The argument of the Meditations goes as follows: first, Descartes establishes his own existence as a thinking thing; then, purely by considering the content of his thoughts, he establishes the existence of God; then, by reflecting on the nature of God and discovering that He is not a deceiver, he finally establishes the existence of other things. He still concedes that his senses might not reliably show him the way bodies really are, but he feels that he can at least rest assured that they do indeed have properties like size, shape and motion or rest. "They may not all exist in a way that exactly corresponds with my sensory grasp of them, for in many cases the grasp of the senses is very obscure and confused. But at least they possess all the properties which I clearly and distinctly understand, that is, all those which, viewed in general terms, are comprised within the subject-matter of pure mathematics." Now, there is plenty of scope for criticising this or that step in Descartes' overall...

No, mathematicians haven't defined any meaning for expressions like "infinity-th" or "infinity+1-th". (The fact that they're so awkward to write should be something of a giveaway!). It's important to appreciate that infinity is not a number. Don't be misled by the fact that we can say things like "there are infinitely many natural numbers", which seems to have the same form as a sentence like "there are three coins in the fountain". The number sequence doesn't go: 0, 1, 2, 3,... 1,000,000, 1,000,001, 1,000,002, 1,000,003,... infinity, infinity+1, infinity+2, infinity+3.... Rather, infinity is a property of certain sets, such as that of the natural numbers. The infinity of that set consists in the fact that, for any member you might care to consider, there will be another member, which is larger than it but which is nevertheless still finite . And we can easily refer to that set as a whole, and we can even quantify universally over its members. We can say, for instance, that they all have...

You seem (reasonably enough) to be understanding the notion of 'better' in the moral sense of the term. But that isn't the sense that Anselm had in mind, and it's not actually the word he used either. What he was concerned with (in chapter two of his Proslogium) was 'that, than which nothing greater can be conceived' (in the Latin, 'id quo maius cogitari nequit'). And it's true that the notion of greatness does sometimes carry moral connotations, such as when we describe a particular paragon of virtue as being a great man or woman. But it works the other way too. In cases like murder and rape, although we might sometimes regard wicked intentions as already constituting crimes -- we certainly do so when these intentions are shared and discussed by a cabal of conspirators -- most of us would nevertheless regard it as a greater crime if those intentions actually get translated into action. And then there are plenty of other senses of 'great' that carry no moral connotations whatsoever, one way or...

There is a certain irony in seeing such a question posted online, typed in via a computer (or, for all I know, maybe some even more cutting-edge piece of handheld technology). Because, if wise men and women, the best part of a century ago, hadn't developed the principles of quantum mechanics, there could be no such things. At least not in anything like their current form: we'd still be on valves and transistors, or even cogs and pulleys... themselves the off-shoots of yet earlier scientific research. As for those hospitals you mention, had it not been for scientific research into human biology, they wouldn't have any treatments to offer their patients (in which case, it really wouldn't matter if their budgets were to be taken away altogether!). Gene therapy, for instance, clearly would not have been able to get off the ground if its developers had not possessed any conception of a 'gene' or understood the structure of DNA. But that is something that we owe to state-funded scientific research. It is...

I don't know of any good reason to believe in God; and, judging by the fact that this question has gone unanswered for more than a week now, it would appear that my fellow panellists don't know of any either. I suppose a theist might say something like the following. Just look around you! Absolutely everything you experience constitutes evidence for the existence of God. The fact that anything exists at all entails that there must have been a creator. The fact that things display such a precise adaptation and organisation entails that this creator must have been an intelligent designer. 'Inference to the best explanation' is a standard mode of argument that is adopted throughout science and other domains, and this would be presented as just another instance of that kind of inference. The data in this case is the evidence our experience provides us of the way the world is; the conclusion is that a certain kind of God exists; and the argumentative move between the two relies on the principle that, of...

