Our panel of 91 professional philosophers has responded to

27
 questions about 
Gender
124
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Profession
5
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392
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221
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110
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77
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75
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218
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67
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31
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89
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110
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69
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88
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284
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Mind
1280
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34
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39
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96
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54
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Medicine
24
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Suicide
70
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Truth
287
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Language
43
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574
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Philosophy
151
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Existence
51
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58
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170
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58
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2
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105
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4
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80
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68
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Happiness
134
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Love
32
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208
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Science
282
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Knowledge
75
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Perception
81
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2
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154
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Sex
117
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Children
374
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Logic
23
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History
36
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Literature
244
 questions about 
Justice

Question of the Day

Someone might reasonably think that the question what personal identity consists of is to be answered by psychology. So we can imagine looking at the formation of individuality over time, through childhood and on, and think we were answering the philosophical question what identity consists of. Clearly psychology cannot pre-empt the answer to the question whether, for example, the bodily criterion of identity is correct. There are a lot of other examples to choose from. The one I am most interested in at the moment is perception. Perceiving, as Ryle points out, is not a process, but the termination of one, like scoring a goal, to use Ryle's example. You can't ask how long it took to perceive a goat, and you ask how long the scoring of a goal took. You can ask of course in a different way how long it took Aston Villa to score a goal - the whole of the first half, say. It took them forty-five minutes. But what about the actual scoring? That is as you might say instantaneous. It happens when the ball crosses the goal-line, whenever that is. I imagine it is the first moment at which any bit of the ball, no matter how small, enters the goal or has crossed the line.