Which Came First, the Question or the Idea?

We must always have an idea before we can ask a meaningful question. For any question consists of ideas, and therefore the question cannot be posed before we have acquired the ideas out of which it is composed. For example, before I could formulate the question that I'm answering, I had to have the concept of a question, an idea and the notion of coming first.

Perhaps a more fundamental philosophical question is where do our ideas come from? Plato's famous Theory of the Forms is one attempt to answer this. He argued that we were acquainted with Forms, such as justice itself, beauty, and the good, prior to birth. The ontological status that Plato ascribed to the Forms is hotly disputed, but it is evident from his theory of recollection that the Forms are postulated as the source of the ideas that we have in this life.

What If Everyone Were on Prozac?

Does pure pleasure have inherent value? Here are a couple of scenarios to consider: 1) We develop the ability to put an electrode into one's pleasure center, and indefinitely support them with IV drip, etc., while they do nothing, think nothing, and feel nothing but intense pleasure; 2) we turn the planet into a garden, with more than enough food growing everywhere, and no need to do anything to satisfy basic needs beyond picking it off the nearest bush... and the food is loaded with tranquilizers and euphoric drugs. Ok? You like these? Do you think one or the other of these is what humanity should aim for? If you leave the ability to think, you're going to have striving, at least by some... so you've got to turn it off, one way or another. But hey, why think, if you've got food, shelter, sex, and (minimal, since we don't think) entertainment? Bread and circuses, like the Romans, right?

You could ask what the difference is between humanity like that and no humanity at all, just blades of grass... I don't see one. I'm not going to present an ethical system with some other basis, although I easily could. I could say that in order to make the scenarios above, or something like them, work, you'd have to change the basic nature of humanity... and then the question becomes: to what do you think it should be changed, and why?

But to give a direct answer: yes. Here's one simple reason: we can't predict the future. If we have a world of contented cattle, they'll need keepers, right? Because something is bound to happen to the system, eventually. Well, who will be our keepers? Robots? Could you trust them a) to do a good job, in the long run... be flexible enough to cope with the unexpected, to not rust away, etc., and b) to not just abandon humanity?

Is Democracy the ‘Least Worst’ Form of Government?

The question assumes that government is for some purpose or set of purposes, and that the only dimension of assessment of different forms of government is how well, or how badly they accomplish their objectives. However, if a political philosopher were to put forward the argument that democracy is the only acceptable form of government — for example, that our duty of obedience to the state can only hold if the state is ruled by a democratically elected government — then it would not matter if democracy was the worst of all possible arrangements for getting things done.

That is not the only principled argument for democracy. Another argument is that the fundamental assumption of human equality is inconsistent with any form of government other than a democratic one.

Are there limits on the duty of obedience to the state? — This is the classic question of political philosophy. Roughly, the reasons given fall into two main categories. Either we are morally obliged to obey the state, in which case the question is how far this obligation extends before it is overridden by other, conflicting moral obligations. Or it is in our own best long-term interest, all things considered, to obey the state, in which case the question is under what circumstances one might make the well founded judgment that disobedience was in one's best long-term interests. My own inclination is towards the first, rather than the second strategy.

On the view that our obligation to obey the state is a moral obligation, it would seem to be that there can be other moral obligations which override it. When a moral claim is overridden, that does not imply that the claim itself is invalid. However, the moral obligation to obey the state is itself conditional on certain requirements being fulfilled. Consider the case of the Israeli who gave away his country's atomic secrets. It is possible that he simply believed he was responding to an overriding moral imperative? An alternative explanation is that he believed that his government, in secretly stockpiling weapons without a democratic mandate had forfeited its moral claim on his obedience.

What is God?

There are a number of conceptions of 'God' each peculiar to a religion. A prevalent conception of 'God' is of a supreme being with a number of different properties like omnipotence, omniscience, infinite goodness, and a number of others. But that is the concept of God. So the concept of 'God' certainly exists. However, whether anything answers to that concept, or any other concept of 'God' is a very different matter. That is the matter of whether there is a God, or whether God exists. We should never confuse the concept of 'God' with God, and think that because the first exists, so does the second. That would be a mistake in logic.

What Does Plato’s Allegory of the Cave Intend to Teach Us?

In Plato's underground cave there are people chained and shackled so that they can only see one wall. Behind them is a fire casting its light upon the wall. Between the fire and the people is a roadway through which other people travel carrying all kinds of objects which cast shadows on the wall.

The chained people take these shadows to be realities. However if one of them were to be released and allowed to look around or even to leave the cave into the clear light of day he would realize that in fact the shadows were not reality.

I think the allegory of the cave is meant to be more than just a way of saying that if we rely on our sense perception we will never attain knowledge, but always be subject to the world of appearance. Rather there is a stronger message that through our intellectual capacities and philosophy in particular we can break the chains that "fetter us" we can aim for the light we can be enlightened. In other words by becoming philosophers we can be free!

There is as well a second part to the allegory. The freed person returns to the cave and is subject to ridicule and danger. Clearly he would not be happy with this situation. But one of the things we learn to see outside the cave, in fact the highest source of knowledge is that of Goodness. In the larger context of ‘The Republic’ (from which the allegory is taken) Plato wishes to describe the ideal state for mankind. Plato thinks that knowledge of Goodness is required in order to run such an ideal community. However those with such knowledge, like the man sent back to the cave are reluctant to go. Bizarre or brilliant depending on how one views Plato, it is those who least want power and responsibility that should have it.

Is Eating People Wrong?

Yes. Kant had the answer to this one: it is immoral to treat a person as an object. If you eat someone, that's what you're doing. Now, there is an interesting variant on this, however. One could conceive of ritual cannibalism, where one eats the dead to show respect for them to symbolically join with them by taking them into oneself, as moral, because then you're treating them as people, not as food. The ritual cannibalism (yes, "communion") of the Catholic Church is something like this. Is that kind of cannibalism moral? I'm not sure, but it seems that it could be, with suitable respect for the dead. But aside from that kind of cannibalism, using a person as food is denying their humanity.

But, what if you're on a desert island, a ship lost at sea, or whatever, and you and some others are starving... and someone dies. Is it moral to eat them? I'd say yes, myself... I'd want to be eaten in those circumstances, anyway, if it was me that died first. What's the difference between that and, say, donating your organs after you die to medicine, to save lives?

Now there's another kind of cannibalism which I have not really thought through as to its morality, and that's where human beings might clone their own flesh to feed themselves, in some future where food is scarce. Is eating cloned human meat, grown in a vat a) cannibalism, b) immoral? After all, that's nearly what we do now with chickens, commercially. Does it make a difference what the meat is, genetically? My take on this is that it's only our cultural conditioning which makes us feel that this is repulsive and immoral, and that there's not any real immorality there; humans are not treated as objects or as food; there's just meat with human genes. On the other hand, taking human genes and employing them in this fashion, it might be argued, is using the human blueprint, at least, in a way that denigrates it and that opens the door to real abuses. That's certainly a reasonable response, and that's why I don't know the answer to this one... I don't have what I'd consider a decisive reply to it. Which isn't to say there isn't one... maybe there isn't; or perhaps I just haven't thought of it yet.

If You Don’t Know You’re Unhappy are You?

