According to the US Supreme Court, there are certain categories of speech or expression that are not protected by the First Amendment, for example "fighting words" or those that incite people to riot or cause a breach of the peace; the "fighting words" are also "insulting", and they are "those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace". These "have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem" (Chaplinsky v New Hampshire 1942). Slander is another example. "There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or "fighting words" those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight...

We don't all agree that there is no such thing as a perfect line, and all the rest. A line, say from point P to point Q is easy to find, but we have to know what a line is. Take a comparison. A captain may instruct his helmsman to set a course to Q . It may be that the waves or the tides push the ship slightly off course here and there, but the course is set. Is it impossible for the captain to ask for the course to be set? Is it impossible to follow the course? And finally, is it impossible for the ship to arrive at the point Q ? Maybe you think that there is no such point, because a point is not physical. But this isn't quite right. The thing that's important is that though the point does not extend into any of its dimensions, it can be located on a map using two dimensions, or in physical space using three. Or again, compare the line to the direction. The fact that a direction is like a line itself is one-dimensional (though it is a vector not just a line) has no relevance to its...

Row 12 is followed by row 14, so that if the steward directed you to sit in row 14, that is where you would go. We should distinguish between the what the rows are called (there is no row called "row 13") and which rows they are. The thirteenth row is still the thirteenth, as could be proved by counting the rows from the first to the thirteenth. You would end up with a count of thirteen rows. But when the steward says, 'Go to row 14,' he does not mean 'Go to the fourteenth row'. He means, 'Go to the row, over there, that you can see has the number "14" written above it' or wherever, even though you might not be able to tell the difference between the thirteenth row and the row numbered "14". Does this help? The thing we shouldn't say is that the fourteenth row is the thirteenth row (that were a contradiction) or that there isn't a thirteenth row. There plainly is such a row, as counting rows shows, and not even superstition can remove it. What is thought to be unlucky is the number thirteen, but - alas!...

You might well think that you have the right or best solution to a difficult problem in engineering, say, and concede that some other solutions, though perfectly reasonable, happen not to be correct. "Reasonable" means that there are good reasons for saying or doing something. Is that reasonable?

When you say that science can or cannot explain this or that what you ought to mean is that, at the bare minimum, the proposition that this or that happens can be deduced from some other more general proposition or propositions. So it is not unreasonable to think that there isn't anything science can't explain. Maybe there are infinitely many propositions, and they are all related deductively. Here I am just applying the nomological-deductive model of explanation, but the same point could be made using any other model, in its terms. It also seems to me that your question confuses two senses of "explain", one in which why a stone falls to the ground is explained when we deduce it from a proposition about gravitation, and another one, in which explanation is ultimate and absolute rather than relative to other propositions, and in which we cannot explain why the laws of nature are what they are and why they exist at all. If you stipulate that the second sense of explanation is legitimate, then your problem...

I have consulted an authoritative legal friend, who suggests the following line of thought. Is smoking marijuana a form of speech protected by the First Amendment? I cannot simply engage in an act and make the act a protected form of speech because I think or claim it is. There is also the objective test as to whether it has that meaning in the culture at large. In the 1960s smoking pot might have been taken as a protest, and yet today it might not, if only because its use is common. Besides, not any act, even literal speech, is protected under the First Amendment. One could not take unlawful killing, say, or "fighting words", for example incitements to criminal activity, to be protected. So far the law. It seems to me that very similar points apply, minus the Constitutional formulation, if the question is taken morally rather legally, in spite of the fact that the preservation of the democracy is not at the heart of morality.

There is no obvious logical if any connection between your premise ('Aren't we ultimately living each day just waiting until the day we die?' which is really an assertion: 'We are ultimately living each day just waiting until the day we die'), and your conclusion, again a rhetorical, question: 'What is the point of life?' The assertion here is 'There is no point of life.' Should this be 'There is no point to life?', I wonder. What is the difference? Compare this with, 'The passengers were just living each day just waiting until they got to port' and 'There is no point in getting to port.' Or again, 'The soldiers were ultimately living each day just waiting until the war was over' and 'There is no point to the war.' It is rather the reverse of what you suggest, in most cases. The fact that this is the one thing everyone is waiting for does not rob its opposite (life) of any point at all. Besides, it is not true that the soldiers were "ultimately" living each day "just" waiting until the war ended'...

Wait! You have proved the base clause all right, but where is your proof of the inductive step? Is it that if you remove the inductive steps, you are left with a true base step, which is true? But this is obviously not a good deductive proof. I think too you may be mixing up mathematical induction, which is a form of deduction, and induction in the sense of generalization, which is not a form of deduction. So your paradox is not a paradox, and it doesn't make trouble for the word "same". What am I missing?

I'm not sure I'm getting your second question. Why should the I that says 'I feel pain' be the mind and not the I? Unlike Descartes, who thinks that both of these things are the same as consciousness, and as himself, not to mention his soul (Berkeley makes these equations too) I would prefer to reserve the words "mind" and "mental" to describe two things that are not me. (i) The intellect. We say, 'He has a good mind' and things like that. (2) The imagination. We say, 'It's all in your mind; you're just imagining it. Snap out of it.' The mind and the imagination are two different things, obviously. But neither of them is me. What is meant by "I" and "me" and so on? It certainly is not the same thing as "mind", and nor could my mind, in my two senses, be me. I have a healthy appetite, especially for Italian food, but the same is not true of my mind or imagination. I have just had lunch. But my mind and my imagination, poor things, never eat. So neither of them is me. They are things or whatever that I ...

I think you have to ask what "inanimate" means. If it means what the root word "anima" (Latin for the Gk. "psyche") suggests, then if consciousness requires a psyche or anima, mind or soul, the answer to your third question is 'Right; an inanimate object can't be conscious.' On the other hand if "inanimate" just means "not living", then the answer to your second question might be, "Yes".