Wow, there is quite a lot in your question here. First, I think it is true that a broadly 'analytic' approach is probably dominant in the English speaking world, but I wouldn't say that all of philosophy is 'analytic'. Also, I don't think that the broadly analytic approach is reducible to 'rigorous linguistics.' Yes, there is a corner of the philosophical world that never seems to argue about anything other than linguistics, but it seems pretty clear to me that it is only a small portion of philosophy.

I still think there are important debates that are being examined.... for example in ethics compare John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue or Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, and Peter Singer's How Are We To Live? these thinkers are certainly engaging in very substantial debates. Or in philosophy of religion read J.L. Mackie's Miracle of Theism and Richard Swinburne's The Existence of God. I'm sure other panelists could come up with their own lists of substantial debates in their own specialties.

If you want to major in philosophy it is important to realize that you probably won't be solely immersed in the contemporary debates, but you should expect to be exposed to a wide variety of contemporary and historical approaches. So, you should take a look and see what your school emphasizes in their philosophy program. You can also take a look at what the professors there publish to see if they are immersed in the analytic debates you dislike.

We can at least make relative sense of a claim like this. For a native English speaker, Chinese is harder than Spanish. How so? Because English speakers can achieve a high level of mastery of Spanish much more quickly, on average, than they can with Chinese. Obviously other such comparisons among various languages are possible.

Could one language be "absolutely" more difficult than another? Though I'm not a linguist, I'd think the answer is yes. Since I can't cite a fully real case (simply because I don't know enough), a slightly idealized one will do. IGNORING PRONUNCIATION, compare German and Afrikaans. They are related languages and there is a good deal of similarity between them. Knowing one will give you a leg up on understanding the other. (I have an intermediate knowledge of German. That lets me make elementary sense of a certain amount of written Afrikaans.) But anyone who has some familiarity with both languages will see that the grammar of Afrikaans is much simpler. In particular, there are no genders and no cases in Afrikaans. If reading and writing knowledge were all that we were interested in, Afrikaans would certainly seem to be easier than German. I'd expect that a linguist could add lots of even better examples.

Sure, but there are several different things we could mean by saying that one language is more difficult than other. One language could have more complex grammatical rules than another. Another language might have simpler grammatical rules, but have more irregularities that break those rules (I am told that English is notorious for having a large number of irregularities). One language might have more letters, words, or use more sounds than another.

We also might mean that one language is harder than another in the sense that learning it might be harder for me based on what I already know. For example, a native English speaker might find Latin relatively easy to learn due to the fact that it uses the same alphabet as English and because many English words have Latin roots and therefore many similar words have similar meanings in the two languages. In contrast, that same person might find Thai to be difficult to learn due to its foreign alphabet, unfamiliar pronunciations, and lack of similarities between the two languages.

This is a nice case of what can go wrong when you (i.e., I) do philosophy too quickly! As Richard charitably suggests, (I think) I was reading the argument (too quickly) to say:

1. John believes that all green people should be killed, and

2. John believes that Mushmush is a green person,

3. Thus, John believes that Mushmush should be killed.

Mitch is right that the original question left "John believes" out of premise 2, so it's clearly not formally valid: 1 could be true, but if John does not believe Mushmush is green (even though he is), then clearly 3 would not follow.

With premise 2 written as here, with "John believes," then it looks much "closer to valid" but "valid" is not like horseshoes or hand grenades, so close does not count. It's hard to see how John could miss the inference, but perhaps he is like some racists in literature who sincerely hold universal derogatory beliefs about another race and sincerely reject that belief about their friend or neighbor who they know is a member of that race (or do they actually reject the universal claim--making an exception for their friend--or do they actually reject that their friend is a member of that race?).

Or maybe, being even more charitable to my former self, I was reading the argument like this:

John believes that: (1) all green people should be killed and (2) Mushmush is a green person, so (3) Mushmush should be killed.

That is, John believes a valid argument. But I think that I doubt that I believed that...

