What impact has analytic philosophy had on American culture or its institutions outside of of the philosophy department of universities?

Is it wrong to profit off someone else's misfortune, even if your profit doesn't make them any worse? Suppose a hurricane hits a nearby town. If I travel to that town and sell batteries at a 300% markup, I can make a lot of money off of their misery, but I didn't cause them any misery. Is that still exploitation?

My psychology professor once told the class that power is a basic human motive. I asked the professor what was appealing about power and he responded that I was asking a philosophical question rather than a psychological question. I told him that my philosophy professor thinks that my questions are often psychological questions rather than properly philosophical questions. So is the question about why power is appealing a philosophical or psychological question and why is that? Also what is your answer about why power is desirable to people?

Since I live much closer to my parents than my other brothers (in terms of geography) do, do I have a greater moral duty to look after them once they'll be in need of assistance?

What is racism and why is it wrong?

Does anybody seriously believe that reality itself is merely a function of language, thought and social convention? Some postmodernists like to say this ("reality is socially constructed"), but I doubt any of them would be willing to drink arsenic that has been socially reconstructed into harmless water. Furthermore, if reality is a function of these other factors, then one could not expect anything unexpected to happen (in a reality that is a function of thought, why should a volcano suddenly erupt if nobody thought of it?); yet the unexpected clearly does happen. So why do people stick to extreme versions of anti-realism and constructivism, when more moderate positions that don't deny an external reality, yet still conserve the valuable aspects of postmodernism (understanding of culture, power structures, categorization and convention; deconstruction of beliefs & ideologies; interpretations of and assignment of meaning to natural phenomena; etc.), are perfectly reasonable and tenable?

You often hear statements like "90% of our communication is non-verbal", though the percentage tends to vary. What exactly do these statements mean? How can you quantify communication? Surely, non-verbal communication can't communicate 90% of abstract concepts or information. So what is communication? Do claims that most of communication is non-verbal make any real sense, or are these just cliché statements?

Chemists used to wonder why gasses tend to react with each other in small number ratios. But after the discovery of atoms, chemists have moved on to other questions. Are there any "dead questions" in philosophy? Are there any questions that were once up in the air, but are now moot or resolved?

Isn't the standard analysis of knowledge circular? Specifically, in order to establish that one knows P, under the standard analysis, one must establish that she has a belief in P, that the belief is justified, and that the belief is also true. It's this last element which seems to make the standard analysis circular. Namely, to assert that P is true seems the same as asserting that one knows that P is true. Thus, since the standard analysis seems to require, as an element of establishing knowledge of P, that P is true, and since asserting that P is true seems to be the same as an assertion that one knows P to be true, it seems that the standard analysis requires one to successfully assert knowledge of P (viz., that P is true) in order to establish one's knowledge of P (since the truth of P is an element of knowledge under the standard analysis). Can someone please clear up my confusion?

What is a variable and what function does it play in such quantified propositions as "There is at least a thing, x, such that x is F", or "Every x is such that it is F"? Does the variable refer to something in the world? Or does it refer only to things assigned to constants? In other words: does the variable stand for things or words? And if it stands for things, does it stand for named things or even for unnamed things?