Noele asked:

In "The Apology", how well did Socrates defend himself?

First of all it is interesting to follow the line of argument — is it convincing? Has Socrates adequately addressed the charges against him?

Socrates spent considerable time addressing the "old" charges before answering the actual affidavit against him, and it could be questioned whether he did not make his case worse by doing so.

Defense against the "old" charges

Socrates is able to appeal to the jurors themselves as witnesses that he does not discuss natural sciences. But he does not directly reply to the charge of making the worse case appear the better. In fact he could be accused of rhetorical trickery in linking educating people and charging a fee, since this latter was not part of the accusation (even though it could be understood to distinguish him from the sophists, the confusion with whom Plato thought instrumental for Socrates' indictment). Basically he dismisses the "old" charges as a routine charge against anybody who seeks wisdom, and says the court case really stems from the resentment of the poets, artisans and orators, whose ignorance he uncovered by his practice of examination. This could have been understood as belittling the charges and attributing of bias to the jurors, many of who must have belonged to the groups mentioned.

Regarding the actual court case, Socrates sets out to address Meletus' charge, saying he will reply to the others later (which he doesn't).

Defense against Meletus' charge

Socrates addresses the charge of corrupting the young by trying to demonstrate that Meletus has not thought a lot about the education of the young, an ad hominem argument, which fails to convince, since Meletus may be an idiot but he could still be right in claiming that Socrates corrupts the young. Socrates' arguments: 1) he concludes from the analogy with horse training that it is not the case that only a minority corrupts but that on the contrary experts are few. Therefore it cannot be the case that only Socrates corrupts the young. 2) The bad harm everybody who is in contact with them; therefore Socrates cannot have corrupted anybody intentionally (because they would harm him). Therefore he either does not corrupt the young or does it unintentionally; in both cases he should not be punished. 3) He points out that Meletus has not called as witnesses for the prosecution the supposedly corrupted or their relatives and asks what reason they could have for not coming forward other than that the charge is false.

Regarding his arguments it could be argued that Socrates debates side issues i.e. whether Socrates is the only one to corrupt the young and whether he does it intentionally or not, but does not really address the issue of corrupting the young. Also one would have to ask — is education really like horse training? Do the bad really always harm everybody they are in contact with? Would that not mean that no one corrupts the young willingly? And could anybody ever be punished for a crime if no one does evil intentionally? Finally one could think of reasons why the corrupted youths/ their relatives would not appear as witnesses e.g. because they did not realize they had been harmed, or because they did not want to make a public spectacle of themselves or be implicated etc.

Regarding atheism Socrates says that 4) Meletus claims both that he does not believe in gods and that he introduces new gods, which is a contradiction. 5) When Meletus accuses him of teaching the sun is a stone and the moon a mass of earth he confuses him with Anaxagoras.

Regarding the atheism claim the demonstration of two claims that cannot be jointly true does not rule out that one is true. It could be true that Socrates does not believe in the City's gods and introduces instead new ones (his "sign"). It is noteworthy that at no point does Socrates proclaim belief in the city's gods. Regarding confusion with Anaxagoras: Even if Anaxagoras held these beliefs first it could still be true that Socrates shares them and/ or teaches them.

His final claim to be pleading in fact on the judges' behalf must have enraged the jury.

In summary a number of problems can be found with the arguments, which in fact failed to convince the jurors.

One could speculate why Socrates' defence was so curiously ineffective. In the Memorabilia Xenophon seems to suggest that Socrates (who at the time of trial was 70 years old) felt his time had come and preferred death to life (i.e. to old age with sickness, senility and a lingering death). Socrates may therefore have provoked the jury ("assisted suicide") or at least have not thought it necessary to appease them.

Another interesting speculation has been advanced by I. F. Stone, who claims that the charge (intentionally misrepresented by Socrates' pupils Plato and Xenophon) actually was a political one — that Socrates was charged to have continued antidemocratic teaching even after the general amnesty for the collaborators of the oligarchic rule of terror of the Thirty (404-3 B.C.), and that he was executed because the democrats feared another anti-democratic coup and held Socrates responsible for the education of Critias, one of the Thirty.

See STONE, I. F. 'I.F. Stone Breaks the Socrates Story: An old muckraker sheds fresh light on the 2,500-year-old mystery and reveals some Athenian political realities that Plato did his best to hide' New York Time Magazine, April 8, 1979, pp. 22 ff. The article can be found online at:

John asked:

Who originally asked the question, "If a tree falls in the woods and there is no-one there to hear it does it make a sound?"?

I would like to know the answer to this one too. I'm afraid that the best that I can offer is a partial debunking of the most popular answers.

1) I have seen it claimed that the question is a Zen koan. This is true in a way: it could be read as a koan — a paradoxical question, intended as thought-provoking rather than straightforwardly answerable. However, it is not to be found in any of the principal collections of canonical koans (the Blue Cliff Records or Pi-yen-lu; the Gateless Gate or Wu-Men Kuan; the Book of Serenity or Ts'ung-jung lu) and I've never seen a specific attribution to any such source.

For more information on koans see:

Jeff asked:

What is memory? How important is it to my identity? Why is my short term memory getting worse as I age? Why am I starting to remember random things from my childhood that I haven't thought about since they happened? Along the same lines (I think), what is the current thinking on the phenomenon of deja vu?

An interesting set of questions. I don't really know how to answer the first one, because I don't know in what sense you're asking it. The recall of past events and objects? But surely you're asking more than that... you mean, what are the mechanisms of memory? That's still being researched... off the top of my head, here's some of it. You have, say, a visual experience: you see something, and you're paying attention to it. The first thing that happens is, maybe, due to reverberating circuits in the visual cortex (neural discharges which regenerate themselves): you have a very clear visual impression which lasts for a few seconds. Second, that visual impression fades and is replaced by a less clear visualization, if you make some effort, which lasts a few minutes: that is, if I recall correctly, "short-term" memory. Then that fades, and you have an "intermediate-term memory" which lasts for a few hours, perhaps days, during which you can recall the object fairly clearly (usually). Then if you paid attention, you have a "long-term" memory, lasting for days, weeks, or whatever, in which, given some cue, like a word, etc., you can recall the object, i.e., visualize it, attach meaning to it, etc., fairly clearly. I think that's about it... there may be another stage in there that I'm forgetting (haha).

Now, what is happening in all that. Well as I say, the first is probably reverberating circuits. The second probably has to do with both the reverberating circuits (which are fatiguing) and evocations from other sensory modalities and association areas... like, red is associated with apples, which feeds back into the fire engine you're seeing to keep it active. Or something like that. The third has to do with establishing those associations, and also with creating a trace of some sort in the hippocampus, which somehow, no one knows how, stores memory for a while (hours or days, maybe) while it somehow creates (probably by creating maps to and from) long-term memories, particular neural paths, in the visual cortex and associated areas.

Loss of short-term memory with ageing is thought to be associated with gradual damage, basically loss of cells, in the hippocampus. This area of the brain seems to be very sensitive to damage, Alzheimer's, etc.... why, no one knows (and I'm not saying you have Alzheimer's... everyone has this memory problem with age). So the hippocampus either doesn't store the short-term memories well, and/or doesn't "write" them into the cortex well. Or both.

As for remembering things from childhood... again, no one knows. I did see an article once, quite a while ago, in which someone had studied some computer simulations of neural nets, and found that when the nets were saturated, i.e., when learning something new caused something old to be partially lost, old patterns would spontaneously emerge. I'm sorry that I cannot recall anything more about this study... it was quite a while ago that I read it, and it may have been disproved in the interim. The other explanation advanced is merely that repetition makes similar patterns more likely to be evoked. Both of those, as you can imagine, have problems and are incomplete as explanations. I don't know about the current thinking on deja vu. There is work being done on "feelings of knowing" (FOKs) by several people, and they find that FOKs are real but not very reliable.

There's lots of literature in the area of memory, most of it pretty technical. You need some background in neuroanatomy and neurophysiology to really get into it, so I don't know if it's worth my giving you many references. You might just browse around the Web until you find information; lots of labs have pages on this topic. However, if you want refs:

Ebbinghaus, H. (1913). Memory; a contribution to experimental psychology. New York, NY: Teachers College.
Kahneman, D., & Treisman, A. (1984). Changing view of attention and automaticity. New York, NY: Academic Press.
Hasher, L., & Zacks, R. T. (1979). 'Automatic and effortful processes in memory'. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 108 (3), 356-388.
Koriat, A. (1994). Memory's knowledge of its own knowledge: the accessibility account of the feeling of knowing. Cambridge, MA: Bradford.
Reisberg, D. (1997). Cognition: exploring the science of the mind. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Wegner, D. M., & Bargh, J. A. (1996). Control and automaticity in social life. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill.

These are just the tip of the iceberg... not even that, really.

Steven Ravett Brown

Sarah asked:

What would Hobbes have thought about the events of September 11th? Also, What would Locke have felt about September 11th?

Briefly, Hobbes was a maximal statist and Locke a minimal statist, and each would regard the events of September 11th as a horrible consequence of the failure to implement his respective political philosophy.

Hobbes believed that the primary motivator of human action is not so much a positive goal as the avoidance of what is most feared. He further held that human beings fear nothing as much as the prospect of a violent death. Consequently, they would give up freedom to say and do as they please with their property if they knew that such forfeiture were a necessary condition of avoiding a violent death. In Hobbes' view, the forfeiture of freedom requires transferring all individual rights to a monarch. The monarch's job is to protect his subjects from danger, terrorize those who would contemplate endangering them, and punish those whom terror does not deter.

