There are many serious questions along these lines. The redness of your rock seems to be a property the rock has as it is in itself, but early modern philosophers, beginning with Descartes but perhaps most famously Locke, questioned whether that is so. There are many sorts of alternative views, but perhaps the most common nowadays is the so-called dispositional theory of color: Colors are relational properties, on this view; for a thing to be red is for it to tend (under normal conditions) to cause certain kinds of sensations in perceivers. If that is right, then there is a way in which color is only in our minds. See, as usual, the Stanford Encyclopedia for more on this issue. Note, however, that this issue isn't really best formulated as one about whether we know the rock is red. The issue is one about what it is for the rock to be red. On either view, we can and often do know such things. Or, at least, whether we can or do is an independent question.

As Lynne said, it varies. Most of us have seen enough applications, and known enough students, to know better than to take GREs with anything other than a pound or so of salt. In my own reading of applications, a low verbal score is a red flag, but I'll disregard it if further reading of the student's material doesn't suggest language problems. Similarly, a low quantitative score (or, nowadays, a low "reasoning" score, or whatever it's called) is also a red flag, but it just makes me look harder at other parts of the file. You don't say whether you are a native speaker of English, but, in my experience, non-native speakers very often have poor GRE scores, even when their spoken and written English is very strong, and even on the Math part. And I've seen such students with excellent GREs, even with high verbal GREs, whose English is so poor they cannot follow a lecture or participate in discussion in a seminar. (There's a lesson there somewhere.) So with non-native speakers, I uniformly disregard GREs...

What a mess! Obviously, your friend and her boyfriend have some serious issues. What on earth is she doing dating someone in Catholic seminary? and what on earth is he doing still dating her? And man, what is he doing having sex with her ? Is he unsure what he intends to do? Has he led her to believe he is unsure? In any event, your friend's actions are extremely wrong, and the fact that he is also acting wrongly doesn't make her deception any more justifiable. (None of us is purely good or purely evil, but that does not mean we cannot do very good and very bad things.) Indeed, her actions are not only wrong but are self-destructive and immature, since he would be likely, at least at some level, if not simply outright, to resent both her and any child they might conceive, even if he did not suspect her of deceiving him, which he might well. (Moreover, if you know the truth, someone else probably knows, as well, and so he might well find out the truth. Lies have a way of being revealed.) A...

Robert Nozick once raised the following question. Suppose there were an "experience machine" capable of producing nothing but wonderful experiences. Enter it today and your memory of doing so will be erased, but for the rest of your life you will enjoy nothing but happiness, indeed, perfect bliss. Do you enter? Nozick's intuition was that he would not, and most of his readers have agreed. What is inside the machine is illusion, and even if one did not know it was illusion, that doesn't change the fact. Inside the machine, it may seem to me that I am successful beyond my wildest dreams, but in fact I am nothing of the sort. For example, no-one loves me, and I love no-one. Many psycho-active drugs can produce profoundly altered states of mind, and there may be something to be learned from such experiences. (Read Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception , for an example.) But I wonder what the value of this feeling of "extreme bliss" really is, however pleasurable it may seem at the time. This "extreme...

I think the idea in the book was that anything that is possible is actually true somewhere: It is not that anything one does imagine becomes true, but that anything one can imagine is true, somewhere or other, the assumption being made that, if one can imagine it, it must be possible. (Whether that is true, whether "conceivability implies possibility", is a much contested issue.) It seems unlikely that the Universe is actually as described in the Hitchhiker's Guide ,if only because the universe is finite and it would seem that there areinfinitely things that are possible. But David Lewis has held a view that is in some ways similar: Reality consists of ever so many universes, all of which are spatio-temporally disconnected from one another, and anything that might have been true is actually true in one of those universes. So, for example, since it is possible that I should explode, leaving nothing but a pile of gold in my chair, there is a universe somewhere in which not I, since I...

A few comments. First, the Bible nowhere says that oneshouldn't work on Sunday. It says that one shouldn't work on theSabbath, and the relevant prohibition is contained in the Law given toMoses, which means that it referred originally to the Jewish Sabbath,Saturday. Second,as Peter Fosl said, the view that the Bible isliterally true, through and through, is largely a recent invention andwould not be accepted by most people who call themselves Christians.But I'll agree with this much: Those who run around quoting Leviticus'sprohibitions against homosexuality while eating pork have a lot ofexplaining to do. Indeed, those who ban gays from their churches whileadmitting those who are divorced have some explaining to do, too.(Jesusis not recorded ever to have mentioned homosexuality, but Matthewrecords him as having prohibited divorce, except on grounds ofinfidelity, on two separate occasions.) Those who "proof text" tend tobe rather selective, as indeed they need to be, since the storiescontained in...

As has often been pointed out here, there is no proof for many statements at all, except those in logic and mathematics, and even then the basic premises from which the proof proceeds can , in principle, be questioned. So the fact that there is no proof of either of the statements you mention seems no more relevant than that there is no proof of either "The Bush administration manipulated intelligence about Iraq" or "The Bush administration did not manipulate intelligence about Iraq". In particular, it doesn't imply that one can't justifiably have an opinion about the matter.

Yes, philosophers have worried about this kind of question. One place it surfaces is in a debate over whether the notion of a "communal language" needs to play some important theoretical role. Michael Dummett, for example, has argued that unless we all regarded ourselves as speaking a single language, and unless our so regarding ourselves imposed normative constraints on how we used our language, then we could never be sure what other people were saying and so that our beliefs that we understand one another would always have ultimately to rest upon some kind of faith. Others, perhaps most famously, Noam Chomsky, have disagreed. Have a look at the entry on Idiolects in the Stanford Encyclopedia. (Our fearless leader Alexander George has a couple very nice papers on this topic, by the way.)

I think many people have this kind of experience. Perhaps art, at least in certain of its forms, is a response to it. Which is to say: Maybe you should try writing a poem, composing a symphony, or creating a sculpture.

There are two kinds of definitions of infinity, one which is"negative" in your sense and one which is "positive". The former is,historically, the older. There are many equivalent definitions offinitude. My own favorite is due to Gottlob Frege: A set is finite ifits members can be ordered as what he called a "simple" series that hasan end, but it would take some time to explain what Frege meant by a"simple" series. What's nice about Frege's definition, though, is thatit amounts to a formal elaboration of the idea that a set is finite ifit can be counted . A definition close in spirit to Frege's isdue to Ernst Zermelo: A set is S finite if it can be "doublywell-ordered", that is, if there is a relation < on S with thefollowing properties: < is a linear order: for all x, y, and z in S, either x<y or x=y or y<x Everynon-empty subset of S has a <-minimal member; that is, if T ⊆ S andT is non-empty, then for some x∈T, for every other y∈T, x<y. Everynon-empty subset of S has a <-maximal...