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Philosophers

Why do you think philosophers act like they are qualified to answer questions about physics, psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience when they have studied none of these?

Philosophy has cast itself in the role of the 'queen of the sciences' which stands apart from all special fields of inquiry and yet pronounces on them, and at certain times in the history of philosophy, philosophers have made 'armchair' pronouncements about particular disciplines of which they had little knowledge. Historically, however, philosophers have been engaged with the culture--science, arts and letters, etc.--of their day, and I think that philosophers are now coming more and more to recognize the importance of engaging with the work of particular disciplines if one is to do good philosophical work on those topics derived from those disciplines. (Thus, for example, when I answer questions on this site, I either answer questions that have to do with topics about which I already know something--or think I know something--even if what I know is only about the history of philosophical treatments of the topic, or about which I can learn something before I answer the question.)
Color
Philosophers

I'm going to be a senior in high school and I've found philosophy podcasts to be a great way to sample the thoughts of famous philosophers without having to drudge through esoteric forests of essays. Between listening to Philosophy Bites and Nigel Wharburton's reading of his book Philosophy: The Classics, I've become familiar with a bit of Hume and Kant. It is probable that I have misunderstood much of the material of the podcasts, so the material of this question does not reflect in any way the reliability of the sources. As I understand, Hume proposed the a priori and the a posteriori, the latter constructed by experience. Kant then respected the two categories but divided them into analytic a priori, synthetic a priori (new after Hume), and synthetic a posteriori. What interests me is the problem of "the missing shade of blue." Because all ideas originate from experience, even simple ones like fundamental colors (or shades of them), then are not all colors a posteriori? For they cannot be a priori in...

Although Hume does not himself use the terms 'a priori' and 'a posteriori', those categories do, roughly, correspond to the distinction that Hume draws between relations of ideas and matter of fact in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding . (The Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is also referred to as the 'first Enquiry', as I will do in what follows, to distinguish it from the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals , the 'second Enquiry'.) Now, by the by, but interestingly enough, Hume doesn't draw the distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact, at least explicitly, in the earlier Treatise of Human Nature , much of whose first Book was recast in the first Enquiry, although he does draw a related distinction in Book 1, Part 3, Chapter 1 of the Treatise , between relations that depend on 'intuition' and 'demonstration', and have only to do with ideas, in contrast to other relations, which do not so depend on ideas, and thus do not admit of the sort of...
Education
Philosophers

Can you please provide some suggestions for a good supplementary text for Martin Buber's "I & Thou?" In spite of our philosophical backgrounds, a friend and I are getting a bit lost trying to comprehend it. We are not reading this for part of a college class, so do not know of any professors to ask.

In Between Man and Man , Martin Buber recounts the following story, which he takes to illuminate the experience at the heart of I and Thou : "When I was eleven years of age, spending the summer on my grandparents' estate, I used, as often as I could do it unobserved, to steal into the stable and gently stroke the neck of my darling, a broad dapplegray horse. It was not a casual delight but a great, certainly friendly, but also deeply stirring happening. If I am to explain it now, beginning from the still very fresh memory of my hand, I must say that what I experienced in touch with the animal was the Other, the immense otherness of the Other, which, however, did not remain strange like the otherness of the ox and the ram, but rather let me draw near and touch it. When I stroked the mighty mane, sometimes marvelously smooth-combed, at other times just as astonishingly wild, and felt the life beneath my hand, it was as though the element of vitality itself bordered on my skin, something that was...
Philosophers

Excuse me, my English is not perfect. But I´ll try to make myself understood. I´m very interested in the problem, which Wittgenstein named "the bewitchment of our mind by language". I think, language is a cage inside we live, if we are not aware of its mechanisms. I want to ask you, if this topic is already investigated? Is there any explicit literature concerning it? Thank you very much. Yours sincerely. S.H.

"A picture held us captive," Wittgestein writes in the Philosophical Investigations , "and we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language...." The sort of picture to which Wittgenstein is referring here consists of pre-philosophical assumptions about the nature of language, of mind, of knowledge that shape the kind of philosophical answers that are given to those questions. On one interpretation of Wittgenstein, his aim throughout his later writings--that is, the writings beginning with the Blue and Brown Books and continuing on to the end of his death, was to expose such pictures in order to break the hold that they had on the great early analytic philosophers, such as Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege, and Wittgenstein himself (in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ). On this reading of the later Wittgenstein, his later philosophy is largely 'therapeutic', aimed at enabling those inclined to philosophy--including himself!--to live content with a 'pictureless' approach to...
Philosophers

On the "about the site" page, reference is made to your cadre of "trained philosophers," and in many questions and answers on the site, the panelists are described as "professional philosophers." These phrases imply that philosophy from a degreed person or one who professes to be a philosopher as a means of earning an income is superior to philosophy from the likes of Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, or Eric Hoffer (all meagerly educated, working-class tradesmen). We know that is not the case, which leads me to the question. If it is not education or profession, then what is it that makes one a philosopher?