Hobbes would point out that because there is no such monarch in the United States, those who inflicted violent death, on a scale unimaginable to people in Hobbes' day, were not deterred that September morn. He would also note with some satisfaction that Americans now seem willing to forfeit their freedom — airport by airport, stadium by stadium, street by street — to a monarch-substitute, the Federal Government. To the extent that they do this, to that extent they demonstrate their preference of safety to freedom when the choice is put before them starkly enough.

Locke thought quite differently. He believed that the sole job of government is to protect the people living under it as they peacefully deploy their property in individual pursuits of happiness. He was not favorably impressed with the record of absolute monarchs in protecting their subjects from violent death. Rather, he regarded absolute monarchs as a major threat to the lives, limbs, and property of their hapless subjects, a threat that had to be reined in through a system of governmental checks and balances.

Were he resurrected to comment on September 11th, I predict that Locke would note with horror the historical record of governments, even the one explicitly founded on his political philosophy, to accumulate powers that go far beyond protecting property rights. He would also cite the frequency, in the two centuries between his time and ours, with which governments have militarily collided with each other in the furtherance, not of the universal interest in peace and prosperity, but rather the particular, private interests of a few. He would lament that this has happened at the cost of millions of lives and trillions of dollars coercively taken via taxation. He would, I suspect, argue that modern world wars, all fomented by non-Lockean states, are hardly more desirable than the "war of all against all" that Hobbes' absolute monarch is supposed to prevent. He would not take seriously the suggestion that the answer to squabbling megastates is a global totalitarianism regime from which no refuge is possible. Locke would make clear that the American government's steadily increasing involvement over the last century in the affairs of Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East can find no justification in his doctrine of government. Finally, he might conclude that such involvement has only made America vulnerable to attack from those who resent that involvement and who would, absent that involvement, not be sufficiently motivated to cross land and sea to kill thousands of Americans in a terroristic assault.

Anthony Flood

Phil asked:

Is science the new religion?

Ooh, you've pushed one of my buttons here. The real-world answer, of course, is both yes and no, depending on how one views science, and religion. But let us take the ideal case.

In religion, one sooner or later comes to something that must be accepted unquestioningly, on faith: a dogma.

In science, ideally, one may not have dogmas. There is, for science, nothing in any principle, methodology, or idea that cannot be investigated as to its validity, applicability, and so forth. Including that statement. Nothing is sacred, above questioning, including scientific methodology. Nothing.

And that, in a nutshell, is the difference between science and religion. Now I am not saying that scientists as individuals and as schools have no dogmas, assumptions, and so forth. But the history of science is a history of the investigation of those assumptions, their overthrow and replacement by other principles.

Now, is this a religion? Is the principle that everything, including this principle, can and should be investigated by any methodology available, and checked and rechecked for accuracy and validity a religion? Well, if it is, then there is nothing that is not a religion, and the terms "religion" and "non-religion" become meaningless distinctions, don't they. If science, as this ideal, is a religion, then that's the end... everything is a religion.

Contrariwise, one can ask something like, "do too many people have a blind faith that science will benefit them?" And if that is making science a religion, then, given the current political and ideological climates world-wide, my own very personal response would be that we need much more of that version of science. The world now seems to me to be in the grip of various religious frenzies; a little more science would be wonderful at this point, in my very politically-incorrect opinion. To put it more calmly... science is a tool, and results in tools. Tools can be used for good or for bad; one can use a plowshare to beat someone else over the head. Science per se is something that must be properly directed; and by the same token, it will always both be used properly and misused, just as all tools are, by human beings.

Steven Ravett Brown

When I first read this question my first response was to write down a list of aspects of the situation that I thought could be the basis for an answer. This list consisted of:

1. Faith and falsifiability
2. Comfort, comforting and comforter
3. Certainty and being certain
4. Explanation and explanatory power
5. Protection and protector
6. Control, controlling and the controlled
7. Defender, protector and weakness
8. Value source
9. Forgiveness source
10. Transforming, life changing and change
10. Belief code
11. Moral code
12. Culture

I thought I would then construct an answer in terms of the interaction of these terms with the key terms of the key question that I identified as: science, religion new and old. However it occurred to me that it would be interesting to take another approach in which we assumed that science was the new religion, in effect asking the question, "supposing science was the new religion?" We can generate a surprisingly rich field within which we can pursue this question just by considering it in the context of the categories of change, time or sequence, person and the logical operator, 'not'.

If we add two examples for each category you can begin to see the complexity that is being generated by the question. For the category of change we can introduce the possibility of 'change for the better' or 'change for the worse'. We can divide the category of time or sequence into 'now' or 'later' by which I mean we can look at 'now' in the sense of the present and 'later' in the sense of the future or we can read 'now' in the sense of what is the case and 'later' in the sense of what follows or what it leads to. Persons, we can consider in terms of 'self' or 'others'.

When we take into account the logical operator of negation taking these terms as its object to produce terms like, 'not change for the worse' or 'not now' then we can construct a total number of sixty eight paradigms or thought vehicles within which we can examine the original question.

So the original question has now become a question generator that produces sub questions like,

Given that science is the new religion,

1. Does it bring about change for the better for me, now?
2. Has it made things better and not worse?
3. Will it make things worse for others later?

Within which you can provide examples, evidence, counter examples and argument for each case and from which you can later look back and search for patterns and generalities that may have appeared within all your answers.

In a sense my answer has also been a non-answer in that it has offered a technique from which you can develop and debate your own answers rather than offer you a specific analysis. It has also offered a general pattern of question generation for developing arguments in the form of the inference pattern:

Given situation S then Question Q?,

Where Q is a question sentence that contains the constituents:

[? Assert or Negate ( Category1 or Category2 or Category3)],

like in the example above.

From which we generate paradigms or pseudo-sentences of the form:

?C1,C2,C3, or ?NC1,C2,NC3. We could for example go back to my initial approach and let C1 = Falsifiability, C2 = Faith etc and proceed with the analysis of your question from this starting point.

All of which is saying something in a very complicated way that we say very simply to children when we teach them to classify biological objects using 'Keys'. This approach may only lead to you from your initial question to many further questions, and possibly some particular answers, but some might consider that this is the most that philosophy can achieve.

Neil Buckland

Thomas asked:

How are we to tell which of the theories of truth (e.g. pragmatism, correspondence) is true? Surely we would already have to be within one of these systems to discern truth?

Your question is a very reasonable one; circularity of this sort does hamper many fundamental enquiries in philosophy. However, this isn't one of them.

Theories of truth are concerned with what truth is, not with what is true. Hence proponents of different theories need not disagree over which propositions are true and which false (apart from the propositions which articulate their competing theories, of course). Rather, they disagree over what it means to say of a proposition that it is true.

Correspondence theorists believe that 'p is true' means that p corresponds to the facts; pragmatists believe that 'p is true' means that p is a useful thing to believe; coherentists believe that 'p is true' means that p is consistent with all the other true things; and disquotationalists (aka minimalists) believe that 'p is true' is just another way of saying p.

It is no part of the responsibility of a theory of truth to help us to identify true and false propositions. Indeed, proponents of the competing theories are often in agreement about the sort of methods we use to do that. Should these methods identify one theory as true and its competitors as false (by no means the most likely outcome) their different theories of truth need not prevent them from recognising this.

Andrew Aberdein

Tom and Isabel asked:

To what extent does conscience prove the existence of God?

Tom and Isabel also asked:

What is the connection between free will and the problem of evil?

There is no question of the pangs of conscience being sufficient to prove the existence of God. There is a question, however, of whether the felt "lure" to approve (or disapprove) of freely chosen actions is entirely understandable in terms of socially ingrained and reinforced habits.

"Freely chosen" implies the reality of alternative possible courses of action competing for one's adoption. This invites the question of the status of possibility itself. Is "possibility" a mere word with no real reference? That is, is everything determined? Could nothing be other than the way it is now given the way everything was? If everything is determined, then there is only one logical modality, not three. There is just the necessary: "possible" refers to nothing real, while the impossible is reducible to negative necessity.

Such is one implication of the denial of freedom. If freedom to choose among competing possibilities is real, then possibilities cannot be nothing, even if they have no agency of their own (because they are by definition not actual). But then where do possibilities "reside," and how do they get actualized in the world of actual things?

From Plato to Whitehead there have been philosophers who have hypothesized God as the answer to the last question. God envisions all possibilities and guides their actualization in things. In the case of human beings, God's guidance can enter into their conscious, self-reflective awareness. An initial aim from God would be felt as a lure to the greatest good possible at each actor's choice-point, but he or she would be under no compulsion to act for or against that feeling. God, according to such a philosophy, is therefore the primary, nonsociological, nonbiological source of the feelings we associate with the goals we entertain, the feelings we call "conscience."

The problem of evil is that of reconciling the great goodness and great power of God with the existence of great evil. The "free-will defense" of God's goodness is that human beings, who are free to choose among competing possibilities, are indictable — and therefore God is not — for the evil consequences of their freely chosen actions. Embedded in the problem is the presupposition that God is the creator, not only of the contingent order of this cosmos, but also of the sheer existence of the things ordered: if God wanted to, God could literally annihilate the whole realm of nondivine beings, i.e., "turn it off" as we would flick off an electric lamp. This notion seems to follow logically from the idea that God is the exnihilator (to borrow a term coined by Mortimer Adler). That is, God does not merely transform and rearrange pre-existing things, but rather brings things into existence without anything and from nothing (ex nihilo) and who can interrupt natural processes. In such a cosmology, it would seem that God is morally indictable for any evil that may result from the interaction of created things, insofar as they exist and have the natures that they do only because of his creative fiat. The traditional free-will defense therefore only lessens the length of the indictment without reducing its gravity.

