I agree that it is more difficult to gain access to and to contribute to highly specialized and professionalized academic communities than to less specialized and less professionalized ones. Not all fields of philosophy are as highly technical as mathematical logic, but nearly all philosphical communities are highly professionalized and can be accessed only by those with strong professional credentials. That said, contributing to a highly professionalized academic community is by no means the only way to engage philospohical issues in a profound manner: the classical philosophical texts and problems are just as amenable (or not) to human thought as they have been, and it is no harder for anyone to think philosophically about them now than it has been in the past.

I think it is extremely difficult to predict future happiness, andespecially so on the basis of expected family income -- human lives arecomplex, and that is a narrow and uncertain basis for prediction. So, Idon't have any philosophical insight about your question as it relatesto expected happiness of your future family members. Happily,however, the larger-scale question you raise is easier to answer:environmental ethicsists moved by insights from the deep ecologicalmovement have argued that humans have an ethical obligation to reducethe destructive impact of our species by limiting our populationgrowth. The destructive consequences of human existence are easier topredict than individual human happiness, and reflecting on the ethicalsignficance of that harm may give you a good reason to limit the numberof children that you create. A modest reaction would be todecide to have just one or two children; a stronger one would be todecide to adopt a child already born rather than creating a new one.Some...

People who commit suicide can surely do so with the intention ofprovoking political change, including resisting tyranny or injustice. Likewise, those affected by the suicide of others can surely beprovoked to political action by that act, including action that servesto fight tyranny or injustice. However, this seems to me a perilous strategy of politicalresistance, and not just because it involves death. I suspect thatindividual acts of suicide are difficult to structure effectively aspolitical acts: because suicide often baffles those affected the mostby them, the odds of any particular suicide having the intended effectlook to be rather low. The consequences of acts of mass suicide alsoseem difficult to predict, in part because media and governments willsurely subject those acts to interpretive "spin" that will inevitablyserve coroporate or governmental interests rather than those of thereistance group. In sum, death in general and suicide inparticular strike me as such culturally complex...

The best way to learn about those movements may be to jump in and read some primary texts, for example Descartes' Meditations and Hume's Enquiry . There are good paperback editions of these works, and decent e-texts available from the " Early Modern Texts " site. As long as you read these texts with some patience and care, you'll be able to understand key elements of both traditions and can come to your own conclusions about their similarities and differences. If you are looking for an historical commentary, Anthony Kenny's A Brief History of Western Philosophy is one of the most engaging and readable one-volume histories of philosophy. Those historical perspectives will provide you with enough insight to understand recent work in empiricism. You will need to select texts carefully, however, because much work on contemporary empiricism is pretty technical and not as engaging or readable as the classic historical texts. Quine's famous article "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" is a...

As my colleagues suggest, professional philosophers will have avaried responses to the various ideas and strands of argumentation thatarise in discussions of embidied minds, embodied cognition, embodiedepistemology, etc that arise in other disciplines. Despite theirdiffering assessments of those things, I suspect that most philosopherswould look askance at the the fairly common move to try to drawsubstantive philosophical conclusions from new scientific evidence ornovek literary critical argumentation or the like: most professionalphilosophers, I suspect, will conclude that those arguments are hastybecause their proponents don't have a sophisticated enoughunderstanding of the complicated underlying philosophical issues. So,this points to one reason why some philosophers are not at allsympathetic to discussions of embodied mind: they believe that thesediscussions are unlikely to bear any philosophical fruit because theyrest on an unsophisticated philosophical understanding. Thisreaction also...

The eventual demise of humanity seems inevitable, so that mereprospect doesn't seem noteworthy. That our activities cause some damageto other things also seems inevitable. Surely,however, we are responsible for enviornmental damage that we cause. Even if some damange is unavoidable, we can--and should--find ways tominimize this damage here on earth or wherever else we find ourselves. Preparingfor emigration off-world seems a hasty response to me, but not becausewe are likely to destroy celestial bodies. Rather, Hawking's conclusonsthat there is nothing we can do to avoid an environmental catostrophehere on earth seems hasty and counter-productive: we don't have thetechnological and financial resources to move the population to anotherworld, but do have the means to reduce the damage that we are doing tothis planet. Therefore, I would think we would be wise to focus onthat. There are many interesting philosophical questions here.For example, when assessing the environmental damage that we...

To add to my colleague’s excellent comment, one might think that, for manyof us at least, dying is such a stressful time--with respect to health,emotionality, family dynamics, etc.--that a dying person is in a relativelypoor position to form and communicate considered wisdom about life. To be sure, for some the perspective of one's imminent death might be usefuland constructive (as, for example, Hegel asserts when he defends the ethicalutility of warfare), but I suspect that popular culture tends to exaggeratethis possibility.

To add to Alex's answer, you might find the idea of "God" not just intelligible, but "meaningful" in the sense of useful or otherwise desirable: for example, you might consider theism socially useful or personally desirable, or might conclude that the world is better off with many people participating in religious communities, etc. In this case, you would still be an atheist but would not be hostile towards theism or religiosity -- indeed, you might even regret that you do not believe that God exists. Possibilities like thisare worth considering, because many assume that atheism involvescontempt towards or hostility towards believers and thus discussions ofatheism and portrayals of it in the mass media are frequently distorted.

I suspect the point of this question was to see whether you could articulate the idea of a "category error," that is a statement that is syntactically correct but is nonsense because its predicate cannot meaningfully be attributed to its subject. If this is what the interviewer had in mind, your answer was essentially correct but could have been stronger if you had explained that this was one example of a more general problem. If your interview was at an Oxford college, you probably would have earned bonus points if you had referred to Gilbert Ryle's classic discussion of category errors.

This question raises interesting issues about animal cognition. I tend totake a rather hard line on this—a view similar to one held by the stoics and bythe contemporary philosopher Donald Davidson---according to which (non-human)animal cognition is so different from human cognition that animals cannot give thesort of consent that humans use to justify their sexual interaction. So, my own answer to your question is this: If it is morally wrong to interactsexually interact non-human animals without consent, then this sexual contactis always wrong because that sort of consent is impossible to obtain. I suppose one who shared my view of animal cognition could take a hardline on this and say that it is morally acceptable to use non-human animals assexual objects for human pleasure, but I would disagree -- at the very leastKant is right that treating animals as ends is wrong because it tends to leadto cruel treatment of humans, and it is probably true that animals are worthyof much stronger moral...