I'm a bit puzzled about where you got the impression that philosophy works this way, Looking at the work of Spinoza, perhaps, might give this impression, but who else? Certainly not Plato. Certainly not Aristotle. Not Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Russell, not a single philosopher active in the last 50 years that I can think of.

The description you quote from your philosophy student acquaintance is pretty reasonable. I'm not quite so happy with the last part—that philosophers determine general principles and rules from their intuitions. The role of intuition in philosophy is much more complicated and also much more controversial than this allows for.

There is no one method that philosophers use. Philosophers worry about consistency and inconsistency. They look for counterexamples and try to avoid them in their own work. They may begin with "intuitions," but they try to develop those intuitions into more precise, well-articulated theses, and they count it as a plus for their view if it covers a range of cases and helps makes sense of things that formerly seemed puzzling. They use thought experiments to explore what their views entail about hypothetical but potentially illuminating cases. They may try to challenge claims made by other philosophers, or they may build on insights that other philosophers have developed. Philosophers also try to make sure that their views don't run into conflict with things we know empirically. But philosophy is not some one thing, philosophers don't all approach their problems in the same way, and just what philosophy is and how it might best be done are philosophical questions.

This all makes perfect sense to anyone who works in the field, because philosophy's issues are by their very nature not straightforward and not capable of being settled in any one way. Questions that yield to the application of a precise "method" are by and large not the questions that philosophers think about.

This frustrates some people. It doesn't frustrate philosophers. It's what gets them out of bed in the morning.

I recommend that you don't think about it this way.

Is mind-independent moral realism true? Geez. I don't know. (And, by the way, neither do you.) But here's some stuff I feel quite comfortable saying.

I want my kids to be empathetic. I want them to give a damn about how their actions affect other people. I want them to take seriously the idea that if they wouldn't be willing to put up with being treated in some way or other, then they'd better have a very good reason, and not just a selfish one, for treating other people that way. I want my kids to treat others decently. I want them to be honest. I want them to be fair. I want them not to be jerks.

Do I want all that because I'm convinced that mind independent moral realism is true? Nope. I want all that because I can't imagine not caring about such things. They seem right to me, and the fact that something called "mind independent moral realism" might not be true seems to me an awfully thin reason for turning my back on my considered judgment that I shouldn't be mean to people, let alone steal from them or cut the brake-lines on their cars.

I also want my kids not to be suckered into buying claims about what's "good" or "bad" that don't stand up to scrutiny. For example: if someone thinks that same-sex romantic relationships are "bad," this may end up making their lives miserable. But it's also moral baloney. The fact that some people think they're bad doesn't cancel the fact that the usual arguments meant to demonstrate this are lousy arguments—and not because they presuppose "mind-independent moral realism." Moral grown-ups who think some things are morally wrong and others are morally right don't think that just because they've been told these things. Moral grown-ups are perfectly capable of seeing through bad moral arguments.

But notice something else. You're looking for advice about how you should raise your kids. You want to know whether you should teach them the highly theoretical and disputable view that you call mind-independent realism or whether you should teach them the highly theoretical and disputable view you hold. You might protest that you're really just asking which approach is less likely to lead to harm for them. But don't you think (leave philosophy aside for the moment) that we should care about what might harm our children? That it would be a bad thing not to worry about this?

This isn't a "gotcha" question. I'm not saying that if you answer yes, you're committed to "mind independent moral realism." I don't know whether that would be true or not, and for that matter, I don't know how much difference it makes to whether moral judgments can be right or wrong. I'm just suggesting that your real worry here isn't about an abstract philosophical question. It's about how best to raise a child—a child who has some hope to growing up to be a wise adult. That's very different from wondering about which abstract, disputable philosophical view you should try to imbue your child with. In this case, I suspect you're likely to do better if you approach deciding what to do from within the midst of things, so to speak, rather than with a highly theoretical idea as your guiding principle.

Suppose S is the set of all things that are blue or green. Then my mug is in S because it's green and therefore satisfies "x is blue or x is green," and my pen is in the set S because it's blue and therefore satisfies "x is blue or x is green." Now it's true: satisfying "x is blue or x is green" picks out only one set: the set of all things that satisfy "x is blue or x is green." But the condition "x is green" is a different condition, and so is "x is blue."

However: when you say "being blue or green cannot be the reason why any other object is in any other set," there's an ambiguity. That could be read as "being blue cannot be the reason why an object is in any other set and being green cannot be the reason why an object is in any other set." In that case, however, it's false. Being green, and hence satisfying "x is green" puts my mug in the set G of all green things, and in the set S of all things that are either green or blue—that satisfy "x is green or x is blue." These two sets are not the same. One is a proper subset of the other. Being in the set S doesn't entail being in the set G, and also doesn't entail being in the set B, though it does entail being in either G or B.

