Sure, it's possible. And here's how it could be established. Suppose it were found that, when and only when people dream, certain things happen in their brains. And suppose that dogs' brains are similar in relevant respects to people's brains and that, lo and behold, their brains exhibit similar behavior when they sleep. That, it seems to me, is excellent reason to suppose that dogs dream. It's not "proof", but, as has often been said here, we don't have "proof" of very much: I don't have any proof that you dream, or even that you exist, but I nonetheless know that you do.

There certainly is a fallacy here, but I don't know what it should be called. In the end, perhaps it is a simple fallacy of equivocation: an equivocation between two senses of the word "definition". Philosophers since Aristotle (at least) have distinguished two types of definitions: definitions of words and definitions of things . Personally, I find the latter notion hard to understand, but the idea is that a definition of a thing tells you what it really is. So gold, for example, might be defined as that element that has atomic number 79. This is very different from saying that the word "gold" is defined this way. The word "gold" could not have been defined that way before the establishment of modern chemistry, but, nonetheless, the true definition of gold—what gold really is—is: the element with atomic number 79. You cannot, therefore, find out what the real definition of a thing is by consulting a dictionary: That will tell you only how the word is defined. What the "real definition"...

I take it that the thinking is that the family is the "basis of civilization" and that marriage is the basis of the family. Both claims can be doubted. More importantly, their conjunction can be: It may well be that each claim can seem plausible, in its own right, but that is because one is understanding the word "family" in different senses both times. Perhaps there is some sense in which it's obvious that family groups are fundamental social units. But what a "family group" is, in that sense, needn't have much to do with "nucelar families" in the sense our President thinks of them. Or again, it may seem obvious that there is some sense in which marriage, by which I mean a committed long-term relationship between adults, is the basis of the family. But then one is of course thinking of "family" in a particular sense, and it's entirely unobvious why families in that sense are the foundation of civilization. Regarding the last question: Why think that civilization needs to have a "fundamental...

I have encountered this argument before, but I don't really understand it. In short, it seems to go: We are part of nature, so nothing we do can be counted unnatural. So far as I can see, that is a simple fallacy based upon no more than word play (or, perhaps, a confusion between purely descriptive and broadly prescriptive senses of the term "natural"). The kinds of freaky creatures that now populate the landscape around Chernobyl are part of nature, too, but that does not make them "natural". Unlike locusts, human beings can choose what they do to the Earth. They ought to choose wisely. Perhaps you do not share the sentiment, but many people believe that we ought not needlessly drive pandas to extinction not because it is nice for us that there are pandas around but simply because it is a good thing, period, that there are pandas around. This attitude involves a certain kind of resepct for nature that is, it seems to me, difficult to explain and more difficult still to justify. But...

Not everything influential counts as philosophy, any more than it counts as science or literature. Yes, of course, the Federalist Papers and the like have had enormous influence, but they do not contain arguments for the same kinds of positions that you find in Locke's Two Treatises on Civil Government , Rousseau's Social Contract , or Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia . The Federalist Papers are much more concerned with concrete political matters—questions about how government should be organized—than with abstract philosophical ones. True enough, of course, the boundary between these is vague, and it is obvious that there are profound "philosophical" differences between the authors of these documents, some of which are made explicit. But that does not make them works of philosophy. It makes them, rather, works of political theory, and so it seems appropriate that they should be studied precisely where they are extensively studied: In political science and in law.

How about this for an argument? Human beings have much to gain by travel, study abroad, and cultural immersion. Students of philosophy are human beings. Therefore, students of philosophy have much to gain by travel, study abroad, and cultural immersion. That'd be an instance of the valid form "Barbara", and I take it both premises are true. Oh! I see! You meant, do students of philosophy, qua students of philosophy, have much to gain by travel, study abroad, and cultural immersion! Well, that's a different question. Let me answer it from the perspective of a North American. Adjust as necessary. But the answer to it is much the same. For one thing, to some significant extent, doing philosophy involves trying to pry oneself free of one's own unnoticed preconceptions. There's nothing like exposure to other ways of living to teach one how unnoticed some of those preconceptions can be. In that sense, then, I think anything that expands one's mind, and one's conception of life...

Are you sure there's nothing to be learned from such a question? The question in what sense radioactive decay, for example, is random is an important question in the foundations of physics, and improving our understanding of the world seems a valuable enterprise. The question how we understand randomness is also important to the foundations of cryptography, because cryptographic ciphers typically require a source of random bits: If the bits aren't really random, then perhaps they can be predicted, and the cipher can be broken. It needs no emphasis how important cryptography is in the age of electronic mail and electronic banking.

I don't believe Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Reid were using these terms—which you take from the titles of their books—in terribly specific senses. There may have been historical echoes. Certainly Leibniz's New Essay Concerning Human Understanding was so-called to echo the title of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding . But there is one obvious difference: "essay" and "treatise" are names of kinds of writing; an "inquiry" is a certain kind of act or, perhaps, a report of the results of such an act. But again, I'd not read much into that. As for the difference between "inquiry" and "enquiry", modern dictionaries regard these as mere variant spellings, and it's worth remembering that spelling was not so uniform in those days as it is now.

As Alex notes, this question is pretty well answered elsewhere. But please note: Saying that there is no moral bar to considering physical attractiveness when evaluating someone as a potential romantic interest says nothing about how heavily it is wise to weigh physical attractiveness. It is not, in particular, to say that people do not give undue weight to this matter.

I'm sure there are more and less worrisome ways of answering this question, and I'd never wish to downplay the reality of racism. But, in some such cases, there is a fairly simple answer: Black-ness may be an unusual trait in certain circumstances, in the sense that there are relatively few black folks in the relevant group. If so, then mentioning that someone is black may contribute rather a lot to the effort to identify or individuate them. It's easy enough to imagine circumstances in which that would not be so. Maybe one is at the NAACP convention. Then one would be rather less likely, I'd think, to say, "I'm looking for my friend. He's black...." It is also, sadly, easy enough to imagine that racism infects the use of this method of identifying people: Some or even many people may be inclined to suppose that the relative number of black people in a certain population is lower than it actually is. So someone might say, "the black congressman" or "the black professor", thinking those...