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Love

Is love selfish? I cannot be in a relationship because I think I have discovered that love is selfish. Consider my argument. Premises: I choose not to be selfish. I choose to reason logically. What does it mean to love? Does it mean satisfying your wants more than those of your lover, or the other way round? IF it means satisfying the wants of your lover more than your own, then you would react in the following way: If your lover deserts you willingly and decides to be with somebody else, you would be happy for your lover and not be jealous (since by being happy for your lover, you are satisfying his/her wants and not opposing them). On the other hand, IF to love means satisfying your own wants more than those of your lover, then you would react in the following way: If your lover deserts you willingly and decides to be with somebody else, you would be upset and jealous. Which way would you react? Assuming you are upset and jealous, then you are selfish. However, such selfishness is needed for a...

I think there is a difference between being selfish and recognizing that one has one's own legitimate interests. For example, when I play cards with someone I generally want to win, although I recognize the perfectly acceptable motives of my friends to win also. If I am in love with someone I do want them to be happy, but not at my expense, and since I have my own interests here I am entitled to pursue them. Should I be happy for someone with whom I am love and who was in love with me to break off their relationship with me if they think this would make them happier? No, since although I do not selfishly seek to keep them bound up with me forever, it is in my interests perhaps to continue the relationship I originally had, if I can, since it is a relationship that I enjoy. If I become convinced that the other person no longer has anything like his or her original feelings then it becomes increasingly implausible to keep the relationship up, of course. Here we reach the nub of the issue, because it is...
Religion

What is all this mystery about God? The secrecy? If the guy exists, why doesn't he show himself - VISUALLY - to us? Anne, age 13

Perhaps he does, but not in the way that ordinary people show themselves to each other. After all, I believe in your existence but all I have as evidence is your message to the group. Does the fact that you are not visually present to me make you mysterious? I don't think so, and believers often claim to find evidence of God's presence in the everyday world around us. I would turn the question around and ask you why you think sight is so significant. Do you only believe things you can directly see? If so, then you surely fail to believe many things that normally are believed by human beings. That does not mean you are wrong, of course, but it does mean that most of the rest of us are, since for most people existence does not depend on visibility.
Business
Religion

To what extent should an organisation or company aligned with a religious order be subject to general employment law? For example, in a general workplace, if someone became pregnant outside of marriage, there would be no issue in terms of their employment/maternity rights, etc. However, if someone works for a church organisation and the church believes that sex before marriage is wrong, condoning this scenario would be contrary to the belief system in place. I believe that any religion-based discrimination is wrong but I was wondering how one might philosophically justify this sort of dilemma.

Discrimination is wrong if it has no basis in a solid ethical reason for treating people differently, so I don't think you are right in saying that "any religion-based discrimination is wrong". A religion is entitled to take a negative view of a particular sort of behaviour and then to discriminate against the actor, and the distinction you draw between religious groups and others is not that relevant here. I work for a secular and public university in America, but could not insist on my right to lecture in German, for instance, if the reasonable expectation is that I would teach in English, nor to invite students for tutorials at 4 am, when the working hours of the institution are different. Nor do I think I could display in my office pornographic images or fly a swastika flag from my window. Why not? Because as you say "this scenario would be contrary to the belief system in place". Here we need to distinguish between minor and major deviations from the norm. The former is alright while the latter...
Happiness

Much of philosophy seems to be concerned with one's world view and the stemming pursuit of happiness through various means, but is there any reason to strive for happiness? Other than the fact that we all want it, just because humans want it, is that the only reason we strive for it? Because, if so, there are other things that we are built do which we should theoretically strive for, is not our desire for happiness just as valid? Is there any reason not to live in pain, other than the fact that it creates unpleasant memories? Is that not a rather weak reason for existence (simply to create pleasant memories or because that is what we have evolved to do)?

Some philosophers have argued that happiness is the ultimate aim of everything we seek to do, not because we are programmed in that way, but because it is only rational to aim for something if we think it is going to have some sort of result in terms of happiness. I suppose that is not a bad way of telling the difference between people who are mad and those who are not. The former often do things which we just cannot link with any conception of happiness, while the latter behave in ways we can understand. As I am writing this response I am eating an apple, and if someone were to ask me why, and I replied because I dislike eating apples, it would be difficult to know how to understand why I am then doing it. You suggest that it is rather weak to prefer something that makes you happy rather than something painful, and that the difference is to be understood in terms of a distinction in memories. But it seems to me that there is nothing "weak" about my decision now to eat an apple, given that I like apples...
Ethics

I know it is considered an abuse of free speech to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater. But, should it also be considered an abuse of free speech to shout "Satan!" in a crowded fundamentalist church (supposing, for argument's sake, that doing so would engender a similar response)? How much does the universality or non-universality of the mindset of the people affected determine the wrongness of this action? A similar, but more personal situation is that my father, a WWII veteran, suffered from "shell shock" (a type of post-traumatic stress), yet a neighbor thought it amusing to set of loud fireworks not far from our house on Independence Day even after being informed of the distress it caused, and cited his right (probably a speech-related right) to do so. Are we obligated to take into account non-universal mindsets when determining if the right to free speech applies? What properties of certain mindsets in such cases would give them priority over free speech rights? The Danish cartoon case is the...

