A man points a gun and pulls the trigger. The gun fires, and the bullet strikes another man in the head, killing him instantly. Was it murder? Anyone who thinks they can answer the question based on what's been said so far doesn't understand the word "murder." Did the man who pulled the trigger do something wrong? Anyone who thinks they can answer the question based on what's been said so far doesn't understand what it means for something to be wrong. Whether what happened was a murder, and whether anyone did anything wrong depends on a lot that's been left out, not least a lot about who intended to do what and who knew or believed what. Scenario #1. The man who pulled the trigger is a hit man. The person shot was an otherwise innocent witness to a crime. The person who hired the hit man wants to be sure the witness can't testify. This murder and the man who pulled the trigger (as well as the one who hired him) did something deeply wrong. Scenario #2: The man who pulled the trigger is a police...

It's pretty clear that the rules of chess don't count as a work of art. That's not a comment on the virtues or beauty of the rules; it's a comment on what we count as an artwork. As it is, particular chess matches/basketball games... also don't count, though we might get a good deal of aesthetic pleasure from contemplating them. Is there anything necessary about this? I'd say no. The view of what counts as art that I find most plausible is some version of what's called the institutional view. Art is a human practice -- an institution in the broad sense. Though there are no strict criteria, to count as an artwork, something has to be related to the conventions, practices, etc. of art in the right sort of way. But just what that comes to can and does change. This might raise chicken/egg worries, but those aren't actually very pressing. There are undeniable cases of artworks, artists, art museums, art critics, art afficianados, etc. To use the not-entirely-satisfactory term, there is an artworld....

How about because they're hard questions? Okay, maybe that's a bit quick. But it's close. When a question doesn't have an obvious answer, it's no surprise that people disagree. And if there's no agreed-upon method for getting the answer, it's even less surprising. A lot of what most people would count as fundamental questions about life are like that. For that matter, so are a lot of questions that most people would have a hard time getting excited about. (A good chunk of what you'll find in academic journals deals with questions that hardly count as fundamental issues about life, but the answers aren't obvious and the methods for getting at answers aren't obvious either.) For some such questions, there's another sort of reason: picking an answer depends on how we rank competing values. Many of the familiar differences between liberals and conservatives are of this sort, for example. And it's not just that questions of value can be hard or that there's not always a clear way to settle them. It...

Let's start with a quick comment about string theory. My knowledge is only journalistic, but it's clear that string theory is a mathematical theory and states its hypotheses about extra dimensions using mathematics. And as your comment about additional variables already suggests, there's nothing mathematically esoteric about higher dimensions. When variables have the right sort of independence, they represent distinct mathematical dimensions in a mathematical space, though not necessarily a physical space. (Quantum theory uses abstract spaces called Hilbert spaces that can have infinitely many dimensions. But these mathematical spaces don't represent space as we usually think of it.) Of course, it might be that getting the right physics will call for the development of new branches of math. Remember, for example, that Newtonian physics called for the invention of Calculus, and though earlier thinkers had insights that helped pave the way, Calculus was something new. Just what sort of new...

Perhaps it will help to distinguish between what "7+5" refers to and how it does the referring. The expressions "7+5," "8+4,", "2x6," "36/3" and countless others all refer to the number 12. (Though not everyone agrees that there really are numbers, we'll set that issue aside here.) But they do it in different ways. Compare: "The 44th President of the United States is Barack Obama" This is true, and it's true because "The 42nd President of the United States" refers to the same person as "Barack Obama." Barack Obama is the same person as the 42nd President of the United States, just as the number 12 is the same number as 7+5. (Of course, the process of adding two numbers is not a number, but "7+5 = 12" doesn't say it is.) The sense of confusion here comes from the fact that there can be more to the meaning of a referring expression than just what it refers to. The description "The 42nd President of the United States" refers to Barack Obama, as does the description "The first...

Or stones. They may be quietly thinking of Vienna. (Sorry; irresistible inside joke.) People who think the mind is material don't think there's some special kind of matter ("Mindium?") that has the power to think. They think that matter appropriately structured and in appropriate relationship with the environment allows organisms to have beliefs, feelings, etc. And "appropriately structured" is best illustrated by things like human brains. The matter in trees and lumps of coal doesn't have anything like the kind of structure that brains do. And so the reasons we have for thinking that purely physical things can have minds don't give us reason to think that just any old physical thing can think. A footnote: some people have suggested that there's a sort of primitive mental character associated with all matter. The view is called panpsychism . But even panpsychists would generally agree that complex mental processes depend on the right kinds of complex arrangements of matter.

I'd been hoping one of our classicists would take a stab at this, but since none has… The Jews were not the only people in the ancient world to develop monotheistic ideas, nor, for that matter, was Judaism clearly monotheistic (as opposed to henotheistic — taking Yahweh to be their god and the most powerful.) There's a strong abstract and unificatory streak in Greek thought that would make the development of monotheistic ideas unsurprising, whether most people accepted them or not. But on the matter of translation, I fid it hard to imagine any of the classicists I know hedging their translations to make them acceptabe to wider Christian culture. On the contrary, if the usual translations were suspect, I'd expect this to be an active debate in the literature, and far as I know, it's not.

There are several questions in what you've asked, all of them interesting. I'm going to single out one of them. If I read you correctly, one thing you're asking is why we can describe the universe using math and logic -- why the universe "fits" our rules of math and logic. We can begin our stab at an answer by noticing that this fact -- that the universe can be described using math and logic -- is weaker than it might seem. Imagine a computer screen of 1024 by 768 pixels, for a total of 786,432 pixels. For simplicity, imagine that each pixel is simply ether off or on; ignore color. Then there are 2 786,432 possible patterns that could show up on the screen. Most of those are a jumble -- not "logical" or orderly in any interesting way. However, each can, in principle, be described. An exhaustive list stating for each pixel whether it's off or on would do. So the fact that the screen can be described using math/logic doesn't really constrain things much at all. Some number of pixels will be on...

Of course, in a perfectly good sense of "exist", existence doesn't exist either. Existence isn't a thing, and so there is no such thing as existence, though of course, bears, bells and BMWs exist, to mention but a few. And yes: there is no such thing as non-existence, because "non-existence" isn't way of referring to a thing. But unicorns don't exist. Neither do square circles. And, according to some, neither do free lunches. No fallacy there. Does everything exist? Well, if "everything" means "all the things that exist," then everything exists. (Though of course, this doesn't mean that there is a special thing, namely everything , that exists.) But since, as noted, unicorns don't exist, it's not true that "everything" in the sense of "everything that might have existed" actually exists. It's likewise not true that that every description (e.g., "round square") picks out something that exists. The conclusion of the argument comes partly from trading on ambiguity. Related: ...

You say that love is an emotion, and in some sense we can grant that. But saying it suggests that love is a feeling , and that, in turn, suggests that it's like a warm sensation in one's tummy -- something that we can simply detect by introspection and that we can't (or can't easily) be wrong about. But it's more complicated than that. If I love someone, I can still have moments when I feel angry at them, for example. But my momentary anger -- a non-loving feeling -- isn't the same as not loving them. Love is, among other things, a complicated set of dispositions. Some of them are dispositions to feel a certain way in certain situations, and others are dispositions to behave in certain ways. I might be momentarily angry with my daughter, for example, but it might be true that if anything were to happen to her, I would be beside myself with grief. I might also be willing to make considerable sacrifices for her well-being. I might worry about her, take time to check up on her, and do all of this not...