The key is to formulate the membership condition so that there's no room for ambiguity. We have

o is in S if and only if o satisfies "x is green or x is blue."
o is in G if and only if o satisfies "x is green"
o is in B if and only if o satisfies "x is blue"

These are three different conditions that pick out three different sets. G and B are disjoint from one another and are proper subsets of S. The union of G and B is S. But the formulation "x is green or blue," while not wrong, masks the fact that "x is green or blue" amounts to "x is green or x is blue," and so is the disjunction (the "or") of two conditions. An object is in S if it satisfies either of those conditions. It's in G only if it satisfies the first, and in B only if it satisfies the second. But clearly by virtue of satisfying one condition ("x is green") my mug can be in S and also in G.

This is a good question, and it is easy to answer. "Coercion" here is something like arm-twisting. It is a use of force or the threat of force to cause someone to do something. It takes this kind of force to prevent freewill doing its stuff. Ordinary causation won't do it, according to compatibilism. If my mother tells me to eat my nice soup, and I do it because I am hungry, that is ordinary causation. If my mother tells me to eat my nice soup, because if I don't she will whack me round the ear with her wooden spoon if I don't, that is coercion. It involves force or the threat of force. In this second case, according to compatibilism, I do not eat my nice soup freely. Why? Because what I do is coerced. By the way, "compatibilism" isn't just "freedom from coercion". It is the broader claim that freewill and determination (determinism) are compatible, and there are other versions. In the version you have been thinking about, the compatibilism of freewill and determinism is achieved by making coercion rather than determination the opposite of freewill. But freewill could also be made the opposite of control, for example (someone else's, of course!) or of mechanism. And there are other options too.

If I really believed that you really believed that these are the only two alternatives, then I'd probably believe that you're stupid. But I don't believe any such thing. I'd be willing to bet a tidy sum that if someone else asked you the very same question, you wouldn't have any trouble pointing out a whole bunch of alternatives that they're overlooking.

Since I don't know anything about your circumstances, I wouldn't presume to guess which alternative best fits your circumstances. But I do think the idea that there's a "real place" for each of us is something to be suspicious of, and I'm also pretty skeptical that even self-aware people are always reliable about what they're capable of.

Of course, if you've already grasped the second horn of your dilemma (false dilemma though it is), my reaction won't count. In spite of this, I'd suggest that one kind of reaction it's often wise to ignore is the one that tries to shame you into not trying things. The approval of people who react like that isn't worth having anyway.

Hi,
I'm going to answer this question as a non-theologian, but I should note that there are many, many different theological approaches to the theory of prayer, and I'm sure some would disagree with, or offer a different answer than, mine. For the purposes of your question, it seems important to first point out that you are conceiving of prayer *merely* as an attempt to affect the course of events in one's (or another's) favor. So one prays for success at a soccer match, or that one's relative recovers from an illness, and so on. This first sort of prayer is what is commonly portrayed, I think, in movies, casual conversations (including jokes), and, I think, it is what most atheists/critics have in mind when discussing prayer. My first point is just that there are other purposes of prayer in many religious traditions; in most traditions, one regularly prays without having a specific request in mind ,in order to be intimate with the divine, our of love (or something like that). I think you have a Judaeo-Christian-Islamic religion in mind (sorry if my assumption is false), so I will also point out that, at least in the Hebrew bible, there are various examples of unanswered prayers of the kind you are imagining (anything from pleading for personal favor or help (Job) to prayers of an entire people for protection against an enemy (so many examples and lamentations here). So, there is plenty of reason to think that God, in the bible, often does not do what we ask him to do. Thus, if I understand your "why" in the question as a sort of accusatory objection to theism, one reply would be: it is not part of the religious doctrine under discussion that God does whatever we request, so the objection fails. If, instead, the "why" question you pose is the theological question, on what basis does God choose to help one player and not the other, I doubt there is anything definitive for us to go on in your story. I suppose one sort of theology would have it that God decided for Mr A because, ultimately or overall, Mr. A was more deserving, but there is so little in the Bible to suggest that things are so straightforward, with plenty of examples of the unworthy and wicked being successful, and vice versa, at a particular event. Again, Job is a good example, but there are plenty of other examples, including the story of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, in which the righteous are made to suffer/lose. A more promising answer, I think, is something like: in the grand scheme of the world, only part of which we see (I mean, we don't see everything in the world that is relevant, like how badly or for what reason, really, each player wants to win, and we also don't see the "scheme" or plan for the whole world, including the future and how it plays out given Mr. B's loss, etc), it is better for Mr B to have lost. Or, perhaps, less grandiosely, but just as plausible: the rules of the game were set, the players played, the best person at playing the game, or just the luckiest, won. We have so little to go on in your scenario, that I doubt there's anything much more to say that would enlighten us about God. I hope that helps! And I'm sorry if I've misunderstood the question.

There are several questions here, and we need to distinguish them.

