I am no expert on these matters. (For an expert opinion, you might consult Philip Kitcher's recent work.) But I would like to point out that "the interests of free inquiry" is an ambiguous phrase. It is one thing to say that ethically, such a study should not be conducted. It is quite another thing to say that the government or some collection of private citizens should take action to prevent a scientist from conducting such a study. Just as "free speech" considerations prohibit the government from preventing certain kinds of speech but do not deem all speech to be ethically permissible, so "the interests of free inquiry" may prohibit the government from preventing certain kinds of studies but do not deem all studies to be ethically permissible. An interesting question is whether a private grantmaking organization should fail to fund such a study. Considerations of "free inquiry" do not require it to be blind to the reasons why such a study might be unethical (just as the interests of "free speech...

That a question begins from making false or impossible presuppositions does not keep us from understanding the question or responding to it with the correct (i.e., true) answer. After all, we know that I am alive today, yet we can reasonably assert things like "Had I been hit by a car while crossing the street yesterday, then I might well not have been alive today." We know what would count as evidence for this assertion (for example, facts about my anatomy, the speed of cars on the street, etc.). The fact that I was not, in fact, hit by a car while crossing the street yesterday does not prevent us from having justified beliefs about what would have happened, had I been hit by a car. Of course, it was *possible* for me to have been hit by a car. But it wasn't possible for Fermat's Last Theorem (a certain theorem about numbers that has recently been proved) to have been false. Long before this theorem was proved, mathematicians widely believed it to be true, since no one had ever found a...

I am not aware of a conventional way in which philosophers standardly draw this distinction. However, if a particular author distinguishes between "causing" and "bringing about", she might have in mind any one of several possible distinctions. Here are three candidates: (i) causing versus being part of the causal background: The alarm clock's ringing causes me to awaken. That I am not deaf, that I was asleep to begin with, that there was air to conduct the sound from the alarm bell to my ear, etc., were all needed for me to awaken; without them, I would not have awakened when the alarm clock rang. So they, too, are causes -- at least, broadly speaking. But we might well want to privilege the alarm clock's ringing from among all of the other, background causes, and say that it was the alarm clock's ringing that brought about my awakening. (ii) causing versus preventing a potential preventer. Dick, pilot of a bomber, bombs a city. His actions cause the city to be bombed. Jane, pilot of a...

Well, I can't speak for other "professional philosophers", only for myself. One thing that philosophers can offer is a capacity to recognize an argument's logical structure and whether arguments of that structure are good-- and, if they are not good, to make clear exactly why they are not good by crafting similar arguments whose problems are fairly obvious. Of course, philosophers are not uniquely able to do this. But philosophical work (as well as teaching philosophy) does tend to make one better able to do it -- more sensitive to ambiguity, equivocation, begging the question, circular reasoning, regresses, distinctions that must be drawn, and so forth. Another thing that philosophers can offer is some historical perspective on a given issue. We may know where similar issues have come up before, what the standard argumentative moves and options are, etc. Again, philosophers are not uniquely so equipped. But philosophical training can help. A third thing that philosophers can offer (though,...

This is an excellent question. You are right: getting heads twenty times in a row is exactly as likely as, say, HTTHTHHTTTHHTHTHHTTH. However, 20 heads is much less likely than (say) 10 heads and 10 tails. There are many more twenty-flip combinations that yield 10 heads and 10 tails than twenty-flip combinations that yield 20 heads. There are more ways to get 10 H and 10 T than to get 20 H. So getting 20 heads is less likely (assuming the coin is fair) than getting 10 heads and 10 tails. Yet getting 20 heads is exactly as likely as getting a particular combination of 10 heads and 10 tails, such as HTTHTHHTTTHHTHTHHTTH. Other cases of "strangeness" are a bit more difficult to diagnose. For instance, suppose a lottery is run and ticket #1729 wins. This outcome is extremely unlikely if the lottery is fair (let's suppose there are 10,000 tickets), but extremely likely if the lottery was fixed for #1729. Does this mean that after this ticket is drawn, we should conclude that the lottery was...

Yes. Here is a longer, more nuanced answer: Any explanation of one fact must be by another fact, as your teacher said. So a regress is launched: A is explained by B, which is explained by C, which is explained by D, which... . How is this regress to end? There are only a few options. One apparent possibility is that it goes in a big circle. But that is not possible: if D is explained by A, then A would ultimately be explained by itself! That cannot be, just as you said. Another apparent possibility is that the regress goes on forever, with different facts at every stage: D is explained by E, and E is explained by F, and so forth infinitely. I don't know of any argument showing this to be impossible. On this option, there are no fundamental laws of nature. Rather, for every law, there is an explanation involving a more basic law. This picture is rather disappointing, I guess, but so is the fact that the Yankees are playing lousy baseball this year. Disappointing things...

I don't think that there is or could be a general principle that says that a paradox arising from idealizations will inevitably carry over (much less become worse) when the idealizations are relaxed. In some cases, the paradox will disappear when the idealizations are removed. In other cases, the paradox will persist (or become worse). There is no general rule here. It depends entirely on the details of the case. For example, various paradoxes result in classical electromagnetic theory when pointlike charged particles are used. Point charges are a convenient idealization for many purposes, but the energy in such a field is undefined (the integral blows up). However, if we go to charge densities and extended charged bodies rather than point charges, these problems disappear. Likewise, in cosmology, Newtonian gravitational theory is afflicted with various paradoxes if we assume an infinite universe with a homogeneous, isotopic distribution of matter. Remove these idealizations and the problems go...

The kinds of reasons that are given for favoring one scientific theory over its rivals are a good deal more subtle than "observation is king." To begin with, a theory need not be justly rejected merely because it conflicts with a given observation; sometimes, the observation is appropriately doubted, and sometimes, a given theory is rationally retained despite its failure to fit our observations because blame for the mismatch is placed on other theories ("auxiliary hypotheses") that were used to bring the theory to bear on those observations. (The Copernican model of the solar system, for instance, was retained despite 300 years of failure to observe the stellar parallax it apparently predicts.) By the same token, a theory that fits our observations very well may nevertheless be justly and emphatically rejected on the grounds that it is ad hoc, fails to fit nicely with our other theories, lacks unity or fruitfulness or explanatory power, etc. Once these familiar features of scientific practice...

Does there need to be a single, particular contribution that philosophical research makes and other disciplines fail ito make? Of course, science and math clarify concepts and contribute to making empirical predictions. Philosophical research does all of that, too, from time to time. I don't think there needs to be an interesting answer to "What does philosophy do?" that distinguishes philosophy from science and math. All are in pursuit of truth. Philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians are trained somewhat differently, often have somewhat different tools in their toolkits, and come out of somewhat (though overlapping) traditions and so will generally be familiar with different argumentative moves. But these may be differences in degree, not in kind.

Sometimes, when we say things like "Jones died because the butler killed him with an ax", what we have said is false if the butler did not in fact kill Jones. After all, Jones' history of smoking cigarettes cannot have caused Jones to develop lung cancer if Jones did not have a history of smoking cigarettes. (By the same token, Jones' history of smoking cigarettes cannot ahve caused Jones to develop lung cancer if Jones did not, in fact, develop lung cancer!) Notice that I have cunningly shifted from explanation to causation. Clearly, for event C to cause event E, both C and E must have happened. On the other hand, there are times when we say that a scientific theory explains some fact even when that theory is false. For instance, if we are deliberating among several rival, mutually incompatible theories, we might say something like "Theory A explains fact E but doesn't explain fact F, whereas theory B explains both E and F, so (all other things being equal) theory B is more plausible than theory A...