We know that when we see Alpha Centauri with the naked eye we are seeing light that left that star over 4 years ago when Bush was still President. Other stars are obviously much farther away and we’re looking at light that originated, say, when Galileo was still around or when the pyramids were being built. When we’re told that telescopes help us see into ‘deep space’ I’m wondering what that means: do they simply magnify the detail of images or do they help us see the detailed images earlier than we would with the naked eye? The difference that I have in mind is this: a friend comes to my house who I know has been travelling an hour to see me. I first see him when I open the front door. But suppose I’m looking forward to the reunion and I set out to meet him half way so as to abbreviate his journey. Suppose further I have the capacity/technology to meet him at his place of origin so I can see him immediately. Now, does a telescope, say Hubble, allow astronomers and cosmologists to see ‘earlier’ into...

Is it wrong for me to accept the very real possibility (in light of social trends in the past decades) that my current partner and I might well break up, for reasons yet unforseeable, in the future? It seems a rational judgement - a large number of marriages don't last, and unmarried partnerships even more so - yet I can imagine that I would be upset if my partner accepted this possibility as one of those "facts of life" we have to deal with.

If everyone has the right to their own body, is there anything even wrong with self-injury? If someone who smokes is effectively also 'harming' himself, what makes a person cutting herself doing something wrong?

How can we precisely define cheating in sports? It does not appear sufficient to say that any instance of willful rule-breaking in sports counts as cheating. For instance, no one would say that one basketball player who fouls another is "cheating," even though there is an obvious sense in which that player is breaking the rules. The difficulty seems to consist in the fact that practically all sports infractions have corresponding penalties (such as opponent free throws) built into the rules of the game. It isn't obvious how we're to distinguish banal infractions, such as fouling a player in basketball, from obvious cases of cheating, such as blood doping in competitive cycling. If a cyclist has his title revoked after being caught doping (or if he is fined, or is banned from future races, or whatever), what would prevent us from saying that his infraction was accounted for by the rules of cycling in the same way as fouls are accounted for in basketball, and that it therefore did not constitute cheating?

Can sexuality be fluid? Does it have to be black and white?

If you personally cannot slaughter an animal by your own hand or even imagine doing so, then should you still eat meat? Do you still have the natural right to eat meat?

Do imaginary numbers exist?

I am a practical person. I wonder whether a good philosopher is able always to answer the questions on this site with a reasonable certainty about how certain he is of his answers ("Philosopher Meta-Certainty Ability")? The readers of this site would clearly benefit from knowing the degree of certainty of the answers they read. Therefore, if the Philosopher Meta-Certainty Ability exists, then the readers of this site would clearly benefit from the answers to this site being prefaced with "I'm not so sure of this..." or "I'm really sure of this..." But the answers on this site do not have such prefaces. So it appears that either (a) the Philosopher Meta-Certainty Ability doesn't exist, (b) it does exist but the philosophers on this site are consciously not doing something that would clearly benefit the readers, or (c) it does exist but the philosophers on this site are non-consciously not doing something that would clearly benefit the readers. Either (1) there are some additional possibilities beyond...

Hello, My question is the following: If a mentally and physically healthy person considers his/her life as meaningless and worthless, would that constitute a rational reason for him/her to commit a suicide.

I've just read about Cantor'd diagonal argument, and I have some questions about it... Let's say we want to map every real number between 0 and 1 to natural numbers. If I'm not mistaken, that can be done this way: If we have number of form 0.abcdef... (letters stand for decimals, but only some are shown since there is infinite amount of them), then we can produce number N which equals 2^a * 3^b * 5^c * 7^d * 11^e * 13^f * (next prime)^(next decimal). For example, number 0.12 equals to 2^1 * 3^2 (* 5^0 * 7^0 * ...) = 18. Given any natural number N, we can easily determine which real number it represents (if any). My first question is: is all this consistent with Cantor's diagonal argument? (Can both be true at the same time?) Cantor proved there is no one-to-one mapping (not just any mapping), is that important for his result? If yes, it somehow seems intuitive to me, at least at the first sight, that one-to-one mapping can be achieved by simply removing natural numbers that don't represent any real...