As opposed, I suppose you mean, to affective or emotional content? Yes, both in the lyrics or librettos of various musical compositions and in the web work of meanings that have come to be attached to various sounds. Like most, if not all, artforms, music exists in an historical context, and within any context music relates to other music. So rhythms, harmonies, instrumentation, chord progressions, intonation, etc. evoke symbols, social ideas, abstract ideas concerning music theory, social criticism, human relationships, the divine, etc. Musical compositions themselves are associated with cultural movements (modernism, tradition, militancy, rebellion), fashion, politics, even entire civilizations (the Europe, Africa, India). When we listen to a song, we listen to a history and to a society.

The problem of theodicy is a marvelous one, isn't it. I can't tell you how much pleasure I've culled from it, as have my students. For myself, I can't think of anyone whose put your point in exactly this way--but I don't pretend to command the enormous literature on the subject. I think an objection, or at least a question, might be raised to your point along these lines: Why is it better that people question the existence of God than not question? Wouldn't it be better if God were simply manifest to all and that there were no good reason for doubting God's existence? What possible advantage is served by God's hiddenness that isn't overwhelmmed by the enormous loss of souls it yields? You yourself raise a second objection: there seems to be a superfluity or excess of evil even if your point is granted. Therefore, the idea that evil is justified because it makes it possible to question God's existence doesn't seem sufficient.

The issue of what's to count as 'reaonsable' is a fascinating one, indeed. Part of the answer depends upon whether what one thinks is reasonable is in some sense transhistorical or whether it changes over time as people develop different norms of rationality. There's a larger than many realize contingent number of philosophers even today who think telelogical arguments reasonable. But your question is about how things stood before Darwin. In my own view, whether you think norms or rationality transhistorical or not, David Hume's argument's against the teleological argument in Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779; first composed in the 1750s) were decisive nearly a century before Darwin. Since, Hume I don't think one really can regard the telelogical argument as reasonable.

Wittgenstein once posed the following question: If one could open up the top of one's head and then hold a mirror in front of oneself so that one could see inside one's own brain, would one see one's thoughts and feelings? It seems to me that the answer is no, and so whatever the relationship of mind is to body, brain activity is not properly called thought and feeling. Realtime monitoring of the brain gives us something like Wittgenstein's mirror. It shows us what goes on in the brain when we think and feel. But it doesn't follow that we should call what it shows us thought and feeling.

This gets a bit beyond my expertise, but I suppose like you I find these sorts of issues irresistible. (Kant thought that part of that irresistibility was a feature of our being rational beings, by the way. Perhaps he was right.) Anyway, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "origins of the 'Big Bang'," but I'm unaware of any scientific theories advance any position at all on any cause or originary reason for the big bang. The bang itself, perhaps from an original singularity, is as far back as natural science goes. Indeed, in a sense, it makes no sense to speak about any time before the big bang, since as I understand it time began with the big bang, too. Now, I have encountered speculation about the big bang being one in a 'series' of big bangs--where a bang would be followed by a period of expansion, which would be followed by a contraction back to a singularity, which would be followed by another big bang. But that still wouldn't offer an explanation about why this cycle exists in the...

There are broadly speaking four ways we get better at reasoning (narrowly speaking there are countless). 1. We learn to apply existing logical principles more skillfuly, using them in new contexts and using them more effectively in old contexts. 2. We invent or discover new logical principles. 3. We learn to apply existing error theories better so that they help us better understand how and why we go wrong in reasoning. 4. We invent or discover new error theories. Reasoning might be understood as a set of discursive procedures or rules that make it possible for us to preserve or secure truth. By this I mean that if we begin with a set of truths (even a single truth) reason allows us to proceed to new truths with a significant degree of assurance, perhaps even certainty. Reasoning well means doing this skillfullly in lots of different contexts, in lots of different ways, with lots of different forms of language and thought. It also means understanding how people go wrong so that even...

"Knowledge" might be divided into four types: (1) theoretical knowledge (knowing that X); (2) practical knowledge (know how); (3) familiarity (knowing someone); and (4) moral knowledge (knowing what's right). 1. Emotion alone doesn't seem able to produce theoretical knowledge. In fact, emotion often obstructs it. 2. Emotion alone can't make it possible for us to know how to do something--e.g. drive a car or play the violin. But it can be a necessary condition for us knowing how, for example, to play music well or for knowing how to manage people psychologically (as an effective manager, parent, or politician might know how to do). 3. Emotion might be the result of familiarity, but knowing someone isn't made possible by emotion alone. 4. The very idea of moral "knowledge" is a strange one, but one might say that knowing what the right thing to do in a given situation might be said to be determined through feeling. But I doubt it would make sense to say that emotion alone yields moral...

The reliability of witnesses is a terribly interesting issue. You may find it surprising to learn that according to the directors of the Innocence Project at Northwestern University (a project that investigates cases of erroneous criminal conviction) the false testimony of eye witnesses is the single biggest reason for false convictions. How is it that so much of our life rests upon something so unreliable, something with no foundation? Well, perhaps we have no other choice. That is to say, we find ourselves subject to belief because it's our human nature or human condition to believe, not because we have what Descartes called a fundamentum inconcussum , an unshakeable foundation. (Hume would agree.) And perhaps there's a positive side to the skeptical insight. Perhaps we're better off acknoweldging that our beliefs may be (or are) without ultimate foundations. Why? Because those who believe that they have apprehended ultimate foundations tend to be dogmatists, and on the basis of absolute...

What a fascinating question. I hope that some of my co-panelists can give you the answer this question deserves. For myself, I would briefly and cautiously answer this way: What makes a series of sounds (or even a single sound or even a silence) music is our agreement to consider it as music. Just as John Cage invites people to consider the silence and random sounds that occur during a 4 minute and 33 second period music (his piece is called, 4' 33" ) and Marcel Duchamp invites people to consider a urinal as sculpture (he called the piece Fountain ), we make something music when we interpret it as music.

When I find myself considering individual cases like the BTK killer and Reinhard Heydrich, I find myself sympathetic to just the sort of argument you present and animated by the feeling that there's really no compelling reason against executing them. But when I think things through more soberly and consider the death penalty as a policy or institution, I find a number of objections compelling. First, let's look at your principle. You present three necessary conditions that must be met for the death penalty to be morally permissible (which I take you to mean when you say "there is a reasonable argument for"). In other words: (A) THE DEATH PENALTY IS PERMISSIBLE ONLY IF THE THREE CONDITIONS CAN BE MET. [DP-->3 CONDITIONS ] I take it that this implies the following: if any one of the three conditions can't be met in a particular instance, then (by modus tollens) the death...