Fortunately, I never thought I would try to be the next Plato or Socrates. I was originally attracted to philosophy because I thought that it asked particularly basic questions, questions that where underneath a lot of the other questions people ask. (I felt somewhat similarly about physics.) When I started studying philosophy seriously as an undergraduate, I wasn't disappointed. I really enjoyed the issues and the arguments, and I didn't mind that we kept circling back to the same big questions without ever definitively answering them. Maybe it's a case of arrested development, but these feelings and pleasures have stayed with me.

There are two ways to overcome loneliness. One is by getting involved with other people so you neither are nor feel lonely; the other is by yourself, so that although you are alone, you don't feel lonely. Your question seems to rule out the first route, but the second remains open. Loneliness is not just being alone, it is being unhappy about it. And you may be able to bring yourself to accept being alone in a way that stops the unhappiness. But I would recommend the first route if at all possible. And perhaps your question does not rule it out after all. For even if you are surrounded by other people you may feel lonely, and even though you are surrounded by other people you may need to overcome the feeling by yourself, or at least the impetus must come from you. But I think the way to do that is to engage with people and projects in ways that help you get rid of that lonely feeling.

This is a big question, but I will just tell a story familiar to philosophers working in the area. A man is found guilty of a crime, and is allowed to give a brief speech before sentencing. He admits the crime, but claims not only to be a criminal but also a philosopher, and one who has convinced himself of the truth of determinism. Since everything he did was determined by causes before he was born, he could not have done otherwise but commit the crime. So surely he should not be punished. The judge, having listened carefully to all this, admits that she too has a sideline in philosophy, and that she too is a determinist. So she cannot help but punish him. When we consider the relationship between determinism and responsibility, we have a tendency not to be entirely constent. Thus we may think that we should not punish criminals nor feel anger towards them. But what is the force of this 'should' if we too are determined?

I agree that the sentence "All I know is that I know nothing" is paradoxical, or anyway false, since if there is one thing that you know than you can't know that you know nothing since that isn't true. But we can probably avoid the problem by saying instead "All I know is that I know nothing else".

Much of it is consistency checking, and this involves playing off our intuitions against each other and trying to get rid of contradictions in our beliefs. The good news is consistency is a necessary condition for truth: if our beliefs are inconsistent they cannot all be true. The bad news is that consistency is not a sufficient condition for truth: there can be more than one system, where each system is interally consistent but where the systems are inconsistent with each other. But consistency turns out to be a suprisingly demanding constraint, particularly as you expand the set of beliefs in play, a set that will for example include scientific as well as philosophical claims. And notice that science too has limitations. Is is not as if observed reality enables scientists to prove their theories. They have a problem similar to the philosophers' problem of mutiple consistent systems. For no matter how much data a scientist gathers, there will always be in principle many theories that are...

I can't tell it the way he can, but Woody Allen has a story about how he had a chest pain and was very worried that he had a serious heart problem. Being too cheap to pay for the tests, he convinces his friend, who has a similar pain, to have the tests instead. The next he hears, his friend is dead. So Woody immediately has a battery of very expensive tests, only to be told that he has nothing worse than indigestion. Very annoyed at having paid all that money for nothing, he calls his friend's mother and asks whether his friend suffered much. 'No, the bus hit him and that was it', replied the mother. Call me callous, but it made me happy to hear this amusing story about a third party's bad misfortune, and I don't think there was anything morally wrong about Woody Allen telling the story. But maybe it's crucial to the morality here that the story was made up. I'm not sure.

The simplest form of inductive reasoning follows the principle 'more of the same': if we have seen a pattern and have no special reason to think it will change, then we tend to predict that it will stay the same. We have noticed in the past that fire has been hot, so we predict it will be hot in the future too. This form of induction, basic to ordinary life and science alike, seems to operate on a principle of analogy: we are taking it that future events will be analogous to past ones. (Then along comes David Hume, with a devastating argument that we have no non-circular way of showing that the unobserved will be analgous to the observed.) Thomas Kuhn, in his important book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , brings out another way that analogy is central to science. When scientists choose which new problems to tackle, they are often guided by principles of analogy. They choose problems that seem similar to problems they have already solved, and they apply techniques analagous to...

I'm no Descartes scholar and Jay may well be right that actually Descartes held that God makes the laws of logic true, or neccessarily true. But the answer to the question still seems to be that, for all Descartes knows in the First Meditation (before he has convinced himself of the existence of God), he could be wrong even about those laws, and that would be so even if the laws of logic were beyond the control of God or demon.

I think that once Descartes goes beyond the dream to the demon, we could be wrong about anything. It's not that the demon could change the laws of logic: according to Descartes, I believe, not even God could do that. But the demon could make the simplest logical truths seem false to us and the most blatant logical falsehoods seem true. This is what he calls 'hyperbolic doubt', a beautiful expression for a nasty situation. What is mysterious is how he thinks that even 'cogito ergo sum' can survive this kind of warp-drive skepticism.

Philosophers of law spend a lot of time arguing over this question. This is not surprising since, on the one hand, there seems clearly to be some close connection; but on the other hand there are both actions that are immoral but not illegal (e.g. not keeping a promise) and actions actions that are illegal but not immoral (e.g. breaking an law requiring people to turn in escaped slaves).

If indeterminism is true then, strictly speaking, nothing is determined no matter how big. Perhaps most larger scale systems behave as if they were governed by deterministic laws, but as I think the physicist Richard Feynman pointed out, all it takes to magnify atomic indeterministic effects is a geiger counter, which could serve as an indeterministic switch to turn on as large a system as you like.