Dear philosophers, I have 2 questions: 1. Do you believe that it is morally permissible for an unmarried person (who has no children to care for) and who has battled depression for many years to commit suicide ? 2. What is your opinion of Liberalism which asserts that a person's life belongs only to them, and no other person has the right to force their own ideals by which that life must be lived ? Thanks, William

William, I will try to answer both of your questions, but I especially wanted to answer the first one. I suffered from depression for most of my life, and considered, in a very personal way, the question you have asked. Forgive my presumption, but I want to make sure that, if you are asking about this because you are contemplating suicide, you know that there are some very effective therapies now for depression. I am not referring just to drug therapies, although medication was crucial (and is crucial) to my recovery; talk therapy is important too. It is not always easy to find an effective and tolerable therapy regimen -- I tried two anti-depressants before I found one that worked -- so (again, excuse my presumption) if you have tried one or even two or three that have not helped, you may need to try another. If all this is irrelevant, then good. The ethical question you ask is a hard one, but I believe that a person who is suffering terribly and who has no reasonable prospect of gaining...

I find the philosophy of religion immensely interesting. Recently I watched a YouTube video in which a well known Christian philosopher/theologian, William Lane Craig, explained how the Anglo-American world had been "utterly transformed" and had undergone a "renaissance of Christian philosophy" since the 1960s (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=902MJirWkdM&feature=related [starts at around the 7:40 mark]). Do you agree with these statements? Moreover, how well respected is Dr. Craig? Is he generally viewed as a top notch philosopher? I also wonder whether the very best arguments on the atheistic side are really being discussed. It seems there is some disdain among philosophers regarding the so-called "new atheists": Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, etc. Who are the top contemporary atheists working in philosophy today? I'd really be interested in reading some of their work. I would really appreciate multiple perspectives on these questions. Thanks a lot.

This isn't going to be a response from a different perspective from Peter Smith's, but I have a little information to add. First of all, William Lane Craig has debated a lot of philosophers over the last fifteen or so years, including a couple of the contributors to Philosophers Without Gods (Edwin Curley, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, and myself). I won't try to give the roster for fear of offending someone I've left out -- but you can find some transcripts of some of the debates on Craig's website: http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/menus/debates.html (Mine didn't make the cut! If you're interested, you can watch it through the Veritas Forum: http://www.veritas.org/media/talks/639 ) . Craig's debate with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong became a book: God? A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist (Oxford University Press) and Sinnott-Armstrong has another book on the relation between religion and ethics: Morality Without God (also Oxford). Robert Garcia and Nathan King...

What is it that seems constantly to put philosophers in a position where they are compelled to justify their work? Even if we accept such asinine criticisms as that philosophy is impractical, say, why aren't people similarly critical of literature or other fields in the humanities? What is it about philosophy in particular that seems to get under peoples' skin?

Well, of course, everyone on this panel loves philosophy, so we're probably not the best people to ask. But here are some speculations. First of all, philosophy deals with questions that a lot of people find tremendously important: what happens after death? what gives life value? is there a God? what is consciousness? So many people --many students -- come to philosophy with high hopes, and with expectations. But second, it turns out that these questions are extremely difficult to answer -- indeed, they turn out to be difficult to even ask . The process of clarifying the issues, breaking down the questions into sub-questions, reviewing answers that others have proposed, taking account of new information -- all this can seem very tedious, and very far removed from the original questions that seemed so pressing and so interesting. People who devote their careers to thinking about these questions --academic philosophers, for the most part -- necessarily specialize andfocus, and their...

Do grades during high school and university show the ability of a person to think? Can someone who does not have immaculate grades still be an excellent philosopher? Or is the success of a student in school directly related to their ability to think in a critical way that is required by philosophers?

Strong performance in a rigorous college-level philosophy class is a good positive indicator of philosophical talent, but poor grades, whether in college or in high school, cannot generally be taken as evidence that a person lacks philosophical talent. The reason is that there are just way too many reasons why a student might do poorly in the classroom that have nothing to do with philosophical ability. I know of at least a couple prominent philosophers who were indifferent -- or, in one case, lousy -- students until they discovered philosophy, and were really grabbed by it. Some students are handicapped by depression, stress, or other personal difficulties, and do not do their best work. Many students are just not that into school, or don't care about grades. Another thing that makes it difficult to predict who will make a good philosopher is that there are lots of different ways one can be a good philosopher. I spoke above of "philosophical talent," but there's really no particular...

My question deals with consciousness. I believe I understand what it means for me to be conscious of what is occurring around me, but I have the feeling that a lot of this depends on what I believe to be the consciousness of what is occurring (perhaps in an abstract form) around me or a result of something that is or had been conscious in some manner at one time. As am example of what I am attempting to describe, would I even take note of a person in my line of sight if something about that person (could be a very simple thing such as a glance from that person in my direction, the shoes he or she is wearing, or the waves of the ocean) that was somewhere along the line a conscious act of that person or of nature. And then could this be projected to a building or a tree since the tree is a living thing and the building was constructed by people. I know there is a certain vagueness about this question but I do not know how to put it in a more definite form.

