When you imagine a space that is empty of everything except one hand, you are still imagining the appearance of that hand from a particular point of view (or, perhaps, from several different points of view). That point of view is what tells you it is a right hand versus a left hand, for it is from that point of view that the thumb extends to the left of the the palm rather than to the right. Some philosophers (e.g. Berkeley) have claimed that imagining anything requires you to imagine the existence of a viewing subject. There is a difference, however, between imagining how a hand looks from a particular point of view and imagining that someone is occupying that point of view. (This distinction is nicely clarified in an important article by Bernard Williams, entitled "Imagination and the Self" .) You can imagine what a particular hand looks like from a particular point of view without imagining that there is anyone occupying that point of view. If you agree with Berkeley that imagining...

Although there are many situations where it would be immoral to discount the wrongness of an act, and many situations where it would be immoral to absolve a person of responsibility for a wrong act, I do not think that forgiveness can ever be immoral. This is because I view forgiveness as a matter of giving up on one's feelings of resentment towards someone else -- not a matter of giving up on one's judgment that that person is responsible for doing something that was wrong. Even if feelings of resentment are sometimes useful (for motivating change, for example), they are not sufficiently under one's control to make the loss of resentment immoral. More importantly, though, I do not think it is our feelings that make us moral or immoral so much as our intentions, and there is no guarantee that resentful feelings lead to moral intentions -- even when the resentment is directed towards the doing of a serious wrong.

It is common to interpret Kant as insisting that the objects we observe in space and time exist independently of any particular observation we make of them,but also insisting that space and time are forms that we impose on our experience rather than characteristics of reality as it exists in itself. Likewise, it is common to read Kant as insisting that causal relations exist independently of any particular observation we may make, but also insisting that causal ordering is something that we impose on our experience rather than something that is present in reality in itself. These contrasting claims are reflected in Kant's famous distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal, and in his endorsement of empirical realism and transcendental idealism. Whether Kant's position is a consistent position is a topic of much dispute. It is common to invoke the image of colored glasses to explain how he can insist that what we see is independent of ourselves but how we see it depends on...

Most concepts get their meaning, at least in part, from their relations to other concepts. The concept of a contract, for example, gets its meaning from its relations to other concepts such as the concept of a promise, the concept of an obligation, the concept of a free agent, and so on. Likewise, the concept of the number two, and the concept of addition, get their meanings from their relations to the concepts of other numbers and other mathematical functions. So understanding what a concept means seems to depend on understanding how it relates to certain other concepts. We can be a competent user of a concept, using it appropriately in relation to other concepts, without being able to explain our usage to someone else -- at least not easily, and without extensive prompting. You might be able to enter into contracts, and to do mathematics, for example, without being able to explain what you are doing. In these cases, you have knowledge that you have difficulty explaining. Whether you...

All arguments seek premises that most people can agree to without needing further support, and in this sense the appeal to what is "obvious" remains alive and well. What people can agree to without further support often depends on the context, however: in the context of a weekend stroll, it may be obvious that there is a goldfinch nearby, whereas in the context of an official birdcount this may be less obvious. It is more accurate to call obviousness a criterion of knowledge rather than a criterion of truth , since the obviousness of a certain claim may be part of what makes my state a state of knowledge but it is not a part of what makes it true. The fact that a bird ate the seed will be true (or false) regardless of how obvious it is to me. The fact that is is obvious to me may, however, contribute to my view counting as knowledge. Note that obviousness may be a criterion of knowledge without being either necessary or sufficient for knowledge. Much of what we know (about the...

First, it should be noted that not all astrophysicists agree that time and space began with the Big Bang. There may be no meaningful way to measure or study space and time before the Big Bang, but that does not necessarily mean that there is no such thing. Scientists can agree on empirical findings and on the theories that best predict further findings without agreeing about the nature of the reality that underlies those findings. (This is especially clear in the case of Quantum Mechanics, where several competing interpretations have scientific adherents.) Kant claimed that an entirely empty space, and an entirely empty time, are perfectly conceivable. So if the reason behind believing that space and time began with the Big Bang is the belief that the intelligibility of space and time depend on the presence of objects in space and time, he would disagree. Indeed, this view is the explicit target of several of his arguments in the Transcendental Aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason. On...

You ask about different areas of consciousness. If you mean different areas of the brain, that is a question that should be answered by neurologists rather than philosophers; and neurologists have tended to think that thought is more correlated with activity in the cerebral cortex while feeling is more correlated with activity in older parts of the brain. All states of consciousness depend on activity in many different parts of the brain, however, so locating any conscious state in just one area of the brain would be simplistic. Philosophers can address some of the differences between thought and feeling, however, and we can help to clarify ways in which how thoughts (of various sorts) and feelings (of various sorts) are related. Thoughts involve judgments -- about what is the case, what could be the case, what should be the case, etc. -- and judgments require the application of concepts or the categorization of experience. (There are a number of interesting and important questions about the...

You assume (1) that you can, to a large extent anyway, choose whether or not to let yourself fall in love with someone new versus sustain the love you already feel for the person you are involved with, and (2) that you have no reason to think the new relationship will be any happier than the old (although you also claim to think that both you and your past girlfriend are better off now than you were before). You also seem to assume (3) that future happiness of your new acquaintance would be the same whether or not you allowed yourself to fall in love with her (presumably because without you she would be involved in some other, equally happy relationship). It is usually very hard to know the accuracy of each of these assumptions, but I do not find them unreasonable. On a straightforward comparison of current happiness with probable future happiness of everyone involved, there seems to be no reason to choose one relationship over the other. You seem to suggest, however, that the transition...

Long before the advances of neurobiology, people recognized that certain mental states were correlated with certain physical states. Contemporary science has been able to discover more and more correlations, with more and more precision, but there are still many different understandings of what such correlations indicate. (1) Some think that these correlations reveal just how closely synchronized mind and body can be despite their very different nature. (2) Others think such correlations establish the identity of mental states and physical states. (3) Still others think that the relevant correlations show us the physical causes of mental states. There are scientists as well as philosophers who belong in each of these camps. It is not possible to decide between these (and various other options) without making controversial assumptions (implicitly if not explicitly) about the nature of identity, the nature of causation, and the determination of necessary versus accidental correlations; so...

The topic of forgiveness has recently received quite a bit of philosophical attention, which means quite a bit of philosophical disagreement as well. In particular: Charles Griswold, Pamela Hieronymi, Jacques Derrida have written in different ways about this topic. There seems to be agreement about the answers to most of your questions, however. Forgiveness is a change in attitude whereby one no longer holds a grudge or demands remediation from a wrongdoer -- despite continuing to view that person as responsible for their wrongdoing. This is not just a matter of ceasing to be angry; it is a matter of relinquishing the demand for recourse. A person who is forgiven by someone she has wronged may still be obliged to correct or compensate for her misdeed insofar as she continues to have obligations to herself, to society at large, or to a higher power. On the other hand, insofar as one is forgiven by oneself, one's society, or one's god, these obligations cease. Forgiveness may or may not be...