Why is such a high value placed in reading the "Classics"? It's one thing to honor the past and honor the fact that, but for those who came before, we wouldn't be where we are today, and another thing entirely to pretend that those "classic" thinkers and thoughts of the past are worthy of the scrutiny of self-respecting truth-seekers today. If I'm being honest, the Pre-Socratic writings are simply idiotic by today's standards, claiming matter is all "water", or "fire", or some other random element. Leibniz, Spinoza, and those guys aren't any better. None of them had even the most rudimentary concept of physics. JS Mill and Kant read like some High Schooler, discoursing at length about Happiness and motivation without even a whiff of suspicion about the basic facts of psychology, treating those terms as if they were transparently obvious, monolithic concepts. Even an idea like the more recently vaunted Veil of Ignorance seems ludicrously vulnerable to someone of even mediocre intelligence, like me. It...

Here's a probability question I've been wondering. Suppose there's a company that has a million customers. It is known that 55% of these customers are male and 45% of customers are female. Task is to guess the sex of the next 100 (of the existing) customers who are going to visit the company. For every right guess point is awarded. What's the best strategy to get most correct answers? If we consider the customers one by one, it is good plan to always guess the most probable answer and therefore guess that all 100 of the customers are male. However if we take the hundred people as a group, isn't this task analoguous to situation where one litre of seawater in a container has same salinity as seawater in general? Therefore we could guess that there are 55 males and 45 females among the group of 100 customers. Certainly, if instead of 100 people we would take the whole million customers as a group then 55%/45% split would be the true and correct answer. My question is this: what changes the way of thinking...

I am often unable to decide upon an opinion, as I know that my knowledge of the subject is incomplete. For example, I am unsure of whether the (as it currently seems to me) few insights that psychology can add to our knowledge of the human mind and human behavior that cannot be found out using reason and individual observations is worth spending my and others’ time and resources on. Another example is my unwillingness to pick a side in the debate about free will, as I know that there are arguments I am not aware of. This inability to decide upon an opinion among many chooses, as I know there might be valid counter-arguments to my view that I do not know of, heavily impacts my life. The psychology example illustrates these consequences well: as I cannot decide on whether psychology is worth studying or not, I feel insecure about taking the big step to starting studying psychology, as it might be the wrong thing to do. My doubting of the very foundations of many opinions, and as in the example of free will,...

Are all beautiful paintings good paintings?

What grounds does a non-expert have for taking a position on an issue that the experts don't agree on? More specifically, how can I be justified aligning myself with a particular ethical theory, explicitly or implicitly (e.g. when I make a reasoned ethical decision), when there isn't a consensus among philosophers, and when I have spent comparatively so little time thinking about it?

When you start a controversial, difficult debate with someone, for example about world poverty, war, crime, abuse, etc. should you regard the personal limitations of the other person involved in the conversation or just keep going in order to increase more social awareness about the problem you are discussing even if this might cause the other person to be partially in shock because of the overwhelming topic? Should raising social awareness and trying to provoke critical thinking in people be also subject to ethical standards even at the cost of limiting possible positive results (if the means of conversation and other type of critical propaganda are more moderate, not managing to achieve such bigger social awareness and positive response due to the basic human need for conformism)?

Is it possible that all branches of philosophy will one day be obsolete and replaced by activities yielding precise answers, similar to the way that the scientific method replaced natural philosophy? May Leibniz's vision of the calculating machine and the end of all disputes yet be realised? If so, I think this might be the ultimate goal of philosophy: to destroy itself, by superseding speculation with experimentation and calculation.

Is it possible for anything to matter? My teacher always tells me if I do bad in a drama scene, I shouldn't worry about it because no one will remember or care in a few weeks. Doesn't that apply to everything? If I cure cancer, surely that will affect almost everyone on the planet, but will anyone even appreciate it a million years after the fact? A billion? Humans can't last forever, and eventually our species will die - meaning no one will be alive to remember cancer even existed. Even Earth will die eventually. Even the Galaxy!! So how can anything I do be important in the grand scheme of things?

Can you define logical validity? I'm engaged in a debate on the subject, with a friend, whom will not easily accept anyones word on the matter, so i would ask that you perhaps post your credentials? thank you for you time and effort!

Does having a mistrust of self identified feminist institutions make you an anti-feminist? When I heard that the university of Colorado invited a group of feminists (I think that's a fair description) from the APA my first inclination was to doubt their report because in my observation biased and otherwise problematic thinking patterns are typical of feminist organizations.