The God of classical theistic philosophy is certainly not responsible for the evil that men do, for they freely undertake to do it. (Let us grant that the world is better with free human beings in it than it would be without them and that God could not have made free human agents without incurring the risk that they would bring some evil into the world.) There is, however, the evil of natural disasters and the pain and suffering thereby visited upon all members of the animal kingdom. There is the evil of painful and debilitating disease not traceable to human malice. God the exnihilator could interrupt such natural processes, and perhaps God does from time to time. There is also the excessive evil consequences that sometimes follows from mere human error. In the great majority of cases, however, cases in which God is implored to interrupt them, God does not. Even one instance of natural evil that a human being was able to prevent, at no risk or cost to himself, but failed to do so would mar forever that person's reputation. Yes, the careening car that is about to mow down that unsuspecting three-year-old child has faulty brakes due to human error, but that does not excuse any passerby from failing to try to move that child out of harm's way if he or she can. Nor does it excuse God.

There are alternative philosophies of God, however, particularly those inspired by Whitehead's Process and Reality, in which God is neither the exnihilator of the cosmos nor its miraculous interrupter. In them, God is the supreme being who incessantly interacts with all other actual entities. Actual entities are not the gross things we perceive, but submicroscopic processes whose time span is a fraction of a second. All actual entities other than God partly create their successors at each choice-point, even as they receive influence and ideals from God and from other things. That is, all of them, not just human beings, have a degree a freedom to choose among real possibilities. The cosmos at any given moment is therefore the resultant of the choices of all actual entities, not just God's choices. God is the primary cause of the contingent order of the cosmos, but God does not make the cosmos either absolutely or unilaterally. God orchestrates the symphony, but doesn't play all the instruments.

In short, such philosophy more fully develops the insight of the free-will defense, without which such a defense is too little, too late. Creativity is characteristic of all things, not an anomaly on a small planet.

Anthony Flood

Mohammed asked:

Please try to answer this problem:

Abdel Magid is a son of a bus driver, his father earns less than 100 B.D. a month, and he has three brothers and two sisters. After high school he could not afford going to college because of his family situation. As time passed, his situation became even worse, he had no money, no job, and no one to help him. Yet like all young men, he needed and wanted a lot of things, so whenever he needed something he simply stole it. Although he was aware of the moral law: stealing is wrong, he did not stop. He thought that stealing from the filthy rich is permitted. To Abdel Magid, he is poor because someone out there has more than he or she needs, and therefore he thought that taking whatever he needs from the rich is not wrong, rather it is his right.

Question: Is there anything wrong with Abdel Magid's thinking?

Well, firstly Abdel is acting under the false belief that stealing from the rich is permitted. It may be a false belief that he is poor because others have more than they need which depends on how far he could have gone in finding work, since there obviously is work available, such as bus-driving. Even if his beliefs were true, he is acting irrationally. He couldn't make it into a principle on which he believed everyone should act since he would be inviting competition and making his life of thieving more difficult, and also if everyone stole from the rich there would no longer be any rich to steal from. Another irrational aspect is that if he were rich he wouldn't think it right for the poor to steal from him.

Apart from being irrational, his behaviour is immoral and lacking in prudence. We see the lack of prudence in his failure to think about the future when he is likely to be caught and punished. This is unsuccessful behaviour. The immorality is in not respecting other's feelings about their property. The filthy rich might have worked hard for their money. Further, needs vary. The richer people become, the more money they need to support new ways of life, so he seems to lack social understanding.

It might also be thought to be politically mistaken. He doesn't have a right to take what he needs especially when these are needs are those of a young man who has developed a desire for a lot of "things".

If he really thought that people are poor because others are rich, and people have a right to take whatever they think they need, perhaps a better course of action would be to set up a political party.

Rachel Browne

Well, you're presenting us with an oversimplified situation and question... why do I say that? Well, how do I know how much in above is really true, and what is exaggeration? For example, what does "need" mean? How did the rich in that society get rich, by their own efforts or by inheriting wealth? How does someone know that a) he has what he needs (or does not), b) someone else has "more" than they need? What is a "right"? How does someone know how much the person he's stealing from "needs" what he's stealing? And so forth. I'm not even getting into the basis for the Koran's admonition against stealing, am I (which I'd have to research, anyway).

But I'll go ahead and give you an oversimplified answer. If Abdel Magid lives in a just society... that is, one that provides the basic needs: food, clothing, housing, etc., and basic education for its citizens, and, if they educate themselves and work hard, the opportunity (not the certainty, mind you, nothing can provide that) to advance in the society and in their earnings, then his stealing is immoral. If he lives in an unjust society, that is, one which does not provide for its citizens' basic needs, nor does it provide opportunity for education, or at the least, self-education (i.e., free public libraries), or advancement, and in addition has a ruling class of hereditary rich, then his stealing is (or could be, depending on situation and circumstance — for one thing, he is stealing only from the rich) moral, and good luck to him, although I think that it would be much better and more moral if he got out of there to a just society, as so many are doing, and tried to educate himself and advance by clearly moral means.

Where are there just societies in the above sense? Scandinavian countries are probably the best examples. Then most of Europe, Canada, the US. There are others. None of those are heaven, all have some injustices, but all, especially the Scandinavian countries, provide (to greater or lesser extent) the basics, and the opportunities, especially if one becomes fluent in their language.

That's all pretty simplistic, and probably won't be a popular viewpoint, but one must consider that there are times it is moral to steal bread to survive.

Steven Ravett Brown

Delocks asked:

What is imagination?

Can you comment on Roger Scruton's Imagination I & II in his book Art and Imagination?

What are concepts and concept formation? what is thinking?

I don't have a theory of imagination, so can only comment on Scruton's. In Imagination I, the first feature, that we imagine something, or that there is an object of imagination seems undeniable. The second feature that in the normal case imagination is subject to the will seems difficult to criticise when we think of bringing images to mind, although the will doesn't seem to be involved in aspect perception, such as seeing the duck in the duck-rabbit in a creative way. The feature that we have incorrigible knowledge of what we imagine might be criticised on the ground that knowledge is not appropriate to internal experience, since there is no means of justification and no possibility of confirmation. I'm not sure about the fourth feature, that there is a verbal criteria for saying that a person is imagining something, because sometimes a statement can falsify what is imagined, or doesn't fully express what it is we imagine. Scruton himself thinks there is more to what is imagined than that which can be expressed verbally, since a person has to experience an aspect to understand what another is imagining, although this itself has been criticised by Malcolm Budd..

Scruton thinks that imagination covers a wide range of activities, but I think he goes too far. In Imagination II, Scruton thinks that the man who sees the duck aspect of the duck-rabbit 'must say something like "It is as though I were seeing a duck"', which indicates an imaginative experience as an unasserted thought. This seems false. We actually are seeing the shape of a duck and we are able to do this because we know what a duck looks like. Similarly, the claim that "It takes imagination to see the sadness in X's face" seems doubtful. If we know what sadness is and how it is expressed, this is an ordinary perceptual experience.

The idea of imagination as unasserted thought, thought that goes beyond what we believe, is also difficult to accept. Music is not the sort of thing which can be sad, and to perceive it as sad, is not to say that it is sad, so Scruton avoids the apparent nonsense of ascribing an emotion directly to music. However, I'd be more inclined to say it is true that the music is sad and, for sure, that I believe it is, rather than that it is appropriate to say so. However, this requires a different approach to truth, and would require an argument to the effect that metaphor is true (and since a word used metaphorically is used falsely of its object, this is a difficult approach to take). The concept of sadness is of an emotion felt by living beings and it is part of the concept that it is expressed in a certain way, since the way it is expressed allows us to understand sadness as felt by another. So although it cannot apply to music, as an alternative to the problems raised by consideration of metaphors, I'd be inclined to think that sadness has a certain something, an inner movement, that cannot be put into words or conceptualised and that it is this we find in music.

You ask what a concept is and very simplistically, because we don't know for sure, it is either taken as a particular mental representation or a word for something. As a mental representation, concept formation would be determined by memory. As a word, concept formation is learnt socially, as we learn a language.

Thinking is the movement of conceptual content, and Scruton would say, that in contrast to imagining, it is asserted. This doesn't seem to be so, but it is the case that a thought is either true and false and if we think something is true, we would assert it. Normally we only ascribe thought to a being with a language although this isn't necessary if we think by means of mental representations or concept formation is a facility for ordering information.

Rachel Browne

Tookee asked:

Do we know anything? Give reasons for your answer.

We know that we are reason-demanding beings. The very skepticism with which one might greet the preceding statement would be sufficient evidence of its truth, for skepticism is nothing if not at least implicitly reason-demanding. We have experiences (something is given in to us in sense, memory, and imagination). We inquire into those data ("What is it?") and form hypotheses about them. We reflect on our understanding and ask if there is sufficient evidence to affirm or deny that the understanding is true ("Is it so?"). When we believe there is sufficient evidence, we pronounce judgment. Knowing may reasonably be defined as this compound activity of attending to data, understanding what we attend to, and judging our understanding to be true or false. One cannot coherently affirm that one has never had an experience, has never understood what one has experienced, or has never verified or falsified one's understanding. (Take reading and disagreeing with the preceding sentence, for example.) Therefore, one cannot coherently affirm that one has never known anything.

