide reasonable support to an argument? It seems as if this shouldn't be the case (why should something that hasn't happened be of relevance to anything), yet in some instances appears to not be entirely unreasonable. For example, "if you had listened to me and turned LEFT at the light, we wouldn't be late right now" seems valid enough in some favourable circumstances. In fact, whether or not such circumstances are favourable seems to be tied to the (thorny) problem of being able to perform induction. I ask because a lot of people use counterfactuals to "explain" failures/situations ("if you had worked harder, you wouldn't be in this position right now" or "if we hadn't struck first, they would have" etc.). Is this a legitimate argument?

Is there a moral difference between wishing for a selfish outcome (e.g. someone's death) - and acting on that wish (murder).

Why is sexism wrong?

What is the philosophical notion of personhood? Sorry if this is a bad question. I'm new to philosophy.

It is legitimate to say that tomatoes instantiate the property red. But is it also legitimate to say that tomatoes "cause" the instantiation of the property red? Thank you.

David Hume said of Berkeley that his arguments are irrefutable but his conclusions unacceptable --- or so I am told. Is this true, and if so, where can I find it? If it is true, isn't it a remarkably succinct statement of bigotry?