Thanks for your good question! In answer to, "Do real philosophers go through this?", the answer is yes, definitely. Any intellectually challenging problem tends to make a person less able to get along practically. This has been observed as far back as in Ancient Greece with Aristophanes making fun of the philosophers in _The Clouds_. This is true of philosophy but I suspect it is equally true of other demanding fields like mathematics. Just as cell phone users tend to be unsafe drivers, philosophers who are deeply engaged with a problem do well to refrain from things like operating heavy machinery, perform surgery, operate microwaves, make marriage proposals, and so on. Most of use who have been through graduate school in philosophy have stories to tell about our professors who violated this rule. One of mine left his car engine running for four hours while he was in his office. Luckily for him the thing just ran out of gas rather than overheating. Anyway, I suggest you make your meals...

Thanks for your question. KCL is an excellent program. If your aspiration is to become a professional philosopher in a relatively traditional sense, meaning teaching and doing research in a university, then I'd say the best things to do are the following: 1. Read voraciously, and *actively*, so that you are always thinking of ways in which one might challenge the author's position. Think of reading philosophy as a conversation, not as an activity in which you're at the receiving end of information. 2. Surround yourself with other students who are passionate about philosophy and spend lots of time discussing issues--before or after class, in pubs, on walks, etc. At least half of what you'll learn is in conversation with peers. 3. Make sure that at least six days/week, you have three or four hours of uninterrupted thinking time to read and/or write about philosophy. (Writing is a central part of your craft, and you should be doing it constantly. And then do it some more.) 4. Go...

You're not the first one to observe a negative correlation between being an eminent philosopher and being married! If there's an explanation for this, I suppose my armchair sociology would lead me to expect it has to do with the fact that philosophy is both fascinating and challenging, and has a way of making its practitioners obsessive. In this way, it's perhaps a bit like mathematics. Both are topics that it's quite hard to just forget when you leave the office or study. As a result, it might not be so much that the idea of a spouse leaves one cold, but that one doesn't have the energy to pay attention to a spouse after wrestling with a philosophical problem for days or months. On the other hand, Berkeleywas married, Locke never married but was involved with Damaris Cudworth, and Mill was married. More recently, Quine and Rawls were married. At any rate, my point is that there are plenty of exceptions to your rule, and many of us who have savored philosophy also find great of appeal in...

As with any other academic discipline, limited resources (salary pools, tenure, endowed professorships and the like) make for competition. I doubt that philosophy as a field is more competitive than many others that are current. Further, when in the past philosophy was practiced outside of universities, competition could also be discerned just as was the case, at that time, in mathematics, astronomy, and other emerging fields. (Just think of how much European jealousy Ben Franklin provoked with his advances in the study of electricity.) However, I don't see that any of this justifies Schopenhauerian pessimism. Rather, the pervasive endeavor to improve on the work of others is, at least in some cases, motivated by the drive to get better answers to enduring questions. I don't see anything inappropriate about that. Of course it is possible to get caught up in the chase, and to get obsessed with what, in at least one translation, Plato refers to as "outdoing". On the other hand, a nagging...