Anthony Flood

Mode, Azim, Ramy, and Niya asked:

We are students from Maldives (where philosophical resources are scarcely available and philosophical enthusiasm hardly found and philosophical expressions highly restricted). we would like to know whether a god as held by major religions of the world exists and and to know whether what the logical positivists say about the meaninglessness of such questions as the existence of a god is really true?

Azim asked:

I would like to know with the incorporation of latest philosophical reasoning which position (theism, agnosticism, atheism,etc) as regards a god is logically sound or which a rational mind will go for!

Thank you for your interesting question.

I am sure you know that many people believe in some god, but I am not clear which religious conception of God you have in mind. There are many major religions in the the world, and each of them has a different conception of God. But at least some religions believe that there is a God who is, among other things, the creator of the the universe, all-good, all-powerful, all just, and so on. As I am sure you know, whether such a Being exists is a matter of disagreement. But I think that none of the traditional arguments for such a Being succeeds in showing he does. The criticisms of those arguments by the British 18th century philosopher, David Hume, and the 18th century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, seem to me decisive in that respect. Of course, the failure of those proofs in no way shows there is no God, but, on the other hand, if for such a long time very intelligent and industrious people have tried to prove there is a God and have so far failed, then that might be taken as reason to believe that the existence of God is unlikely.

The Logical Positivists developed a theory of meaning knows as the verifiability theory of meaning. According to this view, it is possible even to conceive of evidence that a sentence is true, that sentence is "cognitively" meaningless (although the sentence may have emotional meaning for people). If this theory is true, and if it is true that no evidence for the existence of God could even be conceived of, then the sentence, "There is a God" is cognitively meaningless. A good way of understanding the idea of cognitive meaninglessness is that a cognitively meaningless sentence is neither true nor false.

The Logical Positivists did hold that the sentence "God exists" was cognitively meaningless (neither true nor false) An interesting question is whether that meant that the Logical Positivists were atheists. The Logical Positivists claimed that they were not atheists because atheists believed that the sentence, "God exists" was false, but since the Logical Positivists did not believe that the sentence was either true or false, they did not believe the sentence was false, and therefore they were not atheists. Although the Logical Positivists did not believe in God, neither did they disbelieve in God.

I hope this is clarifying. I am very glad you are interested in philosophy.

Kenneth Stern

A logical positivist, as far as I know, would say something like: unless there is an operational definition, i.e., something like: a definition resulting from a methodology for testing the existence and/or characteristics of a god, then the question is at worst meaningless, at best not worth pursuing.

Let me give you my take on this issue. First of all, there are many philosophers who are and have been theists. But they are in a minority today, as far as I know. The reasons for this are that philosophers cannot help but (and should) ask questions such as the following: how could humans possibly have knowledge of a being which cannot be investigated or experimented with? Why is faith knowledge, when it is clear that people have faith in many contradictory things, many of which seem absurd to most other people? What, more precisely, justifies faith, and more importantly, what justifies any particular faith over any other? Getting more specific, why should one believe in any one particular god, and when there are so many different possible choices, and when there seems to be no reason to prefer one over another? Thus, humans have believed, through history, probably in thousands of different gods. All of these are different: in appearance, in emotional characteristics, in their goals, in the way they regard humanity, in their power(s), in their demands. What could possibly bias someone who has not been trained since childhood to believe in a god, to believe in some particular one or group of them from all those choices?

Let us take something we all will agree is ridiculous: there are little humanlike beings with wings, called fairies, living at the end of my garden. I don't see them because most of the time they are invisible, but they are there, and are responsible for things like bees going to certain of my flowers, etc. Now this is absurd, right? But there have been and are people who believe in fairies, much like the ones I describe here. Why shouldn't I? Just because I can't see them? Well... then I shouldn't believe in Allah or Yahweh either, right? I can't see them either. Because I have other explanations for why bees like my flowers? Well... there are other explanations for the existence of the world, for the existence of animals, etc., etc., also. Need I go on? And I have just started a list of possible gods and reasons for gods to exist. There are, as I say, literally thousands I could go through: the Hindu gods, the Norse gods, the Native American gods... and on and on and on. And on. It really gets depressing to me, I'm afraid, to just contemplate the full extent of humanity's time and energy in creating gods. God after god after god... all for what? Explanation? Comfort? A father figure? A mother?

Why not ask this: suppose you were a (or "the") god? Where would you get your values from? A god's god? Why? What justifies a god's actions and goals? What, more importantly, justifies a god's actions and goals that wouldn't be just as valid a justification for us? Gods are smarter? Oh? Which one(s), particularly? Gods are more compassionate, more "ethical"? Really? Need I list the atrocities committed in the name of (and supposedly at the command of) virtually any god one can think of? If you want the basis of a value system, why not create one yourself instead of picking the one of the god you've been raised to believe in? Or you could just obey because you're afraid of punishment. Now, what's the difference between that and animal training: reward the dog with food or a pat, punish the dog with a slap or a shout, and you've got an "ethical" dog, right? Is there a difference between rewarding people with promises of heaven and punishing them with threats of hell, and training your dog or horse or whatever? I don't see one.

Perhaps we want to be assured of "life after death"? And what would that assurance consist of? Your favorite religious book telling you so? And we believe that because... someone tells us that it's true, who has been raised to believe that particular religious book is true... because...? They've had a vision. Yes. Well, what of all the people who have had visions of other gods? They must be illusions, because your god is the true one... because... the person who tells you so had a vision... and around and around and around. Why don't people get tired of this? You know, the only theory I can come up with is that we have an extremely powerful instinct to a) belong to a group, and b) to be dominated, and if one needs to be in a dominance/submission hierarchy, but cannot stand to be dominated by a real person, they invent a god.

But there are lots of theories. You might take a look at Eliade, M. (1959). The sacred and the profane: the nature of religion. New York, NY: Harper & Row; and Frazer, J. G. (1951). The golden bough: a study in magic and religion. New York, NY: The Macmillan Company, just for starters. Dawkins has some nice stuff to say, also, and there are some recent studies on the neurobiology of religious feelings, for example: Giovannoli's The Biology of Belief.

See also: Piattelli-Palmarini, M. (1994). Inevitable illusions: how mistakes of reason rule our minds. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Shermer, M. (1997). Why people believe weird things: pseudoscience, superstition, and other confusions of our time. New York: W. H. Freeman and Co.
Radner, D., & Radner, M. (1982). Science and unreason. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Inc.

Steven Ravett Brown

Natasha asked:

Please can you explain Descartes' influence on philosophical considerations of the idea of the mental?

Descartes introduced the idea of the subject and individual consciousness into philosophy. He highlighted the rational nature at the expense of the emotional, moral and intersubjective side of man and it could be said that Descartes had a de-humanising influence on the philosophy of mind. The criticism that there need be no more to the thought than the propositional content and that the "I" is superfluous makes Cartesianism even more anti-humanistic, since the mental becomes pure conceptual content and the subject himself is lost. Analytical philosophy of mind has concentrated a great deal on the nature of rationality and the proposition and the acquisition of concepts and all this stems from taking man as essentially rational and has dominated philosophy of mind at the expense of the phenomenological nature of the mental which is explored in continental philosophy.

Descartes' position that the mental cannot be explained by the physical is still widely accepted, and although the problems of Cartesian dualism (combined with advanced biological and neurological knowledge) have led to a massive swing in the direction of identity theories, the problem of consciousness which Descartes introduced into philosophy mind remains problematic for these modern theories.

The cogito gives rise to scepticism about the external world so another thread in philosophy is how the mind is related to the world. The res cogitans is a subjectivity with no objective counter-part. This has given rise to consideration about the nature of subjectivity and objectivity. A slightly different question is how we can know things about the world given that we might be dreaming. This does not simply give rise to problems of knowledge, but affects philosophy of mind because it means that we need to make a distinction between philosophy/metaphysics and psychology. We, as Descartes noted, would have to mad to really doubt our senses, which brings to light a strange duality between rational thought or theory (or philosophising), and real practical life.

Another thread in the idea of the mental, consciousness itself, has taken a curious turn. Since Freud introduced the idea of unconscious it has been difficult for us to take ourselves as thinking things or purely conscious beings. Rather we are driven by unconscious forces, keeping the dark side of our nature at bay through repressive mechanisms. However in the post-Freudian, Lacan, we see a return to the Cartesian subject: The subject, as far as he is known to himself, is a rational subject, or at least a subject immersed in language.

Rachel Browne

Chesca asked:

Please cite some philosophers who dealt with similarities between poetry and science and/ or similarities between art and science. if possible, cite some webpages where I can research more about them.

On art by an artist:

Kosuth, J. (1991). Art after philosophy and after: collected writings, 1966-1990. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Shahn, B. (1957). The shape of content.
Fenollosa, E. (1968). The Chinese written character as a medium for poetry. (Edited by Ezra Pound)
Tanizaki, J. (1977). In praise of shadows.

Art & psychology:

Arnheim, R. (1974). Art and visual perception; a psychology of the creative eye.