It seems a paradox to say that a person could be unhappy, even though they didn't think that they were unhappy. Surely happiness is a feeling which you know you have, if you have it, and know you don't have if you don't have it.

The Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle would not agree with what I have just said. He had a conception of 'happiness' as more than simply a subjective feeling but rather a judgment that we make about the quality of a person's life. A man who is being cheated on by his wife is not 'happy' according to Aristotle's definition, even if he is blissfully unaware of the fact and thinks that he is the happiest man in the world.

You might reply that Aristotle is not talking about 'happiness' per se, but something else. The substantial question is what sort of happiness we should want.

There is another dimension to the problem, however. Since Freud, we have got used to the idea that we are not always aware of how we truly feel. You assert you are happy, and as you utter the words you seem to believe what you say. Yet deep inside there is a gnawing unhappiness which is causing you to 'act out' in various ways, spoiling relationships and hurting people. Freud said that his objective was to transform a person's neuroses into 'generalized unhappiness'. It sometimes seems as if he thought that everyone ought to be 'unhappy'.

Are There Questions We Can’t Ask Because the Answers Cannot be Known?

The question we are asking is a question of metaphysics, which concerns our understanding of the concept of truth. If a question can be asked, one of the things which follows from that is that we can grasp what it would mean for that question to have an answer. Of course, not all questions which have answers, are questions we can answer. For example, most people would agree that the question how many times I clicked the mouse today has an answer, but if I am not running a program on my computer which counts mouse clicks, then barring total recall there is no way I can discover what that answer is. I can ask the question, but I cannot answer it.

But now consider the question: ‘Has there ever been, in the history of the universe, a period of time during which absolutely nothing happened?’ In other words, can there be such a thing as an empty time? If you allow that there might, sometimes, occur periods of empty time, then it follows that it is logically possible that in between each key tap as I write these words, the universe stops still for a million years. There is a case for saying that because we cannot conceive of what it would be to 'know' that an empty time has ever occurred, that is one question we cannot even ask.

Is Atheism Logically Untenable?

Must we keep an open mind about God, even those of us who are skeptical about the grounds for theism?

Let me first give some examples of things I personally do not feel I need to keep an open mind about. You may or may not agree:

I do not need to keep an open mind about whether it is possible for someone to predict events that will happen in my life by observing the movements of the planets and stars, or reading the lines on my palm.

I do not need to keep an open mind about the claims of Scientology.

I do not need to keep an open mind about Hitler's responsibility for the Holocaust.

Isn't it irrational of me to be dogmatic, when there are people who believe in astrology and palmistry, or in Scientology, or in Hitler's innocence? — Just because people believe something — perhaps lots of people — just because the available evidence does not logically rule out the possibility that their belief is true, is not in itself sufficient reason for suspending judgment. My argument is if you allowed that such considerations were sufficient for suspending judgment, "just think what the consequences would be."

When it comes to the question of the ultimate ground of our existence, we are all profoundly ignorant. All that is left is the practical decision — the existential choice — whether to live in fear of God. However, existential choice still leaves us with three possibilities: we can choose to embrace theism; we can postpone the choice and profess agnosticism; or we can choose to embrace atheism.

In these terms, I would argue, the atheist option is neither untenable nor illogical. What the atheist has and the agnostic lacks, is something akin to religious faith. For those who find such faith supporting and life enhancing, that is sufficient ground for belief.

What is Determinism?

Determinism makes the ideological point that our actions and thought are determined by some universal basis. This universal basis can be language (Bakhtin talks about linguistic determinism), class ideology (Marx talks about determinism of class-consciousness), will (Nietzsche said that everything is determined by will), writing (Derrida says that everything is writing) and so on.

For example, according to linguistic determinism: if one's native language is English one thinks with the help of language as well as one thinks in this language. Language belongs to one as well as one belongs to language. Everything we say in English is contained in the English language. That is why the writer just expresses the structures which are contained in the language to which he belongs.

Language is the tool of thinking, according to Wittgenstein. But it is not a tool like a hammer. So, one can lose one's hammer and yet hit the nail without a hammer. But one can think nothing without language. Really language is the way of thinking. If one's native language is French, you think as Frenchman, you have the logic and world outlook of French culture.

Every language, in my mind, creates its own would outlook, its own culture therefore its own thinking. For example, what color do you associate with happiness? It might be pink or yellow, perhaps? But for the Chinese, black is the symbol of happiness and laughter. Another example, with what do you associate the flower chrysanthemum? For the Japanese, the chrysanthemum is the symbol of death as well as the symbol of the Emperor.

So, there is linguistic determinism: we can think nothing without language. Everything we think belongs to our world outlook (this is ideological determinism too) and to native language (this is linguistic determinism). Every word we think, say or write belongs to our native language, therefore our thinking, saying and writing is determined by our language.

The basis of determinism, in my mind, is the human aspiration to understand the underlying nature of the person. Freud says that a subsection of the person is sexual appetite, therefore he creates the determinism of sexuality. The basis of the person (Ego) in his mind is Id, which embraces all sexual wants and instincts. I think that the philosopher creates determinism to understand and to describe the nature of the human person and to build his own system of philosophical ideology.

Why Can’t Descartes Doubt his Own Existence?

In his First Meditation, Descartes wants to more or less abandon any belief that he can doubt at all. This is a way of finding a belief that is completely certain, a belief that he can be absolutely sure is true. If he cannot find any reason to doubt a belief, even the slightest bit, then it's certain in this sense. And the reason he wants to find such a belief (or such beliefs) is that he thinks that he can then base the rest of his beliefs on them, and he will be able to be sure that his beliefs rest on a secure foundation.

The problem is that he seems to have found skeptical arguments that show that there is no absolutely certain belief, that every belief he has is open to some (perhaps very slight) doubt. These are the skeptical arguments he gives in the First Meditation. It might seem, then, that he's doomed to be without an absolutely certain foundation for the rest of his beliefs. And this, clearly, would be a grave problem for his aims in the Meditations.

But this is where the fact that he cannot doubt his own existence comes in. It turns out that he really cannot doubt the belief that he himself exists. For the mere fact of his trying to doubt that he exists, or of his thinking anything at all, clearly shows him that he does exist: “I think therefore I am.” So there is no doubt, not even a very slight one, that he exists. Consequently, there is at least one belief that is absolutely certain: that he himself exists. So it turns out that there is a belief of the sort he needs to ground the rest of his beliefs on a secure foundation.

Who Am I?

Self-knowledge. On the entrance of the temple of the Delphian Oracle there was written: "know thy self.” That question of self-cognition was the basic point of Socrates' philosophical dialogues in the Athenian market place. It is a serious philosophical theme. I consider this theme as one of the most labored for philosophical consciousness. Not only because of the difficulty of self-cognition, but because there is not just one way of self-cognition for all people. Everyone should accomplish this knowledge self-sufficiently.

What can we learn from our life experience? What can one know about one's self? Selfhood seems to be the most clear matter. Everyone knows oneself best of all things. Also, only man it seems can know himself. One really knows oneself before all other knowledge. A newborn infant knows nothing, but is first noticed to recognize himself before the age of five. A lot of children prior to that age use time and again the word "I". I am, I can, I want, and I do and so on. Self-consciousness appears at that age and it becomes a man's first and deepest knowledge. Before that age, a child does not separate himself from the world around him. Therefore, we can not affirm the existence of consciousness before self-consciousness. The first manifestation of one's consciousness becomes one's self-consciousness.

