I can't imagine that anyone sets out to solve a philosophical problem with "absolutely no psychological bias" concerning what the correct solution will look like. The degree to which I think I've already surmised "the answer" to a problem before getting down to the hard work of solving it depends on the particular problem. But I doubt I ever embark on finding a solution with no preconceived notion at all about the right answer. I don't think this method counts as intellectually dishonest in general, and especially not in philosophy, where the success of one's solution depends entirely on the quality of one's argumentation, which is open for all to judge. Unlike empirical scientists, philosophical problem-solvers can't fake data. If a philosopher's proposed solution to a problem isn't clearly supported by the argumentation that he/she provides, anyone who reads the proposal is in a position to see that. This bracingly high intellectual standard is one of the main virtues of philosophy when it's done...

No. The mere possibility of a counter-argument (i.e., "there could be a counter-argument") doesn't imply that the premise is false or that an argument containing the premise is unsound. The counter-argument itself must have a true conclusion in order to guarantee that the premise against which it's a counter-argument is false. Every sound argument has a true conclusion (although the converse doesn't hold), so if there exists a sound argument against a particular premise, then the particular premise is false. Often, however, the very soundness of that counter-argument will be a matter of controversy.

Before I could consider the ethics of this scenario, I'd have to satisfy myself that it's a coherent scenario. Let's call the person in question "Jane." The scenario seems to require that something like the following be true: "Jane sacrificed much of her time and energy to achieve justice, but because her sacrificial actions led to an unsatisfying outcome Jane didn't sacrifice much of her time and energy to achieve justice." I can't see how such a scenario is comprehensible enough to be assessed ethically. The question also arises whether Jane's sacrificial actions contributed so much to Jane's identity -- to who she now is -- that it's incoherent to ask what Jane's life would be like now had she not made those sacrifices: we wouldn't be asking about Jane but about a numerically different person.

Entirely! Philosophical training is an excellent complement to scientific training. Indeed, I wish more scientists had received it (see this response ). The sciences abound with interesting questions for the philosopher. A philosophy/science double major can be logistically challenging because of all the lab hours required by many science programs. But if you can make it work, I highly recommend it.

I'm not sure why Tyson, Hawking, Krauss, Dawkins, Coyne, Feynman, et al. , express so much contempt for philosophy. But my best guess is that they're ignorant -- unaware -- of what philosophy is when it's done well, perhaps because they received little or no academic training in philosophy when they were undergraduate students. (By the time they reached graduate school in the sciences, it may have been too late for them to get that training even if they had been interested in getting it.) I don't think they're using different definitions, at least not systematically. Krauss does claim that physics has redefined the words "something" and "nothing," but I think he's deeply mistaken (see Question 4759 ). In general, I find that when non-philosophers, including scientists, reason about philosophical issues, they do so sloppily: making elementary mistakes in inference, conflating concepts that ought to be kept distinct, and so on. That's unfortunate but not surprising, since reasoning well about...

Thing is, the few professors in my department who work in this area don't want to be bothered, so I'm stuck. I find it hard to believe that professors in your department who work in your area of research "don't want to be bothered" with questions about a research topic from someone within a year of starting his/her dissertation. If any of those professors are your advisors, it's their job to field such questions. If, after gently persisting, you can't get constructive advice about your dissertation topic from faculty in your own department, you should seriously consider transferring to a program where you can get such advice.

Speaking for my own response to Question 4636: I offered two quotations of Krauss from his online interview with Sam Harris (in which Harris gave Krauss ample space to clarify his positions) in order to show how advanced training in science doesn't guarantee even minimal competence in philosophy. All three clauses in the first quotation are stunningly false: First, modern science hasn't "changed completely our conception of the very words 'something' and 'nothing'"; arguably, science couldn't completely change our conception of those ordinary-language words. Krauss seems to think that science has somehow made the word 'something' synonymous with 'something material' and 'nothing' synonymous with 'nothing material', but if that were so then those two-word phrases would be pleonastic (i.e., redundant), which clearly they're not. The set {2} contains nothing material, but it contains something; it's not the empty set. Second, the statement "Empirical discoveries continue to tell us that the...

Or even after a difficult day doing theoretical cosmology, to judge from what physicist Lawrence Krauss says about his new book, A Universe from Nothing , in an online interview with Sam Harris . Choice quotations: "Modern science...has changed completely our conception of the very words 'something' and 'nothing'. Empirical discoveries continue to tell us that the Universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not, and 'something' and 'nothing' are physical concepts and therefore are properly the domain of science, not theology or philosophy." "[D]o we have any physical reason to believe that such nothing was ever the case? Absolutely, because we are talking about our universe, and that doesn’t preclude our universe arising from precisely nothing , embedded in a perhaps infinite space , or infinite collection of spaces, or spaces-to-be" (my italics). Those assertions are so confused it's hard to know where to begin. Even fellow physicists have lambasted Krauss for talking...

The reasoning you gave illustrates why Zeno's example has a chance of counting as a paradox at all. As you show, of course Achilles will overtake the tortoise. But Zeno claimed to have equally good reasoning showing that Achilles never overtakes the tortoise. That's the paradox: apparently good reasoning in favor of each of two incompatible claims. For Zeno's reasoning and a critique thereof, see sections 3.1 and 3.2 of this SEP entry .

I interpret you as asking this: Why do we find it puzzling or counterintuitive that statements 1–3 are true in the case in which you own exactly two pets, neither of which is a dog, a cat, or a bird? Is it because we assume that "all" implies "at least one"? Those are empirical, psychological questions whose answers I don't know. But I do think it's worth distinguishing between what "all" logically implies and what "all" conversationally implies. (You might have a look at the SEP entry on implicature .) On the one hand, the statement "All intelligent extraterrestrials are extraterrestrials" had better be true, and its truth had better not depend on the existence of intelligent extraterrestrials. So I think there's good reason to deny that "all" logically implies "at least one." On the other hand, someone who owns no dogs and who says "All my dogs have their shots" has said something odd or misleading, even if true. So I think there's good reason to say that, at least sometimes, "all"...