I'm not sure who has written on the topic under the specific guise that you ask about, but a good deal of work on personal identity certainly bears on it. The philosopher's question would be whether reincarnation (or something like it) is possible on a physicalist view. And on at least one important account of personal identity, the answer is yes. That account is the "psychological continuity" view. It would say that if there's enough psychological continuity (apparent memories, beliefs, attitudes...) between an earlier person and a later one, then (depending on the version of the view) we either have a case of one and the same person at two different times or of two stages of one and the same person. This would be so regardless of whether we had bodily continuity, though there might well be added clauses about the later person/stage being causally connected to the earlier in the right sort of way, and/or that there not be any "competition" (i.e., no duplicates). For example: suppose you step into a...

On the one hand, most anything we can imagine has some sort of potential application. But the fact that we could use Michelangelo's Pieta to block a washed-out road doesn't have anything to do with why we think the Pieta is valuable. Now if we're prepared to use "usefulness" loosely enough, then the "value=usefulness" idea might get a better run for its money. A work of art has the potential "use" of eliciting aesthetic experiences from us. However, the obvious reply is that those experiences are valuable for their own sake and not because they're useful for some other purpose. The defended of the "value=usefulness" idea can still make a few moves. Aesthetic experiences, the story might go, are conducive to a good life. (We'll leave aside the large question of just what a good life amounts to.) But there are two obvious replies. One is that even if aesthetic experiences can be part of some larger value, they could still be valuable for their own sake. The even more obvious reply is...

Right, as Silver himself would be the first to agree. However, we might want to put it a bit differently. The projections could all be mistaken, but not because his methods or premises were incorrect. Here's a way to see the general point. Suppose we consider 20 possible independent events, and suppose that for each, the "correct" probability that the event will happen is 95%. (I use shudder quotes because there's an interesting dispute about just what "correctness" comes to for probability claims, but it's a debate we can set aside here.) Then for each individual event, it would be reasonable to project that it would occur. But given the assumption that the events are independent, the probability is over 64% that at least one of the events won't occur, and there's a finite but tiny probability (about 1 divided by 10 26 ) that none of the events will occur. So it's possible that all the projections could be reasonable and all the probabilities that ground them "correct," and yet for some or...

There's a scene in a movie (I forget which one) where a character claims to be happy, weeping all the while. Of course, that was just a movie, but I dare say you've seen someone blush bright red who says they're not embarrassed, or someone with their teeth clenched, insisting that they aren't angry. Our minds aren't detached from our bodies; what we feel makes a difference to what those bodies do. What people say they're feeling isn't always a good guide to what they actually feel. In the scenario you describe, the person is really feeling the emotion (schadenfreude in this case) but says otherwise. It's possible that the person knows very well what they feel but doesn't want to admit it. If so then they, at least, have "verified" their experience, and with the right sort of persuasion, might even be willing to own up to their emotion. Another possibility is that they are deceiving themselves. Just how self-deception works may be tricky to sort out, but it seems to be a real enough phenomenon....

It is confusing, isn't it? What does it mean to say that there's no absolute truth? It certainly seems to mean that all truth is in one way or another relative. That, in turn, seems to mean that for any potential truth, there are different and conflicting standards, equally valid, and the claim at issue might be true relative to one of these standard and false relative to another. But if this is really how things go for any potential truth, then it seems to go for the claim that there is no absolute truth. In other words, it seems to imply that the claim "there is no absolute truth" is true by some valid standards and false by some other, equally valid standards. This seems to make for a kind of trouble without invoking absolute truth. If someone tells me that there is no absolute truth, I seem by their own lights to be perfectly justified in insisting that I adhere to a valid standard according to which their claim is false. Perhaps they'll shrug and live with that. But there are...

It's an interesting question; a fully adequate answer would take at least an essay, and one that I'm not qualified to write. That said, a few preliminary distinctions may be helpful. First, whether someone feels offended and whether the feeling is appropriate are different questions. I recall a meeting where someone took offense at the speaker's use of "she" in place of the generic "he." In the context, it was clear that the speaker wasn't being offensive and that the audience member's feeling of offense was idiosyncratic to say the least. So while there's a sense in which the speaker "offended" the listener, there was no wrong. For what follows, let's set aside the cases where someone feels offended without good reason and turn to a more central sort of case. Suppose someone calls out "Hey ____!" to get someone's attention, where the blank gets filled with a racial slur. The person on the receiving end may not feel offended, and may not take offense, but that might be, for instance, because he's...

Briefly, it depends on what sorts of philosophical issues you want to pursue. Most philosophers, including most good ones, don't have extensive scientific knowledge, and the questions they're interested in don't call for knowing lots of science. But philosophers who work on issues in physics, or biology, or psychology or other sciences need to be knowledgeable about the sciences they work on. In philosophy of physics, it's not unusual for a philosopher to have an advanced degree (Masters or even PhD) in physics. Even if s/he doesn't have a science degree, s/he will have to have acquired a lot of knowledge of the field - or relevant parts of it. By way of general recommendation, however, the single most useful thing you can do if you're interested in philosophical issues about science is to learn as much math as you can. That can give you a serious leg up on learning the more specific scientific ideas that may be relevant to your interests. So if you have the aptitude, at the very least take some...

It's a good question and the answer seems pretty plausibly to be yes. The impression that people have of themselves can often be off the mark, and that can be shown by how they actually behave. Someone who thinks he's generous might really be stingy, always finding excuses not to contribute his fair share. Someone who thinks she's not very smart might actually have a lot of insight, as those who know her can plainly see. And on it goes. We're complicated beings. There's no reason a priori to think that the part of our minds that tries to make sense of ourselves overall is likely to be especially good at it. No doubt there are some things about ourselves that we're in a better position than others to know, but when it comes to the larger patterns and dispositions that go into making us who we are, disinterested outsiders may well be in a better position than we are to get things right.

You've raised several good questions, but I'd like to focus on just one of them. You offer serious moral reasons for being a vegetarian. And anyone who thinks that you're "forcing" your views on them because you argue for your views has a very strange idea of what "forcing" mean. But I wasn't entirely sure what just what sort of intolerance was at issue here. I assume the people you're arguing with don't want to require you to eat meat, so at least that degree of intolerance isn't at issue. Perhaps they think you're argument that the state should be able to require them to be vegetarians. I didn't take that to be your view, but if it were it would be odd to say that they're being intolerant by objecting to such a potential imposition on their behavior. That said, democratic societies routinely do stop people from acting on at least some sincerely-held moral beliefs. For example: someone might believe they shouldn't allow their children to have blood transfusions. Most democratic countries ...

On one version of the Categorical Imperative, we're told to act only on maxims (roughly, principles of action) that we could will to be universal laws. That may or may not be the right way to think about morality; I don't have a settled opinion. However, there are philosophers who think Kant had the theory right, but fell down in applying it. Kant thought that lying is always wrong; whether the Categorical Imperative requires this is less clear. The question is whether there's a way of formulating an acceptable maxim that allows for lying in some circumstances. Kant's argument to the contrary isn't entirely convincing, to say the least. The case of homosexuality is arguably a case in point -- or more accurately, the case of homosexual sex may be a case in point. Kant thought, far as I know, that homosexual acts are always wrong. But when someone who's homosexual by orientation acts on that orientation, it's pretty implausible that their maxim, universalized, requires that heterosexuals have...