I can't speak to the legal implications, but it seems pretty clear that you should be honest with them. If you can persuade them that in spite of your trip there, you have what they want, they may be persuaded. But it's hard to see what excuse there could be for not being truthful

My co-panelists who specialize in such matters may have more insight than I, but I would have thought the reply would be this: the idea that something could really be right and yet its rightness should provide no motive for doing it is incoherent. "Rightness," so the argument would go, is conceptually connected to motivation. If that's correct (I'm not offering a view on that, by the way), then there doesn't seem to be any room for the idea of "almost right" as you explicate it. There's no obvious way to distinguish the "almost right" from the "almost wrong." (Is murder "almost wrong" even though not wrong? What does that mean if the almost-wrongness doesn't provide a motive for avoiding it?) And so to assess your proposal, we'd need to know quite a bit more what sort of facts "almost-rightness" and "almost-wrongness" are meant to be.

It's an interesting question, but for many theists it's not obviously a problem. Think about the traditional Christian idea of the Day of Judgment, for instance. If that's set for some finite time in the future, the fact that the universe might wind down sometime thereafter isn't an issue; by then the material world will already have served its purpose. Whether one finds such a plausible is another discussion, of course. But on the narrower question of whether the Big Freeze freezes out the Fine Tuning Argument, the answer is that it depends on the associated eschatology, and for many such, the answer is no.

Although the name "imaginary numbers" may suggest some special issue about existence, I think the general view would be that the existence of so-called imaginary numbers is no more and no less problematic than the existence of more familiar numbers, including zero, negative numbers and irrational numbers, all of which were considered puzzling or problematic when they first entered mathematics. Numbers, if such there be, are abstract objects of a certain sort. Whether there really such things as abstract objects at all is something that philosophers have long argued about. A bit too crudely, Platonist say yes, and nominalists say no. So if there aren't any abstract objects, then i5, for example, doesn't exist, but then neither does 5. If there are abstract objects then there's no clear reason to worry about whether 5 exists. And since the extension of the real number system to the complex number system is mathematically straightforward, there would be no clear reason to let 5 in but keep i5 out.

The obvious response is that there isn't a single response, and for a simple reason: quantum theory doesn't have anything to say (or not obviously, anyway) about souls -- at least not if a soul is some non-material thing that doesn't fit into the equations we use to do physics. There is a view that's rather like many worlds and that allows for something soul-like. It's called the Many Minds interpretation, and you can read a short account of it (and get further references) by following this link: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-everett/#6 However, this won't address your worries about the afterlife. And since this is a topic that physics has even less to say about than it says about souls, it's even clearer that there's no good answer. That said, a handful of extra thoughts. The first is that IF there is a non-physical soul (a very big "if), then we can start by asking what happens to it after death on our usual non-quantum picture. And then we could say that whatever the story...

I guess it's partly a matter of what we mean. We could decide that if there's an adaptive explanation for some trait, we won't call it a disorder. That said, the fact that there could be an adaptive explanation for a trait doesn't mean that there is and in particular, the fact that there could be an adaptive explanation for psychopathy doesn't mean there is, and we may well never know All that said, perhaps the real point here is that what we count as a "disorder" isn't just a matter of whether it makes the person who has it more likely to survive or reproduce. We might be able to make the case that on average, psychopathy doesn't contribute to reproductive fitness or other related matters. But even if it turned out that it actually does, we would most likely still classify psychopathy as a disorder. All of which tends to confirm the suspicion that diagnoses sometimes (often? always?) rest partly on value judgments. That raises some red flags, as the case of homosexuality...

It's a lovely question. Let me start by recommending a couple of things to read. One is Bernard Williams' classic paper "The Makropoulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality" (in his book Moral Luck .) Another is Larry Temkin's paper "Is Living Longer Living Better?" (in Journal of Applied Philosophy , 2008.) One of the interesting things about Temkin's paper is that he believes the question isn't merely idle. He believes there is at least a serious chance that we might learn to halt the aging process. Be that as it may, let me raise one issue among the various possible ones. It may seem that living forever would be an unmitigated good. But Williams argues forcefully that this isn't so. His argument has two parts, but I want to note just one of them: if we lived more or less as we find ourselves now, then eventually life would become unutterably boring. The title of his essay is taken from a play in which a woman (Elena Makropoulos) has been given a potion that lets her live...

I'm not sure that whether something occurs "naturally" nor whether it's been thus for a long time is the issue here. Nature gives us many examples of things that are very orderly and not "chaotic" or "random" at all. Crystal structure is an obvious example. So is the periodic table. And things with human origins can display a lot of randomness. Spin a roulette wheel a bunch of times and try to predict the outcomes. A bit too simply, there are cases -- old and new, natural and human-made -- where we can make very accurate predictions about what comes next, so to speak, on the basis of what's come before. And there are other cases where our predictions will be (so to speak) no better than tossing a coin. I think that's what lies behind the distinction you're making, and there are branches of science and mathematics that have lots to say about the matter. (One particularly relevant field is information theory.) Of course, there can be hidden order where there is apparent chaos, and there can be...

Ah yes. We've all been there. It may be worth helping the students see that if they extend this to all opinions, then they've put themselves in a position of telling us that we have no reason to take their own opinions seriously. In particular, if they're right all that all opinions are equally good, then your opinion that opinions aren't all equally good is just as good as theirs. This is a bullet that most thoughtful people could only pretend to bite . Of course, when people say what your students say, they often have something a little less paradoxical in mind. They may mean that when it comes to certain kinds of questions -- the Olde Chestnuts of philosophy, perhaps, or difficult moral questions -- the fact that consensus is well nigh impossible to come by suggests that one belief on the matter is as good or bad as another. A really good answer to this worry would take up rather more space than this forum allows. But a few things seem to the point. The first is that some arguments are...

One thing is clear: people actually do practice philosophy. (Some of my best friends...) And so whatever the reasoning you've offered shows, it can't show that no one can do philosophy because people clearly do do it. But then, most of us can't say what most of our activities amount to in any depth or detail. We just do them. It's a logical oddity that asking what counts as philosophy counts as asking a philosophical question. That's a bit unusual, but it's not inconsistent. Of course, read in another way, asking what counts as philosophy doesn't even have this peculiar character. If someone asked me what philosophy is, I might give them a collection of examples, hoping that they got the idea. I might say "trying to figure out if there is such a thing as free will counts. So does asking what knowledge is. So does thinking about the nature of right and wrong." That doesn't exhaust the field, but it's accurate as far as it goes and (experience tells me) often helpful to the person asking the question...