What is the Difference Between Internal and External Freedom?

Internally, we have the freedom of thought and reason, the freedom to deliberate and decide. However, there are restrictions on decisions, choices and desires which come from external facts so we are not always free to act as we want.

Although our desires and choices are internal in the sense that they issue from us and no-one can desire or choose for us, the satisfaction of desires can prove difficult or impossible when the means are not available. Desires may arise freely internally but we do not have the freedom to satisfy them whenever we want to so the ability to satisfy our desires cannot be regarded as entirely free. The same is true for choices. There may be a range of choices, but what we really want may not be an available option. An example of lack of freedom of choice is the "money or your life" situation. You cannot choose that the person making the threat should take your life and keep the money, because if he kills you he gets the money anyway. But while external circumstances limit your choice in this situation, there is still a sense in which you choose. The person who makes the threat may be understood as forcing the obvious choice upon you, but it is still you who chooses.

Internal freedom is freedom as a power which belongs to you and which you exercise even when compelled. You may hand over your money unwillingly in the sense that you don't want to, but you have to do it from choice or free will in another sense because the action is performed by you.
However, there are other external factors which affect freedom of choice and desire. If we understand by external factors those forces which limit or restrict freedom, there exists facts about your background and character, as well as unconscious forces. These facts are internal in the sense that they are facts about your person but because they have an affect on, or determine, the nature of your desires and the kind of choices you make, these facts also restrain inner freedom. Some things you cannot choose.

So we are free sometimes and in some ways. Internal freedom is the power to choose and the ability to desire, in addition to the power to be able to think.

Is Philosophy Significant to Anyone Else but a Philosopher?

Yes, I think it is widely significant. There are two main reasons I think this. Firstly, everybody, when they try to think a little more deeply about their beliefs and the assumptions they rest upon (or even better, discuss this with friends) is to that extent a philosopher. And this can have some quite profound effects on people.

Secondly, philosophical ideas produced by 'real philosophers' (whatever they are) can have effects far beyond their recognized reach. It is true that many philosophers are read only by other philosophers — or people who are close to philosophy. The views of these people are affected. They then can write about other matters — political, ethical, whatever, in a way that is affected by the philosophical views they have read. Others read this, and in turn write or speak. In this way, philosophical views spread and influence many facets of our lives.

Let me give some examples. The ideas of John Locke about how to run a state affected the writings of many, notably the American founding fathers. The U.S. Constitution is organized in accordance with them. This has had pretty wide effects, I think you would agree.

Or a couple of others. Immanuel Kant's writings on reason heavily influences the Enlightenment — ideas that progress is inevitable and that objective reasoning leads to better actions. Friedrich Nietzsche's criticisms of this approach have led to a world in which such objective thinking and central planning, based on the belief that there is one right answer to every problem, is now widely mistrusted.

I probably don't need to expand on the influence of Karl Marx — basically a philosopher of sorts — who said famously: "Philosophers have previously interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it." Anybody who sets out to change the world, however, must first have interpreted it, and although they may not recognize it explicitly, that interpretation is likely to have been influenced by the positions of philosophers.

What is a Determinist’s View of Punishment?

The question is often asked: If all human action is determined, then how can we punish criminals, since they couldn't do otherwise? But if all human action is determined, the action of punishing criminals is determined just as much as the action of committing crimes! The determinism debate is haunted by the specter of a criminal saying to a judge that he cannot be convicted, because all freedom is destroyed by determinism, and all he really could do was therefore to commit crimes. But such a criminal is in no position to complain if the judge replies to him that because all freedom is destroyed by determinism, all he, the judge, really can do is therefore to find him guilty and sentence him.

What is Philosophical Skepticism?

"Skepticism" derives from the Greek word for "doubt." The Skeptic is one who doubts. But, doubts what? Here we should distinguish between "ordinary skepticism," and "philosophical skepticism."

In ordinary language and circumstances, a skeptic will doubt that something exists or is true. For instance, he will, if he is a (ordinary) "religious skeptic," doubt whether God exists. Or, if he is a (ordinary) moral skeptic, he will doubt whether anything has any moral value (whatever he may mean by that.)

But a philosophical skeptic directs his doubts against knowledge. He will, unlike the religious skeptic discussed above, say, "I can know whether or not God exists.” But this is compatible with not being an ordinary religious skeptic: For the philosophical religious skeptic (unlike the ordinary religious skeptic who doubts the existence of God) may, consistent with his philosophical skepticism still believe in God! He says he knows there is a God, but that doesn't prevent him from believing in God.

The great 18th century British philosopher, David Hume is, I believe, best understood as a philosophical skeptic. He believed many things he thought it was impossible for anyone to know. For instance, he believed that there was an "external material world" beyond our senses, but also held that it was impossible to know such a thing.

Could a Computer Behave as a Person?

In certain respects, possibly all, a computer could behave as a person. It couldn't be a person though. The human mind may have developed because of need. But perhaps also because of desire to continue to live, individually and collectively. Could a computer have such a desire? Maybe (think of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey). But consciousness would be essential to a desire for survival and I don't think self-consciousness is programmable.

And even if a computer could behave like a person, it couldn't be a person as there is more to a human than determinate programmable input can create. How can we program in the ability to love, for instance? We can't even define it.

What is Moral Relativism?

'Moral relativism' is one of the responses you sometimes hear people give in cases of ethical conflict. For example the Romans fed Christians to wild beasts and kept slaves as gladiators, whereas we do not, and regard it as wrong. You can either respond that we are morally more enlightened than the Romans were, that we today have got it right; or you can opt for the relativistic line that there is no answer to these kinds of question. So moral relativism is a denial that there is any single moral code that has universal validity.

Relativists need not deny that there is such a thing as moral truth, although their account of truth will be very different from an absolutist like Kant. Moral truth, to the relativist, is relative to factors which are culturally and historically contingent. So you can be an ethical relativist about truth and justifiability. The wide variety of ethical beliefs in the world is perhaps a point in its favor. How do you even assess the truth of something outside of your own background, language and community?

You can also be a relativist in a slightly different, 'normative' way. This would be to say that we ought to hold that the values of others are as valid as our own. Anthropology has thrown up an exotic array of practices from distant cultures which we simply cannot relate to and even find distasteful (infanticide, cannibalism, head-hunting etc). A moral relativist might claim that we have no normative grounds for judging these kinds of practice by our own moral standards.

How Did Religion Evolve?

There are many theories which try to explain why there is religion. Freud understood it as a kind of universal psychosis. Emile Durkheim, the great sociologist tried to understand it as performing the function of uniting a community. Karl Marx understood is as "the opiate of the masses." He argued that the ruling class provides it to the working class to keep them subservient. I think that, at least in part, religion developed as an attempt to explain natural phenomena (earthquakes, thunder, etc.); a kind of primitive science. The easiest explanation for anything is always that "someone did it." Of course, the rise of science has tended to pull the explanatory rug out from under religion since what science can explain, religion doesn't have to. It is because of that there is an important conflict between religion and science, that some (mistakenly, in my opinion) tend to downplay.

Do We Need a Government?

