There are a couple different parts to this question. You ask about people who "go[] to college for four years to learn about philosophy", so I take it you have undergraduate concentrators in mind. Such people do just about every job you can imagine. The study of philosophy is excellent preparation for many lines of work, because it teaches you how to read, how to write, and how to think, and those are generally useful skills. So it should be no surprise that I've had students go into business, law (a very popular choice), medicine (gotta do those pre-med requirements!), music, and so on and so forth. But I take it you are more interested in whether there is "a philosophy job of sorts". There is, or better, there are. The obvious one is teaching philosophy, and that is what all of us here do, which means that we are employed by colleges and universities. (I've known people who teach philosophy at private high schools, as well.) As part of that work, we also write philosophy: books, journal...

Philosophers are not well placed to answer this kind of question. It's really a question for physicists, who would conceive it, I believe, as the question whether time is quantized.

This is a very good quesiton, and a very hard one. My own view is that your teacher was right, but that there are limits to how far the point can be pushed. Poetry, of course, is characterized by the extensive use of metaphor and other figures of speech. So just consider metaphor. Can a particular metaphor mean something beyond what its author intended? I find the question to be somewhat ill conceived, because it seems to suppose that the author of the metaphor had some paticular interpretation of it in mind, and that's not at all obvious. In my limited experience writing poetry, that certainly hasn't been my experience; and, as is often pointed out, metaphor comes in for pretty heavy use in philosophy itself. (Thus Quine, more or less: The lore of our fathers is a dull gray cloth, black with fact and white with convention, but nowhere quite black or quite white.) It's not that there's something very specific I want to say and could just as well say prefectly literally. Rather, the metaphor itself just...

One reason, I'm sure, is the same reason so many American high schools have eliminated languages, music, and the arts: A lack of money, coupled with a very narrow conception of what education is. The latter, I'd guess, is the reason so few American high schools would have offered philosophy even before the cuts in funding for public education.

I'm not so sure I agree with your initial premise. Suppose the trait in question is having red hair. It seems rather irrational of you to dislike people who have red hair, and for that reason there does seem to be something morally suspect about your attitude toward people with red hair. It seems, in particular, very unlikely indeed that your reason for disliking such people is just that they have red hair. It seems much more likely that your reason is that you think people with red hair are all whatever, and you (quite reasonably) dislike people who are whatever. It's the generalization, then, that is objectionable, because it is unfounded. And if we now consider the cases you mention—weight, physical or mental disability, or race—it seems all the more likely that it isn't just the mentioned quality that people dislike: They think people with the mentioned quality have some other sort of failing. More importantly, however, the kind of discrimation suffered by the kinds of groups you mention...

There are a couple different issues here that need to be disentangled. One concerns what philosophers call "testimony". It's clear that one way of knowing something is being told: If you can't know that the earth is round because you were told, then, as you note, very few people know that the earth is round. Now, as always in philosophy, there is much disagreement about how why one can come to know something by being told. But most people would agree that testimony is only a means by which knowledge may be transmitted : If you tell me that p , and I now know that p , you must already have known that p . Maybe you were told that p by someone else. But the chain has to bottom out somewhere, with someone who knows that p "of h'er own knowledge", as a lawyer might say, that is, not because s'he was told. Testimony therefore seems a distraction here. The problem of religious knowledge concerns how one might know (say) that God exists otherwise than by being told. If...

If you think that's bad, you should try reading Hume, particularly, "On Modesty". Hume there explains why it's morally required for women but not men to have but one sexual partner! Hegel, Hume, and the rest were human beings, and their opinions are just as likely to be infected by prejudice, ignorance, and self-interest as are those of any of us mortals. (One might say the same kind of thing, by the way, about Saint Paul and the other authors of scripture, all of whom were also numbered among us mortals.) Of course, it's part of being a reflective person to struggle to uncover such sources of bias. Hegel and Hume failed in this particular instance. I expect that says more about how deeply rooted sexism was in their cultures than it does about them personally. And, of course, their cultures were the antecedents of our own, so there's something to be learned here about our own culture, too. As for the question why most philosophers are men, I'm sure you can guess the answer to that question....

It's really too bad that there is this common image of religious peopleas simply swallowing what someone else has told them. I don't know manysuch folks myself, though I am sure they do exist. And if the people at your son's church are telling him to stop asking questions, that's even worse: Questioning is not opposed to faith but an integral part of it, and a faith based upon just not questioning is not a faith that will survive very long. Maybe you and your wife should find a different church if this one is not serving your son well. But whatever you decide on that score, there is no reason you can't engage your son's questions. The three you report are very different. (And, not to torpedo your pride, not uncommon: Children are amazing.) The first concerns the second creation story in Genesis. (If you don't know, there are two such stories, drawn from two different traditions.) Assuming your wife isn't committed to literalism here, then the first thing to tell your son is that this is a story ...

These are obviously questions about biology, not philosophy. I'd try a good biology text. That said, it isn't plausible that personhood has to do with number of cells. Number of cells is roughly proportional to size. One would therefore expect that the number of cells in a large tree would dwarf the number of cells in a mature human being. Same for elephants and whales, let alone the strange fungus that is reported to be the world's largest living creature.

Here's Frege's way of making this point: Now these distinctions between a prioir and a posteriori, synthetic and analytic, concern, as I see it, not the content of the judgement but the justification for making the judgement. ...When a proposition is called a posteriori or a priori in my sense, this is not a judgement about the conditions, psychological, physiological and physical, which have made it possible to form the content of the proposition in our consciousness; nor is it a judgement about the way in which some other man has come, perhaps erroneously, to believe it true; rather, it is a judgement about the ultimate ground upon which rests the justification for holding it to be true. ( Foundations of Arithmetic , section 3) Frege attaches a footnote in the middle of the first sentence in which he says that he means "only to state accurately what earlier writers, Kant in particular, have meant by" these terms.