To the best of my knowledge and on the basis of what I know about linguistics, since the grammar--or, to use a technical term, 'syntax'--of a language is largely a matter of tacit or unconscious knowledge shared by all competent speakers of a language, who obviously may differ greatly in intelligence (whatever metric one uses to measure intelligence), it doesn't seem to me that it makes much sense to claim that the mere fact of knowing a more 'complicated' language reflects on the intelligence of the one who knows that language.

One can distinguish between cleverness and depth. A 'clever' philosophical argument may be facile and initially impressive, but upon its examination, its flash may pass and the initially attractive argument may turn out not to be so attractive after all; by contrast, a 'deep' philosophical argument or position may not initially impress, but will reward repeated and sustained reflection. (I believe that some ancient philosopher or another--I'm no specialist in ancient philosophy--somewhere draws something like this distinction, and opts for depth over cleverness: rightly, to my mind.)

While there is progress in philosophy, what counts as philosophical progress is, I think, very different from what counts as progress in math and the sciences. There is no need for working mathematicians and scientists to know the history of their fields in order to contribute to 'state of the art' research, for most branches of most of the natural sciences build on theories that have been empirically confirmed, and mathematics builds on proofs known to be true, and so the present of these fields is what is most important to the researcher who wishes to contribute to ongoing work in those fields. Because, in contrast, philosophy consists in advancing arguments in favor of theses that cannot be resolved by appeal to facts or known with certainty, the history of philosophy is part of its present in a way that the history of (most of) the natural sciences and of mathematics is not part of their present. Not only is there a standing possibility in philosophy that some repressed historical view might go ...

The question of how emotions are related to brain states is an excellent one. Empirical research has long been underway to try to identify areas of the brain associated with emotions; the best-known exponent of this research program is probably Antonio Damasio, who has articulated his approach to the relation between emotions and the brain in several popular books, including Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain . Very few philosophers would deny that there is some relation between mental states and brain states--indeed, even the paradigm early modern dualist, Descartes, believed that there was some relation between most mental states, with the exception of clear and distinct ideas, and brain states--but there is considerable disagreement about the nature of their relation. Some philosophers have claimed that mental states are identical to brain states; some philosophers have claimed that mental states supervene or...

I don't think that there is any need to justify one's ethical or moral beliefs: religion, for example, is a traditional source of the moral commitments of many people, but religion differs considerably from philosophy in that philosophy seeks, unlike religion, to give reasons for certain beliefs or commitments. Consider some moral precept advanced, for example, in the New Testament; the principle in question may well be true, but no justification is given for it in the New Testament; a philosophically inclined believer might, by contrast, seek to provide some rational justification for the principle. And this is a distinctively philosophical contribution to our lives. As Alex George, the creator of this website, writes in the Preface to the second volume of questions derived from this site, What Should I Do? Philosophers on the Good, the Bad, and the Puzzling : "The goal of acting ethically is quite elusive....Philosophy can be of some value here. Philosophers, after all, have been in the...

I take your question to be whether geometry can be axiomatized into a deductive system based on certain definitions, as some philosophers believe mathematics can be, or whether, because geometry is in some way related to space--unlike mathematics--it cannot so be axiomatized. I begin by noting that there is disagreement among philosophers of mathematics whether mathematics can indeed be axiomatized in this way. Charles Parsons, for example, following Kant, believes that mathematics requires intuition. Since I don't know the details of Parsons's account, presented in his book Mathematical Thought and Its Objects , I draw instead on Kant's view, which inspired Parsons (who is also a great Kant scholar): consideration of Kant's view of mathematics will also lead us back to geometry. According to Kant, both mathematics and geometry yield a body of necessary truths, truths which are, in Kant's terminology, ' a priori '; moreover, according to Kant, the truths of both mathematics and geometry...

This is a wonderful and fascinating question, which goes to the heart of the relation between morality and legality. It does seem that the moral status of an action might well be determined by the intention with which the action is performed (in part because depending on one's intention, one may well perform the same external act--say, give money to charity--but act very differently--one might give to charity in order to help others, or in order to get a tax write-off, or to impress one's friends--and so it seems to me that the nature of and the respect to which an act reflects morally on an agent can vary depending on her intention in performing the act. Of course, however, it might well be the case that no one but God can really know the intention with which someone acts--agents themselves may not know their own intentions very well, as Freud and empirical psychology have argued--and so intentions cannot be taken into account in determining whether some external act is in conformity with or...

What seems to be at issue in this question is not racial discrimination, in terms of which the question begins, which would seem to imply that what's at issue is negative bias towards people in virtue of their race, which certainly wouldn't be an aesthetic, but a moral issue; the second sentence suggests that what's really at issue in the question is the nature of the basis for distinguishing among people with respect to their race, which is a distinct matter, and which need not--although, admittedly, it tends to--have moral and political implications. Now there is no doubt that individuals from different races often appear different--even if, as recent empirical work has suggested, there is little to no genetic difference between such people, so that they are not essentially different, even though they appear different--and it does not seem implausible to me that one might, whether because of habit, preference or other reasons, find individuals of certain races less attractive than those of...

It should be noted that most philosophers who are interested in skepticism aren't themselves skeptics: they see skepticism as raising a challenge that must be met by an adequate account of human knowledge, and insofar as they try to defuse skepticism, they manifest considerable skepticism about its truth. However, attention to ancient skepticism reveals a divide in views about skepticism: Pyrrhonian skeptics were skeptical about skepticism, because one aim of Pyrrhonism was to avoid dogmatism about any and all beliefs; Academic skeptics, by contrast, seem to have maintained that skepticism was true, and consequently were sometimes called 'negative dogmatists'. (I say that Academic skeptics seem to have been negative dogmatists because it is a matter of scholarly debate whether the Academics were indeed negative dogmatists, and also whether there were other negative dogmatists.) One deep question is whether the Pyrrhonian or the Academic has the more coherent attitude to skepticism: after all, how...

It's not altogether clear to me that it is correct to draw such a sharp distinction between philosophical and religious questions: for one thing, certain philosophers, like Augustine, Anselm, Bonaventure, and others deny that such a distinction may be drawn; for another thing, depending on what's at stake in appealing, say, to Jesus, one may invoke Jesus while giving a 'purely' philosophical answer to a question. For example, consider the following question treated by the early modern philosopher Nicolas Malebranche (I simplify somewhat to focus the issue as sharply as possible): Why does a completely self-sufficient God create the finite world? Malebranche's answer is that God creates the world in order to incarnate Jesus Christ, on the grounds that only if an infinite being is joined to the finite world will the world merit being created by God. Malebranche appeals to Jesus in this context in order to provide a sufficient reason for God's creation of the world--a sufficient reason, I should note,...