One way to think about oaths would be to regard them as a ritualized form of promise . If so, then one aspect of these questions is: What's the significance of promises? There's a difference between saying that one plans to do something, which can certainly create reasonable expectations and moral obligations secondary to those expectations, and promising to do it, which creates moral obligations that are not secondary to and do not require any such expectations. So one purpose of oaths might be simply to create the sorts of moral duties a promise would. Whether one who makes a promise, or takes an oath, takes those duties seriously is, of course, another matter. Another aspect of the questions is: Why should promise-making be ritualized as an oath? I can think of two kinds of answers worth exploring. One might be that the public and ritual character of oath-taking might encourage taking it seriously. (Perhaps that used to be true more so than it is now.) Another might be that the...

So far as I know, deontic logic has never entered mainstream work on moral philosophy. One of the key ideas of deontic logic is to allow for impossible (combinations of) obligations. My sense is that, while there have been proponents of the idea that there could be such things (notably, Bernard Williams), most have rejected the idea. The argument I have usually heard (this is going back to grad school, so it's been a while) is that the relevant notion of obligation is one of all things considered obligations, and these cannot conflict. Perhaps deontic logic would be of more interest, however, if regarded as a logic of prima facie obligation. But then the deep question is how conflicts between prima facie obligations are supposed to be resolved, and, so far as I know, that's not really the focus of work on deontic logic. Perhaps more recent work than is known to me has addressed that question.

I'm not a philosopher of science, so I have no first-hand knowledge here. But a search of Philosopher's Index turned up a review by Jeffrey Koperski, in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2001, of Peter Smith's Explaining Chaos . I also found a few papers on the relation between chaos theory and quantum mechanics, in which there is, apparently, no room for chaos. See, for example, Gordon Belot's "Chaos and Fundamentalism", Philosophy of Science 67 (2000), 454-465. Oddly enough, most of the references I discovered were to papers in philosophy of religion....

That response seems a little extreme to me. I would have thought it fairly obvious that the husband should (and would) be arrested for assault and battery.

It's perhaps worth saying here that there are philosophers whose intuitions are closer to those of the questioner. Gabriel Segal, a member of this panel, has written a nice book called A Slim Book About Narrow Content defending a view not that distant from the one mentioned. That said, it's important to be clear about what the intuition is supposed to be. As Lynne said (hi, Lynne), the intuition is one about what the term "water" refers to. Or again, the intuition is supposed to be that, if Oscar says, "There's water on twin earth", he speaks falsely. One doesn't have to have that intuition. Some people don't. But before you decide whether you really do, it's worth thinking hard about the fact, mentioned by Lynne, that water is supposed to be a kind of stuff just like gold. Fool's gold isn't gold, no matter how much it looks like gold, and it wouldn't be gold even if it looked a whole lot more like gold, because fool's gold isn't the same kind of stuff that gold is. What we mean by...

I think it's pretty obvious that philosophy has made profound contributions to human knowledge and culture. John Locke's Two Treatises on Civil Government , for example, lay the foundation for the political system in the United States, and that, despite its flaws, seems like a good thing. But maybe you weren't thinking about ethics or politicial theory. Well, Rene Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy helped to establish a conception of the world and what is required for knowledge of it that made it possible for empircal science to grow and flourish, and that was a pretty good thing, too. But maybe that isn't what you had in mind, either. To speak for myself, I tend to think of philosophy (outside ethics) as what something is before it's science. Indeed, in Descartes's time, there wasn't a division between philosophy and science. There was just "natural philosophy", and both the Meditations and his work on optics were part of natural philosophy as he understood it. But as a result...

Frankly, I've never understood what "the meaning of life" issupposed to mean. It's an odd phrase. I take it that the question issupposed to be what the purpose or point of life is, but that's an oddway to ask the question, and I'm not sure I really understand it then,either. Why think that life, as such, that of plants or animals,bacteria or gnus, has any uniform point or purpose? What differencewould it make if it did or didn't? I think people who have asked what "the meaning of life" is have wanted some understanding of what they were supposed to be doing with their lives: If we knew what the meaning of life was, the thought is, then we'd have some idea what the goal of life was, and that would give us some sense of what a well-livedlife would consist in. Then we'd have some idea what we ought to bedoing here. The cover of Killing Joke's second album shows a young ladlooking up at the sky and screaming, "What's this for!?" That's thefeeling behind the question. But note that the real...

In college, I had a professor who was both a devout Jew and a Kant scholar. Kant, you may know, was pretty anti-Semitic, which wasn't uncommon then, of course. I asked him how he handled that. He said to me, "One wouldn't expect a geometer to be a triangle" by which, I take it, he meant that someone who can think profoundly about moral questions need not be very good at putting theory into practice.

Let me add one other thing. I thought the first thing you said was aboslutely right: "the goal is to figure out what the fundamental problem is, i.e. what gives rise to the paradox". The reason is that it is supposed that our being led to paradox in the case of, say, sets or truth or vagueness shows us that there is something about sets or truth or and vagueness that we don't really understand. If we understood things properly, we would understand how the paradox could be avoided, and not simply because we put our heads in the sand. So paradoxes are manifestations of our lack of understanding, and it is the lack of understanding that we really want to remedy.

Most of these questions seem like empirical ones, and I'm not a neuro-scientist, so I'll skip them. But let me ask a question back. Suppose Dr Jekyll performs an operation and, as a result, I seem to remember once sitting on a throne while some guy goes on about how, if I don't let his people go, there'll be plagues and pestilence and stuff. I don't see what that couldn't happen, as a matter of pure possibility. Would you want to say I remembered any of that? If all of us were born with that apparent memory, would it matter what we said to the previous question?