Appreciation (as in appreciation of music, poetry or visual arts) concerns a subject that has become central for a certain, large public and a fair amount of books and articles are devoted to the subject. This notwithstanding, appreciation has received scarce attention from philosophers. It could be that my literature search has not been thorough enough in which case: could you point out for me philosophers that have dealt with appreciation? If I am right, and philosophers do not consider appreciation a worthy subject: could you point out possible reasons? Thanking you for your attention, Jorge D. G.

Aesthetic appreciation means well-informed, skilled and close attention to a work of art, all of which can be improved by various types of education. It may be that philosophers of aesthetics tend to not use the word 'appreciation', but the constituent ideas are certainly important. Have a look at previous answers on this site under the heading of 'art': quite a few of them concern context, culture or knowledge.

Is it possible to 'see' existence (the world) without any bias? Can a lack of bias be considered a bias or just another perpective? Is there a 'true' way to see the world?

'Bias' here might mean 'a distortion of thought caused by the nature of thought being something essentially different from what is thought about'. This notion of bias is discussed in Professor Lipton's answer above. However, a related but not identical definition of 'bias' is 'preconceptions; or thoughts that in some way "colour" my presentations of the world'. Thus, we might accuse a judge in a court case of being ‘biased’ if we believe they have preconceptions (attitudes that are in place prior to hearing the specific evidence in the case) about the guilt or innocence of the defendant. Similarly, a political reporter would be ‘biased’ if their existing political beliefs influenced their reporting. In this case, not being biased would mean being objective. Now, it is difficult to be objective in this way, to be sure; also, we might claim that striving for such impartiality is something like a duty for judges and reporters. However, consider the following admittedly extreme case. I am a...

Pride gets a bad rap in theology and folk wisdom: It's one of the Seven Deadly Sins, and we are told that "Pride goeth before a fall". But it seems to me that a lack of pride can be just as bad, too. And some forms of pride can be good. The belief that some things are beneath one's dignity might keep one from committing certain immoral acts or lapsing into certain degrading conditions. Isn't pride a capacious category that contains both beneficial forms (such as self-respect) and pernicious forms (such as arrogance and egotism)?

I do agree with you; a measure of self-esteem is essential. The problem may be a simple one: 'pride' in modern English has an ambiguity about it, meaning both to be perfectly acceptably pleased about one's achievements, but it also means to be too proud. In previous centuries, however, this ambiguity was not so marked, and the primary meaning was the latter. That simple answer, though, still leaves us with the problem of when does the morally acceptable mode of pride shade over into the unacceptable. I’ll suggest, sketchily, a couple possible solutions. One answer might be when the prideful state has moral consequences: when for example my prideful state leads me to side-step moral rules and be hurtful to others. Still another answer would be when pride is vain; that is, when it is unjustified. The reason why this might be considered unacceptable is that it violates the moral regard I should have to myself. If I can be said to have a moral duty to myself, a duty to care for and...

If one accepts the premise that human beings are, a priori, ends unto themselves, and not means to ends, can any form of economy be considered moral? In communism, the good of the whole outweighs the good of the individual, although one could argue that for the whole to maximize its good, the individual would need to maximize his or her good. In capitalism, I am inclined to say that each individual is treated as an end, and not a means, through the exchange of mutually acceptable value equivalents (money, labor, being the key ingredients). But aren't we also assuming that another person will be a means to our ends (by selling you my goods, I gain energy in the form of whatever you give me, and you gain the goods for a price, each of us thus engaging in a form of means to an end)? Is it moral to allow two people to use each other as means to their own ends, even if they do so freely? And can we even argue that in a free society, persons engaing in commerce do so freely? are they not bounded by the...

An excellent set of questions. What needs to be clarified first is what does it mean for a person to be an 'end' in themselves? The most common way of defining this, coming from Kant, is roughly as follows. (I am paraphrasing pp. 63ff in the Groundwork.) All actions have ends (sometime translated as ‘purposes’) – that is, all actions have something they are trying to achieve. This end is, in Kant’s language, the ground of the determination of the law of the action. Or, in other words, the end I have in mind makes my action meaningful and indeed tells me what to do in order to reach it. What is merely on the way to the end is a means. Where the end is entirely conditioned by (that is, has worth only through) incentives that may be individual to me, then Kant calls the principle of action ‘material’. Where the end is, however, of such a type that it is posited as valuable independently of any incentive I may have – where it is universality and objectively worthy – then he says the principle of...