Philosophy of art by a philosopher:

Santayana, G. (1955). The sense of beauty.
Goodman, N. (1976). Languages of art. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company.
Levinson, J. (1990). Music, art, and metaphysics: essays in philosophical aesthetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Kivy, P. (1994). 'How music moves'. In Alperson, P.(pp. 147-163). University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Kivy, P. (1990). Music alone: philosophical reflections on the purely musical experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Turner, M. (1996). The literary mind. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Maritain, J. (1968). Creative intuition in art and poetry.
Holt, M. (1971). Mathematics in art.

Incredible and unique:

Kepes, G. E. (1965). Structure in art and in science. New York, NY: George Braziller.
Kepes, G. E. (1965). Education of vision. New York, NY: George Braziller.
Kepes, G. E. (1965). The nature and art of motion. New York, NY: George Braziller.

Steven Ravett Brown

Barbara asked:

I know there's a term for 'by deciding to act one way, you've precluded acting any other way' — I've checked categorical imperative, but I'm looking for some term I've heard lately that's less moralistic, and more just practical. Hm.

Well, there's jacta alea est, the die is cast; attributed to Caesar on crossing the Rubicon. And there's always "crossing the Rubicon".

Steven Ravett Brown

Paul asked:

What would be the effect, if the existence of alien life were to be proven, on the Judeo-Christian philosophies of God which focus on earth?

I'm not going to try to answer this, because I think that the science-fiction writer Phillip J. Farmer did a wonderful job in several of his novels on just this theme. Try Night of Light; Inside Outside; the Riverworld series; Lovers; Dare. There's also A Case of Conscience by James Blish.

Steven Ravett Brown

Annie asked:

Would your philosophers give their opinions on whether there is a link between the increased aggressiveness and lack of respect of school aged persons and the lack of encouragement by parents towards a belief system?

As a mum of two teenagers I've seen at first hand the attitudes of youngsters and how much different they are to the ones I was brought up with. I am speaking as someone who was a teenager in the punk era and who was into punk and rock music, but I was brought up (at least until high school) to go to church each Sunday, to respect the law and teachers (I left school in the late 70's when school children were still caned or clipped round the ear). Has my generation produced a society of youngsters who hold nothing in respect? Few of my generation send their children to church on Sundays, most of us still hold anti-establishment views, albeit toned down. However, despite all our shouting we do still hold onto certain values we were brought up with. Has the generation of punk rock and new romantics totally stuffed up society?

I don't agree that the generation of punk rock and new romantics totally stuffed up society. This charge has been leveled at many generations before — Socrates was put to death for it 2500 years ago.

I work in schools and I don't agree that young people hold nothing in respect. I think some of them do (as some of every generation always did), but many don't. In fact, I was talking to one of my classes about this today.

I agree that attitudes are different. However, you need to draw a distinction between the forms of respect and respect itself. I mentioned to my class that some of the forms of respect that were widespread in my youth (standing when a teacher enters the room, calling teachers 'sir' or 'miss') have virtually disappeared. Nevertheless, these students still respect teachers. If the well understood forms of respect of the past disappear, it is easy for older people to falsely conclude that respect itself has gone.

I don't think that sending children to church is any more likely to teach respect than not sending them, nor clipping them around the ear. How they are brought up in the home has much more influence. The best way to produce respect is to model it.

To my mind (and this is an incredibly complex issue, so I am only addressing a few aspects), increased aggressiveness and any failing respect is more likely to be a product of the rise of individualism and greed in public life. Economic rationalism, market driven economies, politicians with an eye only for the main chance: these are modelling a lack of community respect that is really damaging. The real villains in my eyes are George W Bush, John Howard, Maggie Thatcher, Ariel Sharon, Osama bin Laden, Yasser Arafat and lots of others.

Respect is vitally important — it is a complex of basic foundations for morality. But it is also a difficult and contentious cluster of concepts, and the forms of respect can change quite a bit without respect itself disappearing. Respect can best be built, while it is simultaneously being clarified, by working together in communities.

Tim Sprod

I have been working in a Montessori nursery school for a few years, teaching and looking after children aged 2 — 5 years. Older colleagues I've worked with have expressed the view that concerns you, that aggressiveness and lack of respect have greatly increased in young children during their teaching career.

But my first thought is that it is certainly not just 'school-aged persons' who display increasing aggressiveness and lack of respect! You only have to consider the many reported incidents of road rage, attacks on health service workers, teachers and so on to realize that this is a more general trend in society.

I would place some of the blame with the increased use of drugs, which reduce people's control over their actions, and also lead to related crime as addicts are prepared to use any means to finance their addiction. But another factor, which has been suggested to me by my present employer, is that of individualism — which I suspect was mitigated by Christian belief, as it has a strong emphasis on helping others.

Most people today seem to be out to get what they can for themselves, without concerning themselves about how that affects others. There is a general assumption that everyone should be ambitious, aspirational, go-getting, with regard to both careers and leisure time. It's expected of you. It is difficult to get away from this attitude, as it is expressed in the media, and parents unconsciously pass on their attitudes to their children.

My employer suggests that eventually individualism will reach an extreme, after which attitudes will begin to swing back the other way, towards a greater sense of social responsibility.

Katharine Hunt

You have most certainly raised a question which is at the forefront of concern for both government and society at large. For someone, like myself, who can go back much further than yourself, the state of the society in this country, and particularly the behaviour of many young people, is very disturbing. By comparison, people of my generation feel to be living in a totally different country, with radically different values to those which provided the foundations of our upbringing. You have, in my opinion, touched on some of the causes for our present demise, however, there is no simple explanation to what we see going on around us, and particularly in the area that your question focuses on. I am in some agreement with the thrust of your argument, that the belief system to which you and I were exposed now has little or no value in modern society. Also the false urgency and pace of society does not allow time for reflection and taking stock.

In former days most schools actually taught religion, bible study was often the first lesson of the morning; children learned the ten commandments, the sermon on the mount, selected psalms, parables and miracles : as opposed to the modern idea of religious study, which usually means a study of comparative religions or the odd hymn at assembly. In addition children attended Sunday school, and sometimes more than one church service each Sunday. In most communities the church was the central focus, children were not only involved on Sundays but during the week also, in social activities, choir practice, preparing for special events, etc.. In my day the only distraction was the radio, which, apart from "children's hour" and one or two nature programmes, had little impact on our activities. Children played out more, they were more involved in make believe, and were seemingly more inventive than most modern children. They were involved in children's things, the songs they sang were children's songs, they listened to children's stories, they spent more time being infants, progressing more slowly into and through adolescence.

This, I believe, is at the crux of your concerns. Children are not allowed to be children very long, they assume more grown — up ideas too early. One of the major reasons, in my opinion, is the massive influence of T V, the sorts of things that children are exposed to, would certainly never have been allowed when I was a child, nor when our own children were young. The soaps are certainly not the sort of fair that young children should be exposed to. Many children are now not living in the real world anymore, they know the characters of Coronation Street, Eastenders, etc., better than they know the people in their own street. These programmes contain a great deal of violence, bad manners, bad grammar and sex, hardly the stuff for an impressionable child trying to learn the basic values and ethics of life. Much of the pop that is commercially thrust upon them from 'the box' has an aggressive base or contains sexual innuendoes, quite unsuitable for youngsters who should still be singing nursery songs. The role models are hardly suitable for children, however, they are also pushed into it through massive peer pressure, so the problem then becomes cyclic, fed and stimulated by high pressure advertising. I think you are right to be suspicious about the influence of the punk stuff you were involved with. In my opinion the 60's and 70's have a lot to answer for in regard to the decline of conventional values and the rise of aggression and drugs.

Although I hesitate to say it, and indeed do not want to believe it, I would be hypocritical to my own conscience if I did not state the belief that the 'do-gooders' in society must shoulder a great deal of the blame for what we see today in the attitudes of young people. The removal of strict discipline in schools was fatal, children will always take the line of least resistance, and to suddenly find that the roles were reversed, and they could exert pressure on teachers, who were unable to respond without themselves getting into trouble, provided those who disliked school with ideal opportunities. I knew a teacher who almost lost his job for placing a hand on the shoulder of an unruly thirteen year old girl who was refusing to stand in line in the playground, she accused him of assault, he had to appear before the Head the following day in the presence of the girl's parents, to receive a ticking off and warned as to his future conduct.

Another area where do-gooders have intervened targets parents. Children are encouraged to ring a help line to report their parents if they believe they are being ill treated. Now, obviously, no one in their right mind condones violence inflicted on children, whether it be by parents, teachers, or anyone else. However there is a danger here, where perfectly innocent and good parents could be, and, I understand have been, compromised by a vindictive son or daughter. I vividly remember as a child being smacked by one of my parents, for a few moments I hated that parent, I did not consider the fact that I had done wrong and deserved what I got; possibly, under the conditions appertaining to day, I might have picked up the phone in my rage and reported my parent for assault. Children are prone to act on the spur of the moment, and this is the great danger. Some might say, better to be safe than sorry, I don't know. My point in all this, regarding teachers and parents, is to show that some of your concerns must be brought about by the state handing greater power to young children who have not yet acquired the education or the ability to reason that you would expect to find in someone holding these powers. Where parents are lax, this power is carried onto the streets and manifested in vandalism and violence. The do-gooders have also reduced the powers of the police and modified the law in such a way, that to attempt to punish these youngsters in a way that would leave a lasting impression is not now available to them.

