Good heavens, indeed. This isn't, as Charles said, really a question for philosophers. But just on an ordinary human level, it will strike most people that your husband is behaving pretty appallingly, in a way that probably reveals a deep fear or even horror of female sexuality. His response is that of the frightened emotional bully. In the face of his absurd reaction, it must be difficult not to feel crushed, and begin to doubt your own good sense. But of course it wasn't a big deal to go the party (with all the female banter and amused teasing and gibes at male inadequacies -- or so I'm told!); and you need to hold on to that thought in the face of the bullying, and not start to doubt your own sense of moral proportion. To echo Charles again, good luck!

Let me recycle the line of response that I gave to a slightly different earlier question, with a few tweaks (and not disagreeing with my co-panelist, but with different emphases). It is a truism that, when I fully act, it is as a result of my desires, my intentions, my goals. After all, if my arm moves independently of my desires, e.g. because you want it to move and push it, or as an automatic reflex, then we'd hardly say that the movement was my action (it was something that happened to my body, perhaps despite my wishes). But note that even if everything I genuinely do (as opposed to undergo) is as a result of my desires etc., it doesn't follow that everything I do has an egoistic motive in the sense of being motivated by the thought that what I do has a payoff for me or that "the choice is best for [me]". The fact that a desire is my desire doesn't entail that the desire is about me or is about some payoff for me, or something like that. And it is just false that all my desires are...

I'm sure that you are right: most algebraic topologists don't give a moment's thought to what goes on in the philosophy of mathematics. But that's only fair: most philosophers of mathematics don't give a moment's thought to the nitty gritty of algebraic topology (well, maybe there are two or three hardy souls who know a fair bit about the roots of category theory in topology, but that's a pretty specialist topic!). Topologists and philosophers mostly have very different fish to fry. So why not study topology, and just ignore the philosophy of maths? Fine, if what you are interested in is the behaviour of sheaf cohomologies and the like. Similarly, why not study neuroscience, and ignore the philosophy of mind? Fine, if what you are interested in is how our brains work at different levels of functional organization. But suppose you start getting interested in how all those different scientific enquiries fit together? For example, the scientific study of our cognitive psychology seems to suggests...

Well, there's mind-altering and mind-altering! Dope that makes you dopey might give you time out from the nagging concerns of philosophy, but isn't likely to play a role in producing serious thought. Wine or beer seems different. The glass or two in the pub after the seminar do often lubricate good philosophy, and the convivial arguments in the conference bar certainly play their part in world of philosophy. As to philosophizing about mind-altering stuffs, there's of course a good amount of discussion on the ethics and politics of legalizing this or banning that. But Charles Taliaferro is right that, when it comes to writing about our experience of the stuff itself (as opposed to ethical and legal issues about it), it is wine that traditionally gets the attention. That's not too surprising, perhaps, when we recall that at least some it is produced, not just to be glugged down, and certainly not just to make you intoxicated, but to be an object of aesthetic attention and reflection, as a...

This isn't a question to be answered by arm-chair philosophical reflection: it is a question about the empirical facts. But surely all the evidence -- from our everyday knowledge of our friends and family through to more disciplined research by those who do various kinds of empirical enquiry, not to mention the witness of a couple of thousand years of literature -- suggests there is nothing at all black and white where matters of sexuality are concerned. It is a cheerfully multicoloured motley out there!

But what would an infinite decimal correspond to on the proposed mapping? It may be that every natural corresponds on that mapping to a real between 0 and 1. But you need -- and assert! -- that to every such real there corresponds a natural on this mapping, and that's quite plainly false when you think of the reals with non-terminating decimal expansions (the construction doesn't determine a natural).

Gödel's first incompleteness theorem says that any particular formalized theory T which contains enough arithmetic and satisfies some other modest conditions is incomplete. The standard Gödelian proof depends on coding up T -formulae (including those T -formulae which are statements belonging to number theory) using the Gödel-numbering trick. And you can always do that if T is indeed a formalized theory. This just falls out of the conditions for counting as being properly -- in the jargon, 'effectively' -- formalized. In an effectively formalized theory, by definition, we can nicely and determinately regiment the strings of symbols that count as T -formulae and number them off. But note: it is only required for the standard proof of T 's incompleteness that we can code up T -formulae -- and hence code up any statements of number theory expressible in T . It is not claimed that we can code up "all statements of number theory", whatever that might mean. And...

I'm not sure what is meant by "prefer to teach ideas that depend on symbolic logic". Most departments teach e.g. aesthetics, political philosophy, the history of early modern philosophy, the philosophy of mind, and so on and so forth -- and symbolic logic features little if at all in those courses. (When did you last see a quantifier when discussing how it is that we can apply emotion terms to music, or discussing whether we can justify more than a minimal state, etc., etc.?) And a concern for clarity has little to do with symbolic logic (and nothing at all to do with 'higher order' languages). Clarity matters because we want to seek the truth co-operating with other enquirers. And we can't co-operate with other enquirers by together subjecting our conjectures to stern test and criticism and proposing revisions if we can't manage to make ourselves very plainly understood to each other. Of course there are always intellectual pseuds who get off on talking to themselves with willful obscurity ...

In response to the original question. We might have general grounds for thinking that all men are mortal -- e.g. general beliefs about the structure of human beings and about the relevant biological laws -- which we accept on inductive grounds (in a broad sense of inductive) and where our supporting evidence, as it happens, doesn't depend on inspecting Socrates in particular. So there need be nothing "question-begging" in any sense in then going on to deduce a claim about Socrates. In response to Sean Greenberg, (a) it should be noted that the Socrates argument is not a simple modus ponens of the form (1), (2), (3) (the main logical operator in the "all" premiss is a quantifier, not a conditional). Also (b) he uses "sound" and "valid" the wrong way round in the first part of his answer, though that slip seems to be corrected in the last sentence. For the record, in by far the dominant modern usage, an argument is "valid" if the conclusion follows logically from the premisses, and "sound" if it...

What on earth is irrational about being curious about the current state of play in the foundations of quantum mechanics, about loving your beautiful, clever, affectionate daughter, about being bored by mindless chatter about C-list celebrities, about feeling fear when an errant car suddenly hurtles into your path, about being indifferent when picking one from a shelf of ten identical and equally conveniently placed packets of cereal in the supermarket, about being excited at the prospect of going to New York for the first time, about wanting to return to Venice? None of these strike me as in the slightest bit irrational! Rather they seem entirely rational and reasonable responses in any normal sense of 'rational' (indeed, it would be pretty unreasonable not to have most of them). So the original question seems misplaced in so far as it presupposes that such responses must indeed be "irrational". Perhaps though the point behind the question is this. If you use ...