Is it wise to purchase insurance? For example, if I buy auto insurance, then I'm betting that I will be in an accident, and that the insurance payout will be worthwhile, notwithstanding the amount I will have paid in premiums. The insurance company is betting that the amount I pay in premiums will outweigh what they pay me in the event of a claim. Given that they have a lot of actuaries and other smart folks working on this, shouldn't I assume that they are right? I.e., does the fact that someone very smart is willing to sell me insurance count as a reason not to buy the insurance?

One buys insurance for any number of reasons, but the one to which you refer is to protect against a set of relatively improbable events, but events that should they happen would have a devastating effect upon you (or your next of kin!). We can define 'devastating' as meaning: having an effect that is of a different order to the effect of paying the premium. Because the insurance company deals in probabilities across millions of cases, the rationality of selling the policy is simply a mathematical calculation. But for an individual, the rationality involved it is not merely mathematics, but an appraisal of what is too valuable to risk. Thus, the insurance salesperson and I can both be 'smart'. Suppose I pay a premium of $100 for accident insurance. I have an accident, and the hospital bills are $500,000. The odds against having such an accident are 10000 to 1. So, a good deal for the insurance company who, averaged across many thousands of policies, will make a profit. But also a good deal for me,...

I suspect concepts like fate, destiny, happenstance, kismet, etc. are meaningless and, worse, misleading to non-critical thinkers but I find myself using expressions involving luck or lucky all the time! 'Luckily another bus turned up so I wasn't late.' It seems to be the same thing as fate, etc. but seems unavoidable and even useful in everyday speech. Is there any difference, or is it just a linguistic convention? No one would say 'A causal chain of events extending back to the Big Bang led to another bus showing up.' Thanks to you all for a fascinating site.

You should have a look at answers on this site under the heading of Probability, but briefly: Yes, 'lucky' is a useful and meaningful concept in everyday language. It means: something that I judge relatively unlikely happened that I judge useful to me. It differs from a concept like fate because we are talking about measurable and widely-understood probabilities, and not mysterious chains of events reaching back centuries. It is important that it happen to me, of course; the guy standing next to me at the bus stop may have felt very unlucky. He was hoping there wouldn't be a bus, and then he would have an excuse for not showing up at some boring philosophy lecture.

How do we know our right hand from our left hand when there is literally nothing that can be said about one which cannot be said about the other? -ace

Two important historical discussions of this problem. First, Leibniz in the Third Letter to Clarke, par.5. Interestingly, Leibniz asks whether the entire cosmos could be reversed (its handedness changed). Second, Kant, Prolegomena , par. 13, where he calls handed object 'incongruent counterparts'. In both cases, the question is on what grounds, if any, the distinction could be made.

How much does competition, fashion, etc. influence academic philosophy?

How is it that philosophers make their views know to others? By lecturing at a University, for one. But here we have competition for students: Universities with each other, and between departments over students. The student-customer has to make a choice where and what to study. So, in order to be able to lecture, the philosopher must enter into and have some success in competition. Still more so with publishing: since publishers are in competition, the authors must likewise. However, does this competition necessarily influence what philosophers say and think, or just how they market themselves? That is not so clear. Fashion is more difficult still. It certainly often looks like there are philosophical bandwagons that roll rapidly for a few years or decades. No doubt the element of competition is important here: a young PhD student will want to write on a topic that is likely to get him or her a job. But the latest idea in philosophy may be attractive not merely because it is new, or because...

In ethics, philosophers spend much time trying to figure out what is moral and immoral. My question is, why should we necessarily be moral? Where does this obligation to be moral come from or why do we have this obligation?

The answer (which you won't like at all) is this: morality can be defined roughly as 'what I should do'. So, asking the question 'why should I be moral?' is equivalent to asking 'why should I do what I should do?' It answers itself, in much the same way as 'what colour is that red thing?'. Well, that's not very interesting. Much more interesting is the second version of your question: why is there moral obligation at all? That is the question which, in a hundred variations, has been worrying philosophers for thousands of years. Surprisingly, perhaps, very few philosophers have concluded by saying that there are no moral obligations whatsoever, nor any obligations remotely akin to them. (Even Nietzsche, who is often misunderstood on this point, speaks about virtues and duties as well as concepts like gift-giving and friendship.) You'll find several more satisfying answers among the responses to 'ethics' questions on this site: http://www.amherst.edu/askphilosophers/topic/Ethics

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