Is there a rule or a thing in philosophy that names the philosophical state of believing in something and acting/following those beliefs, (simply because they were taught to you in school, by your friends, and/or by your family), (perhaps most people around you still believing in this thing), automatically sometimes even if your personal views are against it and even when large amounts of evidence are against it or pile up against it? "Teachism" is what I fan-named it. Since I used to be a fan of the paranormal, this would be nice to know.

In "The Fixation of Belief," American philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce distinguishes various methods people use to fix their beliefs. Two of these are related to the phenomena you describe: the "method of tenacity" (where people hang on to beliefs even against piles of evidence) and the "method of authority" (where people form and revise their beliefs on the basis of the beliefs that certain others hold or express). You can read this essay at www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html

Are there any academic papers that you would recommend to a student of philosophy, regardless of subject area being studied, as valuable foundational reading?

Yes, there are seminal works of philosophy that are of historical and systematic interest for the understanding they convey of what philosophy is. Here I would mention at least a dozen historical works before any more recent academic papers - works by the usual suspects: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Hume Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Mill, Frege, and Wittgenstein. With regard to academic papers - by which I take you to mean shorter works published in the last 60 years or so - there is no settled canon. Still, it is pretty clear who have been the leading philosophers of this period; and pretty clear also, in most cases, what their most important essays were. It would be difficult to understand the current state of Anglophone philosophy without having read at least a good smattering of the following: W.V.O. Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" and "Epistemology Naturalized", Donald Davidson's "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme", Philippa Foot's "The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine...

Does the Western education system violate human rights? It does after all restrict freedom of movement (as absence from a set class at a particular time results in punishment and it's illegal to skip school altogether). It also violates freedom of thought - one of our most fundamental rights - as it requires a student to think about a set subject at a set time. Even intrinsic biological necessities such as the expulsion of bodily waste are often denied to students. Is it fair to conclude that there is something radically wrong with this system?

Insofar as pupils have the same human rights as adults do, your argument is compelling. If we did to adults what we are doing to adolescents, we'd be violating their human rights. An obvious defense of our education system (BTW, non-Western ones are not much different and mostly more restrictive) would claim that each person's human rights become more extensive as they grow up and that mandatory schooling of people below a certain age does not violate the narrower set of human rights they already have. There is surely something to this story: a mother is not violating a human right of her toddler when she prevents him from exiting down the stairs -- the toddler does not yet have the relevant human right to freedom of movement (though he already does have the human right not to be killed). But can this be developed into a defense of forcing a 14-year-old to attend school? There's amazingly little serious work on this general question: on what competences and capacities children must possess...

I would appreciate some recommendations on texts (for a layperson -- a nonprofessional philosopher) whose subject is the philosophy of science.

Perhaps start with a look at the entry "scientific explanation" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ( plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-explanation ). After that, I would get started with three classics: Sir Karl Popper: The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959) Ernest Nagel: The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation (1961) Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970).

a nice easy question: I love philosophy and consider it one of the most important of humanities interests, but is there a career path I could follow?

Sure, you can become a teacher of philosophy -- most plausibly in a college or university (with a PhD), or perhaps also in a highschool (with a MA). There's not much else, though, for professional philosophers. But then you can also choose another career and keep up with some of what philosophers do as a hobby....

I am a Chinese undergraduate girl living in China and planning to have further study abroad. For preparation, these days I try to know ABC about Western philosophy, but I find it hard to start. Considering my major is in the field of engineering, I am not sure whether or not Western philosophy will play an important role in my future life in the US or Europe. Could you tell me how much Plato's or Socrates' thoughts have influenced Western people's way of thinking, and how the philosophers' thoughts have exerted an significant influence on various aspects of Western people's life? Could you please enlighten me what should I prepare pertaining to philosophy before going abroad? Thank you ever so much. =)

There is a great influence, of course. But it is subtle and impossible to understand simply by reading ancient philosophers. It makes more sense for you to prepare yourself by reading contemporary works that give you a sense of how citizens in the affluent Western countries think about themselves, their relations to the rest of the world, their history, and the world's future. These contemporary works will be more accessible to you, because you understand much better the context in which they were written than you can hope to understand the context in which Plato wrote. And you can still, in a few years, do some study of the ancients if you are so inclined. For now, I would try to find a textbook collection of contemporary essays on ethics or political philosophy, and then learn about the debates we have here about affirmative action, the environment, equality for women, war, poverty, trade, and so on. (By the way, I would give analogous advice to a young Western student departing for a year in China. She...

