Our panel of 91 professional philosophers has responded to

36
 questions about 
Literature
151
 questions about 
Existence
68
 questions about 
Happiness
4
 questions about 
Economics
2
 questions about 
Culture
287
 questions about 
Language
105
 questions about 
Art
75
 questions about 
Beauty
154
 questions about 
Sex
244
 questions about 
Justice
67
 questions about 
Feminism
284
 questions about 
Mind
75
 questions about 
Perception
54
 questions about 
Medicine
1280
 questions about 
Ethics
282
 questions about 
Knowledge
39
 questions about 
Race
110
 questions about 
Biology
170
 questions about 
Freedom
89
 questions about 
Law
27
 questions about 
Gender
134
 questions about 
Love
51
 questions about 
War
110
 questions about 
Animals
58
 questions about 
Abortion
31
 questions about 
Space
43
 questions about 
Color
117
 questions about 
Children
70
 questions about 
Truth
5
 questions about 
Euthanasia
24
 questions about 
Suicide
34
 questions about 
Music
96
 questions about 
Time
374
 questions about 
Logic
81
 questions about 
Identity
77
 questions about 
Emotion
23
 questions about 
History
574
 questions about 
Philosophy
69
 questions about 
Business
218
 questions about 
Education
58
 questions about 
Punishment
2
 questions about 
Action
88
 questions about 
Physics
32
 questions about 
Sport
221
 questions about 
Value
124
 questions about 
Profession
392
 questions about 
Religion
80
 questions about 
Death
208
 questions about 
Science

Question of the Day

Someone might reasonably think that the question what personal identity consists of is to be answered by psychology. So we can imagine looking at the formation of individuality over time, through childhood and on, and think we were answering the philosophical question what identity consists of. Clearly psychology cannot pre-empt the answer to the question whether, for example, the bodily criterion of identity is correct. There are a lot of other examples to choose from. The one I am most interested in at the moment is perception. Perceiving, as Ryle points out, is not a process, but the termination of one, like scoring a goal, to use Ryle's example. You can't ask how long it took to perceive a goat, and you ask how long the scoring of a goal took. You can ask of course in a different way how long it took Aston Villa to score a goal - the whole of the first half, say. It took them forty-five minutes. But what about the actual scoring? That is as you might say instantaneous. It happens when the ball crosses the goal-line, whenever that is. I imagine it is the first moment at which any bit of the ball, no matter how small, enters the goal or has crossed the line.