We have to take care over the interpretation of positive assertions about fictional characters. Consider the sentence "Harry Potter wears glasses". There seems to be a sense in which this is true. We might wish to say, for instance, that Harry Potter wears glasses but Ron Weasley does not. But there seems to be a different sense in which it is not true. We might wish to say that John Lennon really wore glasses, but Harry Potter doesn't. He can't really wear glasses, because he isn't a real person at all. The second kind of claim is just the literal sense we use in ordinary discourse about real things. When we make the first kind of claim, by contrast, we are indulging in a sort of verbal make-believe, pretending to go along with the fiction for the sake of our discourse. We might sometimes opt to make this explicit by prefacing our claims with an expression like "Within the fiction..." or "According to the story...". Of course, most of the time we'll leave this unspoken, but only because we are...

Poetry can certainly be used to express profound ideas and attitudes concerning (for want of a better expression) 'the human condition'. These ideas can affect the reader's soul in a powerful way, helped along by the captivating power of the medium itself. And examples of poetry that might be regarded as 'philosophical' in this sense are innumerable. Indeed, one might make a case for claiming that it's the norm rather than the exception, and that this is the primary aspiration of most of the greatest poetry in history, from Homer to Dante to Sylvia Plath. But does this really count as philosophy? For some people, this is precisely what the best and most important kind of philosophy consists in. For others, however, and particularly within English-speaking academia, philosophy is more a matter of highly technical and abstract theories about the structure of reality, the nature of cognition, and things of that sort. And yet, as it turns out, those kinds of theories have been explored in verse...

There's something else in your question that doesn't seem quite right. Allen Stairs queries your claim that the foetus (please pardon the British spelling!) is "a new person": for my part, I have some misgivings about the claim that it's "a separate entity". In what sense is the foetus separate from the mother? In the literal sense of the term, it blatantly isn't separate from her. It's inside her own body, and connected to her body through the placenta, no more separate from her than are her liver or kidneys. You might say: okay, but it's separate in the sense that it has the potential to survive in separation from her, as her liver and kidneys do not. But, for a foetus in the early stages of development, that's not true either. Many countries permit abortion, but -- except in really extreme cases where the mother's life is endangered -- only up to a certain time, that time being principally determined by the stage of development at which a foetus becomes capable of surviving outside the mother...

One observes an idea simply by having it. For an idea to exist, and for someone to be aware of it, are, for Berkeley, the same thing. To be is to be perceived. You might say: no, the things we are aware of are not ideas but bodies. But Berkeley would say: bodies are ideas, and it is through experience that we know about them. Empiricism holds that experience is the only foundation we have for knowledge, or indeed for any kind of cognition at all, whereas rationalism suggests that we have some other source for knowledge, perhaps some kind of super-sensory faculty of pure intellect. But Berkeley straightforwardly declares: 'Pure Intellect I understand not' ( Philosophical Commentaries , sect. 810). All that our senses reveal to us of bodies are their superficial appearances, qualities such as size, shape, colour, flavour etc. A rationalist would suggest that our intellect enables us to penetrate beyond these, and to grasp the underlying substance to which all these various qualities adhere....

One little historical point to begin with: Descartes didn't actually appeal to the Argument from Design at all. But you're certainly right that it has a long and venerable history behind it. It's the fifth of St Thomas Aquinas's 'Five Ways' of proving the existence of God; and, in some form or other, it goes a long way still further back than that. Regarding the recent controversies (and perhaps explaining the 'oddness' of the trial), there are two issues that need to be distinguished. (i) Is it a good argument? (ii) Is it a scientific argument? The two questions are independent: both scientific debates and debates of other kinds (philosophical, theological, etc.) do get their fair share of both good arguments and bad arguments. We hope that, whatever the debate, the good arguments will win the day: but the bad ones deserve to be given a fair hearing too, so that what is bad about them might be exposed. Now, the recent controversies have centred around the question of whether or not ID is a...