This is a dicey question, especially in light of the fraught family situation. All would be clearer if the original schedule to pay had been notarized and had, therefore been effectively made into a contract, in which case this would be a relatively straightforward case of contract law--but such is not the case. In light of the fact that the agreement to repay the money was a promise to repay--a promise which was broken--in failing to repay the money, your son did do something to undermine his relation to you. I can, therefore, understand the considerable symbolic significance of your request that your son sign a new commitment to repay the money that you loaned him, for in so doing, you seem to think--and I am inclined to agree--that your son will thereby signal his renewed commitment to repay the money to you, thereby at least implicitly recognizing that he had reneged on his initial commitment and harmed your relationship, which can be as it were set to rights and somewhat restored by his...

In order to determine what role, if any, religion generally should play in knowledge about "how things are or came to be," it is essential first to know just what 'things' are at issue. For example, it seems to me that if the 'things' in question are truths about morality, then religion generally may well have a role to play; by contrast, it seems to me that if the 'things' in question are truths about the nature of the physical world, say, then it's not clear to me that religion has any role whatsoever to play in helping us to gain knowledge of such truths. (I write here not from any particular standpoint on the issue: indeed, even the great seventeenth-century French philosopher and theologian Nicolas Malebranche, who famously believed in the truth of occasionalism, the view that God is the only real cause in the universe, and, hence that all changes in the universe were effected by God's causal power, did not think that appeals to God were relevant in the context of giving scientific explanations. ...

One often finds philosophers appealing to the intuitions of the 'folk', or, as an earlier strand of Anglo-American philosophy put it, the views of 'the man on the Clapham omnibus'. Such appeals play a variety of roles in philosophizing--they can be used as the basis for a position that is more clearly to be articulated, or a position against which to argue--but it's not always altogether clear to me what basis there is for such appeals. Why, I am tempted to wonder, should the 'intuitions' of the folk about philosophical issues be any more relevant to philosophers than folk intuitions about the nature of the physical world should be of interest to physics? Such methodological issues were prominent in the heyday of ordinary language philosophy, when great philosophical emphasis was placed on what is said when as a guide to clarifying philosophical issues. (The greatest practitioner of ordinary language philosophy, or what this practitioner himself called 'linguistic phenomenology', was, to my mind, J. L...

Here's an argument that the early modern philosophy Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz gives for postulating the existence of an entity without parts, versions of which he gave from the 'middle' of his philosophical career--roughly, from about the time that he wrote the "Discourse on Metaphysics"--until the end, which, for present purposes, we can take to be the Monadology . Leibniz starts from the fact that material things can all be subdivided--he actually says that material things not only can be divided, but that they are actually infinitely divided. Since a material thing such as a table can be, as it were, decomposed into infinite material parts, Leibniz argues--in a line of reasoning that is especially emphasized in his correspondence with the philosopher Antoine Arnauld based on issues in the "Discourse on Metaphysics," but elsewhere in his writings as well--that a material thing like a table is no more metaphysically real than a heap of stones, a flock of sheep, or a rainbow: the basis for...

I don't think that there is any reason that a materialist metaphysics should lead one to become materialistic. Historically, at least, one of the points of a materialist metaphysics was to bring agents to see that their highest good did not depend on God or an afterlife but could only be achieved in this world, by their own efforts: while there are differences about the nature of this highest good--materialists such as Epicurus, Hobbes, and d'Holbach,, for example, have different conceptions of ethics and also of the highest good--none of them thought that the accumulation of material possessions was the highest good, and although, historically, materialists have tended to espouse some version of hedonism (the best-known materialist ethics, advanced by Epicurus, is a version of hedonism), there is no reason to think that a materialist metaphysics is not compatible with a wide range of (non-theological) conceptions of the highest good, and, indeed, there is no reason to think that a materialist...

This is a version of the question of whether universals exist, about which there has been considerable philosophical discussion over the past 2500 years or so. Some philosophers--call them 'nominalists'--believe that the only things that exist are particulars: in the case of animals, then, only particular sloths, rabbits, dogs, etc. exist; some philosophers--call them 'realists'--believe that not only particulars, but kinds , or universals--in the case of animals, the kind 'sloth' or 'dog' or even 'animal' itself, distinct from particular instantiations of that kind--exist. (Some realists even believe that kinds or universals are the only real things, and that particulars aren't real, or at least not real in the same respect that universals are real.) It seems to me that where one stands with respect to the universalist/nominalist divide may in part reflect one's account of cognition, or how one comes to know things: if one believes that the senses are the only source of knowledge, then one may...

The question isn't silly at all--I think it turns on two distinct senses of 'opinion'. In one sense, an opinion--like a belief--is a mental state, a fact about the person who holds it, that doesn't admit of justification, although one could of course explain why the person has come to hold the particular opinion, how they have come to be in that particular mental state; there is, however, another sense of 'opinion', according to which opinions, like beliefs, are held for reasons and therefore admit of justification. Insofar as one treats an opinion, or a belief, as a mere fact about a person, it doesn't admit of argument, anymore than the fact of someone's height admits of argument; insofar, however, as one treats an opinion, or a belief, as a claim held for reasons--instead of merely as a state of a person, or of a person's mind--then it does admit of argument. In the first sense of 'opinion', I think it's quite right that one can't argue with opinions; in the second sense, however, I think not only...

Not having read Hawking's book, I can't present _his_ answer; I'll try to respond to the question from the standpoint of someone who--as Hawking seems to do--thinks that theoretical physics is the ultimate explanatory authority. The question of where did the laws in virtue of which phenomena are to be explained come from amounts to the question of what explains why the particular laws of physics that apply to our world do apply to it. It seems to me that someone with Hawking's views would probably might that this simply is a question that we cannot answer at the moment: we lack the information necessary to give such an explanation, although, in principle, one could give such an explanation, and one might even--I can't do this, but someone else might--sketch the form that such an explanation would take. (I don't think that someone who shared Hawking's conviction could state conclusively that this is a question that cannot be answered: to do so would be to bet against science.) ...

Although one way to work one's way into philosophy is to begin with philosophical problems, such as those considered in the books mentioned by Allen, another way--which I myself find more congenial, which, for what it's worth, is the way I myself came into philosophy--is to study its history. (Philosophy, Stanley Cavell has written, can be seen as a set of problems , but it can also be seen as a set of texts .) Plato's Republic is a text that sets out a host of problems taken up in subsequent texts. (Hence it was said that Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato.) So I think that working through the Republic is a respectable, albeit most ambitious, way to work one's way into philosophy. The problem that you raise about Book 1 is very interesting: Socrates himself was accused--at least, according to Plato, by his enemies--of being a dialectician, a rhetorician--and Book 1 of the Republic seems to support this charge. In this respect, it's akin to certain of Plato's ...

t does not seem to me that appeals to this principle are based on induction--although there may well be cases in which the appeal is so based, and, consequently, I think that case studies of the extent to which this principle is applied, and when it is applied, on what basis, would be very interesting and most illuminating. It seems to me to that appeals to this sort of principle rest on one of a variety of methodological--or one might even say, metaphysical, presuppositions, of which I give a couple of examples: (i) a principle of epistemic parsimony or conservatism, that one should not multiply theoretical entities unnecessarily (sometimes called 'Ockham's razor') and that, consequently, one should prefer simpler to more complicated explanations when all else is equal; (ii) perhaps in conjunction with (i)--although they need not be conjoined--an assumption that the phenomenon in question ought to be simple, because the phenomenon is an instantiation, say, of a divine plan (cf. Einstein, "God does...