I suspect, and this is confirmed by experience, that professional philosophers if anything change their minds somewhat less than other people. Your early experience with philosophy is that you change your mind all the time. As a learner, every new paper or book seems to have an unassailable and persuasive argument, and you feel yourself pushed all over the place in your views (at least on topics where you are malleable because you haven't already thought much about them - which connects to my point below). But professional philosophers have had the opportunity to read, absorb, and evaluate many many points of views and accompanying arguments. If they have got that far they have probably formed, or reinforced, their own views on very many topics, and those views are correspondingly harder to alter from outside. It is surprisingly difficult to get a philosopher to change his or her mind. That's not because they are especially stubborn (though some are; and also not to be underestimated is the factor that...

This is a very interesting issue. It seems clear on the one hand, as you say, that the thoughts that occur to us have a lot to do with who we are - many of the sorts of thoughts that occur to me won't occur to you and vice-versa. But on the other hand you're right to point to the involuntary aspect of how thoughts occur to us. So what seems to follow is that there is an involuntary part of the self - or some part of our mind that is out of our control, and that is a scary idea. It used to be said, and is sometimes still maintained, that creative inspiration actually comes from outside us altogether, perhaps from God. The scary thought can be softened by distinguishing our conscious from our unconscious mentality, and considering the relation between the two. For a start it is plausible that the items that exist in your unconscious mind, e.g. your belief about what you had for breakfast before I just made it conscious by bringing it to your attention, or your memories of your first love, or your...

What you're asking is whether there could be a philosophical perspective that argued against 'staying green'. Of course there could be. For example, someone might think that the predicted bad effects of climate change will mainly affect people who are not yet born, and that individual may additionally reason that we owe no moral duty to people who do not yet exist. In that case they will not be motivated to stay green - they may even think staying green is a bad thing all in all, since it means some short-term sacrifice of prosperity on the part of presently existing people. A bigger point is that philosophy is incredibly broad both in subject matter and range of views: that we find a view distasteful or morally wrong does not mean it cannot be a philosophical view. In fact, to the extent that the view *we* hold has philosophical underpinnings, opposing views are guaranteed to have philosophical underpinnings available as well. Whether either view has good philosophical reasons supporting it is another...