It seems that the word "answer" is being used in two senses in the question that you ask. Plainly, it can happen that someone asks, 'Is the tomato a fruit?' and someone else answers thus: 'What do you think?' That might well happen. But it is not the end of the story. One could count that as an answer, or as a failure to answer, or as both, but then in two different senses. It is a verbal response or reply, and "response" is one sense of "answer". There is a narrower sense of "answer", in which it means something like, "State the correct (or what the respondent takes to be correct) solution to the problem posed by the question", or something like that. This is closer to the legal sense of "answer", in which one "replies" or "makes answer" to a charge or accusation, by offering a defence. Asking a question as an answer would not work in these contexts. So if I am asked, 'What is the solution to 7x9?', what is meant is "the correct answer", and it is the answer to the question what the product of 7 and 9 is...

Do the perceptual systems work from the environment in, or from the perceiver out? In English there are famously two very different groups of perceptual words, one active and one passive: look/see, listen/hear, touch/#feel, smell/smell (i.e. "smell" has two meanings, one for the activity of sniffing out - ('The dog was smelling my shoes'), and the other for a more passive kind of reception of some smell.) In his celebrated 1966 The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems J.J. Gibson argued that the active seeking out of "information" is more fundamental than passive sensing, and his famous cookie-cutter experiment showed this. If you actively move your hands relative to the object of perception, the percentage of correct identifications is very high. If the stimuli are given to you passively, the percentage drops to under half of what it was. The senses have to be active, and without activity even the passive sensation degrades. This was also shown by some early phenomenological experiments by Katz on...

Do you really believe that there is any truth that you are going to get 7,511,772,360 (the number on the rolling world census at the time of writing) people to agree to? That includes new born infants, who are people. So perhaps we should cut off your question at some later age, say 18. But how will this age be decided? I think probably people have their own views because they have their own ideas, and they have their own ideas because their experiences are different and they are very different people anyway. Still, most people, though by no means all, accept elementary mathematics and the elementary ethics of everyday life. There are standards of evidence and argument that apply to both, to ethics in practical settings and to mathematics in theoretical ones as well. It seems very improbable that short of the coming of the Kingdom of God everyone will agree on everything. But that doesn't mean that what they should agree on, because it is true, isn't true.

Not all of Plato's writings are challenging or difficult. But some are, the Parmenides for example. And Wittgenstein writes perfectly ordinary sentences in the Philosophical Investigations , though people complain that the writing is hard to follow. I can't agree with this, as I think it's a view that insinuates itself when you don't know the arguments very well. The Tractatus is of course different. But both the Parmenides and the Tractatus could have been written in ordinary prose, apart from the symbolic bits, for example in connection with the symbol omega and the theory of numbers, say, or the theory of truth-functions and the general form of the proposition. But your presumption is wrong. When people write about philosophers' work, very little restates the claims of those philosophers. The only point of that would be educational. Much more of the writing about works of philosophy is about what the claims mean and whether they are true. So your contradiction disappears. It is...

The current evidence and theory from cosmology almost conclusively give us the objective answer that the first event was the Big Bang. If God brought about the Big Bang, that too is an objective answer, or if the Big Bang came about due to fluctuations in a sea of quantum gravity, that is an objective answer. As Stephen observes, the steady state theory (the universe was always there) is equally objective. The Big Bang and the steady state theory may be counter-intuitive, but they are objective answers. You ask about the existence of an objective answer to the cosmological question in particular. I cannot see anything about the question where if anywhere the universe came from that raises questions of objectivity. Or is there a religious question behind your question? Does your question really mean, 'Is there an objectively true answer as to where the world came from, rather than a religious answer?' Then is the assumption that religion is subjective? That may be all wrong about what is behind your...

Isn't the more interesting question how it is possible how and that we can know what someone else is thinking or feeling?

What you are offering is a philosophy of philosophy. From your principle that "philosophy of x" should be absorbed into the department of x, institutionally speaking, doesn't it follow that philosophy of philosophy should be absorbed into the department of philosophy? But it must be treated as "a separate discipline" for this to happen. Where else would you teach the philosophy of philosophy, metaphilosophy? In the department of physics perhaps?

The difference is exactly that marriage is a legal bond, and it involves certain obligations and requirements (for example those having to do with property) that may not be implied by the "committed relationship". It is as a result a more serious affair. There is also the historically related fact that marriage is often taken to have a religious dimension, which the committed relationship may or may not. What some people dislike about marriage is that in the past it has existed in a hierarchical setting, so that a priest or other official, at a particular moment, says the words, 'I pronounce you man and wife.' It may be that in a particular committed relationship there is such a moment, but it may also not be the case.

The difference between the cognitive biases and the logical fallacies is that the biases can be taken to be common built-in tendencies to error of individual judgements , whereas the fallacies, both formal and non-formal (so-called "informal", badly named because "informal" actually means "casual" or "unofficial" or "relaxed") are types of argument . The point is that the biases can be said to have causes, and are hence of psychological but not logical interest, whereas the fallacies do not have causes (though the making of a fallacy on a particular occasion may have) and the reverse is true. There is more to be said, of course, because a psychologist might take an interest in the fallacies.

There are "forms" of thinking and reasoning and arguing that do something very specific. They guarantee that if the premises of your thinking and reasoning and arguing are true, then so is your conclusion. These "argument forms", as we can call them, are said to be "valid". Logic is the study of these forms, and the methods used to distinguish them from invalid forms. An example? Well, what about De Morgan's theorems, one of which states not-(p AND q) is the same thing as (not-p OR not-q). This is valid, and it is worth studying, even for its intrinsic interest. And if you do study it, what you are studying is logic, or a part of it.