Sure! One way to pursue truth is to open your eyes and look around. You discover, for instance, that there is a computer screen in front of you. That's a truth. Reading science books, or for that matter seed catalogs, is another way to pursue truth. But it seems to me that you are really asking about truths to do with philosophical issues like the nature of right and wrong or the like. Can't wisdom earned over a largely unreflective life end up closer to the truth than even ingenious and assiduous attention to arguments and definitions? Here too the answer is, sure! After all, the clever engineer's theory of bridges might be mistaken, and the stone mason might by trial and error have happened upon a much better sense of how to span streams. Still, I think that this may be both to understimate the degree to which unscholarly wisdom is systematic, and to underestimate the degree to which good academic philosophy relies on ordinary perceptiveness and intuition. The wise old man has not...

It sounds as though you take the model of a free and controlled action to be one over which you have deliberated like a judge at a tribunal. This is a bit surpising, because some have taken the sort of spontaneous, apparently unforseen actions you describe to be indeed more paradigmatically "free"--free from the allegedly constraining influence of prior reasons and thinking. Now, an incompatibilist thinks that any actions caused by past events cannot be free--not even the more spontaneous ones, for these are simply caused by something other than conscious deliberation. However, a compatibilist thinks that actions caused in the right way are free---that what it is for an action to be done freely, for you to be in control of it, is for it to be caused in a certain way by aspects of you (for instance, by your reasons, your thinking, and your deciding). So your question should really be directed to the compatibilist: a lot of actions seem quite unpremeditated, and to that extent do not...

It's apparently really expensive to shepherd a capital case all the way through to eventual execution--some say, much more expensive than life in prison. http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?did=108&scid=7 That aside, there are plenty of other ethically relevant considerations. You can free a prisoner if the conviction is overturned, but you can't bring him back to life. Few of us, when actually faced with a choice, would choose death over life in prison. Nasty as it is, prison is not necessarily intolerable, and it may allow for the pursuit of important aspects of a good life. And even if capital punishment is already used for some particularly horrible crimes, expanding it to others may face objections of the sort people raise against capital punishment in the first place, to do with fairness of application, the value of life, the inhumanity of easily avoidable killing, and the merits of mercy. Even if these objections did not convince you to keep the mass murderer alive, they might...

Consider these (actual) evidential situations: I have no specific evidence that there is a Danish plumber who looks enough like me to fool my mother in a photograph. I have no specific evidence that there is a thirty-word English sentence that, when uttered, would cause an earthquake in Tonga. I have no specific evidence that anyone has ever said "kumquats are delicious". In each of these cases, not only do I not have specific evidence for the claim, but it's not even true that I likely would have such evidence were the claim true. Despite these parellels, there's a big difference among the cases: I feel quite comfortable in my firm belief that there is no such English sentence, while it seems to me that there may well be such a Danish plumber, and I am nearly certain that someone has said "kumquats are delicious" (this exhibits the problem with rejecting a claim simply because of lack of specific evidence). We would want a good philosophical account of evidence and...

Alan Soble's general points about definition are well taken. However, here's a start to defining own in other terms: To own an item is to have the right, perhaps within limitations, to decide its fate. This leaves it open that ownership might be a natural relation or a socially constructed one, depending on whether the rights constitutive of ownership are natural or socially constructed. It also leaves it open in what circumstances one has such rights.

Let's distinguish between physics and common sense: an adequate physics might or might not include a temporal dimension along which events occur, and this dimension might or might not possess various of the features that common sense attributes to time. That much is familiar from Einstein: it's not automatic that the commonsense conception of "time" is an accurate one---that it correctly captures some real aspect of the physical world. So we have to be careful when answering questions like "Does time have a preferred forward direction?". If we're exploring common sense the answer has to be "of course!", but if we're doing physics then it's a question of whether there really are important asymmetries in a physically real temporal dimension (which is actually a controversial matter: a fascinating discussion is David Albert's Time and Chance ). Similarly for questions like "Did time have a first (or last) moment?". As a commonsense matter, the answer is "surely not!", but here too physics...

If you claim to have gotten evidence for something using a method that I cannot employ, should I rely on your testimony? If I assume that you are sincere, then the key question is whether I should believe that you really do have a reliable evidence-producing method. I must rely on experience. Here's one way: if I can establish that your method led you to true conclusions in the past, I can justify trusting it now. Even if I cannot do that, I might be able to rely on more general considerations: perhaps you are so clearly a scrupulous evidence-conoisseur with respect to all the kinds of evidence whose reliability I can judge that it is reasonable for me to believe that you are not mistaken in taking this alien sort of evidence to be reliable. That much seems true equally of the psychic and the mathematician. A difference may be that mathematicians do not regard the evidence embodied in proofs to be accessible only to people with some special capacity. Certainly producing a proof can...

If you're after truth, it's often a big win to trust people. And in deciding whom to trust, the reports and evalutions of others can be of great value. So there's nothing specifically about truth-seeking that makes it inappropriate to support, or indeed to attack, the reliability of someone who claims to know the answers. However, if a person is trying to establish something not by asking you to trust their word but by claiming to provide reasons which, independently of their source , ought to convince you, then you seem to be right that testaments to their character are as out of place as personal attacks. Similarly, there are two different ways to evaluate the validity of a mathematical proof: you might rely on the expertise and good will of the person who supplied it, or you might evaluate it step by step. In the former case evidence as to the person's character and track record is obviously relevant; in the latter, not. But maybe that's too simple. Even if the propounder of an...

When you consider that characters in stories are so much like us, it can be disconcerting: if they're like us, then we're like them, too. Indeed, what distinguishes us? Just that they're in stories and we're in reality? But couldn't they say the same about us? That's a very tempting line of thought, but we should resist it. There is a big difference between something's being represented as being so, and its being so. I can say that I have fixed the car, but that doesn't make it true that I've fixed the car. Someone might counter, yes it does--it makes it true according to you . But being true according to me is not a way of being true any more than being not true is a way of being true. This can be a little hard to see because of a very natural way we have of describing what someone has said. Often, instead of saying "Crimmins says that the car is fixed", we say, "The car is fixed, according to Crimmins". That makes it sound like the car is fixed, though not in...

I take your point to be that motivation matters to our moral assessment: the latter child, unlike the former, is acting for admirable reasons. Sure. However, as a parent, I reject your first premise: that two eight year old children keep their rooms in immaculate condition.