I hope this isn't too general, but here's a question I've been wondering about: What is it that one has or does that, if one has or does it, one's life was not a waste?

Something seems wrong about the question. At any rate, it's too general a question for me to venture a non-trivial answer to it. It seems to me like asking "What is it that one does such that, if one does it, one has succeeded?" I don't see how to give a non-trivial, general answer to that question. Succeeded at what? Some actions count as successes and some don't, just as (I would presume) some lives are wasted and some aren't, but I don't know how to give an informative, general explanation of the difference.

Although societal pressures do play a role, does atheism manifest itself mostly due to an inborn lack of religious "sense" rather than hearing the logical arguments against God or a life force? Research has shown that autistic people are very unlikely to be religious. I don't know what phrase philosophers of mind use to describe this, but when we talk about people with a strong sense of humor, people with a weak sense of humor, or people with no sense of humor at all, are we talking about a non-physical and antimaterialist noumenon that can be enhanced with training?

I'll chime in just to say that the first question you asked is an empirical question and therefore not the kind of question that philosophers as such are any better-equipped than non-philosophers to answer. I'd be interested in seeing the empirical data myself. I would say, however, that your first question leaves out a possibility that strikes me as more plausible than the two you mention: as they grow and develop, children tend to imitate their parents and other authority figures, including in their attitudes toward religious matters.

More of an observation than a question, about "compatibilism" in the free will "versus" determinism debate. In the short run, there is a strong correlation between life expectancy tables and the number of people who die in a calendar year. Somehow, even though on the level of the individual, many of these events may be due to "luck" (wow, that train just missed me; or wow, what a freak combination of factors to lead to such a bizarre accident); on the level of the population, the total number of deaths in a year can be "predicted" fairly well even if no individual death can be predicted. In the long run, life expectancy tables do change over time: collectively, each individual person uses what they learn about diet, exercise, cigarette smoking, etc. and makes adjustments in their day-to-day lives; and the aggregate results over time do reflect these changes. It seems to me that there is a good question buried here in this analogy but I can't quite figure out how to unearth it. Any thoughts from a...

Your actuarial analogy seems similar to a point that quantum physicists often make. As I understand it, orthodox quantum physics says that the precise behavior of an individual particle is impossible to predict even in principle. Yet once you get zillions of such particles together, their collective behavior -- the behavior of the entire system -- becomes highly predictable. We can't predict the behavior of a particular atom belonging to the baseball, but we can predict with near-perfect certainty that the whole baseball won't suddenly tunnel through the earth and emerge on the other side. So individual unpredictability is compatible with collective predictability, both in the classical case you described and in the quantum case where the individual unpredictability isn't just a function of our ignorance. The flip side of this idea would be deterministic chaos, where individually predictable parts combine to make an unpredictable system -- unpredictable not because the system isn't still deterministic...

If I'm an atheist, does it make sense to criticize the Catholic church for practices such as the exclusion of female priests? Suppose that a Catholic authority replies to such criticism by saying that there is strong Biblical evidence to show that priests must be male. Since I am an atheist, I may be unpersuaded by this argument, and still insist that the church would be more just if it gave women equal status with men. But then, if I reject this Biblical argument it seems that I may as well reject Catholicism itself. In other words, I think there is something strange in the suggestion that Catholics should improve their religious practice by incorporating certain progressive reforms. The justification of these reforms often seems arise of a view that would invalidate, not just the allegedly objectionable practices at issue, but religion altogether. Practices such as the exclusion of female priests may strike me as irrational, but then why should I care if I think that Catholicism quite generally is...

One needn't accept Catholicism in order to argue, legitimately, that the reasons given for a specific Catholic practice, such as the male-only priesthood, aren't persuasive even granting the rest of Catholic theology. For example, if Catholic theology gives a biblical justification for the male-only priesthood, it's open to Catholics and non-Catholics alike to examine the justification to see how cogent it really is: even granting the truth of the Bible passages being used to justify the exclusion of women priests, do those passages really justify the exclusion, or have they been interpreted in a tortured or tendentious way? Is there another interpretation of the passages, an interpretation just as good as the traditional one, that doesn't justify the exclusion? I think anyone, Catholic or not, can legitimately ask those questions.

Hello, my question(s) is: could emotions, concepts and physical things that are opposite to each other, exist without each other? For example, if there were no such thing as hot, then could cold exist? What about joy and sorrow? Could we identify one without the other? Do they require our awareness of them, for them to exist? Obviously this isn't the case with some things, like gravity.

You've asked three different questions about three apparently different kinds of items: emotions, concepts, and physical things. So there may be as many as nine different answers, depending on which question is being asked about which kind of item (and some of those nine answers may be of the form "It depends"). I'll choose just one of those kinds -- concepts -- and try to answer your three questions about it. 1. It's controversial just how concepts themselves exist , but it's clear that a concept can be instantiated -- there can be instances of the concept -- even if the opposite concept isn't instantiated. Take the concept self-identical . Everything instantiates that concept, because necessarily everything is identical to itself. But nothing instantiates the opposite concept, self-distinct , because nothing could be distinct from itself. Or consider two more controversial examples, the concepts physical and nonphysical . Some philosophers say that everything is physical, so...

What is the the truth value, if they have one, of propositions whose subject do not exist? "The current king of France is bald" is the famous example. Is that true or false, or neither? I have a hard time understanding how the current king of France can be neither bald nor not bald, even though I have no trouble understanding that there is no current king of France.

