Certainly nowadays the law would require the woman to pay alimony in this situation, and I am sure there have been many such cases. I find it hard to see how anyone who wasn't just flatly sexist might think it should be otherwise. Perhaps vestiges of sexist thinking with which we have all been saddled by our society would make our gut reaction a little different, but fortunately we have brains and do not have to be ruled by our guts.

It's hard to know where to draw the boundaries on this sort of thing, and we need to distinguish questions. Is the claim that the working class will themselves be offended by use of the term "vulgar"? Or is the claim that, by using the term, you are showing them disrespect (that is, showing disrespect for them), even if they are not themselves offended? Different cases will be different. Consider the verb "gyp", meaning to defraud or swindle. As the spelling indicates, the term comes from "gypsy". I expect few people, other than gypsies, know this. So, in that sense, people who use the term are probably not trying to offend gypsies. But, if I were a gypsy, I'd find it offensive and so, by using it, one may be offending such people, even if one does not mean to do so. One would not be blameworthy for that usage, but, once informed of its consequences, one should stop using the term. A similar case might be "Indian summer". The history of this term is closely related to the more obviously derogatory ...

I'm not sure about the relationship to Plato's theory of ideas, but there are many connections between programming and philosophy. I'll mention just a few. Some of the earliest investigations into natural language semantics appealed to ideas connected to the notion of compilation. Roughly, the thought was that understanding an uttered sentence might be something like compiling a program, i.e., translating it into the "machine language" of the brain. My own view, which is probably the majority view, is that this is seriously confused, but it has been attractive to many people. The idea that "the mind is the software of the brain" has also been very attractive, since it was first articulated (though not quite in those terms) by the great British logician Alan Turing. There are many ways to implement this idea, perhaps the most familiar of them being the various forms of functionalism. Finally, philosophers are often interested in formal languages, and software languages are certainly a variety...

There are a lot of complicated issues here! But let me just address one. Let's suppose it true that black Americans do, as a whole, have lower scores on IQ tests than do white Americans. To suggest that there might be a biological explanation for this fact is to suppose that African Americans are, as a group, (i) biologically different from white folks and (ii) in some relevant respect, biologically similar to each other. That is, there has to be some relevant biological feature that black people generally have that white people generally do not. That is not itself a racist idea, but it is, so far as anyone can tell, just plain false. Black people have various genetic features that causes them to have dark skin, but these genetic features are not significantly correlated with very much else. And, indeed, I recall reading a year or so ago a study someone did that suggested that the skin tone of the early migrants to Europe changed within a couple dozen generations. Now, as I said, the idea...

These are very large fields, so I'm not sure a comprehensive overview is really possible. (Though there is the umpteen volume Handbook of Philosophical Logic .) That said, there is a new book out quite recently, by John Burgess, titled Philosophical Logic , that gives a good introduction to that area. For mathematical logic, I like Peter Hinman's Foundations of Mathematical Logic , as it covers a fairly wide range of material.

One of our graduate students at Brown, Jed Silverstein, is writing a dissertation concerned with issues in this vicinity, so I asked him if he'd like to answer this question. Here is what he had to say: "In recent times, political philosophers such as Susan Okin, Eamonn Callan, and Rob Reich have shown persistent interest in the philosophical significance of children. However, their interest in children generally focuses on the legal and political relationship between the state and the family in a liberal democratic society, and less on the moral status of children within the home. Other philosophers such as Gareth Matthews (sadly, recently deceased) directly explore the moral status of children, and question the prevailing doctrines of developmental psychologists such as Piaget. The upshot of Matthew's view -- sometimes known as child liberationism -- is that society systematically denigrates children on the unwarranted grounds that they are morally and cognitively deficient. "An...

There are two sorts of issues here. Suppose that it is, in fact, extremely unlikely that reproduction should occur as it does. The universe is a vast place. For all we know, it occurs in billions of other ways in billions of other galaxies. Even on our own planet, of course, reproduction occurs in a dizzying variety of ways. That it happens to occur as it does among us might just mean we are the lucky ones. This is just a way of saying that astonishingly unlikely things do happen. The odds against someone being dealt, in a game of bridge, a hand consisting of 13 cards all of one suit are 158,753,389,899 to 1. But it does happen from time to time. And the universe has been around for a lot longer than we have been playing bridge. Probabilities like the one just mentioned concern the probability that an event should occur on a single occasion . Every time a bridge hand is dealt, it is incredibly improbable that it will...

But I think you have what philosophers call the "dialectic" of the argument here somewhat backwards. I take it that the argument for vegetarianism is suppose to be something like this: (i) The lives of animals are of moral significance, which is to say that one cannot permissibly kill an animal without good reason; (ii) The need to eat would constitute good reason, but (iii) as a matter of empirical fact, most of us, at least in developed countries, do not need to kill animals to eat, so we do not have such reason; (iv) Mere preference for animal flesh over plant-based foods does not amount to sufficient reason to kill an animal; (v) So we fortunate people living in developed countries ought not to kill animals for food. So the argument is not really that we do not need to eat animals to survive. It should be clear that the argument does indeed grant that, if one has to kill other animals in order to survive, then that would be morally permissible. But even so, this does not mean that killing those...

First of all, as you say, it seems pretty clear that you would have no moral obligation to allow your daughter to have one of your kidneys. To a significant extent, that is all most "pro-choice" arguments seek to establish. Indeed, Thomson discusses this very point in "A Defense of Abortion". That said, I would agree with you that it would be awful of you not to provide your daughter with a kidney, assuming that it otherwise wasn't going to affect you terribly badly. But the case seems significantly different from a first trimester abortion. And I think that is so even if, like Thomson, we allow (at least for the sake of argument) that the developing fetus is a person: an "unborn child". You do not say what age your daughter is, and that may matter a bit to our intuitions about the case. But what matters more, it seems to me, is the character of the relationship you have with her. What's so disturbing about the choice you imagine making is what it says about that relationship. Obviously, my...

When someone says that a claim P is logically stronger than a claim Q, it usually just means that P implies Q, but not conversely. Thus, an argument sufficient to establish Q need not be sufficient to establish P. So it's good if your premises are "weak". Then you don't need such strong arguments to establish them.