However, as you say, the belief system is a problem, the former belief system has been abandoned with no attempt to replace it. When you tell a child that something he/she is doing is wrong, how do we back up our assertion ? In the past we would be able to point out that God would not be very pleased, or to indicate that he/she would jeopardize their chances of getting into heaven. Say that to most children today and they might give you some very odd looks. Also, based on the christian ethic was the firm idea of 'family,' mother, father and children in a secure home where father was the bread winner and mother was the manager of the household, with close bonding to her children (privileged households excepted). I am not saying whether this is right or wrong, but it certainly worked to the advantage of children. However, human rights, do-gooders, and women's lib, amongst other factors, put paid to this. There is also a biological basis to the family system which people find convenient to ignore. Split families, single parents, step fathers, step mothers, no matter how good these parents may be, and I know some excellent ones, there is often something missing where the children are concerned.

I must conclude by saying that despite the depressing scenario I have painted, there are still many young people who, thankfully, recognise a moral structure in society, who do respect their parents and teachers, and who do not mug elderly people, steal cars and vandalise property. It is just unfortunate that there are now rather more of the latter than there used to be. Also, I appreciate that there are still good parents like yourself that hold on to the basic values of society.

John Brandon

Catrina asked:

I do not wish to be disrespectful, but why do philosophers use so much jargon? Everything can be explained in a way that the majority can understand; in plain easy to understand English so why use words that don't make sense to most people? Doesn't this make philosophy elitist?

Some philosophers are elitist and consequently ineffectual. They use jargon because they will not take the time to clarify their meanings even to fellow philosophers, let alone to the average person. They are the one's showing disrespect. The success of the Dummies and Complete Idiot's Guide series confirm your point that experts can express themselves in a way that interested nonexperts can understand them.

There are times, however, when specialists properly resort to a technical vocabulary when speaking only to and for each other, and they violate no ethics of discourse when they do so. This is certainly true in fields other than philosophy. Ask your question again after substituting the words "physicians" and "medicine" for "philosophers" and "philosophy" respectively. We should all be the poorer were physicians, when consulting with each other about the human body and its maladies, to impose on themselves the high transaction costs of translating their terminology and explaining their methodology into the vernacular.

The great champion of grace and clarity in philosophical writing was Brand Blanshard. I give him the last word:

"But on the great issues of philosophy many of men's hopes and fears do hang, and plain men feel that their philosopher should be alive to this and show it. It is not that they want him to give up his intellectual rigour and scrupulousness at least they do not think that it is; it is rather that when men with hearts as well as heads are dealing with themes of human importance, they should not deal with them as if nothing but their heads, and somewhat desiccated heads at that, were involved...

"I do not know why a biologist, presenting a paper on a technical point to colleagues, should not write in a way as unintelligible as he pleases to those outside the circle, provided it is no obstacle to those inside. But suppose that his subject is one of general interest, that the session is open to the public and that he knows many of his audience will be drawn from that public. Should he then travel the same high and unheeding road? ... He would not whisper a fascinating titbit of information to one friend while another who is equally interested is present, but feels no hesitation in talking to an audience in a language lost on half of them. The French, who have earned a right to speak on these matters, have a saying in point: La clart est la politesse. In philosophical speaking and writing, one's manners are connected very intimately with one's manner." (On Philosophical Style 1954)

Anthony Flood

Suppose I wanted to express precisely the relationship between mass and energy. How should I do that in English? Should I say, "energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared"? The problem is that "energy" is a word that, in English, can mean many things, but in physics, means something very specific. The other words in that phrase suffer from the same ambiguity in English. So a physicist uses the equation, "E=mc²". But that's jargon, right? So now what?

Philosophy is a very old and difficult area, much older than physics (which branched off from philosophy perhaps around the time of Galileo, or perhaps a century or so earlier), with problems that have been kicked around, analyzed in various ways, developed, elaborated, and so forth. A lack of jargon, i.e., precision in expression, would merely indicate lack of progress in understanding and analyzing problems.

Does it make learning and doing philosophy harder? Yes. But one can say the same about medicine, mathematics, chemistry, and indeed all the disciplines which have achieved specialized knowledge, techniques, and need means of expressing them precisely. One might consider, in fact, learning the various disciplines the equivalent to learning their languages.

So when you say, "Everything can be explained in a way that the majority can understand; in plain easy to understand English" would you include physics in that? Formal logic? Computer programming? Electronics? Neurochemistry? Statistics? Cognitive science? Then why philosophy?

Steven Ravett Brown

Why do philosophers use so much jargon? Good question! One of the reasons I didn't go on to do further study in philosophy, after taking a first degree in the subject, was the specialized, academic nature of the subject as studied in universities. I have always been against the use of too much jargon in philosophical writing, and try to make my own writing easy to understand.

Why is philosophy often hard to understand? Sometimes — particularly in the case of classic texts — because it has been translated from the idiom of a foreign language.Other times we may suspect the writer of hiding second-rate ideas behind large, impressive-sounding words!

On the other hand, I disagree with you when you say that everything can be explained in a way that the majority can understand. There is always the danger that, in making a subject so simple that it's possible for everyone to understand it, you may oversimplify it — losing much of its original exactness and depth. I remember a quote I once read, which advised that one should "make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler". There is a place for technical terms within philosophy, just as there is in many other areas of specialized study. Some examples: chromosome, zygote , enthalpy, atomic mass , logarithm, dodecahedron, tempera, impressionism . Such words can often be used with greater precision than ordinary, everyday language. Or they may provide a 'shorthand' way of referring to commonly discussed ideas, which will be familiar to all those who have studied the subject to a certain level — in which case they have a place when those experienced students are writing for each other, but should be avoided in writing intended to be accessible to those with no previous knowledge of the subject. This explains most of the jargon use in philosophical writing — it is usually written with the assumption it will only be read by people familiar with the subject.

Bilal asked:

I have a question about Gareth Evans' example of the name 'Turnip'. What two major views are illustrated in this example and which one seems to be the stronger position?

I'll come to 'Turnip' in a minute.

I was lucky to attend Gareth Evans' seminars on Reference in the Summer of 1977 while I was a graduate student at University College Oxford. The seminars were widely thought of at the time to be as important as anything that was going on in the philosophy of language — on this side of the Atlantic. John McDowell, Evans' close collaborator at 'Univ', was my graduate studies supervisor.

I spoke up a lot during those seminars. At the last meeting I approached Evans to ask if he would be interested in looking at some of my work. He said he would try to fit me in, but the meeting never materialized.

Some time later — it could have been that summer, I'm not exactly sure of the time scale — I heard a horrifying story of an incident in Mexico, where Evans survived a bungled kidnap attempt by bandits on his friend Hugo Margan, the son of the US Ambassador. Both men were shot in the leg. Margan bled to death. Evans nearly died, enduring a desperate taxi ride from one hospital to another, being refused admission because the doctors would not treat gunshot victims.

By a cruel twist of fate, Evans died in Oxford not long after the Mexico incident, from lung cancer.

So much for personal reminiscences.

The two theories of how proper names refer are known as the 'cluster theory' and the 'causal theory'. You might wonder why on earth we need a theory of how names refer to objects. In fact, the two theories represent sharply divided views on the metaphysical question of how our thoughts relate to reality, as I will explain.

A baby is born, and given the name 'Turnip' by its loving parents. (This is my version of Evans' story about Turnip, with a few added details.) Turnip grows up to be quite a character, and many stories are told about his escapades. As the centuries pass, however, some stories are mistakenly associated with the name 'Turnip' when in fact they were about someone else entirely. Let's say, Turnip fought at the Battle of the Boyne. That's true. But Turnip was not, as many falsely believe, the anonymous author of the bawdy novel, The King's Mare. The true author was Swede, not Turnip.

In recent times, the errors have become so compounded that most of the beliefs associated with the name 'Turnip' are in fact true of Swede. But what exactly does that mean? When someone says, 'Turnip wrote The King's Mare', to whom are they referring? Is that statement a false statement about Turnip, or is it a true statement about Swede?

According to the cluster theory, what determines the reference of a proper name is the cluster of descriptions we associate with it. The object to which the name refers is the object about which a sufficient majority of the descriptions are true. In that case, 'Turnip' just means 'the author of The King's Mare'.

According to the causal theory, on the other hand, what determines the reference of a proper name is the initial act of 'baptism' when the object was first given the name, and the causal chain of speakers who each pick up the name from the previous speaker in the chain, with the intention of referring to the object to which the name was originally given. In that case, 'Turnip' still refers to the individual who was originally given the name 'Turnip' even if all the things we have subsequently come to believe about 'Turnip' are in fact true of Swede and not Turnip.

The causal theory was first proposed by Saul Kripke in his paper 'Naming and Necessity' (1972). Gareth Evans wrote a paper, 'The Causal Theory of Names' giving his version of the causal theory. Up until Kripke, the cluster theory was widely, or possibly universally believed to give the correct account of the semantics of proper names.

The metaphysical significance of the causal theory is that it rejects an idea which we find quite plausible when we first think about the reference of a name: that whatever we are talking about depends upon our knowledge of whom or what we mean to refer to. The causal theory says that's wrong. The true significance of our thoughts depends not on the way the world looks to us, from inside our minds, but on an external view which includes information which we do not possess, or which at least is not accessible to conscious reflection.