This excellent question goes to the heart of the vexed issue of what philosophy is (itself a philosophical question, which has received widely divergent answers in the past 2500 years.) Today, there is a profession of philosophy: in order to enter into this profession, it is nearly always required that one have a Ph.D. (there are exceptions--there are professional philosophers, i.e., philosophers with academic positions, such as Saul Kripke and, I believe, Myles Burnyeat, who do not have Ph.D.'s, just as there are professional scholars of English literature who lack Ph.D.'s--my former colleague at Johns Hopkins University, the esteemed critic Neil Hertz, never submitted his Ph.D. dissertation). This requirement reflects the fact that today, academic disciplines such as philosophy are professions, entrance into which requires certain credentialing. Although all the Ask Philosophers panelists have professional positions and Ph.D.'s, this of course does not imply that any of these professionals is...
Philosophers

Why did a whole month pass between Socrates' trial and his execution?

The day before Socrates' trial began, the Athenians had launched a ship, dedicated to the god Apollo, bound for Delos in commemoration of the victory of the Athenian Theseus over the Minotaur. During the ship's voyage, no executions were allowed in Athens. Although the length of the trip was variable--it depended on weather conditions--according to Xenophon (as reported in Debra Nails's excellent, informative entry on Socrates in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ) it took thirty-one, and consequently Socrates lived thirty days beyond his trial.
Philosophers

What does Kant mean by "intuition"? I've been reading a small book by Jaspers on Kant's whole philosophy, but he is so unclear about this word "intuition" and the word seem important in some way to what Kant is saying.

You are absolutely right that Kant's conception of intuition is crucially important to the argument of the first Critique . It is, however, quite difficult exactly to say what intuitions are, for Kant. In the Transcendental Aesthetic of the first Critique , Kant writes: "In whatever way and through whatever means a cognition may related to objects, that through which it relates immediately to them, and at which all thought as a means is directed as an end, is intuition. This, however, takes place only insofar as the object is given to us; but this in turn, is possible only if it affects the mind in a certain way. This capacity...to acquire representations...is called sensibility. Objects are therefore given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone affords us intuitions..." (A 19/B 33). Here's a start at understanding Kant's conception of intuition: intuitions are representations, given in sensation, that provide the material--the starting point--for all cognition.
Ethics
Philosophers

Consider the following scenario: an acquaintance I personally do not particularly enjoy talking to is learning French and asks me for a favour, namely to chat with them an hour per week in French, my mother tongue. Would it be morally good to do them the favour, even if it would just be out of duty? Or another scenario: my mum wants me to visit her for Christmas, but I wish not to, just as much as she wants me to go. Should I go out of duty? According to Kant, good actions must be motivated by a sense of duty, as opposed to inclination. But shouldn't it be just the other way round, at least if the action is about doing another person a favour? It almost seems immoral to do somebody a favour only because of duty.

The question reminds me of Schiller's lines. Scruples of Conscience I like to serve my friends, but unfortunately I do it by inclination And so often I am bothered by the thought that I am not virtuous. Decision There is no other way but this! You must seek to despise them And do with repugnance what duty bids you. These lines are often cited as an objection to Kant's account of moral worth; Frederick Beiser challenges the standard reading of these lines in a discussion of the relation between Kant and Schiller in Schiller as Philospher: A Re-Examination . I want also to add a few remarks about Kant to Matthew's perceptive response. First, a point about the examples in the Groundwork . Kant introduces those examples in order to isolate the moral motive, in order to explicate the concept of a good will, which Kant introduces in the first sentence of the body of the Groundwork : "It is impossible to think of...
Logic
Philosophers

According to Descartes' demon hypothesis, would it be possible for the demon to deceive us about the rules of logical inference e.g. could my belief in the law of non-contradiction be caused by the demon?

Jay is correct that eternal truths are up to God. In a letter to Mersenne, Descartes says that "since God is a cause whose power surpasses the bounds of human understanding,and since the necessity of these truths does not exceed our knowledge, these truths are therefore something less than, and subject to, the incomprehensible power of God." Nevertheless, Peter is quite right--in virtue of the textual evidence that Alex cites--to say that the evil deceiver (or 'omnipotent God') doubt is introduced in order to cast mathematical truths into doubt. It's worth noting, however, that in the Third Meditation, this doubt about eternal truths is characterized as "slight and metaphysical". Indeed, Descartes writes: "Yet when I turn to the things themselves which I think I perceive very clearly, I am so convinced by them that I spontaneously declare: let whoever can do so deceive me, he will never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I continue to think that I am something ; or make it ture at...
Philosophers

René Descartes said that "I think therefore I am". Would it not be more true to say: "I am therefore I think"?

In the Discourse on Method , Descartes summarizes the 'meditations' that led him to discover new foundations for philosophy. He explains that he began by trying to reject as false everything about which he could have the least doubt, but then "noticed that while I was trying thus to think everything false, it was necessary that I, who was thinking this, was something. And observing that this truth 'I am thinking, therefore I exist' was so firm and sure...I decided that I could accept it without scruple." Descartes thus began by supposing that nothing existed, but then noticed that the fact that he could make this supposition--that he could suppose, or think, that nothing existed--required that he exist, and consequently concludes, from the fact that he is thinking (that nothing exists), that he himself must exist. Descartes could not, therefore, accept your proposed reformulation of the cogito (as it is sometimes called), because it assumes what is supposed to be in question--that...

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