One obvious way of getting into a really good philosophy PhD program is to do a master's first. The following website provides some good initial advice: www.philosophicalgourmet.com/maprog.asp

Do we have a duty to write concisely and as accessibly, systematically and neatly as possible? It would take a very long time to bring a philosophical essay to the highest feasible level of accessibility -- perhaps a lifetime. Had I subjected myself to this standard in earlier years, I would be long out of the profession by now. And were I to subject myself to this standard henceforth, most of my contributions would arrive years after interest in some issue has faded. Obviously, we have to make a trade-off here. We want to get things published in real time -- presumably also a goal that the taxpayers funding a system of higher education want to see achieved. But we certainly should be willing to accept some reduction in our publication rate for the sake of making these publications more accessible. How these two desiderata are to be traded off depends a bit on the case. Some philosophical work is read pretty much only by philosophers -- but in some cases this is, you might rightly point out, a ...

In a philosophy paper, you are responsible for your conclusions. The quality of your paper depends on how well you can back up what you conclude. In many cases, you can back up a conclusion by citing someone else's work. But in order for that other work to support your conclusions, what it says must itself have some support and credibility. Thus, for example, if you cite a major work of Kant interpretation, which is widely acknowledged by Kant scholars to be very good, in support of your reading of a certain passage in Kant, then this would certainly support your reading. But if you support your reading by stating that your roommate agrees with it, you haven't given much support to it at all. To be sure, your roommate's opinion may be based on sound interpretation. But this basis needs to be added to your cite for it to gain the kind of credibility that the interpretation of the above author on Kant derives from her demonstrated mastery of the whole text. What matters here, by the way, is not whether...

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...

I think you are over-reading Oliver Leaman's point. He was contrasting philosophers to historians, pointing out that the latter can rely on a wealth of facts while the former cannot. So I believe he was referring to empirical facts ascertainable by observation, such as facts about bullets and bodies found underground beneath a Civil War battlefield. Such empirical facts constrain disagreement among historians (preventing historians from arguing that the battle was fought with swords and spears, for example). No such empirical facts constrain disagreements among philosophers - or so Leaman may plausibly be taken to have opined. This claim is less sweeping and fully compatible with your suggestions that there are truths in philosophy. This suggestion seems right to me. Some philosophical arguments are sound, others unsound. Some philosophical positions are coherent, others incoherent. Some philosophical objections are decisive, others fail. It would be quite natural to say that such truths express...

How about sending them Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World ? It's been very popular and very effective in the sense you intend.

Well, if THE objective in life really is to make money without too much effort, then indeed there isn't much use for philosophical inquiries -- there are better ways of earning money than by being a philosopher. But is earning a living in the best way really the (one and only) objective in life? I think most people would say that there are other important objectives as well: love, religion, friendship, music, sports, and so on -- but of course people have different views about what matters and how much. So here philosophy comes in, helping us to think clearly and wisely about what matters in life. Perhaps earning an easy living is really the best way to live. But wouldn't you want to think about this, and the alternatives, a bit before you commit yourself to such a life?

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....

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...

Yes; and I would distinguish two kinds of such aesthetic appreciation. Some philosophers are very good writers, and it is simply wonderful to read them -- some of my favorites are Plato, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Bernard Williams. And in some cases the problem posed or argument presented is stunning in the unity, elegance, or sublimity it attains. I would once more list Plato and Hobbes as examples here, but also some of the less appealing writers such as Kant (e.g., the second analogy of experience) or Rawls (the thought experiment of the original position). This latter kind of aesthetic appreciation is closely related to recognizing a work as philosophically powerful.