I don't think that one has a moral obligation to pursue any particular career: one's obligation is to oneself, to pursue what one thinks will be a fulfilling, satisfying career, but what will count as fulfilling or satisfying is of course highly contingent on one's values, personality, etc.. Although you are quite right to note that the philosophy job market is quite tight at the moment, that is no reason not to pursue a philosophy PhD: after all, even if one were not to continue on in professional philosophy, the training one receives in a PhD program is highly portable and may thus be transferred to other professions. My recommendation is that you determine whether, if you were to pursue a PhD in philosophy but were not able to secure a job in the profession, you would still wish to pursue the PhD. If so, then you should apply to graduate school in philosophy; if not, then you should not apply to graduate school in philosophy. If you do apply to graduate school in philosophy, then you need to think...

In my experience, among humanists, it is philosophers who ask the most pointed questions: although the questions posed by Anglo-American philosophers (things are different on the Continent, in my experience) are pointed, they are not necessarily hostile, and I have never heard of anyone keeping score so obviously! It is among many philosophers a point of pride that discussions are as focused and pointed as they are, although it is most surprising to other humanists (and in fact I have sometimes inadvertently ruffled feathers when I have raised questions in a talk given in another area of the humanities in a fashion that would be unremarkable in a philosophy conference or talk.) I myself have found that the level of hostility and tension in a conference or talk varies directly with the topic: while there are of course always exceptions, I have found that talks in the general area of metaphysics and epistemology are more tense than talks in subfields of the history of philosophy, ethics, or political...

On the basis of your remarks, it seems that you aren't especially interested in 'theoretical' philosophy (roughly, metaphysics and epistemology), but that you are interested in 'practical' philosophy (ethics) and aesthetics. You might want further to investigate just what kinds of work are being done by professional philosophers who focus on ethics--including 'applied ethics', such as bioethics and business ethics--and aesthetics, in order to get a better sense of what sorts of issues are currently 'live' in professional philosophy. Depending on the nature of your interest in "public perceptions of philosophy and debates about science, and in general about different attitudes and values in society," you may be able to explore the questions that interest you in a philosophy department; the more empirical your interests, however--that is, the more you are interested in determining just what those interests are, as opposed to assessing the basis for those interests--the less likely that a philosophy...

First, you should get letters of recommendation from the professors who taught the philosophy courses that you took. If you didn't take classes with enough distinct professors to have the sufficient number of letters--which I take to be an implication of your question--then you should get letters from professors with whom you had a close relationship and who can attest to your general intellectual ability and suitability for graduate work. This won't be seen as a problem, since dedicated Masters programs--such as those at Tufts and Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Virginia Tech, and Northern Illinois, to take four programs with which I am familiar and whose students are generally placed at very good Ph.D. programs (although there are of course other good programs, and you should consult Brian Leiter's Philosophical Gourmet rankings of MA programs for further information--are in the business of preparing students who lack the necessary undergraduate coursework to apply directly to Ph.D. programs to apply to such...

I don't think that the view that knowledge of the history of philosophy is important for doing contemporary work in philosophy is "very popular": in fact, until very recently, few philosophers would have subscribed to it. I'm not convinced that knowledge of the history of philosopy is important for doing contemporary work in philosophy. But I do think that the history of philosophy is philosophically valuable. One respect in which the history of philosophy is valuable is that it provides a worked-out laboratory of positions on various topics. Sometimes a position in the history of philosophy may be drawn on to resolve a contemporary question. Reflection on the shortcomings of positions in the history of philosophy may also lead one to articulate a new response to a contemporary philosophical problem. Second, in studying the history of philosophy, one can come to appreciate the contingency, or historicity, of philosophical questions themselves; studying the history of philosophy can therefore...

This question is very difficult to answer. A lot depends on what one values in philosophy. That said... The most important work in the history of philosophy to have been published in the last decade is J. B. Schneewind's The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy . Schneewind not only essentially invents the history of modern moral philosophy as a subfield of the history of philosophy, but he also demonstrates the philosophical significance of large-scale, contextual approaches to historical texts. The most significant work in ethics to have been published is T. M. Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other . It's advances a framework for understanding ethics that could have as great an influence on that field as Rawls' A Theory of Justice had on political philosophy. Richard Moran's Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge , is a revolutionary book that should reorient a nest of questions at the intersection of the philosophy of mind, the theory of...

One good test of whether one ought to pursue philosophy is whether one finds oneself staying up at night worrying about philosophical questions. In this vein, I was once told that if I read Thomas Nagel's Mortal Questions and found one essay that kept me up worrying, then I would know that I should go on to graduate school. (Nagel's book is a good test of one's interest because it includes essays on a wide variety of topics, from ethics to the philosophy of mind to free will to the meaning of life.) It is important to try to figure out how much, and why, it matters to one to be a philosopher. After all, philosophy in particular, and academia in general, is not the easiest of professions, and one must be willing to make all sorts of sacrifices, both in graduate school and afterwards, in order to remain in the profession. So one should try to determine whether one is willing to make the sacrifices that may be necessary.