Maybe you asking what it is about a thing you observe that brings you to the conclusion that that thing is a conscious being, say, a person? If that's the question, here's the answer. You can rely on a couple of kinds of evidence: the way the individual looks (like a human being), the way the individual behaves (agents' trajectories through space appear to violate the laws of physics: they can start moving and then just stop and change direction without there being any external force), and the fact that the individual displays behavior (like speaking or gesturing or wearing clothes) that appears to be meaningful. Individual things displaying one or more of these signs very likely are conscious beings. Buildings and trees do not display these signs, so there is no reason to take them to be conscious beings. (The fact that the building was made by a conscious being doesn't seem to me to provide any reason whatsoever to think that it is itself conscious -- I don't know what you have in mind there....

Why does it seem that everything that I read in philosophy always uses "she" or "her" instead of "his" or "he"?

A suggestion: let's use the plural indefinite "they", like we all do when we're talking: "If anyone wanted the last piece of cake, they should have spoken up." That's what I do, but I have to have fights with editors about it.

Does Peter Singer really advocate/defend infanticide under certain circumstances? I recently read that he argues that parents should be able to abort mentally handicapped newborns or even to have a thirty day waiting period with which to decide whether or not they want to keep the child. Is this true and if so does this show a progression of the pro-choice stance on abortion extending beyond the womb?

I don't know if this is Singer's view or not. I just want to respond to the suggestion that the view "shows a progression of the pro-choice stance on abortion extending beyond the womb." Do not buy the facile and cynical "slippery slope" argument advanced by some unscrupulous people that holds that any principle that justifies abortion in any circumstances will lead inexorably to a validation of heinous practices like murder of unwanted children or elderly adults. The term "pro-choice" refers to a particular political position: it is the position that the decision whether to continue a pregnancy should be made the pregnant person, not the government. People who are pro-choice do not necessarily agree on the morality of abortion -- they do not all agree on the conditions in which abortion is morally permissible, and they may not even agree that abortion is ever morally permissible. (Many members of the organization Catholics for Free Choice believe on theological grounds that abortion...

What makes a philosopher a Philosopher? Isn't a philosopher just an opinion of someone who happens to get published?

Nobody owns the word "philosopher." It's used in many different ways, including "someone who ponders important, fundamental questions" and "someone who claims to ponder important, fundamental questions, but actually just screws around." In the use most common among academics, "philosopher" means someone who practices seriously the discipline of philosophy, whether published or unpublished, employed or unemployed. Merely having an opinion doesn't qualify you.

Many people would agree that to use the word "gay" as a term meaning "bad" is disrespectful, or even homophobic. Only slightly fewer people hold a similar view of the word "retarded." However, there are also people who take a stronger position, according to which words like "insane" and "lame" are similarly degrading and inappropriate (I've heard these words described as "ableist"). Although the stronger position strikes me as incorrect, I can't say why. Is there any way to draw a distinction between the use of words like "gay" and words like "insane" as generally pejorative terms? Or will we one day agree that all such usage is comparable to racist or sexist language? What is it exactly that makes such usage problematic?

Words have meanings, but they also have histories. The term "Paddy Wagon" is defined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as "an enclosed motortruck used by police to carry prisoners." That definition is adequate, if all you want to know is what people are talking about when they use that term. But if this definition is all you ever know about the term, you will be baffled by the fact that people of Irish descent usually take offense when they hear that term used. To understand why they have that reaction, you need to know where that expression came from. You need to know that "paddy" is a derogatory way of referring to an Irish person or a person of Irish descent, and you need to know that there used to be (and maybe still is) a stereotyped belief that people of Irish descent are more likely than others to drink heavily and to become rowdy and disorderly -- so disorderly that police must come and pick them up by the "wagon"-load. Originally, bigoted people who used the expression "paddy wagon" to...

I have a question concerning the gender of words that exist in many languages, except in English. What does the presence of grammatical gender in a language say about the mentality of its speakers? A different question is whether the features of a language reflect the characteristics of the societies where it's spoken in a largely unconscious and involuntary way. (Modern) Persian, spoken in Iran and Afghanistan, doesn't have the feature of grammatical gender (anymore), just as English. Many say that the languages that do have grammatical genders are sexist, and that they help to perpetuate the conviction that sex is a tremendously important matter in all areas. For Marilyn Frye, this is a key factor in perpetuating male dominance: male dominance requires the belief that men and women are importantly different from each other, so anything that contributes to the impression that sex differences are important is therefore a contributor to male dominance. Societies whose languages do not have...

As a matter of fact, there are some psychologists and psycholinguists investigating the very question you ask. Lera Boroditsky, at Stanford University, has data that suggest that speakers of languages that use broad gender marking do associate more feminine characteristics with things whose names are marked as feminine, and more masculine traits with things whose names are marked as masculine. You can read a summary of that research here: http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/gender.pdf She argues that these and other data show that language shapes thought. However, psycholinguists at U Penn (Lila Gleitman and John Trueswell), and at Delaware (Anna Papafragou) argue against the view that language shapes thought in this way. (Here's a link to a very readable paper by Gleitman and Papafragou on this topic: http://papafragou.psych.udel.edu/papers/Language%20and%20thought.pdf I don't think that Frye's case depends on how this particular debate comes out. Her point is that there are ...

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