Aesthetic appreciation means well-informed, skilled and close attention to a work of art, all of which can be improved by various types of education. It may be that philosophers of aesthetics tend to not use the word 'appreciation', but the constituent ideas are certainly important. Have a look at previous answers on this site under the heading of 'art': quite a few of them concern context, culture or knowledge.

'Bias' here might mean 'a distortion of thought caused by the nature of thought being something essentially different from what is thought about'. This notion of bias is discussed in Professor Lipton's answer above. However, a related but not identical definition of 'bias' is 'preconceptions; or thoughts that in some way "colour" my presentations of the world'. Thus, we might accuse a judge in a court case of being ‘biased’ if we believe they have preconceptions (attitudes that are in place prior to hearing the specific evidence in the case) about the guilt or innocence of the defendant. Similarly, a political reporter would be ‘biased’ if their existing political beliefs influenced their reporting. In this case, not being biased would mean being objective. Now, it is difficult to be objective in this way, to be sure; also, we might claim that striving for such impartiality is something like a duty for judges and reporters. However, consider the following admittedly extreme case. I am a...

I do agree with you; a measure of self-esteem is essential. The problem may be a simple one: 'pride' in modern English has an ambiguity about it, meaning both to be perfectly acceptably pleased about one's achievements, but it also means to be too proud. In previous centuries, however, this ambiguity was not so marked, and the primary meaning was the latter. That simple answer, though, still leaves us with the problem of when does the morally acceptable mode of pride shade over into the unacceptable. I’ll suggest, sketchily, a couple possible solutions. One answer might be when the prideful state has moral consequences: when for example my prideful state leads me to side-step moral rules and be hurtful to others. Still another answer would be when pride is vain; that is, when it is unjustified. The reason why this might be considered unacceptable is that it violates the moral regard I should have to myself. If I can be said to have a moral duty to myself, a duty to care for and...

An excellent set of questions. What needs to be clarified first is what does it mean for a person to be an 'end' in themselves? The most common way of defining this, coming from Kant, is roughly as follows. (I am paraphrasing pp. 63ff in the Groundwork.) All actions have ends (sometime translated as ‘purposes’) – that is, all actions have something they are trying to achieve. This end is, in Kant’s language, the ground of the determination of the law of the action. Or, in other words, the end I have in mind makes my action meaningful and indeed tells me what to do in order to reach it. What is merely on the way to the end is a means. Where the end is entirely conditioned by (that is, has worth only through) incentives that may be individual to me, then Kant calls the principle of action ‘material’. Where the end is, however, of such a type that it is posited as valuable independently of any incentive I may have – where it is universality and objectively worthy – then he says the principle of...

One buys insurance for any number of reasons, but the one to which you refer is to protect against a set of relatively improbable events, but events that should they happen would have a devastating effect upon you (or your next of kin!). We can define 'devastating' as meaning: having an effect that is of a different order to the effect of paying the premium. Because the insurance company deals in probabilities across millions of cases, the rationality of selling the policy is simply a mathematical calculation. But for an individual, the rationality involved it is not merely mathematics, but an appraisal of what is too valuable to risk. Thus, the insurance salesperson and I can both be 'smart'. Suppose I pay a premium of $100 for accident insurance. I have an accident, and the hospital bills are $500,000. The odds against having such an accident are 10000 to 1. So, a good deal for the insurance company who, averaged across many thousands of policies, will make a profit. But also a good deal for me,...

You should have a look at answers on this site under the heading of Probability, but briefly: Yes, 'lucky' is a useful and meaningful concept in everyday language. It means: something that I judge relatively unlikely happened that I judge useful to me. It differs from a concept like fate because we are talking about measurable and widely-understood probabilities, and not mysterious chains of events reaching back centuries. It is important that it happen to me, of course; the guy standing next to me at the bus stop may have felt very unlucky. He was hoping there wouldn't be a bus, and then he would have an excuse for not showing up at some boring philosophy lecture.

Two important historical discussions of this problem. First, Leibniz in the Third Letter to Clarke, par.5. Interestingly, Leibniz asks whether the entire cosmos could be reversed (its handedness changed). Second, Kant, Prolegomena , par. 13, where he calls handed object 'incongruent counterparts'. In both cases, the question is on what grounds, if any, the distinction could be made.

How is it that philosophers make their views know to others? By lecturing at a University, for one. But here we have competition for students: Universities with each other, and between departments over students. The student-customer has to make a choice where and what to study. So, in order to be able to lecture, the philosopher must enter into and have some success in competition. Still more so with publishing: since publishers are in competition, the authors must likewise. However, does this competition necessarily influence what philosophers say and think, or just how they market themselves? That is not so clear. Fashion is more difficult still. It certainly often looks like there are philosophical bandwagons that roll rapidly for a few years or decades. No doubt the element of competition is important here: a young PhD student will want to write on a topic that is likely to get him or her a job. But the latest idea in philosophy may be attractive not merely because it is new, or because...

By way of a partial answer: the phrase 'against his will' in the quotation places the moral stress on the notion of 'informed consent'. But such consent is not an uncontroversial concept. It may that 'the state' has a duty of care with respect to those whose -- or in those situations where -- consent is not or could not be 'informed'. Please see my answer to a previous question for a bit more on this: http://www.amherst.edu/askphilosophers/question/1157

The answer (which you won't like at all) is this: morality can be defined roughly as 'what I should do'. So, asking the question 'why should I be moral?' is equivalent to asking 'why should I do what I should do?' It answers itself, in much the same way as 'what colour is that red thing?'. Well, that's not very interesting. Much more interesting is the second version of your question: why is there moral obligation at all? That is the question which, in a hundred variations, has been worrying philosophers for thousands of years. Surprisingly, perhaps, very few philosophers have concluded by saying that there are no moral obligations whatsoever, nor any obligations remotely akin to them. (Even Nietzsche, who is often misunderstood on this point, speaks about virtues and duties as well as concepts like gift-giving and friendship.) You'll find several more satisfying answers among the responses to 'ethics' questions on this site: http://www.amherst.edu/askphilosophers/topic/Ethics