Hi, here comes another question about feminism and philosophy and feminist philosophers. I am 30 years old and was a student of philosophy in Germany for 6 years before graduating to Master of Arts. Recently I read a book about 19th century's feminists and stumbled over a small notice concerning John St. Mill's "Subjection of Women". Although I would describe myself as a quite diligent student of philosophy (even in high-school) and also very interested in feminist topics, I never knew about this well known philosopher being a feminist as well. Now I ask myself three questions and hope you can help: 1) How can it be explained that even at university level the discussion of a classic philosopher like Mill never touches the bad F-word (i.e., feminism)? And who is to blame? 2) If even students of philosophy do not touch these topics if not accidentally altough it should be their genuine field of activity, how will other people, to whom the matter is quite distant, ever find out? 3) How many other...

Your experience may be more reflective of philosophy in Germany than of philosophy more generally. There are at least three relevant factors. German students specialize early while students in the US, say, take a broad range of courses in diverse fields during their undergraduate studies. In particular, they take broad (often mandatory) Western civilization courses that focus on philosophical materials that (i) integrate well with non-philosophical materials produced at or around the same time and (ii) are attractive and helpful to students through their relevance to present society. This relates to the second point, that universities in the US tend to reward (often quite directly) teachers and departments for attracting students; and it's rather easier to attract undergraduates to feminist themes than to, say, the philosophy of language. All this in turn reinforces the third point that German academic philosophy tends to be a bit narrow and conservative. While feminism certainly has a presence in...

I teach Philosophy of Law to Law students in Brazil, a discipline that lasts no longer than one semester and does not count on the students' previous affinity, and I am always wondering about the best way of investing the short time I have. I'm an enthusiast of the analytical tradition and its way of approaching the problems of the field. May you give me some advices or tips? For example: Which units are better: subjects, problems, schools, authors, theories? Which model is better: cases and problems, or authors and theories? What is more important: learning a little on many subjects (authors, theories etc.) or learning more on one or two subjects (authors, theories etc.)? Is the direct reading of the authors' texts indispensable or is it replaceable by good introductions and commentaries? Should I spend some time with the history of the discipline, or only with the present debates? I know I asked too many questions, I know a lot of the answers depends on my options and preferences, I know that almost...

More than on your preferences, the answers also depend on the kind of students you face and on the legal system within which they serve. In light of my limited knowledge of these and other relevant matters, I would suggest you focus on leading your students to think philosophically about the law. For example, what moral authority do those in government have to enforce laws against non-consenters? What must the government be like, and what must the laws it is enforcing be like, for such enforcement to be morally permissible? And under what conditions does the mere fact that something is the law give citizens a moral (as opposed to a merely prudential) reason to act accordingly? These sort of questions and reflections are crucial, I think, for students to appreciate the conceptual gap between the law and justice -- a gap that is often deliberately obscured, as when the government agency in charge of law enforcement is called the Department of Justice (its recent head in the US, Attorney General...

In case I would like to know more about philosophy of education, but my background is Political Science...which authors you recomend me to start with?

There are the classic authors: Plato, Rousseau, and John Dewey. Among contemporaries, I would name Nicholas Burbules (pragmatist), Harvey Siegel (analytic philosopher), and Joseph Dunne (Gadamerian). Given your background in political science, you might also want to look at Paulo Freire for critical pedagogy and at Meira Levinson's The Demands of Liberal Education . This is a really well-written book on the education of personal autonomy in liberal society. For placing the philosophy of education into the wider context of political thought, you might look also at Amy Gutman's work. Formerly a political scientist, she is now President of the University Pennsylvania.

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