With all due respect to Professor Green (hi, Mitch!), even that is not the final word. I think perhaps Professor Nahmias was assuming that John knows perfectly well that Mushmush is a green person, Mushmush being his neighbor and all that, and that John has some minimal degree of logical competence.

Still in that case, most people would hold that it does not logically follow that John believes that Mushmush should be killed. There are two quite different reasons for this.

One involves the fact that we cannot, even in principle, actually deduce all the logical consequences of everything we believe. It seems extremely plausible, in fact, that there are propositions of the form "All F are G" and "x is an F" that I believe, where I do NOT believe the corresponding proposition of the form "x is G", simply because I have never gotten around to inferring it. Note carefully that the claim is not that I believe that x is NOT G, just that I fail to believe that it is. In this kind of case, though, you might say that I "implicitly" believe that x is G, meaning something like: If it ever came up, I'd draw the inference and more or less act like I'd believed it all along.

Some people (such as Robert Stalnaker, at least in some moods) would not agree with this. They think the only coherent notion of belief is one according to which I do believe, all along, that x is G. I think those people are nuts, but that is a topic for another day.

The second reason it does not logically follow that John believes that Mushmush should be killed is that John might be irrational. He might just refuse to draw that conclusion, even though he is fully aware of what he believes about green people and of the fact that Mushmush is green. And here we come up against difficult questions about the relation between logic and norms of thought and reason. It's extremely tempting to want to say something like, if John believes all green people should be killed and if John also believes that Mushmush is green, then he ought also to believe that Mushmush should be killed.

But it's unclear whether that is right. Some people (Gilbert Harman is the best-known example) would want to say, no, what John should do is stop believing that all green people should be killed, since, as he himself can see, it leads to the conclusion that his buddy Mushmush should be killed. One response to this is to say something like, well, of course what John ought all things considered to do is stop believing that, but nonetheless, given what he does believe, he ought to believe this other thing, too. That is: As things are, he has sufficient and indeed compelling reason for that other belief, and the fact that his current beliefs give him sufficient reason to believe something he flatly rejects sounds like why he should stop believing what he believes. If so, then perhaps what we should really say is something like: John ought not simultaneously and knowingly (a) to believe that all green people should be killed, (b) to believe that Mushmush is green, and (c) to deny that Mushmush should be killed. The idea is that this trio of attitudes is irrational: Something ought to give.

Obviously, the issues here are exceedingly complex, and I doubt anyone really knows what we should say about this.

Whoa! With all due respect to Professor Nahmias, he is mistaken. The syllogism is NOT valid and here is why. Propositions that are "in the scope" of words like belief can't be manipulated while preserving validity. So while,

Green people should be killed.

Mushmush is a green person.

ergo, Mushmush should be killed

is valid, embedding the first premise in the scope of belief ('John believes that green people should be killed') will destroy the argument's validity. Words like 'believes' (and related ones such as 'knows', 'wants', 'fears') create what is known as opaque contexts, in which inferences that would otherwise be valid are no longer valid. The reason is that what a person believes (knows, wants, fears) depends not only on what is implied by the propositions he believes, but also on whether he *realizes* that these things are implied. Alas, we are all too often unaware of what is implied by the things that we believe.

The point here has been discussed in detail by philosophers like Quine ('Quantifiers and propositional attitudes'), and Kaplan ('Quantifying in') and gets a thorough treatment in more recent textbook discussions such as Cherchia and McConnell-Ginet's _Meaning and Grammar_.

Mitch Green

The syllogism is still valid (i.e., if the two premises were true, the conclusion would have to be true). But you have just found a case (Mushmush) that falsifies the first premise. It turns out John does not really believe that all green people should be killed, but he believes (at least) one green person (Mushmush) should not be killed. Good for logic and good for Mushmush!

I'm not sure how to answer your main question: It seems to me that to say that a statement is offensive is to say that people tend to be offended by it, and so I don't have a clear sense of how a statement could be "inherently offensive" if by that you mean assessed with no reference to individuals' dispositions to judge it offensive.