People feel a need for a government — I include dictatorships here — because the alternative is anarchy and the lack of organization implied would be difficult to accept in an advanced culture.

A government is also able to maintain relations with other states, so that in advanced cultures we are able to take advantage of cheap workforces, goods and raw materials from less developed countries. This seems to be becoming a global goal which the international anarchist movement is trying to put an end to. It is this goal, rather the concept of a government, which is wrong.

The role of a government is to maintain a legal system, impose taxes and distribute wealth in a way the people think is just.

I think this is John Locke's view. Locke thought that people want a government because of the inconveniences of a state of nature which is lawless. It can be argued against this that the impositions and restrictions maintained by government are not actually preferable to a lawless state of nature, but unless we are able to live in small self-sufficient communities — which we do not seem to want to do — then government is necessary.

How Could Nostradamus Have Seen the Future?

What we really are asking is whether there can be knowledge of the future which is not grounded on observation and memory. If Nostradamus genuinely foresaw events that were to happen in the future — that is to say, if he possessed the power of clairvoyance — what we are saying is that his state of belief was caused directly by something happening in the future, rather than by events preceding the formation of that state of belief. In other words, for his state of belief to be anything other than a lucky guess, a cause would have to occur after its effect.

You don't have to go along with philosopher David Hume's analysis of causation, or his account of belief, in order to find the concept of 'clairvoyance' problematic, on the grounds that we simply cannot understand what it would mean for a cause to occur after its effect. Suppose I discovered that whenever I say 'Humpty Dumpty' three times as my daughter is walking up the driveway towards my house, I receive a letter containing five dollars. But when I fail to say 'Humpty Dumpty' no such letter arrives. Then it looks as though, by some mysterious process, saying 'Humpty Dumpty' three times brings it about that yesterday someone put five dollars in an envelope and sent it to me. Isn't that weird? How could that possibly happen?

One answer would be, 'We just don't know how a cause can occur after its effect, but still we can — for example, in the Humpty Dumpty case — know that it does. I am very unhappy with that answer.

The point is that we seem to understand the idea of a capacity to see the future. The question, which I leave open for discussion, is whether any sense at all can be made of that idea.

Can God Make a Rock Bigger Than He Can Lift?

God could make a stone heavier than he could lift, but if he ever did, he would be able to lift it. — What we have stumbled upon is a kind of paradox in the whole notion of omnipotence.

We see that some people have more power than others. This leads us to believe, quite rightly, that there is a scale of 'powerfulness'. We then infer that this scale has absolute limits, i.e. powerlessness and omnipotence.

But omnipotence is not a coherent concept. This is so despite the genius of Aquinas and the other theologians who have tried to show that it is. In the same way that Plato saw horses and concluded that there must be something that is 'horseness', theologians have seen power being wielded and have concluded that there must be omnipotence. Both rest on a confusion.

Reason is a powerful tool. But we should see to it that it does not blind us from the obvious.

'Power' can be explained by giving examples of things that have power. But there are no examples of things that are omnipotent, except of course God. This might work if it weren't necessary to define God by his omnipotence. Seeing as though it is, we are trapped in a vicious circle.

I read somewhere that arguing about the attributes of God (what God can and can't do), is like blind men arguing about the color of the sunset. Leaving aside the literary merit of this analogy, I think the point was that we should either have faith, or leave it all alone. It is not the place of science or logic to define what God can do and what He can't do. Faith must be blind. And where there is faith, there can be no philosophy.

Why Does Plato Think That Philosophers Should be Kings?

The definition of a philosopher and the characteristics required of the philosopher-ruler are subjects of the dialogue Republic. Summarized it can be said that, according to Plato, human beings may reside in two worlds: the lower world of Belief and the higher world of Knowledge. While governance by non-philosophers would mean to be caught in the sensual world and therefore governed by mere opinions, beliefs and self-interest, the philosopher ruler will in contrast govern with virtue and justice without self-interest because of his/her special education in knowledge of absolute virtue, justice and other qualities.

As true philosophy means gaining the above qualities, philosophers are the only possible rulers. It is important to make a distinction between the acquisition of knowledge and the acquisition of truth, because knowledge is not necessarily the final truth. So philosophers of course can make mistakes, but will be ready (and hopefully able) to correct their views towards more truth.

Why Do We Fear Death?

The Greek philosopher Epicurus argued death is nothing to us. It does not concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more. Epicurus was an atomist. He believed that at death the human body is dissolved into the atoms into which it is composed. Philosophers have taken him to be saying something stronger than merely, ‘Don't worry, there is no place such as Hades that you go to when you die.’ There is no subject who undergoes the transition from life to death. According to Wittgenstein, death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.

You can argue the point. If life is good, then death deprives me of something good, which is bad. But in what sense does that concern me? I won't be around to miss anything. Yes, but surely if I am told I am going to die tonight, then I miss the things I was looking forward to enjoying tomorrow now.

I actually think we need something a bit stronger than Epicurean atomism, if we want to show that all such 'fears' for a future reality where I am absent are irrational. Wittgenstein argued that the fear of death is irrational because there is no "I" that exists from day to day, or hour to hour.

In the light of the illusory of personal identity, I would therefore distinguish practical fear and metaphysical fear. Practical fears are for things that we experience, that we go through, that are part of our lives. Those things are real. So the process of dying is very real, is very much something to fear. Metaphysical fear, such as the fear of death as such, the sheer absence of "I" from the world, concerns something unreal and is therefore irrational.

Do Fish See the Water?

The words, 'The birds don't see the sky, the fish don't see the water and the human don't see the Earth' do suggest to me deeply philosophical ideas.
What I see are in fact two fundamentally different approaches to the branch of philosophy that Aristotle called 'First Philosophy', which came to be known as Metaphysics.

What does it mean to say that the fish doesn't see the water? We know that water is only a part of the world. For the fish, however, the world is the water it swims in. The analogy suggested here is that human beings believe that the world in which they live, the world of Earth, water and air — or planets, solar systems and galaxies — is 'all there is'. Metaphysicians from Parmenides and Plato onwards have argued that this belief is wrong. There is another 'world', outside space and time, which is in some sense the 'ultimate reality'. A well known example of this view is the belief that there exists a God who views the universe 'under the aspect of eternity'.

What is Political Philosophy’s View of Globalization?

One of the most pressing political issues today is globalism. It touches many other issues including freedom of the individual, the nature of the state, sovereignty, authority and obedience. But let's concentrate on how the life of an individual would be impacted by globalism.

For the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, a person achieved the "Good Life" — the best possible life for mankind in accordance with his nature as a uniquely rational creature — only as part of a political state. Part of the good life was being a good citizen and one could only be a good citizen by actively participating in the goings on of the state. For Aristotle, this meant that the state or "polis" should be small enough to allow citizens a say in the life of the polis (this does not mean that democracy is the ideal of the good state or the good life since Aristotle restricted citizenship to those who were free of the need to produce in order to survive, so slaves and women were not citizens of the polis.)

So for Aristotle the idea of a global social order or even a modern nation state would be an anti-human way of life and a corruption of our aim for the good life.

However Aristotle was living in ancient Greece. Today, what with near instantaneous media coverage and technology with the potential for making participation in the political life open to all, globalism would perhaps be achievable. And given the horrors of nationalism and fanaticism we see in today's world a one global society may even be desirable.

