I am not a sociologist, so I'm not going to make a prediction. But perhaps you can make your own. When you care for the members of your family and your friends, when you are kind to your neighbors, and when you avoid performing random acts of cruelty toward strangers, are you acting out of fear of eternal punishment from God? Or are you doing it out of (dare I say it?) love for your fellow human beings?

Would it make me sound too much like a college professor to suggest that one non-materialistic reason to go to college is to learn something, to be introduced to unfamiliar important ideas, and to acquire some of the skills required to be a good citizen of a democracy? Perhaps that's missing the real point of your question, which is less about going to college than about earning more than the minimum wage. In the United States, the "minimum wage" set by law is not the same as the minimum required to support yourself. Many people who earn minimum wage in a full-time job find themselves with insufficient income to support their families. Again, perhaps I've missed the real point of your question, which is whether it is materialistic to earn more than the minimum wage. I certainly agree that income inequality is morally dubious. If you find yourself earning too much, then I suggest that you donate your excess earnings to a worthy organization -- such as your local public university.

Determinism is the view that the state of the world at any moment, plus the laws of nature, determine (i.e., logically entail) the state of the world at any other moment. Quantum mechanics and chaos theory relate to determinism in rather different ways. Chaos theory concerns systems whose development is exquisitely sensitive to their current state -- in that a very small change to their current state would produce enormous changes to their later state. A chaotic system is not incompatible with determinism as I have defined it above. But the existence of chaotic systems entails that any small uncertainty in our knowledge of that system's initial conditions (and some such uncertainty is always present, for grubby practical reasons) will quickly ramify into great uncertainty in our predictions regarding that system, even if we know all of the relevant laws of nature. None of this threatens determinism as a view about prediction "in principle." But quantum mechanics does that. The complete state...

Very good question! Let's begin by drawing an important distinction. By "changing a law of logic", you might mean (i) our changing our minds about what the laws of logic are, or (ii) the actual laws of logic changing -- one set of laws was in force at one time and another set is in force at another time. I will assume you had option (i) in mind, since the idea that the laws of logic change is at least as weird as the idea that the laws of physics change (which is to say: pretty weird), and in any case, the change would surely not be a result of something as cosmically inconsequential as our making a certain scientific discovery! So, your question now is: Could we be justified in changing our minds about what the laws of logic are as a result of a discovery in physics? This is a controversial question. Some philosophers have said that we know the laws of logic a priori -- that is, independent of sensory input. In general, such philosophers do not think that we could justly change our minds...

That is not one of the definitions of "randomness" with which I am familiar. Rather than consider how to define "randomness", let's consider the idea of every possible outcome having an equal chance of occurring. Suppose I ask you to select a prime number "at random". What would it be for every possible outcome to have an equal chance of being selected? One way to understand this would be for every prime number to have the same chance of being selected. But there are an infinite number of prime numbers. So the only way for each prime number to have the same chance of being selected is for each to have zero chance of being selected. However, it would then seem reasonable to conclude that the chance of your selecting *any* prime number at all is the chance of your selecting the first prime number (which is 1) plus the chance of your selecting the second prime number (2) plus the chance of your selecting the third prime number (3) plus the chance of your selecting the fourth prime number ...

Yes, the theory of natural selection implies that a trait is more likely to spread insofar as (roughly speaking) the creatures possessing it are better at producing greater numbers of fertile offspring. But this does not mean that the "ultimate goal" of a creature is to reproduce. To speak of a creature as having such a goal suggests that the creature has this goal consciously in mind, and also that the creature's value or worth is to be judged (at least in part) by how well it achieves this goal. Evolutionary theory says no such thing. (Perhaps you realize this, and that's why you put the word "error" in scare-quotes in your question.) Furthermore, even setting this point aside, our ability to think surely contributes greatly to our evolutionary fitness. Of course, it also allows people to choose not to reproduce, as well as to create technology that might (with careless application) sometime lead to the demise of the human species. But it seems to me that overall, being able to think contributes...

An excellent question! Many of Einstein's most famous papers make shockingly few references to the details of previous empirical work by other scientists. To put the same point in another way, many of Einstein's most famous arguments arise largely from "philosophical" considerations. For instance, Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity paper begins by noting a symmetry in electromagnetism: that the current induced by a magnet moving relative to a loop of conducting wire is the same, according to electromagnetic theory, whether the magnet is moving and the conductor is at rest, or vice versa, as long as their relative motion is the same in both cases. However, Maxwell's electromagnetic theory (as it was then understood) assigns the induced current different causes in the two cases. Einstein suggests that the current should be understood as having the same cause in the two cases, which leads him to suppose that there is no fact about whether a force is really electric or magnetic. Clearly, this...

I agree that the student's response was rude. Not knowing the precise topic of your discussion in class, I am unable to say much. But it seems like the student could have done a great deal more to explain the basis for her view, and it seems like a good teacher would have required her to do so. However, an appeal to authority is not always inappropriate. Suppose an art expert tells me that a certain recently discovered painting is by Botticelli. I could ask the art expert to explain the justification for her view. She might reply that the brushstrokes or the treatment of the hair are characteristic of Botticelli's work, and she might even point out to me the similarities between the given painting and others firmly attributed to Botticelli. But suppose I do not perceive those similarities. I just don't see the "characteristic brushstrokes", for instance. It might well be entirely appropriate for the art expert to say, "Well, I've done my best to show you what I see. But it took me years to perfect...

Consider a match. It has the disposition -- the power, the capacity -- to produce fire. But suppose that as a matter of fact, the match is never struck. So it never, in fact, produces any fire. Yet it still had the power to produce fire. "This match produces fire" is false, yet "This match has the disposition to produce fire" is true. In your example, the thundercloud's disposition refers to (in Goodman's words) the "threats or promises" made by the thunderclouds , whereas a sentence like "Thunderclouds produce lightning" is true only if some thundercloud actually makes good on its threat.

See my answer to a very similar question from December 2.