The question of whether homosexuality is a choice may be morally relevant. If, as is commonly--although not necessarily correctly--assumed, agents are only responsible for what they choose or do, then only if homosexuality is a choice can one be responsible for being a homosexual, and consequently, subject to moral or religious sanction for being a homosexual. The question of whether homosexuality is a choice, while a vexed one, remains unsettled, although it does appear that the balance of evidence currently seems to favor the view that homosexuality is not a choice. Although the question of whether homosexuality is a choice may thus well be taken to have moral significance, and although it has been linked to the issue of the legality of gay marriage, it is not clear to me that the issues are indeed related. The issues might be taken to be related in the following way. If marriage is supposed to reflect the 'natural' suitability of the partners in question, then, if homosexuality were indeed a...

The question is an interesting one, although it seems to me to be an empirical, rather than a philosophical question--or rather, several empirical, rather than philosophical questions. The first question is why people play sports; the second question is why people play the kinds of sports that they do; the third question is why people in different countries play different types of sports. (What follows is highly speculative; this is not an issue about which I have any special expertise.) The first question seems to me to be closely related to the question of why peoople--or, for that matter--animals, play at all. (Sports seem to be a particular kind of play engaged in only by human beings.) Considerable research has been done on the topic of animal play. It has been claimed that there are close parallels between animal and human play, and various hypotheses have been offered as to why humans and animals play: for example, that play reduces stress, overcomes boredom, enables creatures to form...

I wanted to add some remarks on this deep and subtle question, to which Charles has very interestingly responded. What's at stake here is when, on what grounds, and if, one should grant forgiveness. This is a thorny issue that, I think, goes to the very heart of human relations. "Forgive them," Christ said,"for they know not what they do." Christ seems here to be advocating that forgiveness should not at all be predicated on any action on the part of the betrayer: this recommendation, however, may be psychologically quite difficult to fulfill. Indeed, in my own experience, I have found that some sort of recognition of wrong is necessary in order for me to grant forgiveness. (Perhaps this simply reflects my own limitations.) As for 'forgiving and forgetting', that, while perhaps an ideal to be aimed at, again seems to be quite difficult to achieve. (It's very difficult to overcome one's own resentment at being wronged. Perhaps this means that it is very difficult genuinely to forgive...

Just to add a little to Eddy's fine response, which neatly limns both what position is taken on free will by most philosophers and the general state of play of the debates around free will. I just want to comment briefly on the status of the debate on free will for moral prescriptions--which I take to mean the justifiability of ascriptions of praise, blame, etc. (however they are understood--and there is debate, especially, on how to understand the nature of blame: for a sophisticated, but accessible and very clear treatment of this topic, see T. M. Scanlon, Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame ). Both compatibilists and incompatibilists agree that ascriptions of praise and blame are justified just in case agents are free, but they differ--as Eddy pointed out--with respect to how they define free will, which definitions reflect differing views on metaphysical and scientific views about the nature of human beings and of the world. Very roughly, incompatibilists believe that in order to be...

The following story is recounted in John Aubry's Life of Thomas Hobbes : "He was forty years old before he looked on geometry; which happened accidentally. Being in a gentleman's library Euclid's Elements lay open, and 'twas the forty-seventh proposition in the first book. He read the proposition. 'By G ,' said he, 'this is impossible!' So he reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a proof; which referred him back to another, which he also read. Et sic deinceps, that at last he was demonstratively convinced of that truth. This made him in love with geometry. I have heard Sir Jonas Moore (and others) say that it was a great pity he had not begun the study of the mathematics sooner, for such a working head would have made great advancement in it. So had he done he would not have lain so open to his learned mathematical antagonists. But one may say of him, as one says of Jos. Scaliger, that where he errs, he errs so ingeniously, that one had rather err with him than hit the...

In Between Man and Man , Martin Buber recounts the following story, which he takes to illuminate the experience at the heart of I and Thou : "When I was eleven years of age, spending the summer on my grandparents' estate, I used, as often as I could do it unobserved, to steal into the stable and gently stroke the neck of my darling, a broad dapplegray horse. It was not a casual delight but a great, certainly friendly, but also deeply stirring happening. If I am to explain it now, beginning from the still very fresh memory of my hand, I must say that what I experienced in touch with the animal was the Other, the immense otherness of the Other, which, however, did not remain strange like the otherness of the ox and the ram, but rather let me draw near and touch it. When I stroked the mighty mane, sometimes marvelously smooth-combed, at other times just as astonishingly wild, and felt the life beneath my hand, it was as though the element of vitality itself bordered on my skin, something that was...

Guilt, like pride, shame, and embarrassment, is an emotion of self-assessment; all these emotions, too, are social emotions, in that they involve reference to (real or imagined) relations to other people and our place in the social order. Given that guilt involves--one might even go so far as to say that it is at least in part constituted by--relations between the guilty party and some other party or parties, it is natural that it might arise in the context of love, understood as a loving relationship. Insofar as love is indeed a relationship--this, I think is a controversial claim: you might consider other entries on this site on love for other perspectives on love--then it would be natural that guilt, shame, and other social emotions would arise in the context of that relationship. What's distinctive of guilt, however, is a feeling of responsibility for an action that one regrets, an action, moreover, that violates authority or breaks rules--including, in this context, the rules constitutive of a...

It should be noted, first, that there is considerable disagreement even in the French Parliament regarding the ban on the wearing of the burqa; it has been suggested that the ban is a political ploy on the part of French President Nicolas Sarkozy. (For more on the internal disagreement regarding the law, see a recent article in The New York Times .) Despite the disagreement in the French Parliament, as noted in the Times article, it is likely that the bill will be passed by the French Senate in September and then become law. Does France thus risk, as Daniel Garrigue, the legislator who cast the sole vote against the law, said, slipping into totalitarianism? I think not; indeed, I think that the law is very much in keeping with France's secularism. The basic rationale for the law, which I think is untouched by the considerations advanced by Nussbaum and differs greatly from those considered by Andy in his response--although, to be sure, issues about security and the public space have been...

Primitive terms in logic are, indeed, those that cannot be defined further, they are basic starting points--like axioms in Euclid's geometry. It seems to me, however, that questions can and indeed are raised about the nature of these primitives. Are they necessary truths? Are they simply necessary relative to some system? Such questions continue to be investigated by logicians and philosophers of logic.

In "Brains in a Vat," the first essay of his book, Reason, Truth, and History , the philosopher Hilary Putnam considers a thought experiment, according to which an ant crawling along the sand produces what would appear to be an image of Winston Churchill. He asks whether this image would count as a depiction of Churchill, and claims that it would not: it would not count as a depiction or representation of Churchill, because the ant has never seen Churchill, and therefore could not have the intention to depict Churchill. The image, therefore, is not intrinsically meaningful: it would take an observer to notice that the ant's tracings resemble Churchill, and to conclude that s/he has seen a representation of Churchill traced in the sand, thereby endowing the ant's tracings with meaning. Nature as a whole, like the ant, does not seem capable of producing meaning: in order to produce meaningful representations (including pictures or words), there must be an agent who knows how to manipulate those signs....