Thanks for your thoughtful question. People often have different conceptions of the same phenomenon. This doesn't prevent them from talking about one and the same thing. One person might think that Venus is a star while another think that it is a planet. In spite of these wildly divergent views, these two people might still be able to disagree about Venus rather than just talking past one another. For instance, one might think that Venus is shining right before dawn, and the other might deny it; they can still have a substantive disagreement. So too, I suspect the same is true of 'therapy': two parties might have different views of what therapy is but can still have the same thing in mind. How can you tell? One way would be to see if the two parties can agree on putative example of therapy. If they can agree on most or all such cases, then we can be confident that even if they have different *views* about therapy, these are views about one and the same thing.

Accordingly, it would be either misleading or a lie to reply as you envision: "I would not be lying by saying "no"." It seems to me that you either would be lying, or would be very misleading unless you add the elaboration you mention 'I am not engaged in a self-indulgent activity...'

This is not to deny for a moment that all too often people *do* talk past each other in spite of using the same words. This failure of communication is common and can be difficult to detect precisely because the words that the interlocutors use are the same.

But we can either explicitly stipulate what we mean by our words, or work on a reasonable presumption that in some cases those words refer to the same thing even when we attach different associations to the things that they refer to, or to the words themselves. When either of these conditions is met, logic can still do its thing.

For further discussion it might help to read about Gottlob Frege's distinctions among reference, sense, and coloring or words. Those distinctions are discussed in various places including textbooks like Lycan's _Philosophy of Language_ (Routledge).

Mitch Green

I really don't think there's an equivalent of Animal Liberation on the other side. That's a classic because it's very clear and philosophically acute, very accessible to the public, full of information, and broad in scope. There are books on the other side, but they tend not to have all those virtues. The book that Amy Kind suggests is a good option, though it's mainly about animal experimentation, not meat-eating. Another book on the other side is The Animals Issue, by Peter Carruthers. It's clearly written and some would say acute, but it's primarily oriented to the academic philosopher. It's nowhere near as readable as Animal Liberation and it's not a source for "real world" information about the treatment of animals. Carruthers wouldn't be interested in such things, since he argues animals don't suffer at our hands--they're not even conscious, on his view.

A very accessible and pretty interesting book on the other side by a non-philosopher is Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication by Stephen Budiansky. If you don't insist on a position diametrically opposed to Singer's, then another book that defends meat eating is The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. Not a philosopher, but a clear thinker with a good grip on the animal ethics literature, he defends consuming meat produced on tiny humane farms, while excoriating modern industrial agriculture.

Thank you for your question. The standard answer is that an instant lasts for no time at all. That is to say, the start of an instant and the end of an instance occur at exactly the same time. An instant is indivisible; it has no separate beginning, middle, or end. You might think of time as like a number line, with (for instance) zero as the time when you started reading this sentence and 1 as the time when you arrived at the end of it. Then each number between zero and 1 corresponds to an instant of time. None of those instants is any length of time at all.

Of course, that an instant of time lasts for no time at all might lead you to wonder how a span of time lasting, say, for an hour could possibly consist of a bunch of instants each lasting for no time at all. This is closely related to some of the paradoxes first proposed by the Greek philosopher Zeno thousands of years ago.

Bear in mind as well that between any two instants of time, there is another instant of time -- and, indeed, infinitely many instants of time, since you can repeat this thought infinitely many times. But that should be no more surprising than that between any two numbers, there is another number -- and, indeed, infinitely many numbers. If an instant of time lasted for any length of time (other than zero) and all instants lasted for the same length of time, then you couldn't fit infinitely many instants between any two instants.

So in thinking about how an hour of time could consist of many instants, each lasting for no time at all, you have to bear in mind that an hour consists not just of many instants, but of infinitely many instants. I hope that this answers your question (a little).

I'm sure that some philosophers, like many non-philosophers, are dodgy when asked a question. This tendency can be fueled by worries about unpopularity or future recriminations, for example.

I'm also sure that some questions deserve dodgy answers. If you ask me whether you should give up your job in order to take care of your mother, I will be rightly reluctant to give you a direct answer since I cannot have knowledge all of the relevant considerations (even if you try to share them all with me), and since this is not the sort of decision that one person should make for another.

