The answer is equally simple. The philosophy of history is about actual human history, and things such as what constitutes a proper historical explanation, whether there are historical laws, the role of the individual in determining historical events, and so on. The philosophy of time deals with much more theoretical questions, not about human history at all, but about time itself. Does time pass, or is that an illusion? Is "the myth of passage" really a myth? ("The Myth of Passage" is the name of a well-known article by the Harvard philosopher D.C. Williams. Does time always flow forward, if it flows at all? Can it flow backwards? If not, why not? If it flows, how fast does it flow, and though what? Since speed = distance/time, the speed of time would be the temporal distance covered by time, such as a minute, divided by time, e.g. per minute; but this makes no sense at all. Etc. Etc. There is occasionally a little overlap between the two subjects. For example, the first event is important both in cosmic...

You could call this science worship, I think. There is also the word "scientism", meaning a sort of extreme and exaggerated regard for science, so maybe "scientism" is the best fit for what you describe. You add in the idea of sacrificing human beings for science, and this already has a name: murder. Murder is wrongful intentional unlawful killing, and that is what you are describing. It was common under fascism of course.

You should study Wittgenstein's arguments against a private language more closely, because I don't think that his view is quite that language "cannot be with one person", although that is really a wonderful way of putting it. It seems to suggest merely the view that the nature of language is that of a interpersonal communication, which is a bit uninteresting, and yet your phrasing is profoundly interesting. I also didn't quite follow why thinking that there can be a private language goes against psychophysical dualism. Surely it's the other way round. Descartes, for example, has to think he can give sense to his words privately, because he can intelligibly doubt the existence of everyone else. And Wittgenstein himself has been thought to be a behaviourist, or closer to behaviourism than to psychophysical dualism. I am very sorry about Croatia too. I imagine you had some more beers. I did.

It is very sad to hear your story. I can give a guess about the awfulness of what you are going through, but I am more certain that I cannot appreciate the full daily horror for you. Your question is a most reasonable one. Is your mother "alive"? It is interesting that you feel obliged to put this word in scare quotes. It is something that "you can't stop asking yourself". So there is something very important here, an important issue. But you have also answered your own question, or part of it. Let us distinguish between the mental and the physical. Is your mother alive physically? Her body is not dead, if we can put it that way. Is she alive "as a conscious being"? Here you give your own answer: ' . . . she is unconscious about anything [that] is happening around her.' I think perhaps you should say that she is conscious only of the most immediate and restricted domain. That perhaps is part of the reason the question is difficult. She is conscious, but not in a full sense. The whole difficulty about...

Philosophers will divide over the question whether tastes, colours, sounds, smells and so on are by nature physical or phenomenal. If these so-called "secondary qualities" are physical, then it makes sense to think of one smell covering up another, which is still there and reappears when the smell covering it up is removed. Similarly, if you think of colour as a physical entity, or you thinkbof it as rather like paint , you can think of one "colour" covering another up, so that the top layer of "colour" could be peeled off to reveal the older underlying colour. But if you think of the qualities as inherently perceptual, then one colour or sound or smell is not covered up by another; it is replaced by it. As Plato puts it in the Phaedo , 'in such a situation it either withdraws or ceases to exist.' My own preference is for a theory in which the "secondary qualities" like tastes are not inherently physical. It makes no sense to think of a physical blue, say, that lacks the quality blue . But...

An ideology or politically organizing world view doesn't have to be about God, so ideology and religion are not the same thing. Is religion a false view that organizes society? (This is Mannheim's "particular" conception of ideology.) Well, you might think so, but you would then have to think that religion is false. You could study religion under the "general" conception, in which it "arises out of life conditions", but it seems to me that a religious person might not disagree with that, provided that "life conditions" is understood sufficiently deeply.

I think what you say about American attitudes towards sex may be true, if we stick to the surface of the culture, and these attitudes are Puritanical compared with European ones, for example French and Swedish ones. What makes depictions of violence wrong, surely, is not just the distress they cause. The answer to that is for people to avoid violent movies. Or if movies with sex in them cause distress, they can easily be avoided. And you are obviously correct that there is something wrong with depictions of sex and violence together, even or even especially from a narrow utilitarian point of view. For one thing, they can make people jaded with the real things; they can make sex less appealing and violence routine and routinely acceptable. And you are right again, I think, to ask the question whether some things are intrinsically obscene. Consider the Madonna and Child in so many representations. There is often a quiet tenderness here that cannot be missed. Then consider juxtaposed some viscous and...

Just a quick response to a point Stephen makes. He writes, 'It is eminently deniable that the universe began to exist.' However you phrase it, is deniable that the universe began to exist, but not "eminently" so. The evidence from physics is absolutely overwhelming. There are detailed measurements of the expansion rate of the universe extrapolated backwards and the explanation of Hubble's Law, the 4% background microwave radiation, which gave Penzias and Wilson the Nobel Prize in 1978, the existence of clouds of light gases, and so on and so on. How can you reasonably deny all this? In my view the logical arguments, though obviously they do not converge on a date of 13.8B years for the age of the universe, are also compelling, such as Whitrow's, discussed in my note above.

There doesn't seem to be any reason to say that an infinite regress "does not make sense" but that an infinite being does. There exist infinite progressions of things, particularly in mathematics. Can there be an infinity of real things? Or of physical things? Or of instants in time? Plainly different arguments are needed in each case, since at least on a Platonist view numbers are real if not physical. So some "regresses" or progressions or series or sequences do "make sense" and others don't. Now what about an infinite being? I suppose the question here is as always what is meant. Could there be a being infinite in wisdom, for example, or infinite in power, and so forth? There seems no obvious reason why not. Would an infinite being, in this sense, occupy the entire physical universe? Well, only if the being is physical and the universe is infinite in extent. But only a very few theologies have a physical or "corporeal" God, Hobbes' for example. So it seems that the standard conception in which God has...

There is something plainly wrong with a group that conceals its real purpose, surely, and lures you in with a false front. But there is nothing wrong with members of a group that is visibly religious in orientation inviting someone to come along and join. 'Why not come and join our Catholic knitting group?' is fine. As to your first question, being sounded out seems OK, because if it get too intense or probing you can always leave. I do think there is something a bit off about a religious group targeting people who are a little lonely or isolated, but on the other hand if there's no expected quid pro quo where's the harm? The devil is in the details of how things are done, I think. Concealed pyramid schemes are another thing altogether, because here the element is deception is at the centre of what's going on.

Plato's view was that poetry is a divine madness - theia mania - and that it is better avoided. He recommended philosophy instead. This seems a bit extreme, and a bit dull. Not all poetry is the product of any kind of mania, and many poets are perfectly sane. Some philosophy, on the other hand, is pretty mad, and does come across as a kind of poetry, though mostly bad poetry. Poetry is not all tall tales, as Plato thought, though some of it has an aspect of fiction. Take for example John Clare's "Autumn Birds", which begins, The wild duck startles like a sudden thought, And heron slow as if it might be caught. The flopping crows on weary wings go by And grey beard jackdaws noising as they fly. There is nothing maniacal about this. Imagination can rise to a kind of poetic description of fact, brilliant and accurate as a mere statement of fact could not be: "The wild duck startles like a sudden thought . . .", for example. The quotation from David Schmidtz seems perfectly reasonable as a piece of...