Where can I find literature within philosophy on the "good judgment" that Miriam Solomon (june 5, 2014) describes as essential to philosophy? Is this "good judgment" something like the "tacit knowledge" explored by Michael Polanyi? If so, what is the current philosophical status of his work (as opposed to status within cog-sci)?

If intelligent people incur a moral obligation to society, can the same argument be made for other forms of (for lack of a better word) power? For instance, being beautiful gives you social influence to wield: on this line of thought, would beautiful people have an obligation too?

Hello! I'm a nursing student that recently cared for a child in the ICU. This child has never had the ability to speak, smell, see, walk, swallow, or care for herself in any way. She comes to the hospital frequently because the only way to survive is with medical machinery and constant suctioning. Unfortunately, the parents have become burned out. I felt like I was prolonging misery. To "pull the plug" on anyone is never easy, but it seems less ethical to do so on a child than it does with the elderly. Should quality of life have greater influence than age?

This is a follow-up to Miriam Solomon's statement describing philosophy: "Philosophy involves more than deductive logic--it involves the exercise of "good judgment" which in fact we do not understand very well." (june 5, 2014) Can someone tell me more about what this "good judgment" is, please? I studied philosophy in college and I can't recall any of my professors ever suggesting that there was some elusive guiding principle in philosophy beyond what could be articulated...Instead, I was taught that it was about starting with premises and then executing deductive reasoning. Are you now saying that there's something mystical in there that philosophers can't articulate but which guides their work? That seems counter the way I learned philosophy, where the professors seemed particularly intent on articulating things clearly.

I have a question about "solved" games, and the significance of games to artificial intelligence. I take it games provide one way to assess artificial intelligence: if a computer is able to win at a certain game, such as chess, this provides evidence that the computer is intelligent. Suppose that in the future scientists manage to solve chess, and write an algorithm to play chess according to this solution. By hypothesis, then, a computer running this algorithm wins every game whenever possible. Would we conclude on this basis that the computer is intelligent? I have an intuition that intelligence cannot be reduced to any such algorithm, however complex. But that seems quite strange in a way, because it suggests that imperfect play might somehow demonstrate greater intelligence or creativity than perfect play. [If the notion of "solving" chess is problematic, another approach is to consider a computer which plays by exhaustively computing every possible sequence of moves. This is unfeasible with...

When I was a teenager, I started to think about sex all the time, but nobody ever talked to me about it. I may have been talking with someone of the opposite sex, for instance, whose dress deliberately accentuated their sexual features, and yet both of us would go on idiotically talking about something else, which neither of us was probably really thinking about. Why is there such a prohibition about pointing out the elephant in the room? Why is it considered morally suspect to make one's sexual reaction to someone an explicit feature of a conversation?

Is it possible to make a clear distinction between kitsch and sentimentality? It seems to me that many philosophers equate the sentimental with shallow and inauthentic, but I assume that most of them wouldn't say it always bad to be tenderly moved by a story or event. But at the same time it seems much popular literature, television, and film really aims to ratchet up the emotions: is this not problematic? Sorry, running different questions together, but I'm just trying to figure out how to understand when the sentimental is good and when it is not. Thank your for your interesting website.

It seems to me that much contemporary philosophy is a bit obsessed with clarifying arguments and analyzing statements and lacks real wisdom about the world. For example, I can imagine a typical situation where an ordinary person asks a professional philosopher a question relating to an applied ethics question. The philosopher answers by analysing the component parts of the statements contained within the question and attempting to assess the technicalities of the implicit argument put forward by the ordinary person. The outcome is that everybody is none the wiser as to the real answer to the applied ethics question because the philosopher has no real wisdom about the world but is merely trying to analyse argument structures! What do you think about this? Thanks

I currently study philosophy at an undergraduate level at Trinity College Dublin, and I am interested in pursuing philosophy of mind at a graduate level – certainly with a PhD. That's the hope anyway. I have considered perhaps doing something like an MPhil at Cambridge. Yet, I am concerned that a lot of work in philosophy of mind doesn't seem to take into account where it sits on the boundary between science and philosophy, and a lot of what we get is some sort of babble that doesn't fit into what we know from science. Often, there is a lot of stuff that thinks it is informed by science, but really isn't – out of simple ignorance. I like David Chalmers's views on this: "Everything I say here is compatible with the results of contemporary science; our picture of the natural world is broadened, not overturned." I have considered completing an MSc in Neuroscience that doesn't take things from a philosophy perspective. There are quite a few programs, such as one at my own university, that accept students...

Is the cause of homosexuality purely a biological and not a philosophical question? Or is there room for philosophical explanation?