There is an intriguing (if not very philosophical) question here what leads otherwise sensible people, such as myself, to attach themselves so strongly to sports teams. I don't really know the answer to that question. But it doesn't seem very plausible that such attachment is in any way deserved or that past attachment creates an obligation to the team. If not, then, one might say, there can't be any moral bar to shifting attachment for any reason one wishes. Sports franchises are businesses, and one increasingly hears fans described as consumers of sports-product. If so, couldn't one argue that shifting one's allegiance is simply a matter of choosing a good product over a bad one? So Yankees versus Red Sox is like Walmart versus Target. Actually, however, I'm not very sympathetic to that line. Being a "fan" of a team isn't, I think, like being a K-mart shopper. Whatever the source of one's allegiance, I don't think it's comparable to low prices or good selection. That's just an intuition,...

These aren't terms from philosophy per se but from logic or linguistics. Semantics is the study of matters have to do with meaning, truth, reference, and the like. Syntax is the study of matters having to do with grammar, like that of a grammatical sentence. The two interact, of course, in complex ways. The question whether a sentence is grammatical is syntactic, but it is an open question to what extent, if any, information about the meanings of words in a sentence—that is, semantic information—is needed to make that determination. Perhaps the most obvious place where the two interact, however, is in the study of so-called "lexical" ambiguities, such as in the sentence "Fighting administrators can be distracting". There are two different things that this string of words can mean, and the now standard explanation of this fact is that there really two sentences that can be written that way, sentences that have very different grammatical structures. (To put it in traditional terms: Is ...

There's another distinction that needs to be made here and that is relevant to the objection to explanation (1): We need to distinguishdifferent sorts of necessity. Nowadays, most philosophers and logicianswould agree that there is nothing whose existence is logically necessary, even the objects of mathematics, although their existence is mathematically and even metaphysically necessary. Even God's existence would not be regarded as logically necessary, even by philosophers who accept God's existence. Perhaps we should regard it as agreed, then, that, if God exists, God exists by metaphysical necessity. If so, then there is no contradiction in holding that it is logically possible that God should have existed. Whether it is consistent to hold that it is metaphysically possible that God should have existed depends upon whether one thinks the so-called Brouweresche axiom of modal logic holds for metaphysical necessity. (Axiom B says that, if it is possible that it is necessary that A,...

There are many simple creatures that are sensitive to light: Theywill move toward it or away from it. I believe there are some suchcreatures that are single-celled. In any event, such creatures are so simple that it's hard to think of them as being "conscious" at all, andbiologists can tell a very convincing story of why these creaturesbehave as they do. The explanation rests upon the fact that there somechemicals that react to light: They are "photo-sensitive". There areother, slightly less simple creatures that have very primitive sorts of"eyes" that are simiilarly sensitive to light, but the reaction ofthese creatures to light is more complex, because these creatures haveprimitive nervous systems. And between those creatures and cats, birds,fish, and human beings are all kinds of other creatures with "eyes" ofvarying complexities. It is, perhaps, hard to imagine how exactlyorgans with the complexity of eyes evolved—for one thing, the time scale is immense—but one can see in thedifferences among...

There are a few distinctions we need to make before we can addressthis question. The work we need to do to make these distinctions is anice example of how philosophy can help us be clearer about whatquestion we're asking. Ask first: Could π have been a different number? Most philosophers today would answer that it could nothave been, just as Richard Nixon could not have been someone other thanRichard Nixon. The expression "π" is a name of a certain number, andthat number is whatever number it is; it could not have beena different number. That this is the right thing to say is somethingthat has been widely appreciated only for about the last thirty yearsor so, as a result of groundbreaking work by Saul Kripke. If that is right, then God could not have madeπ anything other than π, for then π would have been something otherthan π, which it could not have been. That'sprobably not the intended question, though. Rather, the intendedquestion was probably: Could God have made it the case...

