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Education

I'm a student with the Open University in the UK, recently due to industrial action my tutors are no longer marking our essays with scores, they now only put comments on them. Personally I prefer this. I find myself feeling motivated to higher levels, and without the scores I cannot gauge what my average is, meaning that each essay is important to me. Initially this was because I didn't want to receive a bad comment, hence a bad score, but now it's because I am so much more absorbed in my subject. But other students don't feel the same, they feel as if it's their right to know their scores, after all, what is a degree if it isn't one massive score. I've decided that those of us who are enjoying the way things currently are, without scores are at University for the pursuit of knowledge. While those who do not like it are at University in pursuit of a degree. Two very different things. My question is, with this in mind, Do you agree that Universities would become better learning establishments,...

Grading at least some of students' work is probably unavoidable, but comments are essential. I've become fond of the British system of separating teaching from assessment. At Cambridge University, where I work, this means that the weekly philosophy essay that undergraduates write for their supervisions (tutorials) receives extensive comments and is the basis for extended discussion between the student and the supervisor, but the essay is not graded. The student's grade is based rather on tests and extended essays (both types of excercise submitted anonymously), and the grading is done by a board of examiners. Some students who come into this system find it disconcerting: since their examiner is in general not their supervisor, they are nervous that they won't know exactly what the examiner wants to read. But that may be no bad thing, and the system gives students plenty of feedback and separates this from the grade. Since your supervisor is not your examiner, your relationship with her can be...
Philosophy

My 7-year old daughter has asked what philosophy is. Can anybody give an explanation that she would understand? Bonus question: while we were discussing this, she quoted the song, 'Rubbernecking': "Stop, look and listen baby, that's my philosophy". If you can shed light on this you are a legend.

Sadly, I'm not familiar with 'Rubbernecking', but I guess that here 'my philosophy' just means something like 'my general approach to life'. As for explaining to your daughter what philosophy is in the sense we focus on here at AskPhilosophers, examples are better than definitions. For example, you might tell your daughter that in philosophy we think about questions like: 'How do you know that your teachers aren't really robots?
Philosophy

Are there any great literary stylists in philosophy? Its analytical nature would seem to militate against this i.e., trying to express difficult ideas as intelligibly as possible. Some may have (but the only ones I can think of are in translation and far from what the panel go in for) and are usually aiming for a 'felt' response such as Nietzsche, Kierkergaard, Plato's account of the death of Socrates, and so on. Wittgenstein seemed to like portentous statements (again I only know him in translation and couldn't really understand him) such as 'The world is all that is the case' and 'Whereof we cannot speak thereof we must pass over in silence'. Was he trying to sound gnomic and literary while conducting philosophical analysis? I teach English and use Russell's lay writings as models of concision and eloquence in style. I also use extracts from Sartre's 'Being and Nothingness' to show how not to write! Someone told me Sartre had had no training in logic hence his tedious verbosity. I also consider Martin...

You don't have to be a stylish writer to be a great philosopher, as Kant proved. Nevertheless, some great philosophers write beautifully. In addition to Plato, my personal favourites include Descartes, Berkeley, and Hume. I subscribe to the principle that "style should be the feather in the arrow, not the feather in the cap".
Existence
Philosophers

I have been reading Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy , and am puzzled by a paragraph in a section on Plato ('Knowledge and Perception in Plato') pertaining to the use of the verb 'to exist'. The paragraph reads as follows: "Suppose you say to a child 'lions exist, but unicorns don't'; you can prove your point...by taking him to the zoo and saying 'look, that's a lion'. You will not...add 'and you can see that that exists'...if you do then you are uttering nonsense. To say 'lions exist' means 'there are lions', i.e. 'x is a lion' is true for a suitable x'. But we cannot say of the suitable x that it 'exists'; we can only apply this verb to a description, complete or incomplete. 'Lion' is an incomplete description, because it applies to many objects: 'the largest lion in the zoo' is complete, because it applies to only one object". What puzzles me about this paragraph is quite how it is, as Russell sees it, nonsensical to say 'there is a lion, and it exists'. Is it because we do not...

Russell may be making the claim that existence is not a property. An individual may have the property of being furry, of making loud sounds, and of living in Regent's Park Zoo, but it does not also have a property of existence. Rather to exist is for those properties to be instantiated. To say that something exists is to say that there is something with various properties, but existing is not one of them.
Environment

Why do people say that some things mankind does are unnatural? Isn't every human development natural because we are part of nature?

I agree with Nicholas that where we can take natural to mean 'conducive to human flourishing', in Aristotle's sense, there will be a connection between being natural and being good. But there are natural functions that do not carry this meaning. In biological cases, functions often correspond to 'selected effects'. Thus the function of the white fur of a polar bear is camoflage, and that coloration is the result of natural selection. Bears in that environment with white fur did better at reproducing than their more colourful cousins. Selected effects are in that sense natural: they are what the trait is for. From a moral point of view, however, selected effects may be bad and unselected effects may be good. Thus we may have evolved a tendency to deceive other people in certain circumstances, even if this is not morally decent behaviour, and someone who decently resists this temptation may be bucking that evolved inclination. Selected effects may be conducive to what we might call ...

This is a good question: it's hard to know what people mean when they say that an act is unnatural. One possibility is to appeal to a distinction between the functions some things have and alternative uses to which they may be put. A desk clock has the function of telling the time; if I use it as a door-stop, that might count as an unnatural act. That's not what clocks are for. Biological traits also have functions. For example, the function of the veins and arteries in your legs are to help to circulate blood down there. But suppose that surgeons translplant pieces of some of those veins or arteries to your uppper body when they are performing heart surgery: that too might count as an unnatural act. So we may be able to make sense of an unnatural act as the appropriation of something that has one function in order to perform a different function. But people who talk about unnatural acts often claim that those acts are bad, and bad because they are unnatural. The fact that an act is...
Science

Why is it said that scientific results must be replicable? Is this also possible or should that also be the same for mathematics, history, arts or other natural or social sciences?

As David says, replication in science is a way of checking that a result is genuine. We can distinguishing two different senses in which a result may fail to be genuine. One is that it was made up. Replication is a good way of detecting (and discouraging) fraud. Here there is a parallel in the study of history. If one historian makes a claim about what has been found in a document in an archive, other historians may want to check that this is what the document really said. But in science there is also another sense of 'genuine' that gives another reason for wanting replication. Scientific results are usually not just reports of what the meter said. They are often causal claims, like the claim that a certain drug reduces cholesterol. That claim may be based on an experiment where people on the drug ended up with lower cholesterol than people not on the drug. But that doesn't prove the claimed result, that the drug really does lower cholesterol. It might be that there is some other...
Science

Was the discovery of fire, by humans, a scientific discovery?

The discovery of ways to reliably produce fire was a great achievement in technology and engineering. The first observation of fire is not what I would call science (and presumably predates the existence of humans). But there is no sharp border between ordinary observation, inference and explanation and science, though there are clear cases on either side.
Knowledge
Truth

Consider the statement, "There exists at least one true statement." Is a demonstration of the truth of this statement possible, which does not assume the statement's truth? If so, what is that demonstration? If not, does it then follow that certain knowledge - that is, knowledge that is conscious of itself as knowledge - is impossible?

'All statements are false' is necessarily false, so there is at least one true statement.

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