Suppose someone in some remote corner of town is endowed with the gift of sublime philosophical wisdom and insight. When presented with centuries-old paradoxes s/he can simply see the correct answer. Think of him/her as the Susan Boyle of philosophy. Has Philosophy become so institutionalized that this person would have little to no chance of having his/her response heard in a respectable venue? What are the chances that this person might get the attention s/he deserved?

I have a question concerning the gender of words that exist in many languages, except in English. What does the presence of grammatical gender in a language say about the mentality of its speakers? A different question is whether the features of a language reflect the characteristics of the societies where it's spoken in a largely unconscious and involuntary way. (Modern) Persian, spoken in Iran and Afghanistan, doesn't have the feature of grammatical gender (anymore), just as English. Many say that the languages that do have grammatical genders are sexist, and that they help to perpetuate the conviction that sex is a tremendously important matter in all areas. For Marilyn Frye, this is a key factor in perpetuating male dominance: male dominance requires the belief that men and women are importantly different from each other, so anything that contributes to the impression that sex differences are important is therefore a contributor to male dominance. Societies whose languages do not have...

I have heard that Gödel Proved that Arithmetic cannot be reduced to logic or formal logic. Although I have read explanations which basically state that arithmetic is not complete and thus not definitional like in formal logic, I cannot get my head around how 1+1=2 is NOT reducible to formal logic. This seems like an obvious analytic statement in which "one and one" is the same as saying "two". Can anyone shed light on this?

Your life isn't of much significance; there have been billions of other humans in existence, throughout multiple epochs and countless places. Very few of them have changed the world in any palpable way, and even for the ones that have changed the world in a significant way, the fact remains that humans occupy an infinitesimally small part of a gargantuan and indifferent universe, living lifes of grotesquely short duration. However, your life is actually of incalculable significance. If you die the whole universe may as well cease to exist; your perception is reality itself. Which one of these extremes contains the most truth?

I am reading some philosophy and psychology about happiness, and much of the work proclaims that we must act in order to be "happy" (Aristotle, William James, as well as more popular writers such as Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie and Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi). As you will notice, they are all men. Are there difference in how female philosophers describe and prescribe "happiness" (or subjective well-being or flourishing)? Thank you.

I'm a college student, hoping to enter a PhD program and specialize in philosophy of mind and language. I'm deciding if I should spend my electives on mathematics. My experience with math tells me that it furnishes the mind with superior logic, clarity of thought, and a solid scaffolding that helps me reach higher ideas. Often I find myself framing my philosophical ideas, lessons, and questions in ways that mathematics has taught me, not philosophy (although I think this owes to my longer experience with math). So I've been wondering, how much mathematics should an aspiring philosopher study, especially if he or she would like to delve into one of the more analytic sub-fields? I'm good at math, and I do not mind taking a number of advanced math courses, but frankly, I'd rather spend the extra course slots on subjects I prefer, like more philosophy or a foreign language.

Is modal logic first-order logic or second-order logic or higher-order logic? What makes a logical system fall into any of those categories? Is it based on expressive power?

I have always been more talented at exposing flaws in reasoning or hypocrisy in actions than in constructing anything to replace what I criticize. Naturally many people are bothered when they're criticized and aggravated beyond that when not presented with an alternative. What is the status of this ability? Should someone hold his silence if he has nothing better to offer, or is just being critical worthy by itself?

How do good and evil exist if one does not believe in a higher power? Any logic or emotion that renders something "wrong" really has no basis. We all inherently know that murder is wrong, but without a higher power, how is that legitimate? What if one person disagrees? Why is he not right to kill as he pleases? Thank you.

In a hypothetical situation I am a vegan talking to a meat eater who buys his meat from a supermarket and has no interest in where it came from. I say that I don't think people have the right to eat meat unless they are willing to learn about what it takes to provide that meat, witness it first hand or even produce it for themselves. He says that he doesn't want to know where it came from and is quite happy for someone else to do the dirty work if they are happy to and does not feel at all guilty. Is he morally wrong and do I have a valid argument?