We think philosophy can help in finding one's identity and values, as ap points out. We also think that you have identified a number of different values (money, satisfaction, good co-workers...). Some values are essential (you need enough money for food). We suggest identifying your fundamental values, and trying rank or bundle them to get the best overall combination of values available to you. Good wishes from CT and TJH, a soon to be graduate who is wrestling with a similar question!

This question is particularly troubling when it comes to Good Samaratan Laws, laws that would penalize persons who do not aid those in trouble. Some have argued that aiding others should be a matter of freely exercised virtues like courage (or exercising the good of compassion) rather than coercion. But in many cases, especially in life and death situations, we do in fact think it proper to force people to do the right thing. We expect persons to drive carefully, to not murder other people, to not steal from others, to pay taxes, and so on, and it seems difficult to conceive of a community in which there are no enforceable rules. I do not think any philosopher from Plato and Aristotle onward have thought it was possible for there to be a human society without enforceable laws of some kind. Philosophers have differed, however, as to the underlying foundation and extent of such laws. Hobbes, famously, located the justification for law in terms of social contracts, while philosophers like Aquinas saw...

Good question. Some ethical systems have grounded the ethics against homicide on grounds that do not appeal to the right to life. For example, some divine command theories hold that you should not kill innocent persons because this is prohibited by God. And some utilitarians (Bentham) repudiate the appeal to rights. However, there are other philosophical systems in which rights are given foremost attention, and would claim that the reason why you should not kill the innocent is because they have a right to life. This way of putting the matter puts the focus on the person who has a right not to be violated and also leads us to think that if someone does attempt to kill an innocent person (and fails) that person is owed some restitution (the criminal act is not just a crime against the state or God, though it might be agains both; it is also a crime against the intended victim).

Good wishes! I believe you can address Kant's moral argument without having to know a great deal of Kant's views in, say, The Critique of Pure Reason or Critique of Judgement. You could instead focus on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason. You can find a good discussion of the argument in the first and second edition of the Blackwell Companion to Philosophy of Religion. There is a version of the moral argument in the recent Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology worthy of attention. If you wanted an overview of Kant's argument, along with some attention to his other views on religion, you could check out chapter five, "Kantian Philosophy of Religion" in the Cambridge University Press book: Evidence and Faith; Philosophy and religion since the seventeenth century. Good wishes, Greta! CT

Great question. I suppose that if the person does not know she can easily and effectively extricate, then her not removing herself has no bearing on the gravity of the harassment (she may feel trapped and has no means of breaking a contract). Also, if the person can easily and effectively extricate herself and knows she can do so, but imagine that once she does she would be unemployed and perhaps face great hardship, then there would also be no bearing on the seriousness of the harassment. It also might be that if the person knows she can do the extraction and an alternative job exists, she suffers from a profoundly low self-image or she thinks (falsely) that she deserves the harassment. For all these reasons, I think the best way to assess the harassment would be to describe the case itself (e.g. does she have to put up with crude, relentless sexist jokes, uninvited sexual passes, has she been given unfair humiliating tasks when male colleagues are not, does her boss spill hot coffee on her "by...

My colleagues may disagree, but I think philosophical reflection on religion (pro and con) has never been stronger. Leading journals like Religious Studies, the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Sophia, Faith and Philosophy, Philo, Philosophia Christi, and others are vibrant places to find contemporary debate on all major topics in terms of religion (the existence of God, the relationship of religion and ethics, religious pluralism, etc). 'Philosophy of religion' is the top pick for topics in philosophy at Oxford by students, and in a poll of several years ago, it was the second preferred area of philosophy in the USA by students (the first choice was ethics). The profession of philosophy today contains many secular atheists and some are hostile to religion and its practices, but it also contains many Christians, people of Jewish faith, Muslim and Hindu and Buddhist philosophers.... So, I would say there is no consensus on religion among all philosophers today, but there is also no...

Great question(s). Your choice of examples is interesting, as the philosopher Wittgenstein used the term "game" to make his case that the meaning of some terms is not at all strict and relies more on what he called "family resemblance" than a strict appeal to necessary and sufficient conditions. His view is that we might meaningfully use terms without precision and he then went on to speak of different "language games," by which (I believe) he meant different contexts or domains in which different rules (or practices) apply. So, in the "language game" of the physical sciences, the term "cause" may have a different meaning than in the "language game" of religion. That aside, certain practices like philosophy may stipulate that terms have special meaning that may not match ordinary usage. Philosophers in the recent past have used terms like "manifest image" that is vaguely related to the way we ordinarily use the terms "manifest" and "image" but give it a special, specific meaning (the world as it...

Philosophers have tended to think this question (who am I?) is pretty foundational, because it seems that some kind of answer is necessary in the course of addressing such questions as: what should I do with my life? What can I know about the universe or God or right and wrong? What sort of political form of government should I support? Where did I come from? Do I owe any obligations to my parents or society or the state or the religion in which I was raised? Am I a Jew, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, atheist, agnostic......or some combination? What can or should I hope for in life or (if there is one) a next life? One of the earliest philosophers in the west, Socrates, is said to have claimed that the unexamined life is not worth living. Whether he was right or not, it seems that without some self-examination (what do I really desire? what sort of a person am I? do I actually care about others or am I faking it?), it is very difficult to grow, to love others (if I do not know who I am, how do...

An excellent question! You are right to distinguish individual conflict from war. War seems to involve impersonal collaborative lethal conflict, though sometimes the definition of war is stretched to include a state of affairs when two communities (nation-states, cities, empires, tribes...) have declared war and so there might be a war even if the two or more sides never get around to do any actual killing. In any case, you are correct that war is not merely (though perhaps the word "merely" is not the best to use!) a matter of individual stealing or murder. Insofar as your question is more empirical than philosophical, it seems that one can make a pretty good historical argument that war is virtually inevitable. The latest thinking is that warfare probably came about approximately when we developed agriculture (on the theory that hunters and gatherers may fight as groups, but there was not quite the pressure to protect land in the absence of farms and (with surplus agriculture) you can get cities...

Good question! First, there have almost always been women in philosophy in the west, though their status has been very difficult owing to Patriarchy. There is an excellent four volume work called A History of Women in Philosophy, published by Springe. This largely addresses what women philosophers have thought and think (the history goes up to the early 19990s) but you can also find in it pictures of how males viewed females in philosophy. The history is sad; Aristotle was bad, Plato a bit better (he thought women could be rulers in an ideal republic). For a catalogue and examination of the grim ways women have been viewed in culture and the history of ideas, you might check out Simone de Beauvoir's classic, ground breaking book The Second Sex, published in 1949. So, the Springer History will give you a good look at the classical scene, and you might also look at Genevieve Lloyd's The Man of Reason:'Male' and 'Female' in Western Philosophy, published in 1984. For two early modern works arguing for...