A related question may be whether, as an empirical matter of fact, there are some statements that exist some statements are held to be defensive by an overhwelming majority of a given population in many contexts. Probably so, but even then I imagine that are few or no statement that offend all individuals in all communicative contexts. For example (and hopefully not to offend readers by this usage of the word), many statements using the word 'cunt' are extremely offensive and yet there are some usages of that word that many find empowering -- I have in mind, in particular, the popular monologue about "reclaiming 'cunt'" that has been included for many years in Eve Ensler's play the Vagina Monologues.

A third issue your question raises in my mind is whether there exist strong argument that some statements ought to be considered offensive by all, for example, statements that express racism, classism, sexism, or other forms of hatred or bigotry. Maybe so, but when one confronts someone who is not so offended I'm not sure that the best way to describe that situation is that he or she doesn't understand that a statement is inherently offensive -- it seems to me a more promising way to understand this case is to try to understand that individuals' moral perspective, which I think is a broader matter than understanding whether or not he or she is offended by statement that many judge morally offensive.

A fourth related question may be whether, if there are no statements that are universally accepted as offensive in all contexts, this means that individuals' judgments about specific statements used in specific contexts are therefore somehow illegitimate or wrongheaded. I don't think this follows, and so I don't think that we need to ground the legitimacy of our own judgments about what is or is not offensive on a foundation of "inherently offensive" statements.

Thanks for your question. In general, I don't have any idea what the entire range of possible responses are to a question or comment, but here are a few to the ones you mention:

1. One response is to agree with the criticism and thereby acknowledge that these concepts are indeed meaningless.

That's one possible response, but it might leave you a little unsatisfied, so you might consider another:

2. It is perhaps true that some philosophers use terms like these (I'll talk of terms rather than concepts) in a way that is more obfuscatory than illuminating. However, it's not so hard to use 'being' as a term for everything that exists. That seems perfectly intelligible even if we can't give a full account of what that includes, that is of all that does in fact exist. Also, whereas 'nothingness' is a bit hifalutin, one can use 'nothing' with a perfectly clear meaning. For instance a person might point out that there's nothing in the fridge, meaning not that it contains nothing at all (not even air) but nothing that can feasibly be eaten. This seems pretty clear--no less clear than pointing out that there are three letters at the table or someone at the door.

The strategy here is to point out that the words in question can be used with a perfectly clear meaning. If you use those words with what you take to be a clear meaning, but one different from the cases I've given, then you should have no trouble exemplifying it with specific examples just as I've done.

Mitch Green

Thank you for your question. It is not exactly clear to me what sorts of things you are concerned about. Is it about expressing things verbally, or is it defining words or phrases? Your question touches on both issues. However, I'll first just discuss the issue of defining words and phrases. For the case you do raise, namely 'art', there has indeed been a lot of reflection about whether that term can be defined. This was much discussed in the middle of the last century in the field of aesthetics. The topic does still get some attention, and one thing we now see is that it's by no means clear that 'art' cannot be defined. In fact, a number of highly original and insightful contemporary philosophers (including Jerry Levinson, George Dickie and Stephen Davies) have forwarded definitions of art that have something going for them. I suspect that if you studied these theories you'd be at least *open* to the possibility that 'art' can be defined after all. So when you ask whether we lack the ability to define words like 'art', I'd suggest that it's not clear that we do lack that ability.

The larger issue your question points to, however, seems to be this: Are some terms indefinable, and if so, why? I think a consensus among philosophers is that some concepts are not definable, but that it's not clear why this should be a bad thing. After all, just as all explanations depend on unexplained primitives, so too do all definitions. (In geometry, for instance, you have to take something as primitive, such as the notion of a point.) So it's just the way definitions work that implies that some things are indefinable, but it's not clear why this should be a cause for concern. It's not due to ambiguity, nor to linguistics. It's even misleading to say it's due to human limitations, as if some other species might do better. Rather, it's due to the nature of explanation.

This of course does *does* not mean what we shouldn't try to explain as much as we can. It does mean--to borrow an image from Wittgenstein--that eventually our shovel is going to hit bedrock.

Mitch Green