Chomsky's sentence was actually: "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously". Several people have argued that, embedded in the right kind of context, it can be taken as meaningful. For some examples, see a handout from one of my courses here.

From a cognitive science perspective (as opposed to a purely philosophical perspective), you should take a look at Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast and Slow I have a bibliography on the topic (again from the cog sci perspective) here Hope this helps!

You asked what Goedel's incompleteness and inconsistency theorems state. Goedel proved two theorems known as his incompleteness theorems; I don't know of any called an "inconsistency" theorem (of course, he proved many other theorems, too!): Informally, the first one--perhaps it is also the most famous one--says that any formal system that is based on first-order logic plus Peano's axioms for arithmetic is such that: if it is consistent (that is, if no contradiction can be proved in it), then it is incomplete (that is, there is some proposition P in the language of the system such that neither P nor not-P can be proved in the system; presumably, only one of P and not-P is true; hence, there is some proposition in the language of the system that is true but unprovable in the system). Even more informally, an English-language version of the true-but-unprovable sentence can be expressed thus: This sentence is not provable. (If it is false, then it is provable, hence true. So...

I agree with Douglas Burnham and would like to add another point: 5. Philosophy is a conversation that has been going on for over 2500 years. To join in the conversation, it helps to be familiar with what has already been said, in order to bring you "up to speed".

Many philosophers would love to have their own "faculty" or "school" or "college" within a university administrative structure, if only because then the "chair" of their department would become a "dean" who has more power over the purse strings than a mere "chair" :-) More seriously, the location of a philosophy department in a college or university is typically more of a political than a (if you will excuse the expression) philosophical decision. At my university (State University of New York at Buffalo), philosophy used to be in a Faculty of Social Sciences (so, depending on whether you think that social sciences are sciences or not, there's an example that appears to classify philosophy as a science), but, as I understand it, that was for political reasons: the then-new Faculty of Social Sciences was perceived to have more political or financial clout than the Faculty of Arts and Letters. It is now in a College of Arts and Sciences, so it's unclear how our administrators think of it. On the...

I agree with Andrew Pessin. If you agree with Plato that The one who feels no distaste in sampling every study, and who attacks the task of learning gladly and cannot get enough of it, we shall justly pronounce the lover of wisdom, the philosopher. then, for any x, there can be a philosophy of x , which would be the philosophical investigation of the fundamental assumptions, methods, and goals of x (including metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical issues). As Richard Bradley has said, "Philosophy is 99 per cent about critical reflection on anything you care to be interested in". As to which values of x succeed in becoming an established part of philosophy, I think Pessin has it right: It's a question of how many other philosophers also want to study x philosophically; it's not a question of whether x is somehow antecedently "worthy" of being discussed philosophically. Anything has that worth potentially.

I agree with Andrew Pessin. If you agree with Plato that The one who feels no distaste in sampling every study, and who attacks the task of learning gladly and cannot get enough of it, we shall justly pronounce the lover of wisdom, the philosopher. then, for any x, there can be a philosophy of x , which would be the philosophical investigation of the fundamental assumptions, methods, and goals of x (including metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical issues). As Richard Bradley has said, "Philosophy is 99 per cent about critical reflection on anything you care to be interested in". As to which values of x succeed in becoming an established part of philosophy, I think Pessin has it right: It's a question of how many other philosophers also want to study x philosophically; it's not a question of whether x is somehow antecedently "worthy" of being discussed philosophically. Anything has that worth potentially.

There is. My colleague, Carolyn Korsmeyer , has written on the subject.

You should read Stanford philosopher John Perry's award-winning(*) essay, "Structured Procrastination", online at http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/ The 2011 Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

There are (at least) 3 ways to handle the assignment of a truth value to sentences with non-referring subjects, like "The current king of France is bald": 1. Bertrand Russell's solution (as Stephen Maitzen's response points out) was to argue that the subject-predicate (or noun-phrase/verb-phrase) "surface" structure of the sentence was not its real, "deeper", logical structure, and that its truth value could only be determined by examining that logical structure, which would be a conjunction of three propositions: (a) There is at least one current king of France, and (b) there is at most one current king of France, and (c ) he is bald. Because (a) is false, the entire conjunction (and hence the original sentence) is false. It's apparent negation, "The current king of France is not bald", can then be seen to be ambiguous between: (i) It is not the case that the current king of France is bald, i.e.: It is not the case that: (a) & (b) & (c ) and (ii) The current king of...

I don't know anybody who claims that 0 is not a fraction. But I suppose it depends on what you mean by "fraction". If you mean a numeral (that is, a name or description of a number) that is normally written in the format: (integer numeral)/(integer numeral), e.g., 3/4, then, I suppose, strictly speaking, "0" is not a fraction. But you are correct to point out that "0/4" is a fraction. It is then common to identify integer numerals like 0,1,2, ...with fractions 0/1, 1/1, 2/1,... (and, of course, fractions like 2/1 are identified with fractions 4/2, 6/3, etc., just as 1/2 is identified with 2/4, 3/6, etc.). What's really going on here is that a single number , say 4, can be written as lots of different fractions: 4/1, 8/2, 16/4, etc., and these different numerals are then "identified" as naming or describing the same number . So, fractions are numerals . Perhaps what you have in mind are rational numbers , which are typically written as fractions. And, of course, 0 is a perfectly...