Or tiny pieces of tinfoil! One way to think about your question is from the day-to-day point of view of ordinary knowledge. From that point of view, we know -- or take ourselves to believe reasonably -- that your dog doesn't run the world because there isn't the slightest evidence that he does and a good deal of evidence that he doesn't. Unless I'm much mistaken, your dog shows the usual signs of doggly limitations. We seem much better at manipulating him than vice-versa. Most of what we do doesn't have any obvious connection with anything that Poochie shows the slightest signs of caring about. In fact, there's no reason to think that Poochie has much of anything in the way of thoughts about who controls what or about what we think. (Poochie probably doesn't have a "theory of mind," as some people say.) Another way of taking your question is as a humorous way of asking how we know anything at all. In some weak sense of "possible," it's possible that the whole world is under the control of...

I have actually taught philosophy online. (I may be the only panelist who has.) In my case, it was a contemporary moral problems course, and I will be teaching an intro to philosophy course online as well. My own view is that there's no good reason why this can't work. A former colleague of mine had a view of philosophy that I've come to think is correct. Although philosophical conversation is good, philosophy ultimately gets done by writing. I don't know how many times I've had the experience of trying to write up an idea that I'd thought about or discussed and discovering that it needs considerable tweaking if it's going to work. The advantage of the online course is that it's all in writing from the outset. One popular format that worked well for me: I would pose a question in response to the readings or to earlier discussion. The question would be of a sort that couldn't be answered in a line or two. Students would have to post a reply on a discussion board, and they would also be required to...

Our department was having a meet-and-greet a few months ago. A man came up and said to me in a :you'd better get it right" tone of voice: "What is the difference between morality and ethics?" I told him that in my experience, philosophers don't make a sharp distinction in the way they use those words. I told him that some people seem to use the word "ethics" to talk about what we might call "descriptive morality" -- what people happen to think is right or wrong, and reserve the word "morality" for what really is right or wrong. But I reiterated that philosophers don't seem too worried about which word we use for what. He told me I was wrong. The occasion called for stifling the urge to say "Then why the h*ll did you ask if you already know the answer?" and I behaved myself. But I never did figure out what he meant. My guess about the putdown you describe is that it has to do with a curious association: in certain circles, there's a tendency to think of sex when the word "morality" comes up....

As it turns out, the answer is easy: there are aleph-null tautologies (formulas true in every row of a truth table) in any standard system of propositional logic -- for sort, in SC (sentential calculus). Here "aleph-null" is the number of integers. Here's a sketch of a proof. First, how many formulas are there in SC? Infinitely many, of course. But it's possible to set up a function that pairs each formula in SC with a unique positive integer. (There are many ways to do this, in fact.) So there can't be any more formulas than there are integers; no more than aleph-null. But some standard arguments tell us that every infinite subset of the integers has the same number of members (aleph-null) as the set of integers itself. In the usual terminology, every infinite subset of a countable set is itself countable. (I recommend as an exercise thinking about how that might be proved.) So, we know that there are aleph-null formulas of SC. But we also know that there are infinitely many tautologies....

I've been mulling over your question for a while, and I'm of various minds about what to say. On the one hand, there's an interesting issue here. Sometimes we think of some people as less than fully human. We hold our usual attitudes in abeyance because we think that -- either temporarily or permanently -- they aren't fit subjects for, e.g., moral evaluation, rational criticism, or what have you. And as your remarks point out, sometimes this allows us to be more rather than less sympathetic to them. That raises some hard questions about when this sort of attitude is appropriate and about the moral costs of adopting it. That said, there's a lot more to being human than being clever, and some people of modest intellectual means have other gifts of empathy, or modesty, or perseverance or warmth... Furthermore, very clever people can have palpable character flaws. I haven't met you, and don't know you, but one might be forgiven for thinking from the tone of your remarks that you're perhaps a little...

I guess my first question would be whether "style of philosophy" refers to something like "way of approaching issues" or to something more like specific philosophical views. It may not matter, however. In either case it's no doubt true that temperamental factors play a role in what we think and how we argue, though people with quite different "styles" of argument may end up supporting the same views, and people who believe quite different things may use the same sorts of argumentative tactics and rhetorical devices to make their points. The idea that our views are all simply reflections of temperament orpsychological peculiarities, if carried to its limit, would underminethe possibility of taking inquiry seriously; in fact it would undermineitself in this very way. But at the risk of a certain sort of circularity, I see no reason to reduce philosophical disagreement to a mere "battle of temperaments." I should think that everyone on this panel can provide their own autobiographical examples of ways...

There's clearly an enormous amount that could be said about this, but here are a few thoughts. Suppose that some person is suffering, and to avoid certain complications, suppose that there's no "cure" for their pain. Now suppose that the person actually wants us to take his life. (Imagine that he isn't in a position to do it himself.) Then it's not just obvious that it is wrong, all things considered, to kill him. That's why there's a serious debate about euthanasia. That said, there are important differences between typical human beings and most other animals: humans don't just have immediate desires and aversions; humans have self-concepts which include plans, desires and values that bear on their own futures. Most animals, or so we believe, don't have any such things. We normally think that people's views about their own futures count -- that it's wrong simply to ignore them. In particular, if someone is suffering but doesn't want to die, we think that carries tremendous weight. Most...

I don't believe in them myself, though I'd be quite willing to be convinved that some of them are true. However, the story you tell illustrates a typical difficulty of these accounts: we might grant that your in-laws saw something , but what was it? The acronym "UFO," of course, stands for " Unidentified Flying Object." And that's what we have if we take your in-laws' story at face value. We certainly don't know that whatever it was came from outer space, as they used to say. Of course, some stories say more. As you point out, we get tales of abduction, strange beings and the like. Apparently many of the people who make these reports seem otherwise sane and normal. Do we know that what these people say isn't so? I wouldn't say that we do. After all, it's surely possible that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, and that some of it has made it to where we are. But many of the cautions that the 18th-century philosopher David Hume applied to miracle stories seem to apply...

Your teacher seems to have some argument such as the following in mind: 1) Things have a purpose only if some being gives them that purpose. 2) Therefore, humanity ("the human race") has a purpose only if someone gave it that purpose. 3) Only an "upper power" could give humanity a purpose. 4) Therefore, if there is no upper power, humanity has no purpose. 1) isn't as obvious as it seems, but let that pass for now. It would be odd to think that the human race has some purpose quite apart from anyone's intentions, and so 2) may be alright on its own. Even at that, 3) isn't altogether obvious. Groups can adopt purposes without someone imposing them, and so it could be that humanity -- the human race -- sets its own purpose, though there are some puzzles here. But of course, even if we grant the whole argument, all that follows is a hypothetical: if there is no higher power, then humanity as such doesn't have a purpose. If not, it's not clear that believing otherwise is a good thing. ...

It's an interesting question. I'd just add this bit to what Nicholas had to say. Let's take the God of classical theism as our example. Assuming God exists, there are some things God might want, and yet can't simply bring about. God might want there to be creatures who freely love him (pardon the gendered pronoun) as much as he loves them. Now an omnipotent God can certainly make creatures who love him, but that's not the same as making creatures who freely love him. Put another way, God might want there to be creatures who love him, but weren't guaranteed to do so. In fact, many believers think that something like this is so. They would say that God has the power to make free creatures, but that if he wants them to love him freely, he can't guarantee, even in his omnipotence, that his desire will be satisfied.