As with other great works in the history of philosophy, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason -- the single greatest work of philosophy ever written, in my view -- is valuable more for the questions it poses and the ways it develops for pursuing these questions than for the answers. These questions and methods are understood and reflected in the best work done by philosophers today. Still, much current work in philosophy is not at this level -- mistakes of the kinds Kant exposed are still frequently made, esp. ones that are so "natural" to our ordinary ways of thinking. (For example, it is very natural to believe that you just know the temporal order of the events in your mental life ... until someone presses you to explain how a being with a plurality of mental items in her mind could possibly get from these the notion of time and some specific ordering of her mental items in time.) Kant explored so much new ground in this book, pioneering the language needed in this exploration as he went along...

Such crimes in jails cannot be avoided completely -- at least not without utterly draconian and inhumane isolation of inmates. So the state should be held responsible for the statistical excess: for that fraction of the in-jail crime rate that is reasonably avoidable. In the US, this excess is abnormally large. And in the US the responsibility of the state -- and this is us : taxpayers and citizens eligible to vote -- is further aggravated by the fact that the excess is deliberate. We consider vulnerability to in-jail crime to be part of an offender's punishment, and we also use the prospect of in-jail crime to extract cooperation and confessions from suspects. (The cops in Law & Order routinely tell male suspects that, if they won't cooperate, they'll be sent to a jail where they will be "someone's girlfriend." To be sure, with my sheltered life, I have never heard this from a real cop in a real-life situation. But I think that, based on our reading of the news, we can be fairly sure that...

1. Yes, there is much interesting philosophical work on modern art. I would start with Arthur Danto, who has written many interesting essays (often for the Nation ) and a few fascinating books on the topic. 2. The term aesthetics i s certainly applied to music -- see Theodor Adorno and currently Lydia Goehr and Peter Kivy for example -- as well as to poetry. Less frequently to literature, but this is presumably because there aesthetic quality is typically a less important component of overall quality (esp. outside fiction). 3. "Logic" is perhaps not quite the right word for what you have in mind here. Perhaps "rules"? I would think that aesthetic judgments are intuitive judgments, and that any rules laid down for composition or appreciation have standing only insofar as they are confirmed by intuitive judgments. (Intuitive judgments may differ, as they did in respect to the atonal works of Arnold Schönberg, for instance, and judgments about rules will then differ correspondingly.) To...

There are the classic authors: Plato, Rousseau, and John Dewey. Among contemporaries, I would name Nicholas Burbules (pragmatist), Harvey Siegel (analytic philosopher), and Joseph Dunne (Gadamerian). Given your background in political science, you might also want to look at Paulo Freire for critical pedagogy and at Meira Levinson's The Demands of Liberal Education . This is a really well-written book on the education of personal autonomy in liberal society. For placing the philosophy of education into the wider context of political thought, you might look also at Amy Gutman's work. Formerly a political scientist, she is now President of the University Pennsylvania.

It's worth distinguishing two very different kinds of nationalism or, more broadly, partiality. The first is well-expressed by "my country right or wrong". Here the agent is a nationalist or patriot by putting the interests (crudely conceived) of a certain group above those of others and above morality. With the second kind of nationalism or partiality, the agent puts an especially high value on the moral quality of a certain group or of certain special others. To illustrate, consider how a parent may respond to the discovery that her son has stolen toys from a little store in the neighborhood. Family partiality of the first kind may lead the parent to help ensure that the theft is not discovered (even while this parent would not give similar help to stealing children of another household). Family partiality of the second kind may lead the parent to ask the son to bring the toys back and to apologize to the shopkeeper (even while this parent would make no effort to impart such a character lesson to...

Yes: when the ends that matter to one are better served by suicide than by staying alive. Jan Palach killed himself to make a powerful point against the Soviet invasion of his country -- plausibly believing that nothing else he could have done would have had as great an effect (see question 1518). Victims of the Gestapo have killed (or tried to kill) themselves in order to avoid betraying their comrades. Admiral Chester Nimitz and his wife Joan killed themselves in old age, seeking to end their lives on their own terms rather than incapacitated in some medical facility. Each of these people had an end to which they gave more weight than to their own survival -- the end of ending Soviet domination, the end of defeating the Nazis, the end of dying on one's own terms. There is nothing irrational in ranking these ends above an additional period of life for oneself.

Reading your "should" as alluding to what you owe the rest of us, I think there is no obligation either way. Perhaps some utilitarians would hold that you have a duty to maximize the general happiness, even by turning heads and upgrading others' visual fields. But such an assertion is more plausibly taken as a reductio ad absurdum of these brands of utilitarianism than as informative about your obligations. Reading your "should" as alluding to what it makes most sense for you to do, the answer depends in part on your ends and ambitions. Dressing up, you'll have a lot of silly boys and guys chasing you, which can become tedious rather quickly. Still, some of these will have money, power, connections -- and you may feel in need for one or more of these. Continuing your current practice will make you less discouraging to people who are interesting, and interested in you, in other ways; and it will also give you more time to interact with them. This is likely to make your life better, richer, than...

There are well worked-over philosophical questions about whether moral propositions have truth values and whether the things referred to in such propositions (duties, virtues, rights, and so on) are discovered or invented or (like irrational numbers) constructed. I assume that these are not the questions you are raising. On this assumption, the answer is yes. It is likely that people after us will be committed to certain moral propositions for very good reasons that we do not yet know or understand. This is likely from the history of moral thought which has yielded such new good reasons numerous times. (All this is closely analogous to what I would say about science and mathematics: It is very likely that new good reasons for holding certain empirical/mathematical propositions will emerge because the emergence of such new good reasons has been a consistent companion of scientific/mathematical inquiry and reflection.) Your question may be motivated by the thought that the subject matter of morality...

I'm a little uncomfortable with the idea of a "right to feel indignant" and a right that varies in magnitude. So can we just repharase this in terms of it being more or less appropriate for you to feel indignant? The issues you raise are very important. They play a large if poorly understood role in ordinary moral thinking and they are almost entirely neglected by philosophers. In response to your first question, I would say: almost always. When you have never wronged the person who is now wronging you, then you can express this fact in your indignation: "What have I ever done to you that you are treating me this way?" That you are able to say this makes your indignation more appropriate and its expression more forceful. When you are unable to say it, your indignation is correspondingly less compelling than it would otherwise be. The only possible exceptions I can see are cases where the present wrong she commits against you is way out of proportion to the wrong you committed against her. You...

Perhaps a more accurate modern translation would be: "Only a desire can motivate by itself, a belief can motivate only in conjunction with a desire." The Humean's response to your query would be: The belief that some action will give you pleasure can motivate you only if you desire to experience, or desire not to experience, that pleasure. In conjunction with the former desire, the belief will motivate you to perform the action. In conjunction with the latter, it will motivate you to desist. In the absence of either desire, the belief will have no effect on your motivation.