Perhaps there are three different issues hereabouts, There's the question of whether the best route in for beginners is via texts (written material) or via lectures and other media. There's the question of whether first to struggle with " original " texts (meaning articles or books which were/are supposed to be making novel contributions, whenever they were written) or to approach issues via textbook treatments and other works more or less intended for beginners ("supplements", to borrow Lisa Cassidy's word). There's the question of whether to approach things via " original " historical texts (meaning now, in particular, writings by the Great Dead Philosophers) or to start with more contemporary materials. On (1), lectures might be fun and helpful because they tend to be more relaxed and unbuttoned than written texts: but if you are going to study philosophy then, inevitably, you are going to be doing a lot of reading from the very start....

You are quite right that Gödel's (first) incompleteness theorem attracts all kinds of bizarre "interpretations". Various examples are discussed and dissected in Torkel Franzen's very nice short book, Gödel's Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to its Use and Abuse , which I warmly recommend. My guess is that a main source for the whacky interpretations is the claim that has repeatedly been made that the theorem shows that we can't be "machines", and so -- supposedly -- we must be something more than complex biological mechanisms. You can see why that conclusion might in some quarters be found welcome (and other technical results in logic generally don't seem to have such an implication). But as Franzen explains very clearly, it doesn't follow from the theorem.

I'm not as confident as Peter Fosl about the testability issue: perhaps we need to know a bit more about what counts as " the theistic hypothesis". After all, a lot of theistic hypotheses look perfectly testable by ordinary scientific standards. Take, for example, the claim that Zeus exists. I take it that no one now reading this site believes that that claim is literally true! But why? Well the existence claim, taken literally, is bound up with a range of stories about how the world works; and we now know the world just doesn't work that way. Mount Olympus is not populated with gods; bolts of lightning are naturally caused discharges of electricity; clouds and rain are not gathered by supernatural agency; burnt sacrifices to Zeus do not increase the chances of better crops or victory in battle; and so it goes. Science -- in the broadest sense of our empirically disciplined enquiries into how things work -- has shown we have no need of the Olympian gods to explain anything. Of course, that...

No. But that's no limitation on such a god's power. We're not saying that there is some possible task that this god fails to be able to pull off. We're saying that there isn't any task that is coherently describable as "making a square triangle". For consider: what could possibly count as making a square triangle? To be a square requires having four sides. To be a triangle requires not having four sides but only three. So nothing can possibly count as being both a square and a triangle. Hence whatever the god (or anyone else) does, it couldn't correctly be described as "making a square triangle" for that isn't a coherent description of anything. Take a mundane case. I pass you the cookies. You can take one. Or you can take none. Both are within your power. But you can't simultaneously both take one and not take one. But saying that plainly isn't to say that there is some limitation on your powers of choice vis-a-vis cookies! The point is that nothing could count as...

Hello Noah! Right back from the early ancient Greek philosophers, people have wondered about questions like yours. What things are due to the nature of the world? What things are due to decisions by people? It's a good sort of question. For example, it seems to be a law of nature that heavy things drop to the ground when you let go of them (nothing we can do about that!). But it is due to a rule we've made up that people in your country drive on the right (or the left, whichever it is). People could decide to change the driving rule -- as people in Sweden did some years ago. So: it doesn't matter what people choose or want or decide: heavy things fall. It does matter what people choose or want or decide to do when it comes to the rule about driving. Other cases are less obvious. What makes stealing wrong? Is it like the heavy-things-fall case, i.e. is stealing wrong whatever people think? Or is it more like the driving-on-the-right case, so that stealing is counted as wrong because...

Actually, I very much doubt that you do try to root out beliefs as much as possible. After all, you believe -- on very good grounds! -- that apples aren't poisonous, that butter keeps better in the fridge, that New York is east of California, that Obama is President, that the moon isn't made of green cheese, that 2 + 2 = 4, and a whole host of other truths. Why on earth would you want to root out beliefs such as these? And if you did try to do so, how could you live any sort of life? If you had no beliefs one way or the other about what is safely edible, then you'd very soon poison yourself! We need true beliefs to guide successful action. So, I take it that it isn't beliefs in general that you are trying to root out (that way madness lies!), but much more specifically it is those of your beliefs for which there are insufficient rational grounds and/or which are not generated in reliable ways. Beliefs which are not appropriately supported are too likely to be false, and we need our...

But d oes a person have a right to have children? I surely don't have a right that someone else should be sufficiently inclined to procreate with me so that I end up with children produced the old fashioned way (I don't have a right that you or anyone else should find me sexually attractive enough, even when you've had a few drinks: no one owes that to me). Nor, surely, do I have a right that someone or or some agency should provide me with the means to have a child in some new-fangled artificial way. It might be permissible for me to have childen, other things being equal. And perhaps I normally have a right not to be prevented from having children (just as I have a right not to be prevented from doing lots of other permissible things). And perhaps further, we even have some sort of right that social arrangements are not such as to make it very difficult for us to try to fulfil that basic human desire (at least in moderation – though what if disaster would ensue if...

I'm reminded of the exasperated Bertrand Russell faced with the young Wittgenstein: "He thinks that nothing empirical is knowable. I asked him to admit that there was not a rhinoceros in the room, but he wouldn't. I looked under all the desks without finding one but Wittgenstein remained unconvinced." It is Wittgenstein here who is being obtuse and in the grip of a silly theory. Of course we can establish empirical propositions both positive and negative – for example, that there are five desks in the room and no rhinoceroses. By any sane standard, it is just plain false that you can't prove a negative, and that supposed "discussion-killer" should itself be promptly killed off.

How clear are we about the very idea of "falling in love"? When we talk about different cases of falling in love are we always talking about the same single kind of experience? Or are we perhaps talking about some quite complex pattern or syndrome of thoughts and feelings, which might come in different mixes in different cases (so that different instances of falling in love have a family resemblance to each other, though there perhaps needn't be any one core experience in common to all cases)? Well, even if one person's own experiences might have a common thread, the anecdotes of friends and relations and the witness of however many novelists and poets do suggest that the experiences people call "falling in love" are indeed actually rather complex and many-stranded. And as a matter of fact, it seems that at least some of the components of these complex experiences come in degrees (so "falling in love" isn't really an all-or-nothing business). Of course, noting this is, in part, to make a general ...

Apart from the fact that we have pairs each time, I'm not sure I see any other pattern here (even a "family resemblance"). But one thing is clear, the pairs are certainly not all "dichotomies" -- for a dichotomy divides things into two non-overlapping kinds. And while, if we believe Frege, objects ("referents") and concepts are different quite kinds of things, sets and their members can of course be the same kind of thing (since a set can have other sets as its members). Again, while we might suppose physical objects and their appearances are different kinds of things, wholes and their parts needn't be.