Absolutely! Readers of such articles usually number in the dozens or, sometimes, hundreds, and very few readers write to the author. So it's really not a burden and, often, a really enlightening experience. You'll find that, in nearly all cases, you'll get a friendly and grateful reply.

Much depends on the country you're in. You have better prospects in the US, I think, than elsewhere because the US has no mandatory retirement age, holds people responsible for their own retirement savings, and has rules against age discrimination. (In many other countries, when a university hires someone at 45, it gets burdened with the obligation to pay her/him a pension after age 65 or so.) I think that, if you go on the job market at 45 or so with a really good dissertation and perhaps two published articles, you stand a fair chance of landing a job, especially if you also have a track record as a good teacher or teaching assistant. At least your prospects won't be substantially inferior to those of younger, equally qualified candidates.

There are some technical issues with your formula. You need to decide whether you want to understand L as a constant (80 years), thus assigning equal value to each year of human life, or whether you want to understand L as a variable that varies from person to person, thus assigning greater value to life years of persons whose lives are short. There are plausible arguments on both sides. You might also rethink your reliance on percentage increase in the goodness of a person's life/time. Do you conceive of goodness as being always a positive number? And do you assume there to be some upper bound such that goodness can vary, say, between zero and one? Assuming all this, your formula is prioritarian: you give greater weight to those who are worse off. Thus, according to your formula, getting someone from 0.01 to o.11 is 50 times more valuable than getting someone else from 0.5 to 0.6 (+1000 percent versus +20 percent). Prioritarians often use a different formula, measuring down from the top or from...

Yes, there surely are (just look through the list on the right), though it's probably also true that women are better represented in practical philosophy than in philosophy generally. Outside practical philosophy, among the earliest in this country was Ruth Marcus who taught Saul Kripke, among many others, and had a very distinguished career at Yale. Leigh Cauman (even earlier) studied with Quine, taught logic, and was the managing editor of the Journal of Philosophy for many years. Women are very strongly represented in ancient philosophy, with Gisela Striker (Harvard) a good example. In the history of modern philosophy there's Beatrice Longueness (NYU) . If you look through the various departments -- www.philosophicalgourmet.com/overall.asp -- you'll find that most of them have one or more female philosophers outside practical philosophy, so examples could be multiplied. While the profession is still a long way from where we should and want to be, further progress is made likely by there already...

Nearly all the unbearable suffering in this world occurs among the poorer half of humankind which, collectively, accounts for about 2.4 percent of global consumption and 1.1 percent of global wealth. Are doctors lining up to relieve this suffering? Actually, the opposite is the case. Many physicians trained at great expense in poor countries are lured away to rich countries after their training is completed, sometimes by very active recruitment efforts. So, if you became a doctor to relieve this unbearable suffering, you would be one of a tiny number of doctors, each of whom is -- as best as he or she can --replacing hundreds of doctors migrating in the opposite direction. Check out Partners in Health (PIH) for some more information. If you do not become a doctor, the person taking your place in medical school is very likely to choose what indeed is a replacable job: caring for affluent patients in an affluent country. How many GP's in this country don't even open their practice to Medicaid and...

This depends on the university as well as on your specific interests in this field. You might apply especially to universities that have both: a law school with a real interest in legal theory as well as a philosophy department with strength in philosophy of law, ethics, and political philosophy. Such universities also typically offer a joint JD/PhD program, which may be just right for your interests and would allow you to keep more career options open.

If you are really mainly interested in "the philosophical underpinnings of research in political science," then one plausible solution is to apply to political science doctoral programs after all. Look for a program that has strength in political theory/philosophy and/or is located at a university with a strong political philosophy presence in its philosophy department. This way you can take courses in political (and moral) philosophy and can later, when it comes time to write a dissertation, invite a philosopher to be on your committee. This sort of collaboration is quite common -- for example, as a philosopher I have supervised four political science dissertations at my institution. Should prolonged exposure get you interested in other areas of philosophy and make you eager to write a dissertation on a topic that does not fit into political science, then you'll be in a very good position to switch departments at that point. Doing so is usually much easier than getting admitted from the outside ...

Ranking these dimensions is impossible, I believe. You cannotcompare dimensions as such, but at best only specific differencesacross dimensions. Consider, for example, whether teaching experienceis moreimportant than awards. Well, a large advantage in teaching experiencewill outweigh some small advantage in awards, and a large advantage inawards will outweigh some small advantage in teaching experience. Inorderto compare advantages across dimensions, we would need a metric withineach dimension as well as a standard of comparison across thesedimensions. We might then be able to conclude that, say, teachingexperience is more important than awards in the sense that a smalleradvantage in teaching experience outweighs a larger advantage inawards. But such a conclusion presupposes cross-dimensional comparisons ofmagnitudes. There are two further difficulties. First, dimensions that receive a lot of attention from some mayreceive very little attention from others or none at all. Employers have quite...

The answer depends a bit on the country you're in. I answer on the assumption that you are an undergraduate student in the US. Finding a job as a professional philosopher after completing a PhD in this field is a good bit harder than the average for all careers. Still, the odds are not against success. There are somewhere around 25,000 professional philosophers in the US and only about 75 philosophy departments producing PhDs. So, much of the selection takes place already at the stage where people apply to graduate schools. Those who get the PhD normally find a job. In this job search, the quality and prestige of the university, of its philosophy department, and of the student's supervisor do indeed play a major role. You can find lots of information about these matters on www.philosophicalgourmet.com and elsewhere. All this suggests that a philosophy major aiming to be an academic philosopher should think seriously about other careers if s/he cannot get into a philosophy department that...

There are all sorts of regulations about this in different jurisdictions, but I assume you are interested in the moral prohibition and the reasons for it. I don't think it's wrong in general for teachers and students to become romantically involved with each other. It is wrong only when they also have a student-teacher relationship, or a potential student-teacher relationship. I believe that, in such cases, becoming romantically involved is always wrong. This belief is plausible only if the word "potential" is understood in a robust sense. Otherwise any romantic relationship involving a teacher would be wrong (because it is always possible for the other party to become this teacher's student). So I mean it in a robust sense: You are potentially my teacher only if I am a registered student in a unit of a university in which you teach -- a graduate student in your department, say, or an undergraduate in your college -- even if I have not taken a class with you. Such student-teacher...