The metaphysical point about the external view is an important one. But it is not sufficient to vindicate the causal theory. In fact, it seems quite clear to me that both theories are false. In many cases there is no correct answer to the question, 'Is this a true belief about X or a false belief about Y?' The answer is simply indeterminate. Don't bother asking the speaker, because they can't tell you, and no-one else can tell you either. In short, there can't be a philosophical 'theory of proper names' of the kind that proponents of the causal and cluster theories supposed. Human linguistic intentions are messy and complex, and refuse to align themselves to any precise theory.

In his Oxford seminars, Evans was quite critical of his original formulation of the causal theory, pursuing some very interesting lines of inquiry later described in his book, Reference (John McDowell Ed. OUP), published posthumously. Evans combined the 'external' idea with much tougher line on the question under what conditions a person really understands a name. The (sometimes tenuous) causal 'chain of communication', Evans thought, was merely a reflection of the way we use language without always grasping the meaning of what we are saying — what Hilary Putnam calls the 'division of linguistic labour'.

Geoffrey Klempner

Daniel asked:

If logic requires that omnipotence is properly defined as power that has absolutely no limits (the ultimate extent of power imaginable, including the power to make 2+2=5), then does logic require that omnibenevolence is defined as benevolent toward absolutely everything no matter how good or bad? This poses the problem of whether power, and even benevolence, is a real thing in itself, or is only relative to other things. Is power and benevolence like the problem of the 'horseness' of a horse? And, if benevolence is necessarily partly a subjective feeling inside yourself in regard to something of which you approve, then would omnibenevolence include approving of logically (truthfully) self-contradictory arguments against omnipotence?

Several questions compete for attention here. One regards the status of attributes. Another, their mutual compatibility. Yet another is about the status of essences ("the 'horseness' of a horse"). The following is the best I can do given my imprecise grasp of Daniel's point.

Logic requires only that a definition be internally consistent. Apart from that, one may stipulate a word to mean whatever one wishes. Logic cannot require one to stipulate that omnipotence means a power that has absolutely no limits, including logical limits (as Daniel's example implies).

Commonly, the job of defining omnipotence and omnibenevolence (and omniscience) subserves the goal of formulating a philosophy of God. The ideal of the mutual coherence of God's attributes in such a philosophy will guide their definition. Doing this successfully requires more than stipulation. It requires understanding how God functions in one's cosmology. Through a process of mutual adjustment, the definition of each attribute emerges in the light of all the others. I see no reason to accept (what strikes me as) caricatures of attributes so that they are seen as mutually incompatible.

What is the "problem" of the "horseness of a horse"? Perhaps it concerns whether we may affirm that it exists just as we affirm that a horse exists. It seems to me that "horseness" is just an abstraction from our understanding of what it means for something to be a horse. The status of such an abstraction is one thing, and the status of attribute is quite another. An attribute is as real as the thing of which it is an attribute. For example, Celine Dion's voice is as real as she is. It is not independently real, but neither is it an abstraction. My concept of Celine Dion, however, is a horse of a different color: "Celine-Dion-ness" is only an abstraction.

Anthony Flood

Peter asked:

Hi, here I'm sitting in the middle of Bangkok and hesitating.

What are expectations?
How do I define expectations?

This definition is going to be the key element in research done amongst tourists. I'm trying to find out what the expectations of eco-tourists are (nature, forest, people etc). My problem is that I can't formulate questions without a theory and the theory needs a basic. If I use your answer (which I hope you will allow) I will refer to the source in my Masters thesis at the Agricultural University of Norway.

I have had problems with finding an answer, and for two days I have been stocked in thoughts and boring descriptions from www.

Ok, nobody else did it... Let's differentiate between goals and expectations. When you do that, what do you get? A goal is a state or situation, something like that, which you want to attain, to make something into, etc., in other words, a goal involves, usually, it would seem, some sort of effort on the part of an agent, in order to reach it, construct it, or attain it in some fashion. An expectation, on the other hand, is either a state or situation to which you assign, formally or not, some valence as to whether it will exist, usually independently of your effort, for the most part, although I imagine that the two can overlap: one could have an expectation of reaching a goal. But that latter would imply that you think it probable that you'll reach the goal, which again puts a kind of passivity or inevitability into the dynamic, perhaps. Or it's just that valence.

So a goal is a kind of concrete state or thing which you have no necessary likelihood for; an expectation is either a) the likelihood that you assign, or b) a state which you do have a likelihood for. A likelihood is the evaluation, the valence, which can either be a probability or an estimated probability or merely an emotional bias which is attached to... well, whatever you want to attach it to.

How's that?

And so we can extrapolate and claim that there will be both negative and positive expectation hierarchies, right? That we can have gradations of things more likely, and also of things less likely... at least if we think about it. It's interesting, in a way, that we can't, really, have negative expectations... we can say that things are less likely, down to zero, they won't happen; but the only way we can say there is a negative likelihood is if something prevents something else from happening... I wonder if there's any theory for that one; I mean, that might give you negative probabilities, mightn't it?

Steven Ravett Brown

What I want to offer you is first of all a dictionary definition of 'expectation' and then an idiosyncratic theory of expectation as an aspect of the phenomena of 'thinking' which I will place in the context of the concept of a knowledge schema. All of which should give you some food for thought or further research for your Masters.

Collin's Cobuild Dictionary, a dictionary of modern English Usage, exemplifies expectation as: a strong hope that something will happen, or a strong belief that something will happen, or strong belief that someone will develop into having a specific identity, or a strong belief that someone should behave in a particular way. Lawyers for example understand promises to create an expectation in the receiver in the senses given above.

So clearly 'expectation' falls squarely into the field of the concept of belief which could take us into well trodden territory concerning knowledge and it's pragmatic definition as 'justified true belief', a definition used by Nonaka and Takeuchi in their seminal work, The knowledge Creating Company in the context of their paradigm shifting work in 'Knowledge Management'. Which I mention because you could consider the project you are undertaking as a problem of knowledge schema creation and management.

We could find some disagreements with this definition of knowledge and its translation into 'justified true belief' as used in this context given that both are based on the implicit propositional content of knowledge with its associated problems of the verification of opinion or attitude as objects in a private language and some doubts over the logical meaning of the phrase, 'True Belief' or 'False belief' except as metaphor masquerading as theory. Whereas there is a growing body of thought that supports the view that non-propositional knowledge is not simply the absence of thought and the presence of random emotional impulses but that many aspects of thinking include an inseparable propositional and value content although the balance of one over the other may vary according to specific uses or linguistic 'forms of life'.

Goleman, for example argues in his book Emotional Intelligence that the view of knowledge that governments and parents colluded in developing up to now was based on a system education and a concept of intelligence geared towards the acquisition of propositional information and the inhibition of 'emotional intelligence' to use his umbrella term. Similarly, Stevenson argued in his work, Ethics and Language that ethical thinking contains both propositional content and separately emotive content and that both channels of thought support systematic reasoning though they always remain mutually exclusive.

What I want to argue is that we can develop a system of knowledge evaluation called 'SIFT'. This system contains some logic-like features and is based on the idea that there is a central organisational unit of thought that consists of the inseparable conjunction of factual or propositional thought together with emotive or value based thought the underlying vehicle of which is an 'expectation nucleus', though the balance of each channel of thought differs for different contexts. In mathematical thinking for example the value channel of thought is dominated by the propositional channel at the object level but switches round at the heuristic or problem solving level.

In this system knowledge is structured in terms of the categories we can impose on a situation. These divide into static values and dynamic agents, both of which occur together as distinct from occurring alternately or dependently. The static values consist of the mutually exclusive categories of satisfaction and non-satisfaction. The dynamic agents consist of the mutually exclusive categories of promissory value; those agents that produce satisfaction or reduce dissatisfaction and alternately agents of threat value that produce dissatisfaction or reduce satisfaction.

The static values are not simple in that they are made up from the distribution of elements from the primary qualitative expectation field which itself is generated from the fundamental components of the expectation nucleus. This conjugation leads to the generation of the primary 'Qualitative Expectation Field' shown schematically below.

Qualitative Expectation Field

Have and Want = Positive satisfaction

Have but not-Want = Frustration

Not-Have but Want = Dissatisfaction

Not-Have and Not Want = Negative Satisfaction

The agents of change are not simple either in that there are two other general subtypes contained within them, those that increase their protagonist value and/or decrease their antagonistic value, represented symbolically as Pv+ or Tv+ and those that maintain their protagonist value or equivalently counter the effects of reducing agents, represented as Pv0 or Tv0. One further division of the static values allows us to complete the schema for a 'Sift' evaluation of knowledge in terms of qualitative expectation. This comes with the introduction of a category for the objects in the knowledge field on which we are currently not focussing our attention. This provides us with a vehicle to which we adopt an attitude of Indifference. Static value then divide into those things on which we are focussed or those things of which we are aware but currently have no interest. We could think of this as a division between objects of knowledge that we currently consider essential and those that we consider inessential.

Objects in the category of indifference are often assigned the numerical value zero while satisfactions are assigned positive numerical values and non-satisfaction are assigned negative values, in games and decision theory for example. There is a danger that we read the assignment of the value zero as an indicator of non-existence, precisely because this is what it does often signify. In the context of the analysis of knowledge in terms of qualitative expectation it is important to realise that the category of indifference is not necessarily empty and further that we can recognise the existence of two special kinds of indifference, labeled positive indifference, representing those objects of knowledge that we have but to which we are currently indifferent and secondly labeled negative indifference, representing those objects of knowledge that exist but we do not have and to which we are currently indifferent. One final distinction needs to be made and that involves the placement into the earlier major or top level category of non-satisfaction of the sub units of frustration and dissatisfaction.

