On the one hand, it seems safe to say that not all aesthetic appreciation is enjoyment. There are some works of art that are profoundly disturbing, and yet we still value them. An example: I remember vividly the first time I saw one of Ad Reinhardt's large black canvases. I was taken by surprise: I didn't expect to have much of a reaction, and yet I felt something for which the word "despair" is about the best label I can come up with. I found the experience moving, but it feels wrong to call it enjoyable. Still, there are other works of art that we do enjoy and that are beautiful. So let's turn to those. Take an example of some work that you find beautiful -- perhaps the third movement of Beethoven's opus 132 A Minor quartet. If someone asked "Why do you enjoy listening to that?" saying "Because it's so beautiful" would be a perfectly good answer, though there's a great deal more that one could add. If your friend then asked "But why do you enjoy beautiful things?" you might find the question...

Yes and no, though perhaps most importantly no. Saying that something is an art is sometimes a way of saying that it's an exercise of skill, not least of a skill that isn't simply a matter of following a set of instructions. In that sense, cosmetic surgery is an art. Cosmetic surgery also has an obvious aesthetic dimension and no doubt calls on many of the same skills that a good sculptor needs. So all of that is on the "yes" side. But there's another obvious sense in which cosmetic surgery isn't an art, or better, perhaps, an Art . Painting, sculpture, poetry, etc. are Arts in this sense not just by virtue of being skills whose practitioners may have aesthetic goals. They also fit into a familiar set of cultural practices and institutions (museums, galleries, performances, reviews, critical studies, sales, auctions...) that determine what we count as "Art" with a capital "A." Cosmetic surgery isn't an "Art" in that sense, and this is almost certainly a very good thing.

I just posed this question on your behalf to a colleague of mine. Here's what he said he'd tell you: "No!!! But you're wrong..." I suppose we could add: it depends on what you mean by "prove," "objective" and "data." In this case, it also seems to depend on what the meaning of "is" is. (Your hand is a parrot? ) but I think at the end of the day, my colleague's answer would still be more or less right. (Not that I think you really believe your hand is a parrot...) The more serious point: there's no airtight refutation of skepticism, or so many philosophers would agree. But many philosophers would also agree that this doesn't give us a reason to worry about skepticism. As my one-time colleague Dudley Shapere once put it, the possibility of doubt isn't a reason for doubt.

I think the first thing we'd need to say is that philosophy doesn't have "authority" in the way that, say, physics does. It doesn't include a body of more-or-less well-established knowledge. Philosophy is all about the sorts of things that some people call "essentially contested questions." So it's a field where disagreement is built in at the ground floor. You may be asking about where premises in reasonable philosophical arguments come from. There's no one answer. Tradition per se isn't important, though what we might call "reflective common sense" -- the sort of thing that seems reasonable on sober reflection by an informed person -- does often figure in philosophical arguments. So do other things, including, sometimes, mathematical knowledge and things we've learned from science, as well as garden-variety common knowledge. But philosophical arguments are arguments , and as such, they're judged by the sorts of standards that we use to judge arguments in general.

Right. Being wrong isn't the same thing as troubling the conscience. People can have troubled consciences when they needn't, and people can do awful things without a flicker of guilt. That said, it could be true (and seems at least somewhat plausible) that people's consciences are often reliable. We often do have pangs of conscience when we do something wrong, and sometimes bringing this reaction into awareness can be useful.

A good question! As it turns out, not everyone agrees that the purpose of punishment is to reform people. In fact, some philosophers (Kant is perhaps the foremost) held that the only justification for punishment is that the person deserves it, and if we punish for the sake of making someone better, we fail to show proper respect for them -- we manipulate them for our own ends. Setting the question of Hell aside for the moment, we can see that the argument you raise, if correct, would also count against capital punishment. But whatever one's views on the rightness of capital punishment, the widespread support it has in some places makes clear that many people see punishment as a matter of giving people what they deserve rather than reforming them. This idea, fleshed oout and elaborated, is often called the retributive theory of punishment, though it's important not to confuse retribution with revenge. Retributive theorists would maintain that the punishment must always be proportional to the...

In many fields there are what some people call lumpers and splitters. Douglas has given a splendid answer that reflects a lumper/unifier/hedgehog perspective. Here's a rather different take, from a splitter/diversifier/fox point of view. It's often held that ethical obligations trump all others. If something is right from a self-interested point of view, for example, but wrong ethically, then the ethical judgment wins. Another feature of ethical judgments (though not unique to them) is that ethical "oughts" satisfy a universalizability principle: if something is right for a person in a given set of circumstances, then it's right for anyone else in those same circumstances. The mere fact that that it's me rather than you is beside the point. If we accept these points, then we've said something unifying about the ethical, but it's only formal unity. It's consistent with very different views about what is actually right or wrong in particular cases. Your question reflects a suspicion that I share: there...

Let's start with "beated." On the one hand, it's a word as opposed to a punctuation mark or a pony. But that's not what you want to know. Your question is something like: is it a word in English? And so the more general question is: when does a potential word count as a "real" word in a language? What about this? It counts as a word if the people who use the language accept it as one. That's vague many ways over: Which people? (Presumably it needn't be all.) What's a language? (Can we do better than say that it's a dialect with a gun? What's a dialect?) Accept in what circumstances and for what purposes? We'd also have obvious circularity problems if we treated this formula as a serious definition of "word in a language." But the point is that there are no firm facts here; there are complicated, imprecise and often untidy conventions. We all have some say in what counts as a word in a language, because at the end of the day, how people speak and write settles the matter. But there are no simple...

While agreeing with everything in Thomas's characteristically clear-headed response, I would add just one note that may bear on your worry. There are philosophers who think that if a thought-experiment is too far from our ordinary experience, then our intuitions about what we should say about the case may be unreliable. For example, to take a case from Judith Thomson's famous paper on abortion, do we really know what our moral views would be if people seeds floated around in the air and could give rise overnight to embryos by lodging in the fabric on your couch? It's also been claimed that some of the more bizarre thought experiments in the personal identity literature suffer from this sort of flaw. We're being asked to decide what would be true if certain very strange circumstances held, when our usual range of experience may not provide us with a thick enough understanding of the relevant "possible worlds" to know what we should say. That said, as Thomas's reply points out, some apparently bizarre...

The question is whether what we find in the physical world could tell us whether math is true. Let's consider two sorts of cases. One is what we might call mathematical laws -- 1+1=2 is a particularly simple example. An algebraic law like x 2 - y 2 = (x+y)(x-y) is another. The second sort of case includes things like Newton's law of gravitation -- F 12 = G(m 1 m 2 )/r 2 -- or some mathematical description of the characteristics of steel beams used for bridges. This may be closer to what you have in mind. Start with the first sort of case. Suppose we have two 1-liter beakers of water. We pour them together, measure the volume and find that it's two liters. Have we confirmed the mathematical claim that 1+1=2? If so, what do we make of the fact that if we put pure alcohol rather than water in one of those beakers, when we put the two together we get about 1.94 liters? Does that count against 1+1=2? It's pretty clear that neither experiment tells us anything about whether 1+1 equals 2;...