I think the difference between the Danish cartoons and your father's relationship with the fireworks is based on the traditional liberal distinction between harm and offense. Your father was harmed by the fireworks and it was wrong of your neighbor to let them off. People may be offended by the Danish cartoons, but they are not harmed by them. Of course, it might be argued that if there are riots and people are targetted for murder as a result of the cartoons then they do harm people. We then have to balance the potential harm with the good of allowing free speech. It seems clear that it is a good to allow people to express their critical views of other religions and their followers, if we are to encourage an open attitude to those religions and their founders. This is not the issue with someone crying "Fire" in a theater, no critical views are produced and no debate is thereby stimulated. Similarly with the fireworks on Independence Day.
Ethics
Love

I am in love (or as convinced of it as I've ever been), but the woman I love is my best friend. This situation leaves me in emotional ruin after every time we see each other. I am sure that she is not romantically interested in me. What I need to know is: to what extent am I obligated to make my feelings clear to her, even if doing so runs the risk of damaging our friendship?

I don't think you are in any way obligated to make your feelings known, since we are not obliged to tell someone we know everything we think about them. For example, there might be things about a person who is a friend yet which we do not like, and we are not obliged to make this known to them, and many friendships and indeed more romantic relationships would collapse were perfect frankness to be pursued. There is something rather exciting about unrequited love and also noble about remaining silent in a situation where the object of love is unaware of one's feelings. It might not be much of a consolation, but it is worth reflecting on how banal a relationship can be when both parties are in love with each other, while by contrast where one is and the other is not all sorts of interesting possibities arise.
Color

When trying to imagine a completely new colour, similar to those that already exist in brightness - a basic new colour - but one that has never been percieved before - it is antaginizingly impossible. Is this merely a demonstration of the determinism of reality - that there is what there is, and nothing more?

This is one of the issues that perplexed Wittgenstein in his work on colour. The fact that there just seem to be the colours that there are looks like a synthetic a priori proposition, necessary in some sense, but describing matters of fact. Yet colours have often been taken to be good examples of what empiricist philosophers called secondary qualities, features of reality that may be experienced in different ways by different people. How then can we lay down as a rule that there will be no other colours? Wittgenstein argues to a degree that we have this colour system and it is fixed in the way it is right now, and so thinking about new colours does not really make sense within the framework of that colour system. But then he also argues that we could not make sense of the idea of people going to the moon, given our system of physics, and not only can we make sense of this, it has even happened. It rather depends on whether you think that our colour system is an interconnected network of meanings that...
Philosophy
Religion

What is the difference between philosophy and religion? I am attending a weekly "Philosophy Class" but the group does not study any of the Philosophers or their works nor do we "philosophize", i.e. pick holes in philosophical statements, etc. We are read lines from the Upanishads and from the "teachings" of an Indian teacher and we are expected to accept these "teachings" as fact. The "teachings" include stories such as that of a woman had reached a high level on the path to realisation (after many re-incarnations of living spiritual lives) and had reached a state where fear was eliminated and she lived a life of bliss. Surely it would not be practical or possible to live a life where fear is eliminated. Is the emotion of fear not essential for survival? Also is life not a series of experiences of pain and pleasure? In any case if we question the teacher we are given his explanation of the story which we are expected to accept. Is this a Religion Class as opposed to a Philosophy class? We meditate...

Sounds rather a cool class to me! You have indeed raised a number of what are certainly philosophical questions, and it is a shame if the class is not going to consider them. It sounds as though your teacher is not perhaps that interested in those sorts of issues, though, so what I should do is stick at it, learn as much as you can of the system that is being expounded, and then you will have a solid grasp of many of the aspects of the philosophical approach on which it is based. You can go on, probably somewhere else, to consider those from a more critical perspective, and your sound understanding of the Upanishads and the commentaries on them will then provide you with much interesting subject matter.
Philosophy

My first question on this site: What questions should we put to philosphers? One of Kalynne's suggestions: You might ask what makes an answer to a given question a good one. Thanks, Kalynne! My question now: Are there some common parameters by which the "correctness" of an answer can be judged? I mean apart from logical coherence and factual accuracy, what else? I have a feeling that there is some textbook/weblink which has the answer for this. If yes, pls direct me to it.

Alas, if it were that simple life would indeed by kind. But the answers to philosophical questions are very difficult to judge, especially given the variety of types of philosophy that prevail. What some philosophers would regard as the epitome of clarity others might see as evasive and banal. I am not at all sure that logical coherence or factual accuracy are valued by all philosophers, and of course it might be also that different philosophers have different conceptions of what they are anyway.
Philosophers
Philosophy

Dear Philosophers, I often hear philosophers say William Shakespeare, Thomas Paine, Robert Ingersoll, Einstein, etc. are not philosophers, but great thinkers. All of these people have done work, or presented ideas that have deep philosophical meaning that changed the way we view the world. Why are they not philosophers?

It is always difficult to be precise about who is a philosopher, since one would not want the term to be so broad that it includes everyone, or so narrow that it excludes many thinkers. I suppose when they are referred to as raising philosophical questions it is a reflection of the issues they develop, as opposed to the ways in which they do it. So for example while Shakespeare clearly raises a whole range of important topics in his plays and poems about love, faithfulness, truth, sincerity, luck etc. he does not go on to analyze them or deal with them in any recognized philosophical manner. Perhaps that is why millions go to watch his plays and read his poems every year, in marked contrast with the sort of interest created by philosophers!

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