Why should an average, run of the mill, person care about philosophy? The vast majority of people I know don't give a damn whether a given action is "a priori" or "a posteriori," for example. The closest they come to philosophy are stupid questions that any beginning philosophy major could solve, like "Can God make a rock so heavy He can't lift it?" And these are merely bait to get an emotional reaction out of me, not a true question about philosophy!

If philosophy does not yield empirical predictions like science or certain truths like math or logic, what does it do? I have heard of "clarification of concepts" but science and math do that, too.

Why is the continuation of the human atomic structure an insufficient explanation for continued personal identity of an individual? If subject "a" remains subject "a" on an atomic level surely that constitutes the continuation of that subject. Arguably the atoms change over time, but not all at once. If say one atom changes on Monday, and then next on Tuesday, the very fact that an atom from Monday remains on Tuesday (even if it was the new atom on Monday) allows for the continuation of that subject. This simplistic example shows how on a basic level something of the person remains prior to the present moment.

I have an intellectual appreciation for the answers on this site, but at an emotional level I can't help but feel like vast heaps of it are nothing more than BS. Why do I feel this way? Why is philosophy so confounding?

Recently I've had trouble comprehending the idea of a divide between music and noise. I was wondering, are noise and music one and the same? To compose something with the intention that it be noise music seems paradoxical to me, since music and noise seem to be two opposite ends on the line of 'sound'. Yet there exists noise music and even freeform jazz, with completely random notes and seemingly no structure at all. Is this still music? It seems to me that music is a form of art, and art is expression - so there is no reason really why this kind of noise shouldn't be classed as music, since it is the artists intention that it is music, even if its just random noise being recorded. I'm having real trouble understanding whether this is an actual problem or not. It seems to me there shouldn't exist any kind of boundaries in music (and so no boundaries between music and noise?), yet I am reluctant (for some intuitive reason perhaps?) to acknowledge these noise projects as forms of music. Thanks for your...

Given that I can't infer an 'ought' from an 'is', am I always to assume then that moral arguments which seem to make this move actually have an implicit moral assumption? For example: 1. If you did that, you'd be hurting your sister unnecessarily. 2. (unstated) unnecessarily hurting your sister is wrong. 3. (unstated) you shouldn't do what's wrong. So you shouldn't do it.

This is a question about happiness. I am a student who is very serious about academics and is always looking for ways to challenge myself to do better. I take hard courses that require a lot of work. But I often find that I sit in the library reluctantly reading for long periods of time. I am not sure if I am having fun. I see my friends who are taking courses like photography and book-making, and are having loads of fun. (Note that I do realize that photography and book-making have their own merits as a subjects of study, but they are not challenging to me.) I remind myself that the skills I'm gaining in my difficult courses will contribute to my happiness in the long run. I do believe in living the happiest life one can possibly live. But I wonder if the friend who is taking photography has a better approach to living a good life (and that is my question). The reason I think that is because I feel she is living happily now, without looking to the future for happiness.

I have recently started studying philosophy and found that it is increasingly isolating me from non-philosophically inclined people. I find it hard to stop thinking philosophically even in light conversation and become frustrated when people have simplistic views. It is becoming hard to enjoy mainstream entertainment, because the ideas that the entertainment is based on have a long history, much more interesting than the entertainment itself. Can someone who has been doing philosophy longer than me please tell me how to remedy this situation? I really love philosophy, but at the moment it feels as if I almost have to give up citizenship of the "normal" world. Is this isolation going to intensify through doing more philosophy, or is it at some stage going to become more tolerable? Thanks for any help.

Aside from saying that the questions that they concern themselves with are difficult, how do philosophers make sense of their difficulty discovering consensus truths about the world, in the way that scientific communities do? And what would a philosopher make of the idea that philosophers are trying to understand the world through natural language, and not through enough of an observational component, and method (e.g. scientific method). It seems to me that philosophers are only using a small part of their brain when trying to answer questions, and that primarily, their inability to discover things about the world is due to this getting stuck up with language.

If the sperm that fertilized the proper egg of one of my great-great-great-great grandmothers had been a different sperm (from the one that actually fertilized it) and, apart from that, everything had been pretty the same until today, wouldn't I be me?