Why do people (especially philosophers) engage in arguments which cannot be resolved?

Some philosophical issues are resolved, but many aren't--often the deepest ones. Philosophers nevertheless pursue abstract and difficult issues in the hope of solving them. And this isn't clearly misguided: a low success rate might result from the difficulty of the problems instead of from their in-principle unsolvability. Still, even if some enduring problems--the mind-body problem, the nature of free will, our knowledge of the external world, and so on--are not, in fact, completely resolvable, a lot is to be learned about the nature of mind, freedom, knowledge and also rationality by pursuing them anyway. And the pursuit is independently enjoyable and edifying. Or so I have found.

Hello, I have long wondered of some of the questions I have seen on this website and I am glad to see them answered after discovering this website. But I too have a question, more personal though. This message was not written with intent to be posted but I just wanted to ask everyone this. I have been following this site for a couple of weeks now. I am a sophomore in high school. My Algebra teacher often tells me things that make me "freak out". He once got so deep in this conversation about reality and the universe he just said "It gets to the point where you have to ask yourself, Is any of this any real?". My mind have been permanently scarred by thoughts of reality and I find myself shaking at night, scared, thinking of all these things especially while reading questions on the website. I have recently been showing my friend this site and he has had the same experiences as me. Now to get to the question. Have any of you almost "Lost your mind"? I mean like has your life been changed forever after...

I agree fully with all that Alex has said, but would add that the dizzying, off-the-rails experience that philosophical speculation can induce even in those of us who are middle-aged is, in my experience, one of the great joys of philosophy--the very reason for engaging in it. That sense that even the most fundamental assumptions of our daily life are open to refinement, speculation and even doubt is what makes the practice so exciting...even if, like many exciting activities, it sometimes makes you ill.

Why do most philosophers tend to answer complicated questions with complicated answers? Why can't there be something simple? Is it that we can't accept simple answers to difficult questions?

I suspect this will be exactly the type of complicated answer you have in mind, but... philosophers often do succeed in giving concise answers to important philosophical questions. Here are two almost randomly-chosen one liners: Difficult question #1: What makes an action morally right or wrong? Consequentialist answer: An action is morally right if and only if it maximally satisfies the interests of all those affected. Difficult question#2: How can we freely choose our actions if they are brought about by micro-physical processes (be these deterministic or indeterministic)? Compatibilist answer (roughly): Our actions are free if and only if they follow in the right way from characters of the right type. These are succinct answers, and in that sense "simple. But the devil is in the details, of course. The complications come in when we specify how we should understand the answers' central formulations--for example, what counts as an 'interest"?; what is "following in the right...