In general then the Sift schema provides you with the following categories into which you can analyse yours or others thoughts about situations and which represent "knowledge schemas that are built up from past experience to make sense of the world such that our past experience leads us to form expectations about objects or events and from which we anticipate what we are likely to encounter" ( Butler & McManus on Ulric Neisser in Psychology, a very short introduction, Oxford).

[Situation description] can be analysed into examples of [How things are], placing them into categories of:

1.1 Positive Satisfaction
1.2 Negative Satisfaction
2.1 Frustration
2.2 Dissatisfaction
3.0 Indifference

And at the same time examples of [How these things could be changed], placing them into the categories of change:

1. Change for the better
2. Value maintenance
3. Change for the worse.

The concept of 'expectation' has a well defined in use in games theory in which the expectation nucleus or 'act conditioned pair' is the combination of a 'cost' and probability which is then combined mathematically with other weighted pairs in the field of analysis to give an overall value for an event outcome.

There is also a sense of 'likelihood' attached to the ordinary sense of 'expectation' as exemplified in the language of promising in that an object, event or agent, including the speech event or act of making a promise, has promissory value if it is more likely than not to bring about the desired outcome.

Wilfred Hodges book, Introduction to Logic (Penguin) has a very interesting section in which he offers a qualitative analysis of likelihood in terms of 'inequality' operators. So given this gradation of definitions of expectation ranging from the mathematical, through the relational or qualitative logic and cognitive schema to the dictionary exemplified ordinary usage what are the grounds for believing 'Sift' analysis is an analysis of expectation? The grounds are that the concept offers a semantic as distinct from a syntactic explication or mapping of the properties of the concept in that it creates categories which are sensitive to the structures in the concept of expectation and represents them in a schema through which it is possible to undertake symbolic manipulation, an essential feature of 'thought schema's, (Luria The Working Brain and Fodor The Modularity of Mind) without over reducing them to inappropriate logical entities. A complete field of study for example is concerned with exactly the problem of how to represent 'expert' knowledge without over reduction in the context of knowledge elicitation for 'expert systems', computer programs designed to reason.

The key concept of expectation has been represented in the Sift system in terms of the image of change embodied in the mathematical, relational and usage aspects via the concept of promissory and threat value as representatives of agents of change. A full analysis of expectation then, I would argue leads to the development of an expectation schema a part of which involves the assignment of likelihood to the elements in its expectation nuclei. For example when you have classified aspects of the knowledge field for Eco Tourism into the Sift categories mentioned above you can then also assign likelihoods to their occurrence. You can also assign likelihoods to the promissory of threat agents your data surveys produce and these would contribute significantly to the way in which the primary expectation about Eco tourism are represented in marketing and advertising. (See my earlier answer, below on analysing the Guinness advertisements). Attached to the transformational and 'marketing' aspect of expectation is an inferential aspect. For example teachers often find that setting high expectations for students leads to higher achievement and conversely, setting low expectations lead to lower achievement. Expectation in this sense has more to do with creating and sustaining motivation and confidence than assigning probabilities of exam success.

Similarly, expectation has a 'look ahead' aspect that can lead us to reject our present position if we are dissatisfied with the future position to which it leads us in a form of inference by modus tollens.

Finally and most important is the inductive effect or 'lending effect' of promissory value in which present satisfaction is 'lent' from likely future satisfaction. 'I have satisfaction now because I believe I will have satisfaction later'.

Again, the complete structure of an expectation schema for Eco tourism must take account of the inferential aspects of the concept to give you some idea of the way that people could make decisions based on the embedded inferential structures.

Neil Buckland

Claire asked:

I am doing a 6—8 page essay on the ethical issues surrounding vivisection, I am getting along with this pretty good, but need to apply two or more ethical theories in my paper. I am thinking of using Utilitarianism and the Categorical Imperative, do you think these would apply well and could you give me some ideas of how these theories would think and apply to Vivisection.

Interesting task.

Utilitarianism is pretty straightforward, at least in theory. Vivisection is morally right if and only if it leads to greater happiness for a greater number than banning it does. There are, however, a number of pitfalls in interpreting this. What is happiness? How do we add it up? How do we know what the sum total of outcomes would be for each alternative? Even more importantly in this case: whose happiness? Is happiness the sort of thing that animals have?

Peter Singer, who is a type of utilitarian, talks more of minimising suffering than maximising happiness. Animals clearly suffer. Therefore, the suffering of animals must be considered, and weighed against any reduction in suffering that research involving vivisection might produce.

Kant's Categorical Imperative has a great deal more difficulty in dealing with moral questions concerning animals, though some Kantians have advanced ways in which it can. This is because the CI only seems to deal with rational beings. The Kingdom of Ends version of the CI, for example, claims that we must treat others as ends and never merely as means. The others referred to here are other rational beings — those who can impose the Moral Law on themselves.

In this view, we can clearly treat inanimate objects as means. We cannot do the same with humans. But where do animals fit? They are not inanimate objects. They are not rational beings. Standard Kantian theory seems to imply that they belong with the objects, and so there is no moral question concerning vivisection. As I said, some Kantian scholars would dispute this, and Kant himself does say that we owe some moral duties to animals (though I can't remember the details now). I would think it is worth your while chasing this up.

Tim Sprod

Arabella asked:

What is a University?

and Gina asked:

We are writing an essay of 3500 words on the topic, What is a University? For example, when Stellenbosch University became a university, it changed from a college to a university. I have to get one big question, but I can't only find one. My idea is: to build it around the student and from there to the knowledge and spirit.

"The true character of a university is the 'will to knowledge'. It is a collection of students who possess the will to knowledge — the will to possess it and still more the will to advance it. A university is constituted by its students, and by this alone." — Shand.

"A university is not a lecture-theatre, or a library, or a laboratory, it is not a building or a place at all, its essence is a frame of mind." — Shand.

Webster defines universities as institutions of higher learning providing facilities for teaching and research and authorized to grant academic degrees; A university differs from a college in that it is usually larger, has a broader curriculum, and offers graduate and professional degrees in addition to undergraduate degrees. The term also refers to the members of this collectively and a team, crew, etc., representing a university. Modern Western universities have their beginnings in the 12th century with the foundation of universities such as Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, and the oldest still-functioning university, Bologna. They were called universitas magistrorum et scholarium". Here the word "universitas" identified the fact that this institution of masters (magistrorum or professors) and scholars (scholarium or students) was a company of persons, a community, a body, like all other medieval guilds, organized for the sake of its protection from hostile outsiders. The university, from its origins, was not only a center of discussion, but also of critique. It considered issues as objectively as it could, and thus often disapproved, implicitly or explicitly, of policies endorsed by the State and the Church. In an era of authoritarian control by both secular and ecclesiastical authority, this trait surely needed protection.

Another aspect of university was that of a Studia Generalia, or "School of Universal Learning." According to its Website, this is quite the mission of the University of Stellenbosch: to create and sustain, in commitment to the academic ideal of excellent scholarly and scientific practice, an environment within which knowledge can be discovered, can be shared, and can be applied to the benefit of the community".

From these ancient beginnings, modern universities developed and in the nineteenth century the number of universities expanded considerably. The German model of university education with its emphasis on higher degrees (doctorates) has been influential particularly in America, and now universities focus on research as much as teaching.

University education focuses on theoretical analysis and concept-forming, rather than technical skills or development of techniques.

The typical modern university may enroll 10,000 or more students and educate both undergraduates and graduate students in the entire range of the arts and humanities, mathematics, the social sciences, the physical, biological, and earth sciences, and various fields of technology. Universities are the main source of graduate-level training in such fields as medicine, law, business administration, and veterinary medicine.

If you want to built your essay more around the student, following passage taken from Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, might be worth thinking about:

"The real University, he said, has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location. It's a state of mind which is regenerated throughout the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real University. The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself. In addition to this state of mind, `reason,' there's a legal entity which is unfortunately called by the same name but which is quite another thing. This is a nonprofit corporation, a branch of the state with a specific address. It owns property, is capable of paying salaries, of receiving money and of responding to legislative pressures in the process. But this second university, the legal corporation, can not teach, does not generate new knowledge or evaluate ideas. It is not the real University at all. It is just a church building, the setting, the location at which conditions have been made favorable for the real church to exist."

Simone Klein

Amy asked:

In light of the looming possibilities of artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, just what exactly does it mean to be human? If we could create intelligent "beings," would they be tools with our intentions, or is it possible that through emergent consciousness that they may develop their own teleological goals? Would these "beings" warrant moral consideration? Who or what does warrant moral consideration?

I just got back from a conference where this question was posed and answered by Ray Kurzweil (http://www.kurzweiledu.com/index.html), in a manner I find reasonably convincing. He argued that any entity capable of suffering deserves moral consideration. So this would include what animals we could determine actually suffer (rather than behave as if they are suffering — an objection of Descartes which might conceivably apply, say, to insects), and machines we build or cause to be built at some time which also suffer, as best as we can determine.

But one could object that any conscious being deserves moral consideration. The questions then become, 1) can an entity be conscious and not be able to suffer, 2) can an entity suffer and not be conscious? As far as 2) goes, one would have to say no, I would think... but then we get into considerations of degrees of consciousness. Sartre and others have described first- and second-order consciousness, and one might carry that further and hypothesize degrees within those categories. Then we have a much harder question, i.e., how far down can we go and still suffer? No one knows the answe