1) Does belief require objects? Beliefs are "about" in a very broad sense, but I believe (as should you) that there is no ratio of two integers that equals 2 when squared. There is no object that answers to my belief, but it's clear that my belief is really a belief, indeed a true one, and in some sense is about something. In this case, we could perfectly sensibly say it's about numbers, though not about some specific number. This might sound superficially paradoxical, but the paradox persists only if we insist on treating the word "about" in a way that rides roughshod over how we actually use it.

2) Is it possible to have a belief about "nothing" or about a negative, as opposed to affirmative proposition? Two different issues here. I can believe that Barack Obama is not seven feet tall. That's a negative proposition, and I clearly can believe it; any analysis of belief that claims otherwise wold be silly. But it's not a belief about nothing; it's a belief about Barack Obama.

So what about beliefs about "nothing"? Depends on what you have in mind. The way to go about settling the matter is to offer some cases that look superficially like beliefs about nothing. Then examine them to see if they really are things someone could believe. Thoughtful common sense is the place to start here. If they are things someone could believe, try to decide in what sense, if any, they are beliefs about nothing. Ask yourself: what's the content of the belief? Whether or not a belief can be about "nothing," it's a mark of beliefs that they have content. Roughly: they can be true or false.

Or do you mean beliefs about nothingness? Depending on how that's understood, there might well be such beliefs, even if nothingness isn't an object or thing. I'm not willing simply to assume that Sartre's Being and Nothingness didn't express beliefs about nothingness, though there's a perfectly good question about what that amounts to. Making progress here would call for figuring out what Sartre meant by "nothingness" (or "le néant") though that's not germane to our topic. In any case, the idea that a belief must always be about some object—some thing—is a rookie mistake. It doesn't begin to do justice to how we actually use the word "belief."

3) Finally, atheism. An atheist, as most philosophers use the word, is someone who believes that there is no God. If someone claims that they don't understand this, I'd be suspicious. They may have gotten themselves in the grip of a bad idea, but believing that there are no pink elephants, or no even primes larger than 2 or no gods are perfectly familiar cases of belief that any account of belief has to make room for. And these beliefs are only puzzling if you squint the wrong way. In ordinary contexts, we understand claims like this without any difficulty.

A lack of belief in the existence of a God is not automatically atheism. An atheist lacks a belief that there is a God, but so does an agnostic; an agnostic neither believes nor disbelieves. Again, this is no puzzle, I neither believe nor disbelieve that the President of the USA in 2030 will be a Democrat. I don't have a belief about it.

A more general comment: there's lots of worthwhile philosophy to be done in analyzing the logic of belief and trying to sort out just what distinguishes beliefs from other mental states. And since beliefs are in some sense "about" or, to use the $64 word, are intentional states, there's interesting and worthwhile work to be done sorting all of that out. But even if our account of these things ends up going beyond what we'd normally be inclined to say, what we'd normally say is the place to start and the place to keep returning to.

Why assume that Mr A's prayer's were answered? Is the idea of the example that Chelsea won because Mr.A prated for it to happen and God acted accordingly? Suppose I ray for a natural disaster and one happens. Would we assume that this was God answering my prayers? Surely not on any conception of God that's worth taking seriously.

That Mr A prayed for what happened doesn't mean it happened because Mr A prayed for it, and in this case, that seems to be the response the believer should make. There's no reason even for a believer to think that Chelsea's victory was a matter of God favoring Mr A over Mr B.

Of course, non-believers have an even simpler reply. But I'm treating your question hypothetically.

No.

There is a set of even numbers. There is also a set of numbers that are even or prime. (Note, by the way: something can be even and prime: the number 2.) The number 8 is in the first set because it's even. It's also in the second set because it's even, hence even or prime.

Not all good paintings are beautiful, but for present purposes, we can still assume that all beautiful paintings are good paintings. A beautiful painting clearly fits the membership condition for the set of beautiful paintings. But it also fits the membership condition for being in the set of paintings that are beautiful or good and it fits it by virtue of being beautiful.

There's nothing peculiar here at all. If X and Y are both sets, their union is also a set. That's elementary set theory, and it's so whether or not X and Y are mutually exclusive.

Some theologians and philosophers would say that religious devotion to anything less than a perfect being amounts to idolatry, and a less-than-omniscient or less than omnibenevolent or less-than-omnipotent being would be less than a perfect being.

My own view is that this is a view that only someone in the grip of a theory could love. I rather doubt that most believers give much thought at all to the difference between omni-God, as it's sometimes put, and a being so far beyond us that, perfect or not, deserves their profoundest devotion. (Whether there actually is such a being is a separate matter, and not the subject of these comments.)

Perhaps there's one exception. Perhaps a being that was less than morally perfect couldn't be the object of a non-idolatrous religious devotion. That's a subject for an interesting conversation, but I'm not convinced that even this is right. So I think your question is a good one, and I"m inclined to think you're right.