The answer certainly seems to be yes. One example: learning to like something you didn't like at first. (Olives, beer, strong cheese…) Taste isn't the only sense modality that's subject to these shifts. Most of us, I'd guess, have found that people sometimes come to look different to us as we get to know them well, for example. As we think about our earlier reactions to some musicians and some music, we may be struck by how different the same piece sounds to us now than it once did. Obviously there are lots of interesting questions we could ask here. It seems plausible that sometimes these shifts are a matter of learning to notice things we didn't focus on at first. But as others have pointed out, this phenomenon raises more peculiarly philosophical questions. Daniel Dennett considers a pair of possibilities that seem maddeningly hard to disentangle: one might say: I used to like parsnips, but they taste different to me now. Or one might say: parsnips taste the same to me as they always did, but I...

Let's use a phrase from the philosopher David Lewis: concrete worlds . Let it mean complete, concrete universes. Lewis thought that there are concrete worlds other than our own, and that there is at least one for each way our world could be. Lewis also characterizes these words in the way you do: they aren't in our space-time, so they're not at any spatial or temporal distance from our concrete world, and they don't interact causally with our world. As Lewis understand things, they wouldn't be other worlds if these conditions didn't hold. Lewis thought there were such things. He thought that making sense of ordinary truths about what's possible calls for them. My admittedly unpopular view is that this is the wrong way to think about possibility. Even if such worlds do exist, there may be (would be, I'd say) non-trivial modal truths about them. Any particular such world might not have existed, for example. Far as I can see,here's no home in Lewis's account of modality for these sorts of...

I'd say neither. Ideas can inspire, but knowing philosophy doesn't mean you won't be cruel. Theoretical understanding need not change our dispositions and sympathies. The extent to which it does is an empirical matter, but I'd guess that a sociopath could also be a skilled and brilliant philosopher. Even more important, people don't need philosophy to treat each other well. Whether someone is kind decent, and whether they understand Kant are two quite different questions. There's a related point: even if we have the right theory of goodness and justice, the question of how to get people to be good and just isn't one that philosophy can answer. It depends on all sorts of difficult factual questions that call for psychology, sociology, economics and a great many other kinds of empirical knowledge. In short: on one end of the question, I fear you may be overestimating the need for philosophy; on the other end, I fear you may be overestimating its power. That said, there's a problem I haven...

First, a quibble: "murder" usually is taken to mean wrongful killing. But we can set the quibble aside. I'm inclined to turn your question around. I take it to be as plausible as any moral claim gets to be that in general killing people is wrong. Philosophers have had various things to say about why, but a bit of reflection on the fact that typically, rational people would very much prefer not to be killed should tell us something. If we agree that killing people is wrong in general, the question is why it might not always be wrong to kill people Your suggestion is that what we really care about is the "good" life, and that this is more important than mere life. Though it's more complicated than that, there's a nugget of truth there. People who favor assisted suicide, for example, may believe that not just any life is worth living, and that people shouldn't be required to live lives that only promise pain, and that they should be entitled to ask for help in ending a painful life. Whether...

My first thought is that your four alternatives don't carve the territory up adequately. Let's agree: either our futures are determined or they aren't. The way you've set up the debate, you've assumed that if determinism is true, we don't have free will. But that leaves out an important position: compatibilism . According to compatibilists, we can have free will even if determinism is true. This view has a long line of distinguished defenders, including Hume, A. J. Ayer and Daniel Dennett. Before we go further, let's set aside the possibility that we do what we do because God makes it so. The point isn't to take a stand on a theological issue. It's just that if there's a God who makes us do what we do, it seems natural to say that God is the agent. There's room to argue, but for simpicity's sake, we'll assume that the sort of determinism (or non-determinism) at issue is natural. Compatibilism comes in many varieties, but the basic idea is this: you're free if you can do what you want to do....

There are some ethical views that would say you have a duty here. A ham-fisted version of Utilitarianism, for example, might say that you should figure out if taking the job you don't prefer would do more good overall. If so, this crude doctrine would continue, you should take that job all the same. * This is not very plausible. For one thing, the maxim asks us to calculate the incalculable. You might take the job you want less and end up burnt out only to leave it early. And since there are many ways of doing good, most of them outside the workplace, you might end up doing more good against the backdrop of a job that you love. You don't know how things will turn out. More to the point: we're obliged not to do harm when we can avoid it, and it's reasonable to think we're obliged to do some positive good, but beyond that, a good deal is up for grabs. I know of no good argument against picking the livelihood we'd like, within the bounds of decency and reason, and I'd be mightily skeptical of...

You say "Our minds and thoughts are separate from our brains and our physical bodies," but in fact that's controversial, and I dare say that most of the philosophers on this panel don't believe it. Roughly, the view that's widely held among philosophers these days is that thinking, feeling, etc. are actually complex activities of the brain/body. Whether or not thinking, feeling, etc. is the same as computing, the analogy is useful. The computing is realized in/embodied in/amounts to a complicated set of physical goings-on in the computer. If we look at the mind in this way, then your question doesn't arise. What keeps the thoughts "attached to" our brains and bodies is that the thinking amounts to physical events in those bodies. If you reject this sort of view and say that minds are distinct from bodies, then there is an obvious puzzle: what keeps the body and the mind in sync? The most plausible general answer is that the two are causally related to one another: the brain/body has a causal...

I'm going to read your question not as a psychological one (that as "What would cause someone to feel inadequate or unworthy or learning philosophy?") but rather as a question about whether there could be good reasons for feeling this way. Before we go on, an important preliminary: what I'll say is intended to be perfectly general and not to be a diagnosis of your particular case. Since I don't know anything about your case beyond the question I've asked, I couldn't possibly speak to its particulars. As for why someone might justifiably feel inadequate, one obvious answer is that they might lack the requisite talent. For example: if someone paid for me to do a PhD in mathematics, I would feel inadequate for the very simple reason that I don't have enough mathematical talent to be a serious part of the community of students in a PhD mathematics program. And if it turned out that my being part of the program meant I was taking the place of someone with real talent, that would reasonably make me...

Perhaps you're putting more weight on the fable than fables are meant to bear. Fables are short, stylized ways of conveying a point, and the point here seems clear enough: if you come to be seen as a liar, you risk not being believed when it matters. Though I gather that there's a remark attributed to Aristotle that conveys much the same message, once again it may not be profitable to put too much weight on the fable as a device for exploring Aristotle's Ethics. The boy seems clearly to represent someone who lacks an important virtue: truthfulness. The fable doesn't really address the question of whether the townspeople also lack some virtue such as prudence or caution. In real life, we might wonder how many times the boy would have to lie before it become reasonable for the townspeople to ignore him; in the context of the fable, that's not really the point at issue.

I don't quite recognize relativity in what you're saying. Relativity tells us that an experiment in one inertial (non-accelerating) frame will look the same in any other inertial frame (that part also applies to Newtonian physics) and that the speed of light (in a vacuum) is the same in all inertial frames. (That part is a departure form Newtonian physics.) Relativity also tells us how to translate velocities, times, etc. between different inertial frames, and it gives an answer that's different from the Newtonian one. But the evidence for relativity has nothing to do with picking some one observer and giving that observer special status. On the contrary: that would go completely against the point of relativity. Further, there's no question of drawing experimental conclusions of whatever sort based on just one observer. Rather, what relativity says is that whichever observer performs an experiment, his/her state of inertial motion won't affect the physics. Whether the evidence from the observer's...