This varies enormously from person to person, and from day to day., and on how hard the material is. When I'm working intensively on a paper, or trying to develop a new course, I might read one or two very challenging articles a day, or I might try to "blitz" through the relevant literature and read four or five. It generally takes me a week or so to read an entire academic philosophy book. If I'm developing a new course, I'll try to read six or seven pieces for every one I assign (exclusive of essays I know I want students to read.) Then there are novels and political magazines and knitting books The New Yorker . I read about one of these every week. My line is that I'm engaging with popular culture in a way that will ultimately enrich my philosophy Some philosophers, like David Chalmers, read about 17books a day. Linguist and political critic Noam Chomsky writes about 17 books a day.

There is a lot of debate among philosophers right now as to whether our common sense view of "personality" is accurate. We tend to think of ourselves and of others as having stable psychological characteristics that underlie and explain our behavior in a large range of diverse circumstances. But there’s an increasing body of evidence from social psychology that suggests that a great deal of our behavioral responses depend heavily on what situation we’re in. For example, a study of students at the Princeton Theological Seminary showed that the likelihood of a student’s stopping to help an apparently injured person was strongly depended heavily on whether the student had been advised that he or she was running late for the next phase of the experiment. So what may appear to be "uncharacteristic" behavior on the part of some individual may simply be the result of the individual’s being in an "uncharacteristic" situation. And certainly the people one interacts with are important determinants of...

There are two competing views on this. The first view -- possibly the more popular view among philosophers -- is that thought and language are essentially tied together, so that there cannot be one without the other. (Leave aside all the evidence from casual observation that it's all too possible to talk without thinking). The argument for this view appeals to the evidence we generally need for attributing thoughts to others -- namely, verbal behavior. (You can read a good example of this sort of argument in an article by Donald Davidson called "Thought and Talk." ) There is also the consideration you raise, that thinking sort of "feels" like talking silently to oneself. But the inconvenient thing about this view is that it requires us to deny that pre-verbal children and animals have thought. And while we don't have all the evidence for attributing thinking to such beings that we have in the case of fully verbal adults, we do nonetheless have lots of evidence that such beings think. ...

What you have in mind is Descartes's cogito argument: "Insofar as I am thinking, I must exist." Descartes was trying to systematically rid himself of beliefs in any propositions about which he could con ceive of being de ceived about. His insight was that no matter how thoroughly he was deceived on any other matter, he couldn't at least be deceived about the fact that he was thinking, since a person cannot be in the state of being deceived without being in some mental state or other. Hence, he concluded, as long as he was thinking (actually, as long as he was experiencing any mental state) he could be completely certain of his own existence. You're right that this argument can only be made in the first person. Descartes himself had a two-step strategy for demonstrating the existence of other minds: first, he established the general reliability of the senses, and thus established his right to believe in the existence of material objects. So that got him knowledge of other people's bodies...

Your condition sounds truly terrible. You have my sympathy. It would be deeply unethical for me or anyone on this panel to try to discuss your particular situation in a forum like this. I would hope that you have a trusted friend or relative with whom you could discuss the matter, someone who knows you well, and who could serve as a sounding board as you work toward what has to be your own decision. I will only make this observation: you certainly should not attempt to make any decision about this if your depression is not being treated adequately. What I can do as a professional philosopher is to steer you toward some academic work that surveys and discusses the ethical issues involved. I suggest you read Robert Young's entry on "Voluntary Euthanasia", which you can access online at the Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/euthanasia-voluntary/ The article is mainly concerned with the social policy question of whether voluntary...

There's a conceptual reason: if I "preferred" your opinion to my own, in the sense of thinking it is more likely to be true than the one I currently hold, then I presumably would change my opinion to match yours, and your opinion would become mine. Of course there's the matter of considering another person's opinion -- seriously trying to take account of what someone else has to say. Maybe you're asking why "most people" fail to do that, why "most people" are close-minded. In that case, I have to say that I don't think that the presupposition of your question is true. Everyone I know -- my kids, my husband, my colleagues, my students, my friends -- generally do seem to listen to and consider what other people say. So I have a question for you: why do most people say "most people" when they generally mean "some people some of the time"?

There's a common misconception about "proof" -- that if a statement cannot be "proven," then it's equally rational to believe either it or its contradictory. If "prove" means "establish with logical certainty from self-evident first principles", then nothing outside mathematics, logic, and semantics can be proven. Indeed, it's even a matter of controversy whether anything within mathematics, logic, and semantics can be proven. So the class of statements that cannot be proven is very, very big, and includes all of the following: "There is no Santa Claus," "Dogs are animals," "Washington, D.C. is the capital of the United States," and "Salt is soluble in water." But surely you believe all of these things, and would find foolish anyone who withheld judgment about them just because they could not be proven . So the real issue, for any proposition, is what the arguments are. There are certainly many arguments for the existence of God, and many against, most of which are quite...

I have a very strong opinion about this matter, one that results in my condemning some of my very best friends: I think that there are no good arguments for teaching a child to believe in Santa Claus, or for not telling the child the truth the first time he or she asks. So I quite adamantly disagree with Roger Crisp. Prima facie, one shouldn't lie to one's children. More seriously, one has a duty not to try to positively convince them of things that are beyond false, that are preposterous. Now what is supposed to make inculcating belief in Santa Claus an exception to this prohibition? The fact that the child will experience joy while he or she believes it? That can't in general be an argument for inculcating preposterous beliefs, since there are many such preposterous beliefs that would bring a person joy, were a person successful in believing them: the belief that he or she is the most intelligent person in the world, that he or she will live forever, the belief that there are no calories or...

I'm not completely sure what you are asking. Presumably you do not want to know what it is that feminists know that others don't, though I could write you a book on that. I suspect what you're curious about is feminist theories of knowledge , or feminist epistemology . This is a book-length topic, too, but I'll try to say enough in a short space to give you an idea what is going on. Feminist epistemology -- really, feminist philosophy generally -- begins with a simple observation: virtually the entire body of our received philosophical thought has been developed by men, and by socially privileged men at that. The question then arises whether this homogeneity among philosophers has resulted in some kind of bias or distortion in the theories produced. In philosophy, suspicion is heightened by the fact that our methodology relies heavily on "intuitions" that theorists presume are universally shared. What if they're not? (And by the way, there's excellent evidence, apart from...

Most philosophers now recognize a distinction between the biological category "sex" and the social category "gender." One's sex is determined by a collection of biological factors that typically (though not always!) go together: chromosomes, anatomy, and hormones. Gender is the social role a society assigns to persons on the basis of their sex: the set of expectations about behavior and appearance deemed appropriate for someone of that sex, and a system of rewards and sanctions that enforce conformity. The sanctions that I speak of can take many forms. There can be explicit laws or regulations specifying which roles can be performed by males and which by females, with punishments for violators. But there can also be informal or tacit conventions that are extremely effective. A man who wants to get ahead in the American business world will not wear skirts or lipstick, whereas a woman in the same milieu will do exactly that. (Check out "Dress for Success" at your local bookstore.) More...