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Time

Everything that happens, why does is it happen at the moment that it does and not the moment before or the moment after?

Why does there have to be a reason? Maybe some events occur when they do just by chance. There seems to be nothing incoherent about that idea. Indeed, that's how we think that the world actually works. For example, the law governing the radioactive decay of an unstable atomic nucleus seems to be merely chancy. An atom of polonium-214 has a fifty/fifty chance of decaying in the next 3 minutes or thereabouts. But nothing determines when it actually decays. There is, according to our best scientific theory of the matter, no answer to the question of why the decay happens at the moment that it does rather than a little while before or a little while after. Why should there be?
Knowledge

Is it possible to prove the existence of ghosts? By prove I mean that the best explanation for such and such an occurrence would be that it was caused by a disembodied spirit. Am I right in thinking that this would be impossible in principle, and that there would always be a more rational explanation?

The idea of a "disembodied spirit" is hardly a clear one. And no doubt some ways of trying to fill out this idea lapse into sheer incoherence. Understood in such a way, there just can't be any such things as "disembodied spirits". And non-existent beings can't do any causing! But let's suppose we can spell out an internally coherent theory that purports to explain various occurrences by postulating the existence of things that, by the lights of our current scientific beliefs, do look decidedly ghostly. Well, it could in principle turn out that, by our best standards of theory assessment, this surprising theory in the end trumped rival theories. Why not? After all, similar things have happened often enough in the history of science -- meaning that initially whacky looking theories postulating weirdly spooky stuff (action at a distance! photons going through both slits!! many-dimensional strings?!?) can begin, given enough successes, to look to be the best game in town, and even come to be firmly...
Education
Ethics

What is a good ethical decision making model for a professor who has been asked to teach a class outside his qualification? This has been mandated by his supervisor stating he is as qualfied as anybody else at the university and he has the open time.

The question doesn't specify what is to be taught. That matters. To take an extreme case, only a fully expert, well qualified, person should teach brain surgery. It would indeed be unethical to ask anyone else, or for the non-expert to comply with such a request. Too much hangs on getting things right. But that's really a rather exceptional case. Fortunately. And most of us (unless we are very senior or in very big departments) from time to time do have to teach outside our areas of real expertise. Which is no doubt good for us (the effort is rarely wasted, and you can often find surprising connections with your main interests). It can be good for the students too. Being taught by someone who is vividly aware of the difficulties for a beginner on the topic, who isn't in danger of making things too complicated too soon, who is willing to share a real sense of exploring an area together (rather than giving oracular pronouncements as an expert), can all be very positive. Assuming we aren't...
Logic

How does one _prove_ that an informal fallacy is a fallacy (instead of just waving a Latin name?)

How do you show of any bad pattern of reasoning that it is indeed unreliable (whether or not that kind of reasoning is called a fallacy or is dignified with a Latin name)? By coming up with some example arguments that rely on that kind of reasoning yet are evidently and uncontroversially terrible arguments. Such counterexamples reveal that kind of reasoning to be hopelessly unreliable. Suppose that, when the wraps are off, someone's argument relies on the pattern i f A, then B; B; therefore A. That's plainly an unreliable pattern -- just think of e.g. the instance "If Jo is a woman, Jo is human; Jo is human; therefore Jo is a woman"! So the original argument is fallacious. Or suppose that, when the wraps are off, someone's argument moves from the premisses that Xs are not A and a Y is constituted of nothing but Xs to the conclusion that a Y is not A. Then that again is plainly an unreliable pattern -- just think of e.g. theinstance "H2O molecules aren't wet; a...
Abortion

Why do so many people feel that abortion is not a major issue? Regardless of what end of the field you stand on, you’re either defending human rights or you’re defending human life, based on your perspective. Both of these things are clearly important issues so why do so many people attempt to devalue the controversy of abortion?

I wonder what you mean when you say that "many people attempt to devalue the controversy "? I suppose that it is true that a lot of people are not at all tempted by either "end of the field" -- if that means holding at one end that abortion is tantamount to murder, or holding at the other end that even very late abortions are morally insignificant. Many people think that the moral status of an zygote/embryo/foetus increases as time goes by -- the natural or unnatural death of the immediate product of conception is of little or no consequence, the natural or unnatural death of a foetus near term a matter of very serious concern, with a sliding scale in between. If you take this "gradualist" view -- a rather attractive one, I think -- the loud controversy between extremists at either end will indeed seem wrongheaded: it's not that the gradualist ignores the controversy, or merely ducks out from taking sides, rather she thinks that there is a third option. I've written a bit more about that...
Abortion

Why do so many people on the pro-choice end of the abortion argument insist that life does not begin until after birth and that a fetus is not a human? I mean, you can say that an embryo is not a human because it has no cognitive abilities. You can use science to show that it has no cognitive abilities too, but you cannot use science to prove that cognitive abilities are the defining attribute of a person. As a matter of fact, don’t scientists identify organisms as members of their respective species based on their unique genetic signature? Human beings have a genetic signature of their own. Every human has it and no other species shares it with us. So, scientifically the fetus is a human, it’s only when we put religious sentiment into the mix that we can define it as anything else than a member of our species. The life argument is more effective except that biologically there’s no significance to the instant of birth. It’s culturally significant but is there any real transformation in the 32-week...

