Is it okay to disobey a just law just because you disagree with it? For example, take under-age drinking of alcohol. In various parts of the world there is a general disagreement about when it is a right age to drink alcohol. In the United States, the drinking age is 21. Many choose to begin drinking at an earlier age because they feel they have a right to do so. What philosophical problems are there with disobeying a just law?

This question is in regards to social philosophy: Suppose someone is inclined to think that capitalism (at least, the capitalism that is being practiced at present) is neither fair nor egalitarian. In addition, they do not wish to (necessarily) take part in its practice (to make money). My question is this: how could this person expect to make any kind of "decent" money while not being a capitalist when capitalism is (as they say) "the only game in town"?

What is the sense of literature at all? Sometimes I wonder if the sense of literature is merely a capitalistic one. I am a writer myself, I like to write, a creativity in me that walks its own roads. But why do we read fictional texts from others? If I read one of my own, I know "what it is about", I know the grounds, dreams, feelings, hopes, etc. I had while writing. But then someone else reads that- how could he read anything in that text, that I tried to put there rather in between the lines. Does reading literature tells us something about "the other"? Does literature work as a translator between two people with singular minds? Is literature a connection between "myself" and "the other"? Is then, therefore, the sense of literature to (very general) live in a human society?

It has been long believed that the more you study philosophy, the greater the probability that you would see things more clearly and reasonably. However, the problem is sometimes, philosophical problems caught us too much that we would lose the insight of the present moment. Philosophy in other words has the tendency to get us lost in thoughts so much that we lose grip of reality. In my case, I would want to be a full-pledged philosopher but I also don't want to be a man always lost in thoughts. As professional philosophers, do you ever experience this? If so, how do you cope with it?

Why is it that people talk such awful things about each other, but still seem worried about what others think? Why is this self-image we are trying to uphold so important to us?

Why do we procrastinate? Why do we persist in avoiding doing something when we know avoiding it only hurts us more? Just because a task is unpleasant doesn't mean it will get any less unpleasant in the future when we have less time to do it. If I can logically reason, this why do I still procrastinate? Do we become "wantons" (those incapable of guiding our own free will) according to Harry Frankfurt when we submit to procrastination?

Have any of you witnessed a student cheating in your very own ethics class? Did you just laugh at the situation? Have students tried to challenge why they were morally right for cheating? If you haven't caught a student cheating, what do you think of the situation in general and how would you react?

If the only financial institution in town is located on the only riverbed in town, is the sentence "Judy went to the bank" still ambiguous?

Even if there was no intelligent life at all in the whole universe, if there were no humans, or other thinking creatures, mathematics would still exist, wouldn't it? Of course no one would ever find out about mathematics' existence, but its truths would just be THERE... Isn't that magnificiant? We didn't make up mathematics. It just exists and doesn't require any atoms or whatever... Do you think it is something divine?

I find the notion of fictionalism in mathematics utterly perplexing. From what I understand of it, it seems that fictionalism is the thesis that mathematics is a created fiction, and that there is no mathematical truth separate from the relevant fiction. On this view, it seems, mathematical statements -- such as 2 + 2 = 4 -- are analogous to statements like “Humbert Humbert is infatuated by Dolores Haze.” But how can this be right? Does this mean I can construct a mathematical fiction in which, e.g., 2 + 2 = 5? On the fictionalist account, I can’t see why we ought to prefer, say, a mathematics in which 2 + 2 = 4 over one where 2 + 2 = 5 unless the former captures some inherent truth that the latter misses.