I recently decided to change jobs; I had to go through a lot of interviews at various competing firms. In order to keep my job search secret from my current employer, I had to make (often false) excuses to leave work early / take long lunch breaks / take afternoons off work. Was it ethically wrong to do this?

It's plausible that medical advances will mean that, probably at a huge cost, we will be able to extend our lives a lot longer than people used to expect to live. I'm thinking something like 500 years or so of quality life. Presumably limited resources and things would mean that less children would be born, or that most people on earth would be stuck with poor and shorter lives. Would it be wrong to make use of such an opportunity?

Why does Thomas Hobbes choose "Leviathan" as the model for his Commonwealth? It is, after all, an Old Testament sea-monster that God will slay at the end of conflict. It does not seem a very promising image for an argument in favor of civil society.

Should we consider technology to be no more than just applied science? I often become discouraged that many of my "techie" friends have rather simplistic views of technology. Most would never consider that nearly all technologies, if examined more critically, contain some kind of implication for the human condition. Certainly, technologies always have some human element embedded in their very structure? Is this right?

This is in response to the question about Hellen Keller and whether or not there is thought without language [http://www.amherst.edu/askphilosophers/question/459]. How could a thoughtless person ACQUIRE language? It seems that the process of learning a language (or anything else, for that matter) would require thought. Doesn't this argument prove that thought exists prior to language acquisition? The same can be said of babies. Not many would argue that pre-verbal babies are incapable of thought. Otherwise they would never learn anything.

If numbers are infinite how can we call anything truly accurate? How can any number exist (i.e. 1 or 17.8732)? It's an infinite regression. You could always make your measurement more precise. Thanks.

It's safe to say that Electricity has no feeling. and that a dead body has no feeling. And that a live body that's in a coma has no feeling. Therefore is it not also safe to say that a soul must exist? There has to be something to make a person a person. We cannot have "minds" and "thought" if we are only electricity and cells. Correct?

Is there a contradiction at the root of philosophy? Here's what it might be: Philosophy began "in wonder", and asks us to question things -- the roots of our opinions, our beliefs, religions, the essence of objects, the values of life, etc. But it does NOT, emphatically, ask us to question the value of questioning. It ASSUMES (something philosophers should never do!!) that we should question. That seems to me a normative claim never questioned by you philosophers. And even if we WERE to question the value of questioning, we'd be engaging, it seems to me, in an act of performative self-contradiction. We'd still be assuming that we should question!

From the some of the questions I see submitted to this site, it seems that many people expect philosophers to affirm that their faith / superstitious beliefs have some positive value or grounding in reality. I cannot however think of many modern philosophers who would support such a belief system, so my question is: why do people feel that philosophy will be more supportive of faith-based belief systems than science?

I've been giving a lot of thought lately to a line out of Woody Allen's most recent movie, "Match Point," in which the lead character opines that "...faith is the path of least resistance..." My tentative conclusion is that this may be true for what I call "megachurch faith," but perhaps not for thinkers like St. Augustine or Maimonides who struggled in their faith. What do your philosophers think about this proposition?