I graduated this year with a philosophy B.A., and now I am cautiously considering grad school in philosophy. My professors think I have promise; for example, they have encouraged me to try to get a couple of my undergrad papers published. However, I know that, given the state of the philosophy job market, I would likely end up out of philosophy and underemployed if I pursue a PhD. Do I have a moral obligation to pursue a less risky but productive career?

I don't think that one has a moral obligation to pursue any particular career: one's obligation is to oneself, to pursue what one thinks will be a fulfilling, satisfying career, but what will count as fulfilling or satisfying is of course highly contingent on one's values, personality, etc.. Although you are quite right to note that the philosophy job market is quite tight at the moment, that is no reason not to pursue a philosophy PhD: after all, even if one were not to continue on in professional philosophy, the training one receives in a PhD program is highly portable and may thus be transferred to other professions. My recommendation is that you determine whether, if you were to pursue a PhD in philosophy but were not able to secure a job in the profession, you would still wish to pursue the PhD. If so, then you should apply to graduate school in philosophy; if not, then you should not apply to graduate school in philosophy. If you do apply to graduate school in philosophy, then you need to think...

The media frenzy and general public outcry arising from the acquittal of Casey Anthony has raised a major ethical issue:- If "everybody believes" that Casey was the person who killed her her child, was the jury wrong in concerning itself with the legal technicalities, such as the absence of any substantial evidence linking Casey to the murder. She claimed that her father was implicated in the child's death, and the jury considered him as a completely unsatisfactory witness, and that seemed to have given rise to the "reasonable doubt" that the jury had, and which ultimately caused them to opt for acquittal.

I think that the issue raised by the Anthony case is more directly bound up with the philosophy of law than with ethics more generally. Indeed, the justification for the verdict seems to reflect the nature of American law in particular, which holds that in a criminal case, guilt must be established "beyond a reasonable doubt." In the Anthony case, the inability of the prosecution to establish the cause of death was an especially important factor in the jury's verdict. What's crucial in this context, is the standard of evidence required for a guilty verdict, which is set quite high in order to try to give the accused the 'benefit of the doubt'. Regardless of whether all the evidence seems to point towards Anthony's guilt, the jury was quite right strictly to insist that guilt be established "beyond a reasonable doubt": this insistence does not reflect a misplaced concern with legal technicalities, but rather a commitment to the letter of the standard of evidence in American criminal trials. Despite...

Are philosophy conferences really hostile? I ask this because I was reading how there was a guy in a conference with his portable white board keeping score of who was winning. I also hear that you guys are vicious trying to pick arguments. Is this some type of philosopher bonding thing or are you guys really just hostile? hehe.

In my experience, among humanists, it is philosophers who ask the most pointed questions: although the questions posed by Anglo-American philosophers (things are different on the Continent, in my experience) are pointed, they are not necessarily hostile, and I have never heard of anyone keeping score so obviously! It is among many philosophers a point of pride that discussions are as focused and pointed as they are, although it is most surprising to other humanists (and in fact I have sometimes inadvertently ruffled feathers when I have raised questions in a talk given in another area of the humanities in a fashion that would be unremarkable in a philosophy conference or talk.) I myself have found that the level of hostility and tension in a conference or talk varies directly with the topic: while there are of course always exceptions, I have found that talks in the general area of metaphysics and epistemology are more tense than talks in subfields of the history of philosophy, ethics, or political...

Is human nature the subject of philosophy, or of the empirical sciences?

I myself am inclined to think that both philosophy and (certain) empirical sciences--including psychology--investigate human nature, although they investigate it in different ways. For example--and oversimplifying--the genetic differences between human beings and other animals can be investigated by biology; philosophy, however, can investigate whether there is some ultimate, natural end that all human beings seek, a question that does not seem to me to admit of resolution by natural science but squarely to fall within the province of philosophy. (Aristotle, for example, claims that 'all men by nature desire to know': I do not think that this claim admits of empirical confirmation or disconfirmation.)

What area of Philosophy currently has the most impact outside of philosophy? On things like neuroscience, literature, religion, maths etc.

I'll be very interested to see how other panelists respond to this question!! My first inclination is to respond that very few areas of philosophy--especially as it is practiced in the English-speaking world--impact areas outside of philosophy; if pressed, I would venture that although the influence of 'Continental' philosophy on literary interpretation and art history isn't anywhere near as great today as it was, say, even a decade, but especially two decades ago, it nevertheless continues to influence those fields to an extent unmatched by the influence of philosophy on any other fields of inquiry.

Why is there a universe, rather than nothing at all? Is this a question that shall never be answered by science?

Why is there something rather than nothing seems to me to be a quintessential example of a metaphysical question, one that cannot be answered by scientific investigation. It is logically possible that science might come to explain how the universe came into existence--although the information necessary in order to answer this question may well be inaccessible to us, so that the question is practically unanswerable, but even if we had that information, the question of WHY the universe came into existence seems to call for an answer beyond causes investigated by science and thus to lead directly to metaphysics (and religion).