Karl Marx too sought a global community. Marx thought that nation states were organized and controlled by a certain economic and social class; those that controlled the means of production in society. He thought that the workers would establish an all-encompassing and long lasting global community, where once again the best possible life for man would be found.

However there is another form of globalism which would not perhaps be the most desirable state of affairs. This is the consumer globalism that creeps into our lives through the work of multinational companies. Manufacturing products around the world and gaining such power that even the national governments bend to their will. This is not only a danger to individual lives but even political structures. Needless to say neither Aristotle or Marx would be happy with this form of globalization.

Where and Why do Eastern and Western Schools of Thought Diverge?

Roughly speaking, in the West, the tradition, really from Socrates on (with some problems in the Middle Ages) has been to question pretty much everything. Socrates sacrificed his life to start that tradition, and it has more-or-less stuck. That is, the Western traditions of philosophy, leading to the scientific revolution, have fairly explicitly included the idea that one must not take any explanation, nor its assumptions, for granted. Overthrowing schools of thought, replacing them with syntheses, with deeper analyses, or with simply radically different schools is, overtly at least, encouraged.

This, in the main, is not true in traditional Eastern thought. That latter is for the most part religiously motivated, in the following sense. While various schools of "philosophy" may elaborate greatly on some tradition, questioning the bases of that tradition is almost always forbidden. Thus one may work within a particular school of Buddhism, try to understand and elaborate on it, but to attempt to go to its roots with the idea of altering, improving, destroying, or in any way radically changing them is just not (traditionally) done. There is almost always a "dogma", a set of underlying assumptions, which practitioners of a particular school must follow. Since I follow the Western tradition, and indeed believe it is better, in that sense at least, I do not consider traditions which discourage that type of ultimate questioning as philosophy, but as dogmas, usually religious. Inasmuch as that is changing, and allowing that kind of questioning, as it is in many places, it is indeed philosophy. Now if you want the difference there between Eastern and Western thinking, I would be much harder put to characterize it, except to say that much of Eastern philosophy is heavily influenced by the religious roots it now questions. Thus, in Japan, for example, phenomenology is extremely popular, because of its natural fit with Zen practices and the Japanese meditative traditions. Inasmuch as it may question those traditions, it is philosophy. Inasmuch as it is adapted only to further those traditions, it is not, in my opinion, philosophy.

What’s Wrong With Basing Your Life on a Lie?

As in the science fiction film ‘The Matrix,’ let’s say I discover that my familiar world, the whole of my life, has been a dream produced by an evil scientist. My body which has been asleep since birth awakes to a world reduced to a post-apocalyptic wasteland. A mysterious stranger offers me two pills. The blue pill will let me return to my comfortable world of illusion, eliminating all knowledge of the choice I have made. The red pill will allow me to remain awake to face the awful truth.

I would take the red pill, without hesitation. As a (armchair) philosopher, I feel obliged to say that. But what's so wrong with taking the blue pill? Taking the blue pill means choosing a life 'based on a lie'. But at least I will have the complete confidence that the deception will never be uncovered. I will never live to regret my decision.

Were Socrates, Plato and Aristotle Gay?

We are asking, from the point of view of modern culture and ideas about sexuality, about a culture 3000 years in the past and their ideas about sexuality, and we want their ideas translated into modern ideas. "Gay" is a word we use now to describe certain types of male homosexuality, right? Well, what is male homosexuality? Is it the case that if a male person has one sexual experience, sometime in his life, with another male, he is homosexual? What if he has two... three... what would you take as a dividing line? What if a male desires other males, but not usually as much as he desires females, and never has a sexual encounter with another male; is he homosexual? What if he desires other males more than females, but never has a sexual encounter with another male? What if he desires other males less than females, but lives in a culture in which male-male sex is preferred, and has that kind of sex; is he homosexual? You can create a few more combinations here and puzzle over them if you want.

The latter case was, as far as we know, more-or-less the case in ancient Athens. Male/male sex was considered preferable to male/female sex as being an encounter between equals, and sex between an older man and a younger man was the most preferred, for a variety of reasons. Were the ancient Greeks homosexuals? From what we see in the Dialogues, Socrates actually seems, relatively, pretty "hetero", in that in at least one or two cases he refused offers of sex with other men. But there's no indication that he always refused it. He was married and had children, but that was the obligation they all had, otherwise the state would disappear.

As far as Aristotle goes, he and Plato probably had a lot of sex with men... were they "gay"? "Homosexual"? By their standards, our terms would have made no sense. Their culture preferred the opposite of what our culture prefers; how do you compare them, then? If you're evaluating it in terms of personal preferences, we have no idea at all of those; but we do know that one's preferences are due to some degree on one's culture and upbringing... but not entirely... so we're back to ground zero in terms of saying what, sexually, Plato and Aristotle, for example, "were" by modern standards. They were almost certainly men who had sex primarily with other men and probably preferred it that way, for some reasons quite dissimilar to, and probably other reasons quite similar to, the reasons men today have sex with other men.

Are Human Rights Universal?

If human rights are universal, then there has to be a universal justification for them — they have to be equally valid no matter which society you come from. What is this justification? John Locke, who is largely responsible for human rights talk, thought that they came from God. The writers of the American Constitution agreed with him. [It has been argued that we still accept universal human rights even though we have done away with the theological underpinning for them and have not found a replacement for it.]

Immanuel Kant thought that they come from reason, via the Categorical Imperative. It is common nowadays to claim that they come from the nature of a human being, though the details of how they so arise differ between many authors. Is it merely the concept of a human (or more commonly, a person) — and if so, which features of that concept? Is it our rationality (Kant), our special status granted by God (Locke), our immersion in community, our ability to empathize, our ability to have moral views, or something else?

If you believe that morality is relative — that what's right for me (or for us) may not be right for you, then it is difficult to see how you can support universal human rights at all. One account of rights is that they are granted by governments or rulers. If this is the case, then they differ from one society to another, and cannot then be universal.

Should We Obey Immoral Laws?

Gandhi came to grips with this question. Martin Luther King grapples with it in his ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail.’ My view, like King's, is that there are certain laws which are inherently immoral, and that therefore (provided the immorality is serious enough) I am morally bound to disobey them.

The difficult philosophical question is what grounds I have for claiming that a law is inherently immoral. King had an answer to that one — an immoral law is one that is at odds with God's Law. However, there are serious problems with basing morality on God's Law, as Plato pointed out in the Euthyphro. Does God promulgate His law because it is right (in which case what makes it right is something other than God's word), or is anything that God endorses therefore right — even the murder of innocent children (Abraham and Isaac)?

Of course, many answers have been advanced as to how we can tell what is inherently moral or immoral, while others have argued that there are no inherently moral truths — that morality is relative. The latter view makes civil disobedience very problematical, but I don't hold it.

Why Do We Exist?

Each of us, at some time in our lives, is brought face to face with the contingency of our own unique existence. If your parents had not met, you would not have existed. Neither of them would have existed if their parents had not met, and so on. You are a fluke, and so am I. Your existence is a gigantic improbability and so is mine.

Of course, if neither of us existed, neither of us would be asking the question. But that is not an adequate answer.

