OK, so first a disclaimer: I teach at a place where we send off two or three students each year to highly ranked Ph.D. programs who will only have BA degrees when they begin. I understand that it has become much more common for students to get MAs first these days, but so far, our students seem to be doing fine without that intermediate step. So this is the basis for what I am going to say. I have served on graduate admissions committees at two places I worked before, but neither was ranked even near the top 15. So feel free to ignore what I will say, since I am not actually based at one of the places you are wanting to go. But I did want to say that everything that I have heard strongly indicates that what you were told about the paramount importance of writing sample and recommendations holds true. The most influence generally resulting from GRE s and such is that they might be brought in to decide between two candidates who otherwise look more or less equal on the basis of writing sample...

What? You want a quickie bloggy-type answer for a question that would merit (at least) a whole book? OK, but be warned: what you are looking for is much, much more complicated and richer than the following answer (or, perhaps any bloggy-type answer) could indicate. Knowledge is usually conceived as simply being in the best--or at any rate, a sufficiently good--kind of position in one's cognitive relation to the thing in question. Knowledge is generally regarded as requiring something like a truth condition (if what you think is false, you don't know), a belief condition (if you don't believe something, you can't know it), and some other condition (usually called "justification" or "warrant") that shows why the true belief in question actually fulfills whatever other standards apply to distinguish between knowledge and other forms of true belief--after all, one can have true beliefs about something and still not know it. For example, if I believe something that's true, but for the wrong...

Aristotle is usually classified as a "classical republican," which is more misleading than helpful, given contemporary American political party names. A "classical republican" is typically contrasted with a "classical liberal," which only makes matters worse, given contemporary political (ab)uses of the "L-word." So here is a quick-and-dirty (read: not entirely adequate) brief account of what these terms are supposed to mean. A classical liberal is one who tends to think in terms of maintaining limits on the government's power to interfere in individual people's liberties. (A term related here that is also important in contemporary rhetoric is "libertarian.") Classical republicans tend to think in terms of what would make the best and most effective (or most admirable or choiceworthy) constitution, such that the entire welfare of the community is the primary consideration. Anyway, for better than a quick-and-dirty, look up these terms in the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy (see the lower...

Sure it is. Obviously, one would have to defend any such claim with specific examples in mind, but here's one that is now famous among philosophers. For a long time, people used and made decorative items made from "jade." But then, chemical analysis showed that what people were calling "jade" was actually two distinct materials, which are now called "jadeite" and "nephrite." Both are still generically called "jade," but sophisticated buyers now know well that there are differences between these two materials, and these differences may have an impact on the value of artifacts made from each material. Here's the point: a language that simply has the term "jade" in it will not be as effective for describing the world as a language that has both "jadeite" and "nephrite" in it. So there's your answer.

As someone who teaches ancient Greek philosophy in translation (almost all the time, at any rate), I have worried a lot about questions like yours. I have also been a translator of some of the texts I and others teach, and so I have also encountered the problem from that side, too. It's a thorny one, for sure. The easiest answer is the purist one: translations are simply never adequate. But in the end, I also think this is far too easy an answer, to the point of actually being worthless. Here's why: What happens when some student decided he or she really wants to avoid the pitfalls of working from someone else's translation? Well, he or she must learn the original language. OK, good choice. But wait: do the teachers of that language themselves somehow manage to avoid the cultural and social aspects of the culture(s) of teacher and student so completely or effectively that the process of learning the new language is not itself just as likely to continue whatever misunderstandings the student...

So let's start with the most obvious part: "philosophy" comes from the Greek " philo " (love) + " sophia " (wisdom). Whether what we do now is all rightly conceived as wisdom might be a matter of debate, but it seems highly likely that no one will be a good philosopher unles he or she really loves philosophy. Moreover, although I don't believe a good philosopher has to love all philosophy, I do think it is important that he or she loves at least a lot of it. This is partly because the best philosophy makes connections to other areas of philosophy, and often brings in sophistication from more than a single narrow area in application to problems within that area. The other reason why such love is critical, I believe, is that philosophy is hard . Solving philosophical problems is a rarity, to be honest, and even understanding some of the solutions others have offered can take a great deal of effort and patience. One who does not love philosophy will find all that effort and...

Something seems to have gone a bit wrong here. There can be no doubt that human evolution has effects on our sexualities, but I see no reason at all to agree with the reduction of all sexuality to reproduction. Sexuality can manifest itself in sociality and other very important aspects of human life--aspects required for fitness in the environments we inhabit. The very fact that human females are only fertile for a fraction of each menstrual cycle--but can be sexually active throughout that cycle--seems to me to show clearly that there is more to sexuality than reproduction. So I'm afraid I'm inclined simply to reject the assumption behind this question.

Apart from fairly radical views that would prohibit any human use of any animal, I see nothing wrong with the basic idea of having dogs providing diagnostic assistance. We know that dogs can be really good at sniffing out explosives and bed bugs, for example, as we already use them for such tasks. If they turn out to be also especially good for medical diagnosis or troubleshooting, it seems like a reasonable thing to have dogs do for us. Obviously, the same rules about humane treatment for the dogs applies in these cases as for any others, and we would also want to have strong support from medical studies to confirm that the dogs really were helpful and reliable for these tasks. Even if we have only some reason to think that dogs are good at this, then they could be regarded as potentially good indicators of some problem. So if a cancer-sniffing dog reacted in such a way as to indicate that I had cancer, I think I would be well advised to go and get a check-up, even if there was not...

I assume there will be non-academic thinkers who are regarded by future generations (or even by others in the current generation) as great philosophers by some. As Aristotle said long ago, honor depends on those who bestow it, and so if enough people think that someone's blog or whatever is loaded with "great philosophy" then so be it. Moreover, I see no reason to think that even some groups of academics will find some the writings (or bloggings) of some non-academic worthy of the title, "great philosophy." But I also think that we may be talking past one another here. For there are certain fields of philosophy that have become extremely technical, and I regard it as very unlikely that anyone who is not academically trained in these areas will be able to provide important advances in such areas. But of course, there might still come to be some self-taught genius who does just that. So who knows? I suppose one thing that would be worth thinking more about would be what characteristics make...

Both the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy have good articles on truth. Two books I would recommend that get into some related issues would be: Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton 2002) Simon Blackburn, Truth: A Guide (Oxford 2005) Hope this helps!