Does music create emotion, or does it bring to the surface existing emotions?

All spoken and written languages - current or extinct - have things they express poorly or can't express at all. Art can be used to fill in the gaps of the inexpressible. How many languages would a person need to know to express everything, and by being able to express everything, would they be more capable or less capable of art?

Why do we often put our thoughts into words which we have no intention of writing down or speaking? Surely language is a much less efficient way of perceiving the world as it doesn't express our exact viewpoint, therefore we have to add our own meaning to language anyway. Why then, do we sometimes put exact thoughts into an inexact form during the thought process?

Here's a real life question faced by most of us at some point in our lives and that I will soon face: Given our cultural context, what is the best thing to do with the last names of a couple that is to be married? The default position even today of the so-called "person on the street" is that the woman should take the man's last name. However, given the patriarchal ideology which this practice is a manifestation of, this seems like a social norm that ought to be violated until it no longer exists. But what to put in its place? I see three plausible alternatives: (1) both the man and the woman keep their original names; (2) the man takes the woman's name; (3) the man and the woman create a totally new last name that they choose to share in place of their former names. Option (3) seems best to me right now, because it seems to get the desired symbolic value of a common last name (it symbolizes the couple's unity and commitment to live their lives essentially together) without symbolically subordinating...

Lewis Carroll spoofed logic, semantics, and language in Alice with constructions such as (paraphrased): must I mean what I say when I say what I mean, to which the response was I see what I eat isn't the same as I eat what I see. Chomsky cited "time flies like an arrow" and "fruit flies like bananas". My question is, are such constructions possible in all languages (presumably the above examples are not always directly translatable) especially non-Indo-European ones and, if not, what are the philosophical/linguistic ramifications of this? Does it just boil down to word play in any given language or are there linguistic universals at play? I once read a bilingual Chinese/English American (!) philosopher claiming that Chinese was more conducive to essaying logical analysis than English and, as far as I know, all writing about linguistic philosophy has been in 'Western' languages, usually English. Is this significant? Do individual languages or language families rather than language itself colour our...

My friend asked me this question and frankly, I have no answer for him. "Is it possible that people that are mentally unstable (a little on the crazy side) are actually sane and we are the ones that are crazy?"

In art or design, why do certain combinations of color, shape, contrast, font, etc., strike more visual impact and/or seem more appealing than others? There are certain standbys or principles of design that seem to be successful (e.g., appropriate white space, complementary colors, etc.), yet it also seems entirely subjective as to what we find beautiful in artistic realms. Is there any generalizability to the quality of visual appeal?

It has been argued that if you duplicate a person the duplicate will not be the original person but a copy, identical but separate. (Teleportation devices would also fall into the above trap, as a recombination of your existing atoms is no more "you" than an identical duplication.) So does this imply that your essence is transcendent, and that materialists (like me) are wrong. How do you define your essence when it seems independent of atoms?

If you watch a car drive away from you down a straight road, it appears to get smaller as it gets farther away. We know that it doesn't *really* get smaller, it only *appears* to get smaller. So we distinguish between the real size of the car and the apparent size (at a particular distance). I have two problems with this. First, at what distance do we see the real size; or, at what distance does the apparent size equal the real size? Second, the real car is supposedly outside our heads and the apparent car is supposedly an image of the real car, and inside our heads. But the car we actually see is (a) outside our heads, so real, and (b) changing its size with distance, so an image inside our heads: but how can it be both?

If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear it, it does not make a sound. This makes sense because sound is a perception. Without a perceiver, the falling tree just creates sound waves that are never perceived as sound. But, Schrödinger's cat applies to a living thing whose existence is not dependent on any outside observation. Why is it that the the cat cannot be said to be alive or dead until an observation is made? Seems that the status of the cat is simply unknown until an obervation is made. Please explain.