I don't know your students' experiences, of course, so I don't know if they were justified in coming to the conclusions they did on the basis of those experiences. I can tell you, from my experience, both that I strive mightily to teach philosophy as a discipline dedicated to finding the truth about important questions in a systematic and disciplined way. In my introductory undergraduate courses, I teach (and I don't know of anyone in the profession who does not) questions like: Does God exist? Is morality objective? Do we have free will? Is the mind distinct from the body? In my introductory course, "Philosophical Issues in Femnism" we take up a number of topical issues: Does nature determine gender roles? Is affirmative action justified? Should pornography be restricted? Should abortion be legal? Does religion oppress women? It is not my express goal to either improve my student's character -- I think that would be presumptuous in the extreme -- nor to "deepen their lived experience....

Your dance teacher is correct in thinking that some philosophers believe that there cannot be thought without language, but not that all philosophers believe this. I do not, for example. There was a very similar question to yours that I answered a while back. Check out question 953 .

No. No.

You are absolutely right about the bumpersticker, and your analogy brings out precisely what's wrong with it. I am in favor liberal abortion laws. But I cringe every time I see that bit of rhetoric emblazoned on a car or button. Here, perhaps, is what the bumpersticker would say if one had a much, much larger bumper: "Reasonble people can disagree as to whether a zygote, embryo, or fetus ought to be accorded the same moral status as a mature human being. If they are not properly accorded that status, then killing them is not murder. Given that reasonable people can disagree about all this, the state ought not to legislate against abortion, but should rather leave it up to the conscience of each idividual whether to have one or not." It is a sign of the general degradation of our public political discourse that so much of it involves the mere trading of elliptical, misleading, and inflammatory bumpersticker-size slogans. The general trend against sober, reasonable discussion in the public realm...

There is no expertise a philosopher can provide that's pertinent to this question -- it's one that any thoughtful, well-informed person ought to be able to answer. But since you did ask a philosopher, and since I consider myself to be a thoughtful and well-informed person, I'll give you my opinion. I don't think capitalism as we know it in, for example, the United States, is a viable form of social organization. The U.S. knows far too much poverty and violence for us to claim that our society is a success. As for extending this form of social organization throughout the world -- that would be economically impossible, even if it were advisable from a moral point of view, which it isn't. Those who are comfortable in the U.S., who are confident that we live in the best of all possible societies, depend for our comfort on an obscene rate of consumption of the world's resources. With 5% of the world's population, we consume one-quarter of the world's processed fossil fuel. In my view, this problem...

I doubt that philosophy has ever harbored more sexism than any other academic discipline, now or in its history. But sexism has nonetheless played a role in keeping women from doing philosophy, and from being taken seriously when they tried. And this is still true, to a discouraging extent. I work in the philosophy of mind, and in epistemology, sub-fields where women are less well represented than in ethics or history. The main thing I do to combat sexism -- including my own -- is to work hard at "microenvironmental" issues that are known to have a negative effect on women's participation in intellectual activities. I take care to notice if women have their hands up, to acknowledge and follow up on their comments, to attribute their good points to them by name, and to see that they have as much time to develop their points in discussion as men do. I try to get women, in other words, to see philosophy as belonging to them as much as it does to men. As for readings: they are still...

Clearly, machines can process information. For the machine to have knowledge, however, this information has to be information for the machine – the machine would have to understand the information it processes. What would that involve? In the first place, the states or events in the machine that store or process the information (including, for example, data bases and the contents of memory registers) would have to be richly integrated with all the other states of the machine, and particularly with the machine’s input and output states, analogously to the way in which our thoughts and memories are integrated with our perceptions and motor commands. This is a functional requirement on machine understanding. The second requirement is that the input states that supply the information be properly related to the states of affairs in the world the information is about. For human beings, the input states are perceptions, and what a visual perception "means" – what it is about – is determined...

Developing technologies have always caused new ethical challenges to arise, often by making once impossible states of affairs possible. Insofar as our ethical thinking has failed to take account of these new possibilities, our ethical systems will be tested. But I see no reason to think that foundational ethical facts, like the wrongness of causing gratuitous pain to a sentient creature, are under any threat from new inventions. You probably have in mind developments like in vitro fertilization and cloning. These developments challenge us to think harder about what it is about what qualities are really at the heart of moral personhood -- is it the mere biological fact of human specieshood, or is rather certain capacities, like being able to feel pain, or being able to reason? They also raise questions about what human beings ought to have the right to try to control, since they offer us the prospect of controlling things we couldn't at earlier times in our histories. Notice that...

I think this is an excellent idea, and should be implemented, and hereby declare myself, forthwith, Supreme Arbiter of Philosophical Usage. I leave it to you to notify all the other philosophers.

I don't know if there is any general presumption that intelligence and morality go together. And it's up for grabs, I think, whether there is any general faculty of "intelligence," equally applicable to, and equally present in all domains. But suppose we're talking about "school intelligence" -- the kind of ability that's tested on IQ tests. In that case, I think the following can be said: If one is basically a good person, or tries sincerely to be, then intelligence can be an aid in acting morally, and in understanding what morality is. It can help you develop a comprehensive and consistent system of moral principles, help you render your judgements consistent, help you think of new cases to test out your principles, and help you keep your thinking straight when matters get complicated. But if you are dishonest, insensitive, selfish, cruel, or negligent, intelligence can be a hindrance to your moral development insofar as it facilitates your constructing clever, but bogus...