Philosophy is a subject with very porous borders, and, as has beenpointed out by others here, disciplinary distinctions don't alwayscorrespond to anything important. There are plenty of questionstheologians discuss that philosophers also discuss, such as the problemof evil, which has been much discussed elsewhere on this site .There are, however, different ways one can approach such a question,and it's there that the difference, such as it is, between philosophyand theology lies. A theologian might draw upon certain religioustraditions or certain religious texts in crafting an approach to theproblem of evil. A philosopher would not do so, or at least would nottreat those traditions and texts in the same way. One does not get to appeal to the "revealed truth" in philosophy—that's not how the game is played—any more than one does in physics. Of course, the sameperson might be both a theologian and a philosopher, and write about the problem of evil from each stance, even mixing the two perspectives in a...

First, I'm going to bristle. Logicians are mathematicians, even ifmost mathematics departments nowadays don't seem to want them. Work inlogic is often driven by profound philosophical concerns, and in thebest such work— Solomon Feferman 's would be an example—mathematics andphilosophy are so intertwined that it would be pointless to try todisentangle them. But I'll stop bristling now and assume that thequestion concerned how foundational work might affect non-foundationalwork. Onemajor question is to what extent incompleteness, of the sort thatinterested Gödel, is of serious (non-foundational) mathematicalconcern. It's been known for some time now that most of the centralresults of non-foundational mathematics can be proven in tiny fragmentsof Zermelo set theory, let alone Zermelo-Frankel set theory. Much workin set theory, on the other hand, concerns extensions of ZF that makethe first inaccessible cardinal—that being the smallest cardinal whoseexistence cannot be proved in ZFC (if it is...

There are some syllogistic figures that at least some Aristotleansregarded as valid that are not treated as valid by modern logic. Anexample would be: All Fs are G; all Gs are H; therefore, some Fs are H.This is valid if ,but only if, one supposes that "univeraljudgements are existentially committed", as it is sometimes put, thatis, if one supposes that, if "All Fs are G" is to be true, there mustbe some Fs. That assumption is not usually made in modern logic, and sothe contemporary translation of this syllogism: ∀x(Fx → Gx); ∀x(Gx →Hx); therefore, ∃x(Fx ∧ Hx), is not valid. However, if one does thinkthat "All F are G" is existenally committal, one can perfectly welldefine a new quantifier, "∀ + x", that incorporates that assumption. Andthen the inference can be shown to be valid. Whether the English statement "All Fs are G" is existentially committed is not for a logician ( qua logician) to decide. That's an empirical question about natural language.

I'm not sure what you have in mind here by "Aristotelian principles of logic". I can think of a couple possibilities. I should say first, however, that some philosophers spend a lot of time thinking about Aristotelian logic, namely, historians of ancient philosophy. But I take it that your question concerns contemporary philosophy. One aspect of Aristotle's writings on logic is his theory of valid inference. This is not much discussed because it has been essentially supplanted by modern logic, which can explain the validity of the valid figures of the syllogism and do much that Aristotle's logic could not do. Famously, Aristotelian logic cannot explain the validity of the inference from "Every horse is an animal" to "Every horse's head is an animal's head". The validity of that inference can be explained by modern logic. Since such inferences occur throughout mathematics and ordinary reasoning, Aristotelian logic is simply far too limited in its scope. Another aspect of Aristotle's...

The article to which Dan links raises questions about marriage, adoption, and child-rearing that are often found at the basis of people's concerns about gay marriage. I think there is a great deal of discomfort in US society nowadays (I'll stick to my own country) concerning these issues and, more generally, all kinds of issues relating to family. Some people feel very profoundly that the biological link between parent and child is deeply important, and the stories one so often hears of adopted children devoting large parts of their lives to seeking their birth-parents reinforces this opinion. (So-called open adoption bypasses that problem.) I think one can understand why someone with strong enough views along these lines would be opposed to gay marriage, in so far as gay marriage would instill certain kinds of parental rights. Of course, as has often been pointed out, such rights existed in Massachusetts before gay marriage was recognized, and there are many other jurisdictions in which such...