Sure. I know how the grapes in my back yard taste, but I can't come close to expressing that adequately. I know how John Coltrane plays the soprano sax---with an unmatched genius and intensity---but there's not much else I can really say. And I know how it feels when I see my daughter smile. But if you want me to express that, then I'll have to resort to bad poetry.

I'm not sure why one would suppose that "love of others"---by which you seem, obviously, to mean romantic love---is a "supreme value", expressing which over-rides so much else. That said, yes, this kind of question is very real. And surely it's possible for someone to decide, in certain circumstances, that it is better to have an affair than to destroy a marriage, neither option being a very good one.

Sorry, but this is a silly argument. Replace "animal" with "person", and you get an argument in favor of breeding children for slaughter. ( Apologies to Jonathan Swift .) But yet, surely, it's better for a person to exist than for it not to exist, right? Actually, that's not so obvious, as we'll shortly see. But if it's not obvious in the case of people, it's certainly not obvious in the case of animals. The argument purports to show that it's (objectively) better for an animal to exist than for it not to exist by showing that, if it were (objectively) better for it not to exist, then we ought to sterilize all the cows. But this assumes that, if it's not (objectively) better for an animal to exist than for it not to exist, then it must be (objectively) better for it not to exist. But the obvious reply is that there's just no better or worse about it. It's neither (objectively) better for one more cow to exist nor (objectively) worse. But then the argument goes nowhere. What's fundamentally...

"B.C.E." stands for: Before the Common Era, though it can also be taken to mean: Before the Christian Era. See the Wikipedia article for more information. I don't know a source for the quotation you mention.

It's perhaps worth adding that a child has a lot of different rights, and these to different degrees, and there's no particular reason to suppose that these have to come all at once. As a blastocyst becomes an embryo becomes a fetus becomes a child, it would seem that it might acquire these rights, to varying degrees, as it develops.

A dialethist would also make this claim. If p is a true contracdition, then it is both true and false. Hence it's negation is both true and false, but it's negation is a tautology.

You are right that people usually use the word `believe' only if they are not entirely sure. If they were, then they'd say something else, maybe "I know that...", or "I'm sure that...", or just "...", all by itself. But it does not follow that "I believe..." MEANS "I'm not absolutely certain", etc. This point is due to H.P. Grice and is central to his work on `conversational implicature'. We also need to distinguish knowledge from certainty. It may likewise be true that people say "I know" only when they are fairly certain, but it does not follow that "I know..." means: I'm reasonably certain.... What knowledge is, well, that's a disputed question. But let's just pretend it's justified true belief. Then knowing is having a justified true belief, and you could know but not be certain you know, or even be very certain of something you truly believe but not know because you aren't really justified. Most (though not all) philosophers would hold that, if you know that p, then you also believe...

There seem to be some large assumptions being made here, such as: If one dies, then it won't matter what one has done. I don't see any reason to believe this. Martin Luther King, Jr, died nearly forty years ago, but what he did with is life seems to have been rather significant. My grandmother died about a decade ago, and while her contributions didn't have quite the global significance that Dr King's did, they were nonetheless important to those of us who knew her and who benefitted from her wisdom, love, and advice, not to mention her giving birth to and raising my mother, who is the sine qua non ("without whom not"), as far as I'm concerned. Death, it has been said, is the ultimate human equalizer, and I'm not saying that one shouldn't live in full awareness of one's mortality. Indeed, I'm inclined to think that, if we did all live in full awareness of the fact that we will one day die, we would live very different lives, focused on things that will survive us rather than upon things that...

I'm guessing the review to which you refer is Terry Eagleton's in the London Review of Books . I sympathize with Eagleton's frustration, though I don't think he quite plays his cards right. Surely it is true that Dawkins would barbecue any theologian who decided to write a book on evolutionary biology without boning up on the subject, and rightly so. One does rather expect that an author will have some minimal knowledge about what he or she is writing about. But the point (my point, anyway) isn't that Dawkins isn't himself religious. The point is that there are lots of people who study religion, and they do so from many different points of view. Some of these people are my colleagues at Brown, and some of them are Dawkins's colleagues in Oxford. Many of them are religious, but some of them are not. And for Dawkins to write on this topic with, so far as I can tell, essentially no real knowledge of this work is intellectually dishonest, at best. I don't think a knowledge of Duns Scotus and...

There are other sorts of examples that pose a more interesting question. There is a phenomenon known as "code switching" in which a bilingual speaker will begin a sentence in one language and end it in another. A simple example would be something like "The man in the funny hat tiene un perro loco". There are examples, better ones, in which it's clear the syntax isn't that of either of the two languages used by the speaker, since, taken as a whole, it violates both. This one is close, since, in English, adjectives generally precede the modified noun whereas, in Spanish, they generally follow the modified noun, but there are exceptions in both cases. One of the things that is interesting about these examples is that the places switching may take place are determined by the underlying grammatical form of the sentence, as described by theoretical linguistics, not by the surface form of the sentence. So this kind of phenomenon provides an interesting sort of evidence for the "psychological reality" of...