If someone says of a (human) foetus that it is not human, then presumably they are not making a biological remark. They are not foolishly assigning it to the wrong species! Rather, they are expressing -- not in a very happy way -- a moral view. The claim is that a foetus. at least at sufficiently early stages in its development, doesn't have the same moral status as a developed human being (a fully-fledged person). Now, given the gradual biological development, it would -- as the question implies -- seem intolerable to suppose that there is, somewhere along the line between conception and birth and beyond, a point where there is a sudden jump from having no moral standing to having the standing of a full person. The natural view is that there is a corresponding increase in moral standing as you go along. And indeed, that seems to be what almost everyone actually thinks when considering the natural death of embryos and foetuses. A high percentage of conceptions (over 25%) result in...
Value

Is there a reason why caviar and wine are considered finer than cheeseburgers and soda pop?

I suspect Oliver Leaman has to be teasing. Good wine is -- of course -- a lot more expensive than soda pop because it is a very great deal finer (and that takes effort to produce!), not finer because it is more expensive. The long cultivation of vines over many seasons at a good estate in the Chianti or Bordeaux, the careful harvesting, the long stages of production from vats to barriques to bottles, the cellaring, ... all that is not a cheap business, so of course decent wines are necessarily more expensive than industrially produced soda gunk. But we happily pay the price for the result of the loving labour of good producers as the wines are indeed one of the great achievements of human civilization. We appreciate good wine for the elusive complexity we find in the aromas released in the glass, the intricately structured tastes, the very feel in the mouth, the lingering aftertastes. We delight in the delicious intoxication that it brings. As we experience more good wine, we learn to...
Philosophers

Do any professional philosophers disagree in a huge way with Wittgenstein? If so, are there any works on the subject? If so, can someone please tell me the basic ideas behind these disagreements? Thanks!

Oh yes, lots disagree profoundly. For a start, recall that around half of what Wittgenstein wrote after the Tractatus period was about the philosophy of mathematics (indeed, he wrote in 1944 that his “chief contribution has been in the philosophy of mathematics”). You can find a useful though rather charitable survey of his thinking on mathematics here . As you'll see, Wittgenstein's line is radical, to say the least, in its suspicions of standard infinitistic mathematics. Very few philosophers of mathematics agree with him at all. (Stewart Shapiro's excellent introductory book Thinking about Mathematics doesn't even mention Wittgenstein's view, he is so wildly outside the mainstream.) Another point where (rightly or wrongly) very few philosophers agree with Wittgenstein is on the question of the nature of philosophy itself. Even if they find value in Wittgenstein observations about the mind, say, very many philosophers want to recruit the worthwhile insights into something like a...
Philosophy

Although they cannot pretend to have "solved" the problem of induction, scientists have no qualms whatsoever about making inductive inferences in their work. Likewise, I take it that judges and lawyers agree that murder is a terrible crime, even if they are at a loss to explain why one's death is a harm to one. Why is it that we feel totally comfortable in going about the various activities of human life, even when there are (seemingly) gaping holes in the philosophical theories which are supposed to underwrite or justify those activities?

It is perhaps worth asking whether our commonsensical beliefs that the regularities in nature will be much the same tomorrow as today and that it is wrong to murder someone actually need 'underwriting' or 'justifying' by philosophical theories? What could that possibly involve? And what would underwrite those philosophical theories? If you are a sceptic about induction, say, why not equally be a sceptic about any theory that purports to justify it? If I come up with some long involved argument whose conclusion is that, indeed, we are right to believe that the regularities in nature will be much the same tomorrow as today -- as occasionally philosophers have tried to do -- would that actually increase your confidence in that belief, or make it any more sensible? Will the premisses from which the long involved argument starts -- if they don't in fact already smuggle in the assumption that the future will be like the past -- actually be any more secure than the belief that they are supposed to...
Education

I'm thinking of buying a philosophy dictionary as I'm just starting to read philosophy books and finding there are a lot of terms I don't understand. There are a lot of philosophical dictionaries out there however and I was wondering which one you'd recommend?

Simon Blackburn's The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (and not just because Simon is one of my colleagues ....)

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