Philosophers have given various answers to questions like yours. See, for example, this SEP entry . Here's one approach: "The current king of France is bald" is false because it implies the existence of a current king of France when in fact there isn't one. "The current king of France is not bald" is likewise false if it's construed as implying the existence of a current king of France (and asserting of him that he's not bald). On a possible but perhaps less likely interpretation, the second quoted sentence is simply the wide-scope negation of the first quoted sentence: i.e., "It's false that the current king of France is bald." On that interpretation, the second quoted sentence comes out true since it simply asserts that the first quoted sentence is false. On neither interpretation is anyone neither bald nor not bald, so that particular claim of classical logic -- everything is either bald or not bald -- is preserved.

Why do we do anything if nothing lasts forever? Every action we make is but a blip on the finite timeline of the universe, ending with the heat death. All our actions fade into insignificance as they become the past. Similarly, on a smaller scale, why do we do things if life is finite too? What difference would it make to the individual who is unable to witness the effect of his actions?

I presume you're asking a philosophical question about the rational justification of our actions rather than simply a psychological question about our actual motivations for doing them. The first thing to emphasize is that your question isn't rhetorical (and I'm not saying that you meant it to be). In other words, the burden of proof rests with anyone who says "You're right: there really isn't a good reason to do anything if nothing lasts forever, if our every action is but a blip in the overall history of the universe." Whoever asserts the claim I just quoted owes us an argument for it, because it's very far from obviously true. I've seen arguments -- or at least what loosely resemble arguments -- for the quoted claim, but I've never found them persuasive, as I explain in this short magazine piece . A classic discussion of this issue appears in Thomas Nagel's 1971 article "The Absurd," available here . So the reasons we typically give for our actions can't be dismissed in advance...

More people are familiar with the ideas of Camus and Sartre, two examples of continental philosophers who wrote of the need of philosophy to be applied to the human condition, than are aware who Quine and Wittgenstein were. Does it bother analytic philosophers that most people consider analytic philosophy to have zero relevance in their lives yet regard many continental philosophers as public intellectuals?

Speaking for myself as an analytic philosopher, I'm bothered more by (a) the fact that "most people consider analytic philosophy to have zero relevance in their lives" than by (b) the fact that many people "regard many continental philosophers as public intellectuals." I think (a) stems from most people's ignorance about what analytic philosophy is and about what training in analytic philosophy can enable them to do. Among other things, training in analytic philosophy can help them see that some of today's public intellectuals (including, yes, some philosophers in the continental tradition but also some physicists and biologists) don't deserve the publicity they've received. Unfortunately, given the way North American schoolteachers are currently chosen and trained, I'm not sure how much philosophy can be properly taught to secondary school students. Given entrenched current realities, a student's education in philosophy may need to wait until college/university. In that case, of course, only...

Are sex selective abortions immoral? In countries where abortion is legal on demand, does it make any sense to try and prevent sex selective abortion if the legal system allows abortion for any reason?

You've asked two independent questions: (1) Are sex-selective abortions immoral ? (2) Does it make sense to try preventing sex-selective abortions where abortion is generally legal? Now, 'make sense' in (2) can be construed at least two ways: (2a) Is it a practical policy to try preventing sex-selective abortions where abortion is generally legal? (2b) Is it morally consistent to try preventing sex-selective abortions where abortion is generally legal? Question (2a) is a largely empirical question having to do with how effective such a policy would be versus the practical costs of enforcing it. Question (2b) is a philosophical question. One could consistently give different answers to (2a) and (2b). As for (2b), I think that any legal system that regards abortion as lawful is committed to regarding abortion as not seriously immoral , because I take it to be one of the law's essential functions to outlaw seriously immoral things if there are any. But I also think that if ...

Why are counterfactual claims taken seriously by philosophers? Aren't they just an imaginative way of thinking and talking? For example, why is a counterfactual of the form "If it had been the case that A, then it would be the case that C" supposed to have truth conditions? For if causal determinism is true, then there is a complete specification W of the history of world w in which A would occur such that W entails either the truth of C or the falsity of C, making the counterfactual either vacuously true or a contradiction (and this is so for all possible deterministic worlds which include A); whereas if causal determinism is not true, then the history of w cannot be fully specified because A depends on non-deterministic processes, and the truth or falsity of the counterfactual is not determined. And for a non-deterministic world of which the history is fully specified (i.e. W includes the outcomes of non-deterministic processes) in which A occurs, the vacuous/contradictory result again obtains. ...

A very sophisticated question! In short, philosophers take counterfactual conditionals seriously at least partly because everyday language and thought take them so seriously. Entire legal regimes, such as the negligence regime in tort law, use confident judgments about counterfactuals -- "Had you not acted negligently, the plaintiff wouldn't have been injured (then and there)" -- in ways that matter hugely to people's lives. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a way of living that doesn't sooner or later involve counterfactual reasoning. The reliance on counterfactuals probably extends to all of natural science too, because explaining how or why a phenomenon occurred commits one to counterfactuals about how things would have gone had the "explanans" for the phenomenon not occurred. Your points about determinism and indeterminism are good ones. Theories of counterfactuals are supposed to work regardless of whether determinism is true. If determinism is true, then a counterfactual of this form must...

Pages