If you believe in God, then here's a way to make sense of the fact that someone named ‘Kim’ exists. God is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good. In creating the universe, God knew the precise date that Kim would be born, and, being all-good, his decision to create a universe in which Kim would exist was motivated by the thought that, taking everything into account, a universe containing Kim was better than a universe without Kim.

The trouble is, that doesn't answer the question. The question that still grips me, and the question that ought to grip you is, ‘Why did I have to be in the universe?” One can say the same thing about Kevin as I have said about Kim. God saw the possibilities that each of these two individuals represented and approved. Yet still I am gripped by the question, ‘Why did I have to be Kevin?’ And similarly, you ought to be gripped by the question, ‘Why did I have to be [insert your name]?’ I cannot ask your question and you cannot ask mine. It is a question that each human being can only ask about themselves and no-one else.

It is not as if it would make any sense to imagine that I might have been someone else other than Kevin. As the eighteenth century philosopher Leibniz famously commented, “To imagine myself being Descartes is to imagine myself not existing and Descartes being in my place.” If all your thoughts, feelings and experiences are replaced by Descartes’ thoughts, feelings and experiences then there is nothing left of 'you' to think the thought: 'Now I know what it is like to be Descartes!'

So what we are left with is a mystery, the mystery of I. There is no answer from science. There is no answer from theology. The only contribution that philosophy has to make is to point out that the real problem is prior to the question 'Why...?'. For no philosophical theory, that I know of, has succeeded in explaining how there can be such a thing as the sheer fact that I exist.

How Can Good Exist Without Evil?

What are we implying? Is it that good cannot be seen to exist without the contrast of evil? Or that good only exists to destroy evil? Whichever is implied we are still left with a teasing dilemma. If God is the creator of the universe, why allow evil into the creation in the first place? Or could it be that God did not have all his own way, working as the creator of good alongside the creator of evil? Some religious people believe in the existence of a very strong Devil.

There is no doubt that the battle between good and evil seems to have been going on since the world began, but in a “natural” world a caring God seems to take second place. However, as the question implies, it would appear that the evil we see round about us stimulates the concept that there must be some power for good to which an appeal can be made. There is also the notion at the root of religion that the world is the creation of a 'good' power, but, somehow, evil has managed to gain access. Some claim that a mistake was made initially by God when he allowed humans to have a certain amount of freewill.

Then there is the question of evil itself, with all its variable concepts. Many regard the perceived cruelty of nature itself to be evil: what is regarded by many as a natural and necessary food chain to maintain the balance of nature, is seen by others to be an unnecessary form of cruelty which extrapolates to evil. Here is another dilemma: take the simple case of a domestic cat coming in from the garden with a dead bird in its mouth; the owner of the cat gives the animal a good beating. Which action can be interpreted as evil, the action of the cat in killing the bird, or the action of the owner in beating the cat, or both? Some will say that a natural action, though cruel, cannot be evil, but an action punishing natural activity is both cruel and evil. So, we are presented yet again with a complicated problem regarding God. If God is the creator of nature, surely He could have presented us with a kinder regime of nature. How could a loving God confront us with such cruelty?

Separate from nature are the choices regarded as evil, or which lead to evil, made by humans themselves. A choice to murder, rob, deceive, inflict pain, betray, hate, etc. Pertinent to our question, it might appear that God is somehow responsible for the evil which the question suggests He cannot live without. However, the existence of God depends on factors other than evil, the general claim is that the universe must have a creator, and most are content to believe that this must be God. Regarding God as the creator means that he exists whether or not evil is present. Perhaps the “Grand Design” must include evil to make it work properly. Supporters of God would not argue with this seeing that their apology rests on the premise that God knows best. As Kant implied, our minds are not constructed to go beyond a certain level of knowledge, i.e. there are things which will remain outside the powers of human understanding.

How many times have we looked back at something evil and destructive in our lives, only to find that if it had not happened the subsequent good arising from it would have been denied us? There are so many things in our lives where good has had to be preceded by bad.

Should We Let a White Supremacy Group March in a Black Neighborhood?

John Stuart Mill would say that it is okay for white supremacists to march in a black neighborhood, so long as they do not harm those living in the area, or encourage others to harm them. And so long as they do not prevent those living in the neighborhood from expressing their own opinion or marching themselves. This is because Mill argues that we are free to do what we want providing what we do does not harm others. Mill also argues that mere offense or distaste does not constitute harm, so the white supremacists would be allowed, and perhaps even encouraged by Mill to march.

Now there are problems for Mill in saying just what it means to harm someone, or the limits of encouragement that is allowable, but generally most people would perhaps agree with his views. There are however opponents that would disagree with Mill. I think we can identify three major types: one that is call 'free speech hypocrites', a second which could be called 'free speech humanitarians'. Both of these work within Mill’s framework and disagree with the details of Mill's theory. But a third opponent is one who would reject entirely what Mill has to say about liberty.

Free speech hypocrites are all those like the white supremacists, who argue the case for freedom of speech as a constitutional right under law, so that they can march, but only appeal to the value of free speech in order to actively deny such rights to others, namely those living in the black neighborhood. Such opponents would not accept the consequence of Mill's view that everyone has the freedom to do what they want. They would not want others to be free to march against them.

The second group agrees with Mill that liberty is a good thing and free speech should be permitted, but disagree with Mill that whatever its content, free speech does no harm. They would argue that racism, homophobia, fascism, and other prejudiced beliefs are harmful and should be prevented from being freely expressed. The problem here is that no matter what anyone says it will offend someone; should we therefore ban all differing opinion, or offensive behavior?

The third opponent does not agree with Mill that free speech or individual liberty is necessarily a good state of affairs. They usually would argue that individual freedom leads to unfulfilled lives. Such opponents would find support in the works of Plato and Aristotle, who argue the need to live the Good Life, a life that is defined by the role one plays within a society. Thomas Hobbes would also disagree with Mill. He thinks that individual freedom must be sacrificed to a powerful sovereign if those individuals are to avoid war and conflict.

I do not think that Hobbes would allow the white supremacists to march, if the march would lead to frustration or harm the black community, because it would them mean that there was an imbalance in the freedom given up by some. If this imbalance was corrected by the sovereign allowing the blacks to have their own march, it would lead to frustration on the other side, possibly resulting in conflict, and so the sovereign would not be doing his job. The only way the sovereign could protect all the members of society would be to ban the march in the first place. Freedom is given up for the sake of peace and survival.

Why Study Philosophy?

The study of philosophy is really only the recognition and placing on a formal and justified footing of what everyone always already does; because all of us act and think in terms of some 'philosophy' that guides, steers or orients us. We perceive things in terms of our 'philosophy'. How many people are victims of the philosophy of others? The answer is probably, most people. And how much of other people's philosophy has been neither examined or only ill examined by them? The answer, again, is probably, most of it. That is a scary thought. Another example of our pre-existing relationship with philosophy that all of us always already have, is relationships, and love in particular. Our ideas about relationships and other people guide our behavior. The way we react to other people's behavior toward our self in relationships affects our self-regard. We form habits from our beliefs that have arisen out of our patterns of thought, which have become ingrained. In short, the way we think is the essence of the way we are.

