The early philosophers were much involved with sport, in particular Aristotle who used the Olympic games as metaphor for society. Why does sport feature little, if at all, in modern philosophy? From John L.

I read a question on this site: What are the questions philosophers usually ask? My question is: What are the questions we (non-academic people/people not trained in philosophy) should put to philosophers? Elaboration: Are there areas in philosophy from the exploring of which laypeople would benefit? If yes, any list of priorities? With a list of questions (from various philosophers), I'll start my next innings on this site. :) But, seriously, I would really like to know what questions philosophers would "advise" people to ask, and not necessarily the ones they'd love to answer.

Some friends and I were having one of those classic hypothetical discussions: Suppose a scenario existed in which, by killing 10 million innocent people, you could save the lives of everyone else on earth. I said no. You don't kill the 10 million innocents. To my surprise, everyone else in the group was incredulous. They didn't think the point was even debatable. Of course you kill the 10 million to save billions. Greater good and all that. I argued that when you intentionally do unjust harm to innocents in order to be able to offer that good, then absolutely, yes, that is a horrendous thing. "By your standard," I said, "you could wipe out 49.99999% of the world's population, raising the standard of living for the other 50.00001%, and call yourself a goddamn hero." They still weren't convinced. I feel sure I'm right, but don't have the skills to explain to my friends why. Can you help? Or . . . explain to me why I'm wrong?

What, precisely, is requested when the question "What is X" is asked?

Is religion based around God or can people have a religion without believing in God?

Are there any interesting arguments for the existence of God from the existence of beauty? i.e., because there is beauty, we know there is God?

If my mum hadn't got pregnant with me and I'd never been born, would I be someone else? Sorry that isn't very well phrased, I hope you understand what I mean.

There is a lot of evidence that reincarnation is a fact, yet the proposition and evidence are ignored or rejected by western society. What evidence would have to be presented for it to be accepted?

Consider a first-order axiomization of ZFC. The quantifiers range over all the sets. However, we can prove that (in ZFC) there is no set which contains all sets. Soooo.........how can we make a _model_ for ZFC? The first thing you do when you make a model for a set of axioms is specify a domain, which is a set of things which the quantifiers range over......this seems to be exactly what you can't do with ZFC. So what am I missing?

The Times reports that Martin Tankleff was just granted a second trial after spending 17 years in prison for a crime that he very likely didn't commit. If he's found not guilty, or, more to the point, if he's in fact not guilty, why doesn't he have the right to commit 17 years' worth of crimes "free of charge"? OK, maybe not 17 full years' worth, but you'd admit, I hope, that at least some of the jurisprudence of punishment is based on retribution, so can you discuss the role of his time served in future punishment deliberations? For instance, say he happens to commit a crime later in life, not out of some sense of entitlement, but for any of the other "normal" reasons (like passion!): how relevant should his time served be?