Others may have things to add, but one obvious way is that many of our beliefs about the past are caused by things that happened in the past and produced traces, either directly or indirectly, in our brains. But on the usual view about how the universe is wired up, our beliefs about the future aren't caused by future events. This doesn't make knowledge claims about the past uniformly more secure than knowledge claims about the future. Some facts about the past may be well nigh inaccessible; their traces may be faint or non-existent, and there may be no good general grounds for inferring. (For example: I'd guess that there's almost no hope that anyone will ever know exactly how many people were on the swath of ground now marked out by the University of Maryland campus at noon on April 3, 1808. But -- skeptical worries aside -- we can reasonably claim to know that the earth will rotate on its axis over the next 24 hours. Still, knowledge of the past has a certain priority. Our knowledge that the...

We might start by pointing out that there's a controversy about just what rights are and also about whether animals have rights, but let's try to finesse those issues. On one common way of understanding rights, for me to have a right is for people or institutions to be obliged to treat me in a certain way. Whether that's the whole story, it's plausibly at least part of it. But cats, dogs and so on aren't obliged to act in any way; creatures who aren't capable of understanding obligations can't have any obligations. If we put these two bits together, we get a plausible answer to your question: if there were no humans, then there wouldn't be anyone who had any obligations. (Of course, if there are non-humans who have the right kinds of minds, the story is different.) If there aren't any creatures who could have obligations, then the animals don't have rights. We can back off this a bit. Let's use the term moral agent for any creature who is of the sort that can have moral obligations. Then...

Some systems of rules and codes of conduct are arbitrary. In Canadian football, it's 3 downs; in the USA it's 4. There's no question of which is really right, and if the CFL or the NFL decided to change its rules, no one could object that the proposed new rules were wrong. Likewise, a fraternity might have a secret handshake, and members of the fraternity might make it a rule to greet one another that way. But they could do away with the rule or change the handshake and once again, no one could say that they had somehow gotten things objectively wrong. It's part of the way that we use moral terms, however, that when we make a moral claim, we intend the claim to be universal. It's part of the concept of morality that something could be part ofsomeone's "moral code" or "system of morality" and yet be morallywrong. If someone says "It's wrong to keep slaves" they mean that it's wrong whether or not the slaveholder agrees, and whether or not the particular group or culture that may be at issue has a ...

On your general question: "is there any question that cannot be philosophized about ?" I think I can provide a proof that the answer is no. Suppose, for reductio , that there is such a question, call it Q . Then the question of why we can't philosophize about Q is a perfectly good and obviously philosophical question. Thus, Q , the question about which we can't philosophize, is a question about which we can philosophize, which is absurd. And so there are no questions that cannot be philosophized about. QED That said, treating garden variety questions like "Can you give me a lift to work?" or "Would you like to go to the movies tonight?" or "is there any dirty laundry in the basket?" as occasions for philosophizing is usually a pretty good way to annoy the people around you. Being clear about this sort of thing should probably be required for getting a philosopher's license, but far as I know, the regs in most jurisdictions don't include it.

You've raised lots of issues, but I wanted to single out one in particular. You seemed particularly worried by the possibility that there might be some sort of influence from present to past. The worry seemed to be that if someone did the wrong sort of monkeying around now or in the future, your past might be wiped out. That's a disturbing thought, but fortunately we needn't read Gödel et al that way. The trick is to distinguish between influencing the past and changing the past. Think of it this way: reality (or physical reality, anyway) just consists of the eternally-existing set of all events. On this picture, there's no question of a sort of "moving present" with events becomingpresent and then slipping into the past. There's just the set of eventswith all their many relations. You might find it useful to read what my fellow panelists Peter Smith and Jasper Reid had to say in response to question 2032 . Among the various relations are space-time relations, but...

Part of what you're asking is a social science question: taboos against public nudity are pretty common (though not universal). How come? What's the best psychological or anthropological or perhaps even evolutionary explanation? Not being a social scientist, all I could do is speculate. The blindingly obvious thought it that it has something to do with sex, which is what I take you to be suggesting, though exactly what it has to do with sex is harder to say. If I were going to try to sort this out, I would probably turn to anthropology. Different cultures seem to have different attitudes toward nudity, and perhaps the anthropologists have some light to shed on all this. It's clear that societies with more relaxed attitudes toward nudity aren't morally defective on that account, but it would take some arguing to show that societies with a more modest outlook (ours, for example) are morally better for that reason. Here's another thought. Fantasies about others' bodies are exciting for some...

The reasons are no doubt complicated, and insofar as what's called for is a historical explanation, my amateur guesses are no better than the next amateur's. But we can still ask what might give the monotheistic notions a special philosophical interest. And when we ask this, I think we see fairly quickly that monotheism per se isn't the issue. Rather, it's the details of the way that the monotheistic traditions have developed their idea of God. Let's start by contrast with the Greek gods. What's striking about them is that they're so thoroughly physical. They live in a particular place, they have physical bodies, and they have a variety of physical limitations. Suppose we discovered that somewhere atop some misty mountain, there really were such beings. That would be fascinating in all sorts of ways, but it's not so clear that there's much philosophical interest here. They would just seem to be rather remarkable physical beings. We might wonder how they manage to do what they do (I can't...

Consider this little argument: A society with laws against killing is a society where true freedom doesn't exist. A society where true freedom doesn't exist is undesirable. Therefore, a society with laws against killing is undesirable. The argument is superficially valid, but it rests on an equivocation. The first premise is plausible if "true" is read as "unlimited" or "unbridled." But if "true" means something like "ideal," then the premise seems false. On the other hand, the second premise is plausible if "true" is read as "ideal," but seems false if "true" simply means "unbridled." Indeed: if "true freedom" means "unbridled freedom," then most (all?) societies don't have "true freedom." But that's a mere tautology. Using the word "true" here doesn't give us any reason to think that a society with "true" freedom (in effect, a "society" with no laws at all) would be a good thing. It's hard to see what's desirable about a society where goons and thugs can go around offing people with...

Let's start with the more general question: is it possible to recognize evidence of something that we had no experience of before? The answer seems pretty clearly to be yes, since we've frequently found good reasons to believe in various such things. We have evidence for black holes, for example. We have evidence of the existence of various exotic particles. Although the details are complicated, the way this works can be explained in this sort of way: We're interested in whether there are Xs. We ask: what would we expect to see if there were? What evidence E would Xs produce? And how likely is it that we'd find E if there were no Xs? Assuming that the "prior probability" of Xs isn't too low (assuming, for example, that Xs would have a sensible place in our larger scheme of things), assuming that the probability of E given X is appreciably greater than the probability of E given not-X, finding E might well give us good reason to think there are Xs. Or at least, this is a fairly common kind of story...

Sorry you've been having this sort of experience. And the amount of time it took for any of us to reply may give you the same sort of feeling you were asking about. But let me at least start with a possibly lame excuse. It sounds like what you want to know may be something more in the realm of psychology: what is it about how our minds work that can make snubs, rejection and the like psychologically painful? Why don't we just shrug it off?And insofar as the question deals with how minds actually work, philosophers aren't necessarily the best experts. That said, we're in a domain where ordinary experience and insight may be able to shed some light, so let's give it a try. Part of the answer is that we sometimes do shrug such things off. If I nod to a stranger on the street and he doesn't nod back, I might experience a momentary sense of annoyance, but I'll probably have forgotten about it literally within seconds. Whether this stranger takes account of me isn't something that matters to me. But for...