If, then, we turn our thinking upon itself, if we decide to improve this area of our being, we will need to study philosophy. Of course there are different methods of study and different areas of philosophy that we might take up. The point here is that we are already caught up in philosophy whether we like it or not. The choice to take up philosophy in this or that way, or to take up this or that kind of philosophy is itself philosophical. I am not taking you round in circular arguments here: the fact is that philosophy is embracing. A human being cannot step outside its embrace without ceasing to be human.

So, philosophy is for people who want a life that is more worth living and to live in a world which is a better place. This "more" and this "better" depend on philosophy, no matter what the circumstances.

Can Faith Be Rational?

The answer we get is apt to differ from philosopher to philosopher, since religion is an emotional topic.

It seems to me that religious belief should be thought of as similar to all other beliefs (although, of course, very important to those who have it). Faith seems to me as just a kind of belief, although, no doubt very fervent belief. It is, therefore, not an alternative to belief, but like all beliefs, it needs reasons for it to be a rational belief. It seems to me a bad error to say something like, "I don't need reason because I believe 'on faith'." That treats faith as a kind of reason, when, in fact, it isn't. It (to repeat) needs reasons. So, to say "I believe on faith (or worse 'on the grounds of faith')" is only to say, "I believe because I believe." So faith (or religious belief) is not rational on its own. It is rational only if it is backed up by reason.

Sometimes, faith is identified with revelation: direct communication with God. The philosopher, John Locke, pointed out that even if we accept (as he thought we must) that revelation is true, since it is the direct word of God, nevertheless we have to determine whether what we believe is a revelation really is a revelation and not, perhaps, from the Devil, or because we are under the influence of some drug. And the only way to decide that is by reason. So even in the case of revelation, reason trumps faith.

Are You Responsible for Everything that Happens to You in your Life?

To me it seems that the obvious answer is 'no'. I am not responsible for things which are beyond my control. If a meteorite were to crash through my roof right now and smash off my big toe, I would not be responsible for the loss of my big toe.

However, if I have a choice which directly, in a manner I have foreseen, leads to the outcome, then I am responsible. So, if I know that pushing this glass will knock it off the table, and that it is then likely to break, and do it anyway, then I am responsible for breaking the glass.

Complications enter in several different ways. What about when I ought to have foreseen the outcome, but did not? To me, it seems that I am still responsible to the degree that it was an easy and obvious possible outcome to predict, and that I was negligent in not foreseeing it. This sets up a continuum of responsibility, from full to lesser.

Similarly, I may be an actor in a complex situation where the actions of other actors all contribute to the outcome. Here, I can also be only partly responsible, to the extent that my own actions contributed foreseeably to the whole situation (German Nazi’s for example).

I might add that it is becoming increasingly common (in our culture of victimhood) to claim that I am not responsible for my actions because some outside event means that I did not choose freely. For example, I am not responsible for my choice to rob you, because my parents beat me as a child. I find this trend deeply disturbing and dangerous to our society.

What is Destiny and Does it Exist?

I am not interested in the standard, question-begging explanations of where the alleged false belief in destiny comes from. Of how and why we fall under the illusion that there are things we are destined to do, or the illusion that we possess a destiny. "There must be a reason why the world is the way it is, it can't just be an accident." Or, "There must be a reason why I am here, in the world, it can't just be an accident." So the explanation proceeds, we are led to invent a reason that exists 'out there' — perhaps a reason that God knows — all the while totally unaware that 'the reason out there' is merely a creature of our own imagination.

A more contemporary, but no less question-begging explanation is the idea that we are story-telling creatures, that we feel impelled to construct a coherent narrative that makes sense of the events and the decisions in our lives. As in the previous explanation, the sense of destiny is supposedly revealed as nothing but an illusion, an invention, a prop. The fact that you or I might find it difficult or impossible to live without that invention does not make it any less an illusion.

Both styles of explanation may be described as reductive: There is no such thing, in reality, as destiny. The belief in destiny has a cause. But the description of that cause does not involve the concept of destiny. In the same way, the belief, in the Middle Ages, that there were such things as witches who possessed supernatural powers derived from the Devil had a cause. Understanding that cause does not require that we believe in the actual existence of witches. The belief in destiny is false, just as the belief in witches is false.

Can True Happiness Be Achieved By Taking a Pill?

There is a tradition in philosophy going back to Aristotle which contrasts the subjective feeling of happiness with objective reality. We can only call a man or woman truly happy provided that certain objective conditions are met. So that a man who died thinking he had been the happiest man alive, could not be said to have been truly happy if his wife and family, and the people he believed to be his closest friends despised him.

You would no doubt reply that Aristotelian happiness embodying as it does a moral judgment about the quality of a person's life, is not a scientific concept. In any case, it does not follow from the fact that no-one would want that kind of deluded happiness, that in such a situation one would not in fact be happy.

It is important that we are talking about happiness and not the sensation of pleasure. In a famous experiment, monkeys' brains were wired so that by pressing a button, they experienced intense pleasure. The result was that the monkeys could not leave the button alone, and died of starvation. Perhaps the same would happen to humans. However, a happiness pill is not a pleasure pill.

What would a happiness pill do? It would fill you with energy and a joy for life. The dullest task would be undertaken with a relish. The pain of failure would be minimized, the joys of success magnified a hundredfold. One would be filled with the love of humanity. One would be incapable of envy or malice. I am not talking about drugging yourself up with Ecstasy tablets and dancing until you drop. The effect would be precisely the effect that is attained by a few fortunate persons through philosophy or religion: a feeling of serene, confident joy.

"How can this be genuine happiness if it is purchased so cheaply?" Well, we could make the tablet really expensive!...Seriously, I can't see that price has anything to do with it, whether measured either in monetary terms, or in terms of human striving and effort.

No, I don't see how one could rule out that there might be such a pill some day. Or, better still, let's suppose one could re-write a few lines of human genetic code to achieve the desired effect. Then there would be no danger of coming down to earth with a thump when the pill supply ran out.

We need not take seriously the skeptics who complain that they prefer to remain unhappy in the face of the world's miseries, because the kind of happiness I am talking about is a spur to action rather than a temptation to complacency. And besides, there wouldn't be any misery. With the happiness pill, or with your genetic code altered, you could be happy, even in the face of imminent starvation.

I just have this suspicion that it wouldn't work. Not necessarily for any reason that can be derived from philosophy, but because of the complex nature of human psychology. Because we do not understand enough about the psychology of happiness, we imagine that you could take one aspect of our mental life and turn it up, the way one might turn up one of the control buttons on an I-Pod, while holding everything else constant. I suspect that what we have overlooked is the contribution of the down side — boredom, depression, anxiety, all the 'negative' feelings and emotions — to the overall condition of human psychological well being. But I could be wrong.

Is Suicide Ethically Wrong?

There are at least two reasons why suicide is regarded as ethically wrong. Firstly, if you commit suicide you fail to take the feelings of others into account; those who care about you. It is the essence of morality to think of others. The second consideration is that you have a moral responsibility to yourself. Immanuel Kant, for instance, argued that we should treat others with respect as Ends in Themselves. As individuals, one among others, we too are an end in itself and should treat ourselves with respect. Kant also thought that our moral community was essentially a rational community and it is rational to want to live.

So if ethics is grounded in either feelings or rationality, suicide is immoral.

However, if it is the case that no-one actually cares whether you commit suicide or not, then on the first reason, I cannot see that it would be unethical. You will not hurt anyone, except yourself: And it is not even clear that you would actually be hurting yourself. Our bodies belong solely to us and I think that we have the right to dispose of them as we think fit.

