Thank you for your question. No doubt there are many situations in which it doesn't matter much whether you make a distinction between a situation in which you are fooled by something and one in which you are not. However, there are plenty of situations in which it does matter even if, "from your point of view" as you say, you can't tell the difference. If your friend is pouring kerosine on and igniting the "dog", I assume it matters a lot to you whether the thing is real or fake. Likewise, someone tempted to fall in love with an *apparent* person with whom she is communicating through a keyboard and monitor, would most likely be be very concerned whether that apparent person is a real one or a machine, and, if a machine, what kind of machine. More generally, your phrase, "from that person's point of view" seems to be at the very least a way of referring to what that person thinks: You write, " from that persons point of view the room is just as understanding as any chinese person on...

Thanks for your excellent question. The possibility of "believing at will" has received attention from philosophers on and off since at least the Victorian era when there was debate over the "ethics of belief." At this point it seems that there is a consensus that it is impossible to believe something at will "just like that", that is, simply as a result of deciding to do so. By contrast, many philosophers would agree that it is possible to form a belief in an indirect way, say by means of hypnosis or brainwashing. Thus for instance, if I want (perhaps because someone will pay me a lot of money if I do so) to bring it about that I believe that Greenland is not melting, I could hire hypnotists, ask friends to make sure I don't see newspaper articles discussing global warming, hang out with people who deny the phenomenon of global warming, and so on. It seems likely that after a while, belief (in the proposition that Greenland is not melting) will "come to stupefy my scruples", to borrow a phrase...

Here is how I understand the difference between semiotics and philosophy of language. The former is a *doctrine* about the nature of meaning, roughly to the effect that the most important types of communication depend upon one or another form of code. This doctrine is applied (controversially, many would say) not just to natural language, but also to gestures, facial expressions, and even such things as how people dress or how cities are laid out. By contrast, the philosophy of language is an inquiry into the nature of such phenomena as meaning, truth, implication, and communication. It tries not to presuppose any answers to these question, but rather tries simply to find the best answer or answers available. In this way, while both semiotics and philosophy of language tend to study the same phenomena, the former comes to the project with certain preconceptions about how they are to be understood while the latter does not.

Your question has a number of facets. First of all, many theorists of emotions see them as complex rather than as simple entities, comprising at the very least a physiological dimension, a set of dispositions to behavior (including such things as facial expression and verbal behavior) and a phenomenology--a way that the emotion feels from the inside. Now it is pretty widely agreed that while the physiological and behavioral dimensions of any emotion can be described verbally, many would deny that we can put their phenomenology into words. After all, how would you explain how elation feels to someone who knows nothing of it, such as Mr. Spock? Yet if the "how it feels from the inside" dimension of it can't be articulated in words, then it seems that you're being hard on yourself in being distraught about being unable to articulate some of your pleasures. Likewise, if I can't articulate how one of my emotions feels, it is hard to see how that detracts in any way from the emotion--pleasure or...

I'm not sure that philosophers have a uniform answer to this question, and as you may have guessed, before even proposing one they tend to spend a lot of time trying to get clear on just what the question is supposed to be. If the question is: To what extent is human behavior explicable in terms of our biological endowment, and to what extent is our behavior explicable in terms of environmental influences?--if that is the question, then one point to notice is that some current views in the philosophy of biology would deny that the question makes a lot of sense. For example, Paul Griffiths in such places as _What Emotions Really Are_ defends a "general systems theory" according to which it is part of our biological heritage to be inherently plastic, and thereby inherently capable of being importantly molded by environmental influences. That would be one thing separating our species from many (though certainly not all) others. If this view is correct, then it is hard to see what the point is of...

Dear Joseph, thank you for your question. What reaction the world would have to the scenario you envision is an empirical question better answered by a sociologist or a social psychologist. However, let me just note that when Evolution by Natural Selection started to be popularized in the Nineteenth Century, many saw that it tended to take the wind out of the Argument from Design. Many theists were indeed quite upset about this, and that is no small part of why Darwin met with such hostility. But the result was not "mass destruction and chaos." So it is not clear to me why mass destruction and chaos would result from the tables turning in the other direction. Also, my guess is that many natural scientists who stake their research careers on Evolution by Natural Selection's being true would be *surprised* in this scenario, but rational enough to face the facts as you imagine them. If in fact they could be convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that ENS is false, and that theism is true, ...

Philosophers have been trying to articulate rules for unobvious things like intentions for quite a while. The more careful accounts don't suppose that those rules are ones that we self-consciously follow. Rather, those rules, insofar as we are supposed to follow them, as ones that we follow implicitly or unconsciously. By analogy, linguistics who work in the area known as syntax postulate quite complicated rules that most of us master by around age five. However, the linguists who suppose this don't have to say that this mastery is one that is conscious, or even could be made conscious if we tried. Similarly, a philosopher might postulate a complicated basis for our behavior without getting hung up on the extent to which that basis is something of which we are consciously aware. Most would say that proceeding in this way still gives us a much more precise handle on the phenomena than a conditioning or associatinist model. Finally, giving a conceptual analysis does not preclude empirical...

As with any other academic discipline, limited resources (salary pools, tenure, endowed professorships and the like) make for competition. I doubt that philosophy as a field is more competitive than many others that are current. Further, when in the past philosophy was practiced outside of universities, competition could also be discerned just as was the case, at that time, in mathematics, astronomy, and other emerging fields. (Just think of how much European jealousy Ben Franklin provoked with his advances in the study of electricity.) However, I don't see that any of this justifies Schopenhauerian pessimism. Rather, the pervasive endeavor to improve on the work of others is, at least in some cases, motivated by the drive to get better answers to enduring questions. I don't see anything inappropriate about that. Of course it is possible to get caught up in the chase, and to get obsessed with what, in at least one translation, Plato refers to as "outdoing". On the other hand, a nagging...

I'd like to add one further point to the two made so far. Many contemporary philosophers infer from the so-called Paradox of the Stone that omnipotence is not a matter of being able to do anything, but only a matter of *being able to do anything it is possible to do*. That observation suggests another possible insight. Consider the Problem of Evil. If God exists, then it might seem puzzling that God should permit the extent and kinds of evil that we can find. Now there are many things to say about this, but one pertinent to God's omnipotence is this: Certain moral virtues seem to require some evil, and in such a way that even God can't have one without the other. Even God, it might be remarked, can't make a world in which there is, for instance, forgiveness in the absence of any wrongdoing. (I can't forgive you unless you've wronged me in some way.) This is not to say that all virtues require evil, but just that some seem to, even if you're God. As it happens, contemporary philosophical...

Your question has many dimensions. First of all, it might be taken as asking why our species seeks out beauty while others do not. If that is the question, then one point to note is that it might be the case that other species seek beauty as well. For instance, males in other species of animals produce exotic ornamentation in order to gain an advantage with females in sexual selection. Do those females seek out beauty? I would be hard pressed to show that they don't. Second, and leaving that question aside, one might take this question as asking why we like things that are beautiful. But if you reflect on that for a moment, it might seem a bit strange. Imagine someone trying to figure out why we don't like pain. Perhaps all that can be said is that painful things hurt, which by definition we don't like. On the other hand, assuming that beauy is pleasant, one may still ask the question: Why do we find beautiful the things that we do? For example, anthropologists, psychologists and...