The other classic paper on this issue is Alan Turing 's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", from 1950, which articulates what has come to be known as the " Turing Test ". Turing's idea was to set up an experiment. A modern version might use some kind of internet chat program. You are talking with two other "people". One really is a person. The other is a computer. You can talk to them for as long as you like, about whatever you like. Then if you can't tell the difference, Turing says, the computer is intelligent. Obviously, this is, at first blush, what Andrew calls an "epistemological" approach to the problem, but Turing doesn't see it just that way. Let me mention, by the way, that 2012 is also the " Alan Turing Year ", celebrating the 100th anniversary of his birth. Turing had a very interesting, and tragic, life. Not only was he one of the founders of modern computer science, he put his genius to work for the British military during World War II and helped crack the German codes ....

I guess I'm wondering why we should assume any such thing is true. Frankly, the website where I found that advice sounds like it's trying to explain precisely how to manipulate women. So the rest of the questions just don't seem to arise. And why believe there is any such thing as "women's courtship demands"? Is there some kind of secret society that decides what those are? Are they passed by majority vote? or is the decision imposed by an unelected dictator?

It goes by another name, sometimes "argument by cases" or "argument by dilemma" or "the disjunctive syllogism". The basic rule is: A ∨ B ~A ∴ B Obviously, this can be extended to any number of disjuncts, e,g.: A ∨ B ∨ C ∨ D ~A ∧ ~B ∧ ~C ∴ D So the disjuncts represent the possibilities you have before you, and the negations represent your ruling out all but one of them. There are quantificational versions as well, e.g.: ∀x(Fx → x = a ∨ x = b ∨ x = c) ~Fa ∧ ~Fb ∴ Fc This would normally be derived from one of the propositional versions.

You've pretty much answered your own question. There are two ways of thinking about this. On the first, the "domain" of the theory being axiomatized is taken to consist only of the natural numbers (i.e., the non-negative integers). So it is, in a way, like when the coach says to the driver, "Everyone is on the bus". She doesn't really mean that everyone is on the bus, only that everyone on the team, or whatever, is on the bus. We speak this way all the time. It's not exactly the same phenomenon, but it's close enough to get the idea. The second way, which you mention in connection with Tarski, is to introduce an explicit restriction to the natural numbers into the axioms. So let "Nx" be a predicate letter meaning: x is a natural number. Then the idea is to "relativize" the axioms to Nx: We replace each universal quantifier (∀x) by: (∀x)(Nx → ...); each existential quantifier (∃x) by: (∃x)(Nx & ...) So the addition axioms will take the form: (∀x)(Nx → x + 0 = x) (∀x)(∀y)(Nx & Ny → x +...

As the Stanford Encyclopedia article on the subject defines it, causal determinism "is, roughly speaking, the idea that every event isnecessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the lawsof nature". This is a much stronger claim that is made at (2). To say that "everything can be determined", in the sense in which that phrase is used at (1), seems to mean just that every current fact can be known, i.e., can be determined to be true by some sort of ideal observer. That is itself a very strong claim, and not one that is obviously true. (Can it now be known what the temperature is inside some star millions of light years from here? What about facts in the past?) But even if it is true, that does not show that, to use your example, your raking the leaves now was causally necessitated by past events.

I've heard this kind of reasoning before, and I think it's well worth thinking about. But I also think it is ultimately sophistical. (Something seems to have been mangled in the beginning of the question. The first sentence seems ungrammatical, and I would have thought the views expressed were more likely to be those of pro-choice folks rather than pro-life folks. But this doesn't really affect the issues raised.) Yes, once a child has been born, the life of that child has precisely the sort of value that any human life has, and any parent who raised such a child and refused to acknowledge the value of that child's life (I wish you'd never been born!) would be a monster. But suppose the mother has been raped by her priest and, for whatever reason, decides to have the child. That does not make the child's life any less valuable, and if the mother raises the child with love, I can only have the deepest respect for her. But should she then have no regret about the fact she was raped? Should she...

I find it hard to see why anyone would suggest they are not responsible at all for their actions. But surely it is a good question whether they alone are responsible for their actions. And here, of course, the controversy becomes political. Did "higher-ups" issue orders that were tantamount to suggesting that such abuse would be tolerated or even welcome? Did the "higher-ups" turn a blind eye to what was happening and fail to supervise the prison properly, perhaps intentionally, so as to distance themselves from what they knew was likely to happen? This latter responsibility, for oversight, is particularly important, since we know, from the Stanford prison experiment and the classic work by Stanley Milgram , that otherwise decent human beings, when subjected to the right sorts of stresses, will do almost arbitrarily horrendous things to one another. Finally, then, one might ask whether what we know from these experiments does to some extent excuse the behavior of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib,...

I guess I too am a bit confused. Surely philosophers have been questioning Plato's notion of forms ever since Plato. And one could presumably say the same thing about any other example one might care to offer. One could even object to the idea that a chair is any object designed for sitting. Surely there are chairs no one designed for that purpose, but are merely used for that purpose. But is anything that is used for sitting a chair? No, since sofas are also used for sitting, as are benches, tables, and old stumps. So what exactly is a chair? That's the kind of question that gets philosophy started. This particular question isn't so interesting in itself, of course. The question philosophers really debate concerns the terms in which such questions are to be answered. And if such questions seem unimportant or useless, then consider the question what species are and how they are to be individuated. This is a question discussed by both biologists themselves and by philosophers of biology, and many of...

The question asked here is interesting, but not in my area of expertise, I'm afraid. I would, however, like to say something about the background stated with the question. The most familiar form of the doctrine to which you are referring is known as "substitutionary atonement". It was introduced in the twelfth century by Anselm and has since become central to many people's thinking about the meaning of Jesus's death on the cross. For all I know, it may be the official doctrine of some denominations that have official doctrines, such as Catholicism. This doctrine does have some basis in scripture, but it has been and continues to be controversial. One reason is that many people find it offensive that God should require God's own son, Jesus, to suffer a violent, agonizing death, no matter what its alleged purpose. And the idea that God would require atonement for wrongdoing to take the form of physical suffering seems to many people to make God out to be some kind of cosmic child abuser. As the...

It's been shown in several studies that political views vary with how much education you have had. People who have a post-graduate degree of any kind tend to be to the left of people who have only a high school or college degree. In the 2004 US presidential election, for example, people with only a high school or college degree voted about 53-46 for Bush, the Republican, whereas people with a post-graduate degree voted 55-44 for Kerry, the Democrat. Indeed, I do not have access to the numbers, but if you focus on people with PhDs, as opposed to doctors (MDs, DDs, etc), lawyers (JDs), and business school types (MBAs), then the difference is even more dramatic. Since philosophers do tend to have PhDs, then, of course they trend with that group. Does education make you more leftist? Or do people inclined to be more leftist just seek more education? These are interesting questions, but, obviously, they are empirical questions, so I will not try to answer them.