A majority of feminists as I understand them argue that the per se enjoyment of the physical body and particularly the female form is a form of "objectification". I completely disagree because in my opinion the female form has aesthetic qualities that are not "object" like at all and are actually quite human and therefor the appreciation of the female form is not objectification. Are there feminists who agree with that stance?

Many philosophers committed to feminism are concerned with 'objectification', i.e., roughly, treating a person--often, as in this case and henceforth, a woman--as a thing in some way. While the concept of objectification is slippery, as noted in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the topic, from which I profited and which one can access by clicking here , the case you present is clear-cut. While there are senses of objectification that are akin to taking the female form as an object of aesthetic appreciation--such as the reduction of a person to her body or her appearance--the mere appreciation of the beauty of the female form in particular or of the human body in general does not seem to me, in and of itself, to constitute a form of objectification, and I would be surprised if it were indeed the case that the majority of feminists would consider the aesthetic appreciation of the human body to be a form of objectification. To be sure, if one rigorously and uniquely adopts an ...

When I see myself through Freudian glasses, my behaviors, fears, and understanding suddenly make sense. I can see how I might have repressed certain feelings which, as an adult, have led me to behave neurotically; and I can see how cultures, in order to deal with social anxieties, create political institutions and cultivate their own forms of art. When I think of the world from a Freudian perspective, everything makes sense. When I read theorists like Adorno and Horkheimer, Freud makes even more sense. But we're told that modern neuroscience has largely done away with Freud's ideas, or at least revised them so drastically that we wouldn't recognize them as belonging to Freud. What do we then do with the body of literature that seemed to clarify so much of our behavior, now that scientists are telling us that it's based on a pseudoscience? In particular, I'm reading Hermann Hesse's novel Demian right now. It mirrors my own experiences of growing up, searching for meaning, and trying to overcome the...

The great poet W. H. Auden wrote, in "In Memory of Sigmund Freud": "If often he was wrong and, at times, absurd To us is no more a person Now but a whole climate of opinion." Freud's 'deepening' of the mind is now, I think--and rightly so--part of our 'folk psychology': that is, we understand each other at least in part in terms of categories derived from Freud. If the existence of the unconscious does not admit of 'scientific' confirmation--as its critics allege--or if those criticisms rest on overly narrow conceptions of what scientific confirmation amounts to--as its defenders allege--the fact is, as Auden's poem and considerable other work testifies, we live now in a post-Freudian age, and we now understand ourselves in terms of categories inherited from Freud. It has been claimed that Freud's categories have no more relevance to lived experience than the Greek gods, in response to which I simply ask you to consider whether the testimony of your own experience counts for or against the...

Does certainty suggest or indicate truth?

I presume that in asking whether certainty suggests or indicates truth, you mean whether an agent's certainty about some proposition is a mark of its being true. If this is correct, then in order to answer the question, one needs to get clear about the kind of certainty at issue. It certainly does not seem to be the case that an agent's psychological certainty , or confidence, in some proposition, is a mark of its truth, since one can be confident about the truth of some proposition that isn't true. If the proposition, by contrast, is certain--if, for example, the proposition is a necessary truth, or a proposition that is the object of what Descartes in the Meditations calls the 'natural light', or reason, and hence can be said to be metaphysically certain, then the certainty of the proposition would indeed be a mark of its truth. It seems to me, however, that the propositions that we, as epistemic agents, are most interested in aren't metaphysically certain--_pace_ Descartes, I fear that we...

Dear Philosophers, I would like to ask whether there is any reasonable explanation why many after/today's philosophers rather refer to Descartes than to Leibniz. Although Descartes had influenced significantly new modern era in philosophical thinking, so did Leibniz. Moreover, Leibniz proved some imperfections in Descartes’ metaphysics. I mean both of them deserve our attention, yet in my opinion Leibniz is somehow still in Descartes’ shadow. Why is that? Thank you in advance for any tangible arguments or inspiring ideas. Kind regards, Pablo

There are many reasons why Descartes is taken as a reference point for early modern metaphysics and epistemology rather than Leibniz: I present a few. Descartes preceded Leibniz, and certain of Leibniz's philosophical innovations, and especially those in the philosophy of mind, were developed in response to Descartes, who continues to be referred to as 'the father of modern philosophy'. Many of Leibniz's most interesting philosophical works were not published during his lifetime--or even for many years after his death--and he wrote no single, magisterial statement of his views in metaphysics and epistemology like Descartes's Meditations , so it is somewhat more difficult to isolate Leibniz's views than it is to do so for Descartes. Although all professional philosophers are exposed to Descartes's Meditations --most likely, multiple times--over the course of their training, and may even teach the work itself, or at least parts of it, even if they are not specialists in the history of early modern...

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