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Knowledge
Religion

There are many attributes that are commonly attributed to God, or at least some versions of the Christian God, one of which is omniscience. I have my doubts that omniscience is a possible trait for any being to have because it seems to me to be a paradoxical trait. If God (or any being) knows everything that can be an object of knowledge can s/he know what it is like to not know everything that can be an object of knowledge? I say everything that can be an object of knowledge because there are obviously things that are unknowable like a round square or a married bachelor. However, I don't think that a being could know everything that was knowable and simultaneously know the experience of not knowing everything that it knowable (knowing the experience of not knowing everything that is knowable is something that is knowable because as humans that is how our experience is).

Just a minor addition to Mitch Green's astute observations: Some defenders of the coherence of omniscience (Richard Swinburne, for example), hold that omniscience does not include the knowledge of future free acts. Swinburne and R.M. Adams and others do so on the grounds that there is no truth or falsehood now about what a future free agent will do. Aristotle held this as well (or at least most commentators think so!). If this viewpoint is correct, "omniscience" would mean something like all that it is possible to know or all that can be known. If future free action is not knowable in principle then any being, even an omniscient being, would not know something and thus would know what it is like to be ignorant. For an excellent book on omniscience and other divine attributes, check out Richard Swinburne's The Coherence of Theism. Professor Green rightly notes that some philosophers have worried about the limits of knowledge that might be in play if a being is incorporeal. And I must agree...
Knowledge

I have had this issue circulating in mind probably since I was in kindergarten. The basic question is this: how – being conscious of my own being, seeing through my own eyes, thinking my own thoughts, interpreting all the other senses, etc. – can I know or accept that every other person in existence does the same thing, if I myself have no way of experiencing other people's beings except from a third-person perspective? From my vantage point, I am the only person who has his own thoughts and autonomy. It has often occurred to me as an afterthought that, since I consider myself pretty intelligent in my own right, that perhaps everything else in my environment could be some massive illusion that my own mind is causing me to accept as reality. Could the fact that there are philosophers responding to this very question prove that my mind is playing a trick on me by creating a response for me to interpret? I suppose my basic question is, is this entire situation possible, and/or is there a concrete way to...

This is sometimes called the problem of other minds. You should check out the 17th century French philosopher Descartes and his Meditations and Discourse on Method! I personally am with you and Descartes in thinking that various radical skeptical hypotheses are possible (we could be in the Matrix), however philosophers from Hobbes to Wittgenstein to Ryle to Putnam have all worked hard to undermine such radical skepticism. You can find various strategies at countering skepticism in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy --in particular, check out the entry on the private language argument. I think all of them have weaknesses. For example, one commonplace anti-skeptical move is to argue that you cannot intelligibly ask your question unless it turns out that the skeptical hypothesis is false. For you to even be able to think or speak about your having a point of view or perspecitve or to be subject to illusion presupposes that we are subjects in a very public world of other persons and non...
Knowledge
Suicide

I have a practical question that arises from my Solipsistic views. The more negatively I view my life as a whole, the more disturbed I am by the prospect of my own suicide. When I feel my life has meaning, the option of eventual suicide, though not in the near future, becomes attractive. Conversely, when I feel helpless and depressed, I would rather let nature kill me. However, this tendency reverses when I entertain the thought that people exist outside of my mind. Even coming from a Solipsist who holds that nothing outside of the mind can be known, my attitude towards suicide depends upon the reality outside the mind. Since I have to make the decision of whether to live or die, I have to also take a stance on what exists apart from the mind. How do I choose which potentiality to base this decision upon? Can there be any reason to prefer one potential scenario to another? The scenario where others exist apart from my mind comes more naturally, but is this reason enough to continue entertaining it, hence...

I am not sure there has ever been any actual solipsist. Keep in mind that a solipsist thinks that only he /she exists. There is no one else. This is as radical a view as possible, though perhaps NYU professor Peter Unger went slightly further in a paper of his called something like "Why I don't exist"! If you are a solipsist, you are committed to holding that none of us exist --you are not in communication with any person outside of yourself. The difficulty of actually holding such a position comes out in an encounter that Bertrand Russell once reported. Russell tells us that he met a woman who thought solipsism was a great philosophy and she was surprised more people aren't solipsists. The reason this might be funny is because if the woman was truly a solipsist, she would not recognize that there are any other people at all. You may be conflating solipsism and radical skepticism. A skeptic may claim not to know about "the external world" or "other minds," but that is different from...
Knowledge
Love

How do you know when you are in love?

I suggest one of the ways is by monitoring when you feel happy or sad. When you are with someone (Skippy), do you feel happy? When Skippy is not around, do you feel sad? If so, this is one of the marks of love. Further reflection will then be in order: what is it about being with Skippy makes you happy? Maybe Skippy likes you and you like being liked. This would not be enough, I suggest, to indicate whether you actually love Skippy her or himself. When you get to the point of realizing that you are delighting in the sheer goodness and well being of Skippy and that when you are sad, you miss the presence of Skippy, then I think you have quite a bit of evidence that: you are in love.
Knowledge
Truth

I recently had an argument in an epistemology class about the relationship between facts and human minds. I argued that a fact cannot exist until a human mind knows it. Most of the rest of the class (and the professor) argued that facts can exist independently of human minds. My professor's example: Every human being believes that the world is flat, when it is in fact round. I argued that the fact that the world is round did not exist until someone thought it. Can a fact exist without a human mind?

You are adopting a pretty radical position, for it seems like common sense for us to recognize as facts (or truths or as actual states of affairs) all sorts of things quite independent of human minds. Most of us would want to say (for example) that it was true that there was life long before there was intelligent life here on earth. Your professor's example is a little odd, partly because very few people have ever believed the earth is flat. (There is a good book on the myth of believing in a flat earth). But you might be able to defend your position as part of a philosophy of language, contending that facts are what correspond to or are referred to as sentences and simply hold the line about not recognizing facts until you have language-users. I believe Fred Stoutland holds that position, and Richard Rorty expresses something like that in The Mirror of Nature. Still, you are not in an enviable position in terms of arguments, as most of us would want to recognize that it is a fact that before there...

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