These are very good questions. For myself, I often think people overreact when children are exposed to human sexuality in entertainment, especially when they have so few compunctions about violent entertainment. Much of the question, however, depends upon psychological issues--when can children grasp the emotional, social, and personal consequences of sexua and violentl conduct. Practicallly speaking, I think the principle concern of parents is that children will imitate what they see or seek it out before they 're ready or when it's socially undesireable. The ideas that children have little appreciation of the consequences of various forms of conduct and that they imitate what they see are well grounded, I think. So, I think in order to determine what is appropriate for young people to see we ought to consider four factors: (1) how well children appreciate the meaning and consequences of what they see; (2) how likely they are to imitate it; (3) how much control they have over their impulses and...

I'd recommend these: 1. The Philosopher's Toolkit (Fosl & Baggini) 2. How to Think about Weird Things (Schick & Vaughan) 3. A Rulebook for Arguments (Anthony Westin) 4. The Art of Deception (Nick Capaldi) 5. Nonsense (Gula) 6. Crimes against Reason (Whyte)

I remember once posing the following question to a class I was teaching: if we take the religions of the world, isn't it true that at most one can be right and that perhaps none are right? Every single student in the class answered in the negative, holding that all can be right. When I pointed out that such an option would violate the principle of non-contradiction in the sense that it would mean that both X is true and X is not true (where X is a religious doctrine, for example that Jesus is God). To my amazement, every student was comfortable with tossing out the principle of non-contradiction. At the time I figured that the event showed that people are more interested in moral and political practices of tolerance and even simple manners than with logic. But I later thought to myself that my students might be onto something about the curious way "truth" plays out in religious discourses. There may be a sense in which it's wrong to use ideas of truth and falsehood as they appear in the sciences,...

In deduction, the move from premises to conclusions is such that if the premises are true, then the conclusion must also be true. For example, take the following argument: 1. Elvis Presley lives in a secret location in Idaho. 2. All people who live in secret locations in Idaho are miserable. 3. Therefore Elvis Presley is miserable. If the two premises are true, then it must be true that Elvis is miserable. Note, however, that if Elvis doesn’t exist any longer, then the conclusion need not be true either. But IF 1 and 2 are true, then so is 3. Unlike deductive inferences, induction involves an inference where the conclusion follows from the premises not with certainty but only with probability. Often, induction involves reasoning from a limited number of observations to wider, probable generalisations. Reasoning this way is commonly called "inductive generalization." It’s a kind of inference that usually involves reasoning from past regularities to future regularities. One...

Well, in some ways it's a matter of definition. One might plausibly, I think, distinguish between pacifism and non-violence as a positive form of political struggle (though I think in practice most pacifists haven't made this distinction and the line is often blurry). Pacificism by this account would be negatively defined as the refusal to engage in violent acts, turning the other cheek as it were, without any attempt to provoke violence. Non-violence struggle often includes pacifism but would also involve the positive objective of trying to achieve some political end, perhaps by eliciting a violent response. Those engaged in non-violent struggle, however, aren't always pacifists. They simply think that non-violent techniques are in the relevant contexts the most effective techniques. Some involved in the Palestinian struggle, for example the ISM, use non-violent tactics but aren't pacifists where being a pacifist is defined as holding to the principle that one should never be violent. ...

This is a provocative question. I wish you had been more specific in what you consider the "base communist beliefs" to be and how they manifest themselves in "each government." Might there be some consistency with regard to things like (1) the social or collective (as opposed to private) control of the means of production and distrubution as well as (2) production and distribution directed by need and social choice rather than profit and the chaos of markets? On the other hand, I think you're right that much of what goes and has gone by the name of communism and socialism deviate quite a bit from Marx and Engels's theories. But, of course, modern market capitalism differs quite a bit from the sort of thing described by Adam Smith.

This is a bit more of a sociological or psychological than a philosophical question. My personal experience provides virtually no basis for knowing the answer. My guess is that, as with Copernicus, the proof would take some time to catch on. During that period we'd see a lot of people, particularly those heavily invested in religion, attacking the proof, attacking the person who invented it, and attacking those who accept it. There'd be fatwas against purveyors of the satanic proof; somehow it would be found to manifest the mark of the beast or correspond to some dreary prophecy in Revelation . Well scrubbed suburban homeschoolers would recite its flaws in between trips to the mall. A formerly unknown Danish newspaper would be catapulted to the center of the world's attention for publishing it and then be charged with racism for employing Arabic numerals in doing so. Pat Robertson would condemn the proof as another effort by the homosexual, secular left to undermine religion, morality, and...

There's a funny old remark that goes something like this: "I don't fear my own death, because it's not something that will happen in my lifetime." The Epicureans held something of this view. Death isn't something that happens to us, the argument goes, because when dead we no longer exist. As he was dying, David Hume is recorded as having remarked along these lines when someone asked him whether he feared death: no more so than I regret not having been born earlier. The time before we were born was nothing to us; the time after we die will be nothing, too. It's irrational to fear nothing. But, of course, it's not irrational to fear dying. The process that results in death is certainly something, and it's hardly irrational to fear the sorts of torments that afflict many in the course of that process. Then again, some hold that there's some sort of afterlife during which we might be subjected to indescibable horrors. If when dead we don't cease to exist, then maybe there is something to fear in it...

It's a great question, and the way you pose it raises a number of fascinating issues. About the concern whether "anything" is true, I assume you mean any truth claim. Things can be said to be "true" in certain contexts ("That's a true Rembrandt"; "That way is true north"; "Mine is true love"), but typically in philosophical contexts it's statements that are either true or false. Here I'm inclined to say that it's not unwise to withold some measure of judgment on virtually any truth claim. If by "sure" you mean, impossible to doubt, then I think we might be better off not trying to achieve it. Skeptical philosophers like Sextus Empiricus, Hume, and Montaigne have in various ways advanced ideas like this. On the other hand, Ludwig Wittgenstein and other philosophers have held that in many contexts it's simply senseless to raise doubts our to try to raise doubts. I must say, I've not been persuaded yet by this strategy. But, as Hume reminds us, we must be as diffident of our doubts as of our...

This is a question with which I've struggled for some time. The answer depends upon one's interpretation of Aristotle, one's view of the meaning of the relevant terms, and the proper way to approach historical texts. I've come down on the side of the APA on this one, but in a qualified sense. Here's why: 1. While interpreting the conventional use of "man" as a metonymic figure is not wrong, it is incomplete. I've become convinced on both empirical grounds and on my reading through the history of philosophy that the term is something of what Hilda Smith calls "false universals." That is, while it poses as representing humanity and in a sense does, it's burdened with masculinist connotations. 2. Aristotle, of course, doesn't use the term, "man," but rather mostly variations of anthropos . Anthropos , however, is in my view also a false universal; but it's closer to "humanity"--which, by the way, isn't always used in a neutral way, either, but is I think less inflected than "man." ...