William, I will try to answer both of your questions, but I especially wanted to answer the first one. I suffered from depression for most of my life, and considered, in a very personal way, the question you have asked. Forgive my presumption, but I want to make sure that, if you are asking about this because you are contemplating suicide, you know that there are some very effective therapies now for depression. I am not referring just to drug therapies, although medication was crucial (and is crucial) to my recovery; talk therapy is important too. It is not always easy to find an effective and tolerable therapy regimen -- I tried two anti-depressants before I found one that worked -- so (again, excuse my presumption) if you have tried one or even two or three that have not helped, you may need to try another. If all this is irrelevant, then good. The ethical question you ask is a hard one, but I believe that a person who is suffering terribly and who has no reasonable prospect of gaining...

This isn't going to be a response from a different perspective from Peter Smith's, but I have a little information to add. First of all, William Lane Craig has debated a lot of philosophers over the last fifteen or so years, including a couple of the contributors to Philosophers Without Gods (Edwin Curley, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, and myself). I won't try to give the roster for fear of offending someone I've left out -- but you can find some transcripts of some of the debates on Craig's website: http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/menus/debates.html (Mine didn't make the cut! If you're interested, you can watch it through the Veritas Forum: http://www.veritas.org/media/talks/639 ) . Craig's debate with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong became a book: God? A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist (Oxford University Press) and Sinnott-Armstrong has another book on the relation between religion and ethics: Morality Without God (also Oxford). Robert Garcia and Nathan King...

Well, of course, everyone on this panel loves philosophy, so we're probably not the best people to ask. But here are some speculations. First of all, philosophy deals with questions that a lot of people find tremendously important: what happens after death? what gives life value? is there a God? what is consciousness? So many people --many students -- come to philosophy with high hopes, and with expectations. But second, it turns out that these questions are extremely difficult to answer -- indeed, they turn out to be difficult to even ask . The process of clarifying the issues, breaking down the questions into sub-questions, reviewing answers that others have proposed, taking account of new information -- all this can seem very tedious, and very far removed from the original questions that seemed so pressing and so interesting. People who devote their careers to thinking about these questions --academic philosophers, for the most part -- necessarily specialize andfocus, and their...

Strong performance in a rigorous college-level philosophy class is a good positive indicator of philosophical talent, but poor grades, whether in college or in high school, cannot generally be taken as evidence that a person lacks philosophical talent. The reason is that there are just way too many reasons why a student might do poorly in the classroom that have nothing to do with philosophical ability. I know of at least a couple prominent philosophers who were indifferent -- or, in one case, lousy -- students until they discovered philosophy, and were really grabbed by it. Some students are handicapped by depression, stress, or other personal difficulties, and do not do their best work. Many students are just not that into school, or don't care about grades. Another thing that makes it difficult to predict who will make a good philosopher is that there are lots of different ways one can be a good philosopher. I spoke above of "philosophical talent," but there's really no particular...

Maybe you asking what it is about a thing you observe that brings you to the conclusion that that thing is a conscious being, say, a person? If that's the question, here's the answer. You can rely on a couple of kinds of evidence: the way the individual looks (like a human being), the way the individual behaves (agents' trajectories through space appear to violate the laws of physics: they can start moving and then just stop and change direction without there being any external force), and the fact that the individual displays behavior (like speaking or gesturing or wearing clothes) that appears to be meaningful. Individual things displaying one or more of these signs very likely are conscious beings. Buildings and trees do not display these signs, so there is no reason to take them to be conscious beings. (The fact that the building was made by a conscious being doesn't seem to me to provide any reason whatsoever to think that it is itself conscious -- I don't know what you have in mind there....

A suggestion: let's use the plural indefinite "they", like we all do when we're talking: "If anyone wanted the last piece of cake, they should have spoken up." That's what I do, but I have to have fights with editors about it.

I don't know if this is Singer's view or not. I just want to respond to the suggestion that the view "shows a progression of the pro-choice stance on abortion extending beyond the womb." Do not buy the facile and cynical "slippery slope" argument advanced by some unscrupulous people that holds that any principle that justifies abortion in any circumstances will lead inexorably to a validation of heinous practices like murder of unwanted children or elderly adults. The term "pro-choice" refers to a particular political position: it is the position that the decision whether to continue a pregnancy should be made the pregnant person, not the government. People who are pro-choice do not necessarily agree on the morality of abortion -- they do not all agree on the conditions in which abortion is morally permissible, and they may not even agree that abortion is ever morally permissible. (Many members of the organization Catholics for Free Choice believe on theological grounds that abortion...

Nobody owns the word "philosopher." It's used in many different ways, including "someone who ponders important, fundamental questions" and "someone who claims to ponder important, fundamental questions, but actually just screws around." In the use most common among academics, "philosopher" means someone who practices seriously the discipline of philosophy, whether published or unpublished, employed or unemployed. Merely having an opinion doesn't qualify you.

Words have meanings, but they also have histories. The term "Paddy Wagon" is defined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as "an enclosed motortruck used by police to carry prisoners." That definition is adequate, if all you want to know is what people are talking about when they use that term. But if this definition is all you ever know about the term, you will be baffled by the fact that people of Irish descent usually take offense when they hear that term used. To understand why they have that reaction, you need to know where that expression came from. You need to know that "paddy" is a derogatory way of referring to an Irish person or a person of Irish descent, and you need to know that there used to be (and maybe still is) a stereotyped belief that people of Irish descent are more likely than others to drink heavily and to become rowdy and disorderly -- so disorderly that police must come and pick them up by the "wagon"-load. Originally, bigoted people who used the expression "paddy wagon" to...

As a matter of fact, there are some psychologists and psycholinguists investigating the very question you ask. Lera Boroditsky, at Stanford University, has data that suggest that speakers of languages that use broad gender marking do associate more feminine characteristics with things whose names are marked as feminine, and more masculine traits with things whose names are marked as masculine. You can read a summary of that research here: http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/gender.pdf She argues that these and other data show that language shapes thought. However, psycholinguists at U Penn (Lila Gleitman and John Trueswell), and at Delaware (Anna Papafragou) argue against the view that language shapes thought in this way. (Here's a link to a very readable paper by Gleitman and Papafragou on this topic: http://papafragou.psych.udel.edu/papers/Language%20and%20thought.pdf I don't think that Frye's case depends on how this particular debate comes out. Her point is that there are ...