This question seems to raise an aesthetic version of what has come to be known as the 'Euthyphro Question' (from Plato's dialogue Euthyphro ), where it is asked if what is holy is holy because the gods love it, or if the gods love what is holy because it is holy. If one answers that what is holy is holy because the gods love it, one endorses a version of the view that values are created, or even subjective; if one answers that the gods love what is holy because it is holy, one endorses a version of the view that values are discovered, or even objective. (There are, of course, a range of alternatives between these poles, but let's stick to them, since they bring out the issue most sharply.) By parity of reasoning, it might seem that if one believes that the capacity to appreciate beauty reflects the sophistication of one's aesthetic judgment, then it would seem that beauty is independent of the perceiver, discovered by perceivers, and maybe even is objective; if one believes that beauty is...

The remark that murder is a victimless crime, while surely ironic, hits home. As Alexander George remarked a while back on this site in response to a related question, "death is rather peculiar...in that it's a misfortune that eliminates from the world the subject of the misfortune." Alex went on to say that "once one's dead, not only does one cease to experience things, but one ceases to have interests too," which, he explained, makes the question of what harm is caused by death difficult to answer. Alex's response concludes where your question begins: "As one of my students once asked when we were discussing this in class: 'So murder is a victimless crime?'." The fact that the victim of a murder dies may make it difficult to say in what respect the victim's interests suffer in virtue of that victim's death, which complicates the question of who is harmed by murder. This question, however, is distinct from another question that you raise: "why is it that we find the thought of murder abhorrent?"...

Philosophers distinguish different types of rationality. The ability to judge whether means will achieve ends is generally called 'instrumental rationality'. Epistemic rationality consists in proportioning one's beliefs to the relevant evidence--although it's a nice and subtle question just what counts as 'relevant', and seems to me in fact to call for the exercise of epistemic rationality. A third type of rationality, related to the first, since it concerns actions, is practical rationality, or practical reason: the exercise of reason in forming one's intentions, or determining what one should do in a given situation. There may well be other types of rationality as well, but to my mind at least, the three types that I have identified continue to receive the most attention from philosophers. One issue that continues to be engaged concerns the relation between instrumental and practical rationality: some philosophers have claimed that practical rationality just is instrumental rationality; other...

Provided that there is some cue to the fact that the work in question is a satire of sexism--even if the cue is only a matter of conversational implicature (a notion introduced by the philosopher Paul Grice to capture aspects of meaning that may be communicated without being made explicit in the communication)--as the question seems to assume, then it would clearly seem not to be the case that the work is itself sexist. (Similarly, it seems to me that Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" is clearly not an invitation to cannibalism or infanticide.) But how, exactly, can one tell that a piece of writing is satirical: that's a nice and subtle question. (A parallel question: how can one tell one a speaker is being sarcastic? Some people have difficulty in doing so, at least with some speakers.) I don't know that any necessary or sufficient conditions could be enumerated that would allow one to determine when something counts as satire and when it doesn't; to my mind, in order to be able to...

Philosophers interested in judgments about works of art certainly do tend to focus on beauty, but other aesthetic categories have received philosophical attention. Ted Cohen has written a book on jokes and other work has been done on the philosophy of humor. The concept of ugliness has recently received some attention from philosophers interested in Kant's aesthetics. The concept of sentimentality has received intermittent sustained attention from philosophers. There has been some consideration of categories like 'camp' and 'kitsch'--if you haven't read Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp," I highly recommend it; Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being contains provocative remarks about kitsch. To my knowledge, however, the concepts of the cute and the cool haven't received attention--and they should. Indeed, to my mind, at least, aesthetics is one area of philosophy that has especially suffered from what Wittgenstein would call "a one-sided diet," with too much attention...

You raise multiple questions, all very important and interesting, which intersect in various ways, but which, I think, can be distinguished. (1) Are reasons causes? (2) Is an agent constrained if s/he acts for reasons? (3) Can one freely act against one's own better judgment? (4) Even if one could freely act against one's own better judgment, would the ability to do so be valuable in the way that freedom is valuable? (Now (4) gives rise to a further question: In what respect is freedom valuable?) Now it seems to me that the question that's driving you here is whether agents can be determined--"governed"--by reasons and nevertheless free, and so I'll treat it. (Note that I've subtly shifted the question from whether agents can act for reasons and still be free to whether agents determined by reasons can still be free. I do so in order to focus the question on choice, which I take to be the locus of freedom, and away from action, which requires a different sort of analysis.) In...

Although I agree with most, if not all, of Professor Taliaferro's response to your fascinating question, I want to add a few remarks that may take the discussion in a slightly different direction. You asked whether Shakespeare was a philosophical genius, and whether philosophers have "deduced a coherent Shakespearean belief system from his works." I think that the two questions should be distinguished. It's not at all clear to me that an author may be a philosophical genius only if a philosophical system can be deduced from his works. Indeed, Wittgenstein, for example, who to my mind at least was certainly a philosophical genius, resisted--at least in his 'later' writings--systematization altogether, so it would be somewhat misguided even to try to deduce a philosophical system from his writings. One might of course respond that Wittgenstein was systematically anti-systematic, and that that in itself constitutes a kind of systematicity. But that seems to me to be a Pickwickian sense of ...

I don't know to what extent any philosophers or philosophical positions are mispresented outside of academia. However, throughout academia, both in philosophy and in other disciplines, 'Cartesian' and its cognates have become somewhat dirty words, implying a completely 'unhuman' separation of mind and body, a commitment to an absurd notion of the transparency of the mind, a downgrading of the body in favor of the mind, a sharp separation between reason and the passions or emotions, and other errors. Consideration of the historical Descartes, however, reveals that he is not guilty of certain of the errors that are imputed to him, or that his purported errors, when set in the broader context of his own overarching philosophical aims and projects, are less absurd than they might seem when taken out of context. One reason that this sort of misrepresentation may take place is that the historical Descartes, the 'founder of modern philosophy', is seen as a father who has to be slain in order for...

"The only way we can ever get rid of philosophy," the great philosopher J. L. Austin wrote in "Ifs and Cans," is "by kicking it upstairs." In 'kicking a philosophical question upstairs'--which Austin takes to be an improvement on treating the question philosophically--a putatively philosophical question is revealed to belong to another branch of knowledge. There are numerous examples. Although there was considerable speculation in ancient, medieval, and early modern philosophy about the nature of the physical elements, that issue is no longer debated; similarly, although there were debates about embryology from antiquity through the modern period, the way the fetus is formed is no longer a topic of philosophical discussion. In these cases, however, empirical questions have been split off from more properly philosophical, or conceptual issues--and there are, of course, philosophical issues that arise in connection with cosmology and embryology. I myself am inclined never to pronounce a philosophical...

The question needs to be clarified a bit, I think. Philosophy is taught in high school in certain countries: for example, in France, in the last year of high school, ' terminale ', all students studied philosophy; in the US, philosophy courses are taught in some high schools, largely private schools; however, it does seem to be the case that philosophy courses are not regularly taught in American secondary schools. I agree that the skills taught in philosophy courses--careful reading, clear prose, the construction of arguments--would be beneficial for all students, for they are highly 'portable' and are used in all walks of life. I am inclined to think that one reason that philosophy courses are not generally taught in high schools--at least today--is due to the tests to which schools must teach; another reason that philosophy may not be taught in high schools is that there generally aren't qualified teachers of philosophy working at the secondary level. (Here the contrast with France is...