You've pointed out that you're quite comfortable committing "wrong" actions if it suits your needs. That should already suggest a pretty clear reason why most people wouldn't be too happy about your outlook. If I were around you and I believed that you really look at things the way you say you do, I'd watch my back. I wouldn't trust you, and I'd be worried that you might do me harm if it served your purposes. Of course, as stated, that's not a reason for saying that your outlook is wrong -- not unless you're willing to admit that some things really are wrong, and the presupposition of your question seems to be that you aren't. But even here there's something strange about the way you press your point. You ask why people would think your way of looking at things is wrong when you are perfectly happy living that way. But what does that have to do with it? If I'm trying to decide whetheryour way of life is right, I'm not asking whether it makes you happy. If you want an argument that doesn...

Consider these lines; perhaps you know them: In a Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough I first came across this poem 35 years ago. Though tastes may vary, it still works for me. But as you may well know, it's by Ezra Pound, who was a propagandist for Mussolini and a virulent anti-Semite. If I bring that to mind as I think about the poem, it leaves an unpleasant taste. But I don't think this shows that the poem itself is less valuable, and I also don't think it means that one can't legitimately take pleasure in it. Whether all cases work this way is another matter. Pound was trying to present a pure image. A good deal of art isn't like that. Outside the context of art, knowing how to interpret someone's words or gestures sometimes calls for knowing something about the person. It doesn't seem crazy to think that this could also be true for certain works of art, though there is a large and long-standing debate here. On the main...

How about neither? Or both? (Or both neither and both?) Put another way... Time is just one of our many concepts. By far most people who use the concept of time aren't philosophers and aren't scientists either. And so the concept of time as such isn't a peculiarly philosophical concept, nor a peculiarly scientific one. That said, time has a special place in science as a fundamental parameter. We can do a lot of science without the concept of sex, for example, even though there's a place in science for the study of sex. (And of course, if there were no sex, science would grind to a halt in a few decades!) But outside of mathematics, we can't do much science without the concept of time. Moreover, physicists have things to say about time that are deep and surprising and were mostly beyond the imagination of the philosophers and the folk until relatively recently. Philosophers have long taken an interest in time as well, and have taken it as a special subject for philosophical analysis. They've...

Best of luck to you in this worthy undertaking! I hope my colleagues will provide suggestions of their own; there are many possibilities. But I'd like to offer a general thought or two, as well as a couple of specific suggestions. Although I have great respect for the scholarly attempt to wrestle with texts by Plato, Locke, Kant and so on, there's a caution to keep in mind. Philosophy is primarilya problem- and question-oriented, and doing it well has more to do with a certain kind of careful thinking than with knowledge of texts by classic authors. A look at a typical philosophy journal bears this out. The articles may refer to the recent literature (though "recent" in philosophy doesn't just mean "last year"), but they often don't mention classic literature at all. I just glanced through the bibliographies of the articles in the Spring 2007 issue of a major philosophy journal. At most 5% of the references were to texts or articles before 1960. The old texts can be valuable, but they...

It may be that I'm missing the point (I haven't had my daily ration of chocolate yet), but what's wrong with this way of looking at it? Conscious or not, a thought can't be its own cause -- at least, not given our usual assumptions. That's what I take your premise 1 to entail. And it seems right: I can't be conscious of a particular thought X before I think it. (It may be, for all that, that I can think it before I'm conscious of it.) But why can't my conscious thought X be the cause of a later conscious thought Y ? For example, my thinking now about a jigger of gin might cause me to think, a moment later, that there's a bottle of gin in the freezer. Or maybe the issue is this: if I'm going to consciously cause a thought about Vienna, the content of that thought must already be part of the thought that does the causing. In that case, I'm conscious of the thought before I've thought it, contrary to premise 2. But then premise 2 ends up suspect, doesn't it? Couldn't I be sitting here...

You're right: we shouldn't throw the word "causes" around too casually. Let's fix on depression as our example, and let's keep in mind that simply being sad isn't the same as being clinically depressed. On the one hand, neurochemicals probably aren't just symptoms of depression; they probably have something to do with causing the symptoms -- the listlessness or anxiety, or excessive rumination or protacted feelings of sadness. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that clinical depression is , at bottom, a malfunction in the neurochemical system, though this may be too reductionistic, and it also may turn out not to get the biology right. But perhaps what you're pointing to is that it still makes sense to ask what causes this malfunction in the first place. That's obviously a very good question. My impression is that sometimes life circumstances can trigger depression, but sometimes there's no clear external cause. The right answer here is likely to be very complicated. At the moment, far as I...

An intriguing puzzle. The first point is that insofar as it's a question about how our minds actually work, it's an empirical matter, and the answer depends on the facts. But there's a design-level issue here (which I'm hoping my better-informed colleagues might chime in on.) Suppose we have a complicated program that's broken up into sub-programs, or modules. And suppose that there is one module whose job it is to monitor what's going on in various other modules and stop them if they appear to be running amok. Perhaps, for example, this monitor module will kill a process if it has cycled through a million iterations without halting. You no doubt get the idea (and may well have thought of it yourself.) If a system is modular enough, and if it has enough safeguards, redundancies, monitoring modules and so on built in, then the chance that it will just go nuts might be small. And so if the mind is essentially a computer, it may be that millions of years of evolution have built it in this sort of...

I suppose She wasn't twiddling Her thumbs, since I believe God has no thumbs... But a bit more helpfully, there are two ways to think about God's relationship to time. On one view, God is eternal . That means that God is outside time and space altogether. On the other view, God is everlasting -- is in time, but has no beginning and no end. My sense is that the former view is the dominant one in Catholic tradition. And in that case, God wasn't doing anything "before" the Big Bang, since "before" and "after" don't apply to God. You might want to look at the entry on Eternity in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (see the link to the right) and you might also find the paper called "Eternity" by Eleanor Stump and Norman Kretzmann (Journal of Philosophy, 1981) interesting, though that paper is a bit difficult. By the way: on one way of thinking about the Big Bang, "before" doesn't apply to it either. Time itself begins with the Big Bang. If that's the right way to think of it, then...

I'd like to know if my colleagues have any better information than I do. The best I have to offer is a not very reliable guess based on limited information. There is a graph at http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/97trends/ea1-6.htm which, when extrapolated, leads to the estimate that perhaps as many as 70% of people in the USA who have a high school diploma will have at least some college education. And what's posted at http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/censusandstatistics/a/highschool.htm claims that 85% of adults 25 and over have a high school diploma. This suggests that perhaps about 64% of people in the US will have at least some college education -- a figure that I seem to recall being consistent with something I read elsewhere. But to complete our guesswork, we need an estimate of the percentage of people among those with at least some college education who take a philosophy course. Here I have nothing to offer but instinct. And my guess is that it is no higher than 20% and quite possibly considerably...

Let me begin by saying that I'm sorry for your loss. This must be terribly hard. And your sense of guilt is understandable. It's hard to think the thought that one's child may have done the best thing in taking his own life. But as you point out, this thought doesn't come from lack of care or lack of grief, but from the very opposite: from deep caring and empathy born of intimate knowledge of your son's situation. There are some well-known theological and philosophical arguments intended to show that suicide is always wrong. Immanuel Kant offered one that strikes many readers -- it certainly strikes me this way -- as bordering on sophistry; I won't try to reconstruct it here, and won't recommend it as anything you need consider. Theological arguments against suicide often rest on dubious claims about the divine will and the way in which taking one's own life supposedly usurps God's perogative to decide when we die -- arguments that might well make a believer in a loving and merciful God shudder. But...