Can a feeling that God exists count as a good reason for believing in God? Could it also count as good reason for public policy -- for funding churches and religious schools?

How can understanding of issues be advanced even when definitive knowledge can’t be had?

Hello. I wanted to ask about revenge. (1) Is there anything morally wrong with taking revenge? (2) If the urge to take revenge is a genetic instinct (and surely, it's quite plausible that it might be), why should it have less moral authority than any other feeling about right and wrong? The background to this question is that, while there's no explicit eye-for-an-eye in the laws of most contemporary societies, usually judges take community expectations and appropriate punishment into account when sentencing, and not just factors like legal requirements, precedence, rehabilitation and deterrence -- so revenge is arguably still very much a part of modern law.

I'm a literature student and I've become aware that Marxist theorists (Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and so on) often talk about 'dialectics' - a term, I have traced to Hegel. But I'm unclear what is meant by this or how the term has been adopted. Is there anywhere you could point me which has an overview/guide to this?

Hi, I'm struggling to understand free will. I've been told that either of the following scenarios is commensurable with free will: (1) an omniscient being that knows all future events; (2) a block universe where future and past in some sense coexist with the present. But if free will is commensurable with these scenarios, would it be merely epiphemomenal? Would free will play any causative role if either of these conditions was true?

Are there any good reasons to think that life has intrinsic rather than instrumental value?

Science claims that the cells in our bodies are alive, but the fundamental parts of the cell such as molecules and atoms are not alive. Does that mean our bodies are only partly alive?

Recently, I noticed about sorites problem. I thought that problem is serious to all of philosophical endeavor, but my friend told me that is problematic when you assume some kind of platonism. Is he right? Or is it equally problematic when we assume nominalism?

If I have a choice between two candidates, neither of whom I like, is the morally responsible thing to not vote, because I then wouldn't be causally implicated in either of them coming into office?

Hi! I was looking at images from Abu Ghraib today, and I was wondering -- is there any sense to thinking that the mere act of looking at the prisoners is wrong, or even in some way harms them? Many of the prisoners are not identifiable from the photos, so I'm not sure that my worry is about reputational damage. The same might apply to other sorts of images, and even text. For instance: "Fapgate", where nude images of celebrities were distributed without their consent. Or what about if I find a person's diary on a train and read it? Is there any sense to the feeling that I am violating someone, though that person and I will always be strangers to each other? To add one more twist: what if the author of the diary, or a prisoner depicted in one of the photos, is now dead? Can I still be said to harm them?