The rationality argument against suicide shows how you would be hurting yourself and applies even if you don't accept Kant's theory of respect. If you have no reason to live, and no desire to do so, suicide would seem to be the rational conclusion. But this would only be so if there was no future possibility of coming to want to live, and this possibility cannot be rejected. If there is an ethical sense to this it would be that one should be good to oneself and allow oneself the chance of some future happiness.

Can World Peace Be Attained?

As Egypt erupts, I wondered whether world peace is possible.

It is human nature to form strong beliefs and alliances and to be territorial. This is not necessarily incompatible with world peace as long as wars and terrorism are made impossible. Wars and terrorism will only be impossible if there is a worldwide ban on the production — or a total control of — weapons and arms. However, even if all national governments agreed to give up arms to some central control, or there was a global government with the power to command this, man still has the intelligence and ability to make weapons. There may be no wars if nations were to abide by international peace charters — or if they were all committed to one global government — but this would not rule out terrorism and terrorism tends to lead to war.

A global aspiration or commitment is difficult to envision. For example, we could all commit to environmental conservation at this time, but man is too selfish. This selfishness is, though, part of our ability to form close connections in a beneficial sense, since it gives rise to commitments to communities. We care most for those with whom we live in close contact. Since mankind doesn't have a universal attitude which can bring unity between persons, war and terrorism seem inevitable.

Religious commitment is one cause for strife, and although atheism is now an option, it doesn't follow that religious zeal, where it exists, is lessened. Indeed, it is probably strengthened. Even if there were no territorial claims based upon geographical and religious alliances, there would still be individuals who strive for power and wealth who will make claims against which others rebel.

So, really, there is no hope for peace for mankind. It might be wondered whether mankind might change. If we were inclined to be peaceful we would be a strange passive, tolerant sort of being with no strong beliefs and no religious attachments.

How Convincing are Religious Experiences in a Secular Age?

Religious experiences are very personal events; hence, to convince others of such experiences is a very difficult task. It is, of course, easier to convince 'believers' than those set against such phenomena. In a secular society where the understanding is that the materialist views of science do not cater for spiritual revelation, religious experiences are usually taken to be hallucinations. Physical manifestations are usually judged to be coincidences, or at best interesting events which will eventually submit to scientific investigation, and prove to be 'natural' occurrences.

Justification of religious belief is best backed up by logical argument. Empirical proof, so far as I understand, is extremely hard to come by. In a secular society believers are usually linked with superstition, and exaggeration of their experiences. On the other hand, secular views themselves are open to dispute, and just as believers usually find it difficult to prove religious experience, so opponents have an equal difficulty in refuting the claim.

Is Man Good by Nature?

Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard says that what is special about humans is that we can transcend nature towards ethics. But suppose for a moment that we were unable to do this, what would it be like?

My guess is that things would stay pretty much the same, we would still have relationships, we would still donate to charity, we would still have babies, we would still be polite to people. But what would be different as the philosopher Kant notices, is that we would do all these things not because it is right to do them but because of other reasons, self satisfaction, self-interest, sentiment; these reasons may be useful and beneficial, they are done in accordance with the Good but are they done because they are what the Good requires?

Consider cases where the Good may require us to give up our life for someone; how many penguins have you seen thrown himself on a grenade to save his fellow penguins? A penguin may trip and fall on a grenade when it is about to explode and save the colony but that wouldn't be self-sacrifice. Self sacrifice is not part of nature, it requires something special.

It requires that we move beyond the binds of nature. Penguins can't do this but we can. Kant thought this move involved reason giving itself laws of action; ones not conditioned by inclinations or motivations, but are followed solely for its own sake. Kierkegaard suggests that the move is made when we encounter the special presence of another person, who demands our help. This move does not just solely require sacrificing my life, rather all ethical acts are an act of self sacrifice of some kind; it is the putting of the others needs before my own.

Kierkegaard argues that the other person is special in that are Other, they are different from me and to treat them as if they were the same, would be to do them a violence; it would be to take something away from them. Therefore in order to protect this otherness, I must not place them in or reduce them to a mere role in nature, they are better than that.

Humans then are not good by nature, they are self satisfying animals, but because we can transcend nature, we can do good.

Why is Astrology Condemned by Christianity?

Astrology is regarded by the Christian Church to be a form of fortune telling, it is one of a list of practices condemned by the church. Those involved in these practices are considered to be atheists, or more significantly, followers of the Devil. Hence, astrology is linked with trickery, conjuring, witchcraft, deceit, spiritualism, psychic phenomena, all types of fortune telling, mysticism, etc. The claim is that these are all practices condemned by Jesus, Paul and the Apostles.

We might ask: If these practices are condemned why is it that Christianity accepts miracles? The answer is, simply because Jesus and the Apostles are understood to have performed miracles like healing the sick, making accurate predictions of future events, changing water into wine, raising the dead, feeding the five thousand, etc. The difference between those who perform miracles and those who perform tricks is allegedly made clear in the New Testament where, in the Acts of the Apostles the powers of Stephen the Apostle are compared to those of an outstanding conjurer and mystic, and found by the people to be vastly different; to put it crudely, the mystic was not in the same league as Stephen, who is seen to have powers far superior to him. This power is alleged by the church to come from the gift of the Holy Spirit within him. Those selected by God are blessed by the presence of the Holy Spirit, which invests them with special powers outside those of ordinary people.

Anyone claiming supernatural powers who is not blessed by the presence of the Holy Spirit is considered by the church to be a charlatan or a servant of the Devil. The seeking out of witches in the 17th and 18th centuries is well documented, all the victims were accused and condemned on the basis of church dogma regarding special powers. If special power was not coming from the gift of the Holy Spirit there was only one other source — the Devil. Among the victims of the witch finders were many alleged fortune tellers, including those dabbling in astrology. It was feared that fortune tellers could not only foretell the future, but could also influence it. It was deemed likely that such influence would come by way of the Devil and would constitute a challenge to God's plans for his people.

What Effects Have Socrates, Plato and Aristotle Had on our Lives?

Take away Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and you take away the starting point of 2,500 years of Western philosophy. Imagine a possible world where philosophy met a dead end and the early speculations of the Pre-Socratic philosophers were buried and forgotten. Or imagine a possible world where philosophy started out on an altogether different basis from the Socratic method, or the theories of Plato and Aristotle.

One can imagine these things in the abstract, the problem is that, as an armchair philosopher, it is simply impossible to subtract the influence on one's whole way of thinking that these historical facts represent, or imagine how one might have thought differently. Philosophers are always trying to think differently, trying to break out of the confines of starting points and assumptions. The difficulty is that one can never know how far one has succeeded, in the face of the suspicion that, given the historical point that we have actually started from, there may be ways of thinking that are impossible for us to comprehend.

Or we could be asking how important the influence of 2,500 years of Western philosophy has been in the West. Undoubtedly, philosophical views are deeply ingrained in our culture. It is also true that over the last 150 years the increasing confinement of philosophical activity within the academic departments of universities has led to a situation where philosophy, as a branch of human inquiry, has had decreasing influence on our lives. Not so very long ago, a person who had not studied philosophy was considered uneducated. How little that is true today.