I can't make sense of the idea that truth could be relative. Suppose that I find some dish spicy, while you find it mild. We might be inclined to say that (R) "This dish is spicy" is true relative to me and false relative to you, but I think that way of speaking is by no means forced on us and, in fact, is misleading. For if R itself were true, its truth would have to be explained in terms of the truth of this non-relative claim: (NR) This dish is spicy relative to my taste but not yours. NR neither is nor implies the claim that truth is relative. Rather, perceived spiciness is. So too with (P) "Polygamy is acceptable" is true relative to culture A but false relative to culture B. P is an avoidable and misleading way of making the non-relative claim that culture A accepts polygamy whereas culture B doesn't. The acceptance of polygamy is relative to culture, and that's a non-relative truth.

I respectfully disagree with your claim that logic doesn't help in the search for truth. On the contrary, we need logic in order to find out what any proposition P implies -- what other propositions must be true if P is true -- which, in turn, is essential for verifying that P itself is true. This holds as much in science as in philosophy or any other kind of inquiry. You suggest that you need a definition of the word truth before you can answer the question whether philosophy can find truth. But if that's a problem, it isn't a problem just for philosophy: it affects science and any other kind of inquiry just as much as it affects philosophy. You could say to a physicist, "Until I have a definition of truth , how can I know whether physics can find truth?" The only difference here between philosophy and physics is that a philosopher will take your question seriously. I don't think you need a definition of truth -- or at any rate not an interesting definition -- in order to see...

You give an interesting argument that the ground of one's identity is biological rather than (just) physical and/or psychological. But it may run into a problem. Not only can one's body reject organs transplanted from someone else. It can also, in the case of autoimmune disease, "reject" (i.e., attack) one's own cells and tissues: sometimes the body doesn't "know its own." Yet it seems incorrect to say that sufferers of autoimmune disease have a "compromised" identity. Does this problem cast doubt on your proposal?

This purely instrumental justification for assigning moral responsibility is typical of hard determinism, which says that, because determinism is true, agents are never morally responsible for their actions, even though society can benefit from talking and acting as if they were. One obvious objection is that it would be dishonest and unfair to treat agents as morally responsible if in fact they are not. But there is another deterministic view of moral responsibility: soft determinism. It says that agents can be genuinely morally responsible for their actions, even though determinism is true, provided that the agents (1) act from motives that they would endorse on reflection, (2) know what they are doing, and (3) are not coerced by other agents. All of (1)-(3) are compatible with determinism. For this reason, soft determinism is a compatibilist attitude toward determinism and moral responsibility. It avoids the charge that assigning moral responsibility is dishonest and unfair. You can...

In my experience, philosophy courses take the explicit, self-conscious formulation and evaluation of arguments (i.e., reasoning) more seriously than any other courses of study, with the possible exception of those math courses that emphasize proofs. Moreover, the breadth and depth of philosophical problems exceed those encountered in math. Therein lie the advantages of philosophy courses as compared to, say, math or economics courses. If you pursue philosophy, I think you'll discover that the standards of argumentative rigor expected in philosophy courses surpass -- sometimes by far -- the standards of rigor expected in any courses outside of math, and again they're applied to a much more varied, and often deeper, set of questions.

I don't see a contradiction here any more than I did back at Question 26649 , which is nearly identical. Yes, the empty set has the property of being empty and is the only set having that property. But the emptiness of the empty set doesn't imply that the empty set has no properties. On the contrary, it has the property of being empty, being a set, being an abstract object, being distinct from Mars, being referred to in this answer, etc. Why would anyone think that the empty set must lack all properties?

It needn't. Like Descartes, you might try to demonstrate a priori that you possess perceptual (i.e., external-world) knowledge. Your demonstration needn't presume perceptual knowledge in the course of demonstrating that you possess perceptual knowledge. Therefore, your demonstration needn't beg the question of whether you have perceptual knowledge in the first place. Most philosophers, I think, regard all such demonstrations (including Descartes's) as failures, but I don't see any reason to think that all such demonstrations must fail because they beg the question. Consider a more interesting case. Suppose I analyze knowledge as true belief produced by a reliable mechanism , i.e., a mechanism that yields far more true than false beliefs in the conditions in which it's typically used. A skeptic then challenges me to show that some perceptual belief I regard as knowledge, such as my belief that I have hands, was in fact produced by a reliable mechanism. In response, I offer empirical...

None that I can think of, including none of the candidates that I've seen offered by "dialetheists" (i.e., philosophers who say that some contradictions are true). If you have any promising candidates, please let us know!

As far as I can see, the definitive property of the empty set is not nothingness but instead emptiness : It's the one and only set having (containing, possessing) no members at all. The empty set can be empty, in that sense, without itself being nothing. So I see no threat of contradiction here. Indeed, the empty set can belong to a non-empty set, such as the set { { } } , which couldn't happen if the empty set were nothing.

I take it you presume that there is an objectively true answer to your question (otherwise, why ask it?). I can't see how there could fail to be an objectively true answer concerning where the universe came from, and the objectively true answer may be that the universe never came from anything because the universe (in one form or another) has always existed. Of course, the existence of an objectively true answer to the question is, by itself, no guarantee that we will ever come to know the answer.