I suspect, however, that most cases of what you are calling "dodgy" answers are actually just very complex answers -- answers that spend a lot of time trying to clarify the terms of the question, and answers that include lots of conditionals (If ____, then ____; but if ___, then ____; etc.). If you ask whether or not we have free will, for example, I will first want to say quite a lot about the different things that might be meant by free will. I will then go on to say that if free will requires the intervention of non-physical causes in a physical world, and if the physical world includes not only all properties that are themselves physical but also all properties that supervene on the physical world, then there is not free will, but if free will is present as long as one choices is not coerced, and if coercion depends on interpersonal threats, then there is free will. This answer will be frustrating to anyone who wants a simple "yes" or "no" answer, but it is the only sort of answer that is responsible to the complexity of the issues involved.

Usually, when philosophers identify certain emotions as negative emotions, they are referring to emotions that include or result from a negative judgment -- such as the judgment that something is bad, or unjust, or harmful. Since there are many things that are bad, or unjust, or harmful, there is nothing wrong about making such judgments or having such emotions. Indeed, it would be worrisome if people never made negative judgments and never felt negative emotions.

It is widely assumed that a happy life is preferable to an unhappy life; certainly most people, given the choice, would choose a happy life over an unhappy life. But negative feelings can actually contribute to our overall happiness insofar as they are a sign of meaningful connections to one's surroundings (the cheery but deluded life is not as happy as a wise but sometimes sad life).

Happiness may not be as important as we think it is, though. A recent book by Barbara Ehrenreich, entitled Bright-Sided, makes several good points against the prevalent preoccupations with happiness.

You ask an important question. Some philosophers (realists) argue that simpler theories are better confirmed by the data and therefore more likely to be true. Other philosophers (anti-realists) argue that simpler theories are psychologically easier to work with and therefore more convenient for us, but not likelier to be true.

It is difficult to state exactly what counts as a "simple" scientific theory. Does it mean fewer causes and/or entities? Or something about the mathematical expression of theory? In any case, simpler theories are only preferred when all else is equal, and that is rarely the case. (We would love a simple theory of the causation of schizophrenia, but simple theories of the etiology of the disease have already been discredited.)

Some feminist epistemologists have argued that simple scientific theories are not inherently preferable to more complex ones. Helen Longino, notably, argues that simple scientific theories often reflect/express/derive from a hierachical ideology of single powerful causes, and that more complex theories (often reflecting a more egalitarian ideology of interactive causes) should be proposed and taken seriously more often.

I'm not sure that it's right to describe death without afterlife as "quiet peaceful oblivion." If there is no afterlife, and you cease to exist at death, then there is no you to experience the peace and quiet. If you've ceased to exist, then you have no experiences at all. It's precisely for this reason that philosophers like Epicurus claim that we should not fear death; on his view, all good and evil consists in sensation, and death is the absence of sensation. So, says Epicurus, "death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing ot us, since so long as we exist, death is ot with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist."

In short, if you're looking for a quiet, peaceful oblivion, I don't think death is the right place to look...

An excellent question. The relationship between art, standards or rules, and originality has been discussed on this site before. But I'll wade in with a few comments.

First, if we think of rules or standards as being heavy-handed in their determination, then that causes problems in many more domains than in art. If our standards for what makes a good X are entirely dependent upon a repetition of the qualities that made Xs good in the past, then innovation in any field becomes impossible. A good place to start, then, is with the recognition that such rules or standards must always be a little loose or flexible and capable of evolution.

Second, however, the problem becomes exacerbated in the domain of art, if we accept that one criterion of art is precisely the absence of any determining criteria. This idea comes from Kant’s aesthetics and, in various forms, has become a mainstay of philosophical aesthetics. Kant’s solution to how it is possible to judge despite this (that there is a specific kind of cognitive ‘play’ which, in effect, serves as a standard for judgement) is only one possibility.

Third, there is a danger that innovation and creativity themselves become the game. On such a view, the task of the artist is not to create art in a way that is original, but just to be original; originality is no longer just a necessary but also a sufficient condition. (Among others, the French philosopher J.-F. Lyotard advanced such an argument.)

Fourth, does the artist write, paint or compose for the future? What does something mean to be a timeless classic? That could only be the case if the standards of art ever stopped developing. I think Moby Dick is a great novel and a ‘timeless classic’ – but if anyone used that novel as a blueprint and wrote other novels using its standards, the result would old-fashioned, clichéd, ponderous and otherwise poor. In general, when one looks back over the history of the novel, say, one finds ‘great’ novels to be supremely successful representations of their period. The originality is ironed out. Does that mean that the manner in which we judge historical works is different from contemporary works? Or does it perhaps suggest that originality is a specific way of relating to the artistic (and other) standards of a historical period?