Thank you for your nice question. We normally think of our beliefs as things that ought to be responsive to evidence, and only to evidence. So for instance, most of us would agree that it is not a proper reason for thinking that smoking is not harmful to my health, that it makes me feel better to think so. Rather, most people would probably criticize me for thinking something on the basis of what I want to be true rather than in light of how the world is. Again, we would probably criticize an adult (though perhaps not a child) for believing in the Tooth Fairy, if his or her reason for so believing was that doing so makes her feel better. After all, wishing something to be so doesn't usually make it so. (Possible exceptions to this rule have to do with our own behavior: wishing to go outside to enjoy the weather might induce me to go outside to enjoy the weather, but this sort of case seems far removed from the topic of your question.) So wishful thinking seems to be what some philosophers...

Thank you for your question. This is a good one that I had not heard before. If I understand you correctly, you are concerned that the notion of omniscience is not coherent. The reason is that omniscience means knowing everything. However, if a being knows everything, then it knows what it is like to be ignorant of something. However, to do that, such a being would have to have the experience of being ignorant of something, and that in turn requires that it is, or at least has been, ignorant of something--but that contradicts the definition of ignorance! This is, I take it, an epistemological analogue of the Paradox of the Stone, namely the question whether an omnipotent being could do something it is impossible to do (like make an unliftable stone). Someone who wants to defend the coherence of the notion of omniscience might, however, not be convinced that you've raised a compelling objection. The reason is that your objection assumes that to know what ignorance is like, you have to...

Thank you for your question. I would suggest that the "secondhand" opinions you are interested in might in some cases be justified; in others less so. Imagine for instance that I've read a good deal about environmental damage in China. I've never been there, and so have no firsthand experience of the situation, but I have read reputable sources of various kinds on the issue, and have done so at some length, making a point of seeking out different positions on the issue. In a case like this, I would suggest, it is acceptable for me to form an opinion on the issue in spite of having no firsthand knowledge. By contrast, and all too often, people form secondhand opinions about issues on which they have done inadequate research. One only needs to listen for a few minutes to talk radio shows of various kinds, for instance, or user comments on online news sources, to see how many people form confident opinions on important issues (terrorism, economics, war, etc.) about which they are woefully ill...

I'm not sure that philosophers have a uniform answer to this question, and as you may have guessed, before even proposing one they tend to spend a lot of time trying to get clear on just what the question is supposed to be. If the question is: To what extent is human behavior explicable in terms of our biological endowment, and to what extent is our behavior explicable in terms of environmental influences?--if that is the question, then one point to notice is that some current views in the philosophy of biology would deny that the question makes a lot of sense. For example, Paul Griffiths in such places as _What Emotions Really Are_ defends a "general systems theory" according to which it is part of our biological heritage to be inherently plastic, and thereby inherently capable of being importantly molded by environmental influences. That would be one thing separating our species from many (though certainly not all) others. If this view is correct, then it is hard to see what the point is of...