I'd go along with Peter Smith's answer, but I figured I'd just take the occasion to point you in the direction of a couple of classic discussions in this area, which you might be interested in following up. First, your question is startlingly close to a problem raised by Saint Augustine at the end of the fourth century AD -- you're in good company! If you're not already familiar with Augustine's discussion, it's in his Confessions , book 11, paragraphs 17 to 38, pages 168 to 174 in this edition . I don't know how much his own solution to the problem would actually appeal to you, which is effectively to say that time only really exists in the mind, the past in memory, the present in sight or consideration, and the future in expectation. But another way around the problem is suggested by J.E. McTaggart's article, 'The Unreality of Time', first published in the journal Mind in 1908 and available online here . McTaggart lays out various alternative ways of thinking about time, and it's up to you...

I shall begin with a 'philosophical' kind of answer, the kind of answer that philosophers ever since Aristotle's time might have given. (Indeed, it is closely related to the answers that Aristotle himself gave to Zeno's paradoxes of motion. Perhaps you're already familiar with those paradoxes: but, if not, then I'd invite you to look them up, for you might enjoy pondering them). I think the flaw in your question lies in that phrase "the next moment". In the case of space, you seem to be treating it as continuous in the sense that, between any two points, no matter how close they might be, there will still be further spatial points between them -- so that to jump straight from one to the other would have to involve some sort of teleportation, bypassing all those intervening points. And yet (as a philosopher might tell you) time itself is equally continuous, and in exactly the same way. At any given moment of time, there is simply no such thing as the next moment. The continuous nature of time...

According to my dictionary, the word 'bachelor' means 'an unmarried man'. That's why the statement 'all bachelors are unmarried' is analytic, because the status of being unmarried is built into the meaning of 'bachelor'. Now, when I look up the word 'chair' in my dictionary, it tells me that it is 'a separate seat for one person, of various forms, usually having a back and four legs'. It doesn't define it as 'that which is red', or make any mention of colour at all. Of course, you might very well reply that this is just because it's not actually the case that all chairs are red; and that, if they were all red, the colour would in that case infiltrate the meaning of the word. But I don't buy that. Even if there was a global campaign to paint absolutely every chair in the world red, I still don't feel that the word 'chair' would thereby come to mean 'that which is red'. It would still be defined in the same old way, in terms of an object's form and function. And the reason why I say this is that it...

It does indeed seem that Descartes believed that God was not constrained by the laws of logic. However, what he did nevertheless believe was that human thought was thus constrained. In an absolute sense, maybe a so-called logical impossibility was in fact possible: but the important point is that such a possibility was not something that we could conceive. And let's remember what Descartes was actually trying to achieve. He stated his goal in the opening paragraph of the First Meditation: to attain some knowledge that was "stable and likely to last". Notice that he did not say that it should be true, and still less that it should be 'absolutely' true. What he wanted was a system of beliefs such that he could be confident that no possible evidence could ever come to light that would shake him out of them. But if, as he believed, human understanding could not even grasp what it would mean for a logical impossibility to be true, then a fortiori we could never encounter any grounds for...

Pinning down precisely wherein personal identity consists is certainly a thorny problem in philosophy, which has been debated for centuries and still seems quite far from a definitive solution. I can't promise to solve it for you, but here are a few considerations that you might find it interesting to ponder: 1. Let's look at the way you set up your question: "As you gain knowledge and change your opinion, your personality changes and you seem to be totally different then you were before ." You're using the same pronoun throughout, which is already enough to imply that there is just one enduring thing here to which this pronoun continues to refer. If you really believed that the things which existed in these different times really were distinct, wouldn't you refer to them in different ways? Moreover, you're attributing to change to something, but that too seems to imply an enduring identity. The very notion of change, the notion that a thing is now different from how it ...

First of all, I'm inclined to say that, if I was to read that in someone's university application, I would rather admire the applicant, not only for their boldness but also for the evidence it would provide that they were the kind of person who just naturally approached things in a philosophical way. I wouldn't actually agree with the sentiment, and I would look forward to exploring it with the candidate in an interview. But, when you're still at the stage of applying to university, you can't be expected to have all the answers already: the important thing is that you're sensitive to the questions. The concept certainly isn't nonsense: it is an objection that has been raised several times, over the centuries, against philosophers who were committed to rigid theories of pre-determination. For an example, I might quote the late seventeenth century French philosopher, Pierre Bayle -- who was certainly no fool! -- in his critique of Spinoza. Spinoza had argued for a deterministic system in his book, ...

It is a fact, as inescapable as it is unfortunate, that female philosophers have generally been eclipsed by the men, over the millennia. But there have been a fair few women who have done good stuff in philosophy. Someone from the ancient period, often cited by people searching for such figures, was Hypatia, a philosopher and mathematician of the fourth century AD. Unfortunately, we have to rely more on other people's testimonies of her than on her own works: as far as I know, none of the latter have survived. In the medieval period, I suppose one might mention Heloise, the beloved pupil of the scholastic philosopher, Peter Abelard. The evidence would seem to suggest that she was genuinely a pupil, and even an inspiration, as well as being a lover, and that she probably understood what Abelard was going on about far better than most women in her time would have done. But, again, we don't have a whole lot to work with, philosophically speaking. The problem, through most of history, was that...

In his paper, 'The Ways of Paradox', W. vO. Quine draws up a useful classificatory scheme for paradoxes, dividing them up into three groups. 'Veridical paradoxes' are conclusions that seem profoundly counter-intuitive, and yet are actually perfectly sound. An example might be the paradox of the ravens: on the face of it, it doesn't seem right to claim that an observation of a red pencil can lend any support at all to the hypothesis that all ravens are black, but there's a good argument to suggest that actually it does lend a (very) small amount. (Basically, the hypothesis that all ravens are black is logically equivalent to the hypothesis that all non-black things are non-ravens, and the appropriate method of confirmation for the hypothesis in that latter formulation would seem to be to take a non-black thing and to check whether it's not a raven). 'Falsidical paradoxes' are ones where an absurd conclusion seems, on the face of it, to be supported by a good argument, but where further scrutiny can...

The Ontological Argument, in its simplest form, runs as follows: God, by definition, is infinitely perfect in every respect. One respect in which something can be perfect is by existing -- it's better to exist than not to exist -- therefore God must possess this perfection alongside all the others (omnipotence, omniscience, etc.). If God lacked existence, He would thereby qualify as imperfect, but that would contradict the definition of what we mean by 'God'. Now, Kant makes a number of points about this argument: but, at the heart of his critique, his main objection is that it's wrong to think of existence as a perfection comparable to those others. The point is sometimes expressed by saying that the term "exists" is not a predicate: its logical role in sentences and thoughts is very different from that of genuine predicates like "is omnipotent" or "is omniscient". Existence is not a quality that we ascribe to a subject, as we might ascribe omnipotence to it. It is something prior to all such...

With regard to Socrates, the thing to remember is that we're not reading his own works -- because, by all accounts, he never actually wrote any. Plato's Socratic dialogues, although they probably do have some connection with things that the historical figure of Socrates said and did, are principally designed as means for Plato to present his own philosophy. If the character of Socrates is portrayed as arguing in a certain manner, we should regard this primarily as a rhetorical device of Plato's design. Now, it's quite true that Socrates (the character), notwithstanding his regular insistence that he's only asking questions in hopes of being enlightened by his interlocutor, is often presented as dominating and leading the discussion. But this isn't always the case. In some of the dialogues ( Timaeus , for instance), he's just sitting back and passively receiving instruction from another character. In others (such as Parmenides ), he does challenge his interlocutors, but he actually backs down when...