Thank you for your question. I'm not sure there's one reason why philosophers care about this, and I'm not in a position to exhaust all the various reasons why the topic might be of concern to them. However, here are some of the reasons of which I'm aware: 1. A long tradition dating all the way back to Plato suggests that the self survives the destruction of the body. Socrates (Plato's teacher), for instance, didn't fear his death at all, and gave as a reason for this attitude the belief that he would exist after his body ceases to be alive. That thought has cast a very long shadow, and philosophers have for a long time tried to figure out what it would be to survive the destruction of one's body. These discussions can generally be separated from questions about the existence of God, and have in recent centuries coalesced into discussions of what is known as "personal identity". One core issue for this topic is what it means for one and the same person to survive over time, even when his/her...

You're not the first one to observe a negative correlation between being an eminent philosopher and being married! If there's an explanation for this, I suppose my armchair sociology would lead me to expect it has to do with the fact that philosophy is both fascinating and challenging, and has a way of making its practitioners obsessive. In this way, it's perhaps a bit like mathematics. Both are topics that it's quite hard to just forget when you leave the office or study. As a result, it might not be so much that the idea of a spouse leaves one cold, but that one doesn't have the energy to pay attention to a spouse after wrestling with a philosophical problem for days or months. On the other hand, Berkeleywas married, Locke never married but was involved with Damaris Cudworth, and Mill was married. More recently, Quine and Rawls were married. At any rate, my point is that there are plenty of exceptions to your rule, and many of us who have savored philosophy also find great of appeal in...

You're surely right that the use of 'in' here is metaphorical. Instead a literal cashing out of the claim that something is in our memory might go like this: A fact is in my memory when I am able to call it up for purposes of reasoning and action. That is, something is "in" my memory insofar as I can activate it in such a way to use it for some cognitive or practical purpose. This suggestion for cashing out the metaphor could in turn use a great deal of further elucidation, but this is not the place for such pedantry. Again, something is "in" my imagination, either because I can form an image of it, or I can reason with the possibility it signifies in order to draw conclusions. Thus Pagasus is in my imagination because I can form a mental picture of it, and so forth. In his classic _The Concept of Mind_, Gilbert Ryle discusses various uses of the metaphorical "in" that's bothering you, and I'd recommend his discussion. (You can appreciate a lot of what he says here without having to buy...

Thank you for your question. I don't know that level this class is, nor even what the ostensible subject matter is. As a result I'm shooting in the dark a bit in trying to answer. However, aside from the obvious choice of asking students to engage directly with a philosophical work, such as a classic work or a contemporary text, you might consider philosophically provocative literature. For instance, Huxley's _Brave New World_ raises questions about what it is to have a just society, and what is the nature of happiness. For another example, it's not to hard to find in Mark Twain lots of material to get students to think about the relation between duty to the laws of one's country, racism, and duties of friendship. In fact, much great literature also raises philosophical questions, and often students "philosophize" better by responding to literature than by discussing philosophical theories directly. Some suggestions of technique might also be helpful. Rather than trying to teach...

Thank you for your question. First of all, it is not true that philosophy is a product of Greco-Christian culture. There are Buddhist, Chinese and Islamic philosophies (among others) that are not products of Grec0-Roman culture. (Granted, Islamic philosopies were influenced by, for instance, Aristotle, but it's an overstatement to describe them as *products* of Greek culture.) While these philosophies are not as well known in the West as the traditions that trace back to Greek thought, they are complex, innovative and fascinating traditions in their own right. (For a treatment of just one, see Siderits' _Buddhism as Philosophy, published by Hackett_.) But second, and more important, it is hard to see why being a product of a culture would circumscribe a field's conclusions. For instance, it would not be terribly convincing to argue that since Pythagoras was Greek, his Theorem only applies to a certain culture or tradition. Instead, it seems a lot more plausible that his Theorem applies to...

Thank you for your question. In the broadest terms, ethics is a branch of philosophy. Alongside this branch are others such as epistemology, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and logic. Unlike these other fields, however, ethics is now extending its reach beyond the confines of traditional departments of philosophy. For instance it is not hard to find departments concerned with one or another area of "applied ethics" in such places as medical schools, law schools or business schools. Bioethicists are often found in schools of medicine, and scholars of business ethics are often found in business schools. Analogous things can be said for law schools, and engineering schools often have faculty concerned with environmental ethics. Less administratively and more substantively, ethicists share with other philosophers a desire to make progress on urgent questions in spite of the fact that at least right now we in general do now know how to answer them by means either of empirical demonstration or...

You might think of a sentence type as an abstraction from lots of individual occurrences of a given sentence. There's fairly clear sense in which in the following: Fred eats spinach Fred eats spinach I've written two sentences, and a fairly clear sense in which I've written just one sentence. In the former sense of 'sentence', we have what are called *sentence tokens*. In the latter sense, we have what are called *sentence types*. That would still be true if the latter of the two above sentences had been written in a different font, or a different font size. More generally, the notion of 'type' here abstracts away from the peculiarities of all the tokens there may happen to be. Now in addition to all the sentence tokens that there are, one might reasonably suppose that those that are meaningful express something that transcends them: A meaning, a content, or what you will. Thus two synonymous sentences of different languages seem to express the same content, and many...

Thank you for your provocative question. I don't feel qualified to answer it categorically, but I will try to give some reason why some people have doubted that psychoanalysis is science, and how those doubts might be met. One reason some have doubted that psychoanalysis is science is that claims made by some analysts about the reasons for people's behavior (including slips and dreams) appeal to explanations that don't seem subject to tests. To take one extreme case, Freud claims that any element of a dream that has three parts or is associated with the number three (such as a triangle or a tripod) must symbolize male genitals. Then if one asks him for his evidence to back up this claim, one sometimes finds him or his follower replying not by providing evidence, but rather by suggesting that the person asking the question is exhibiting a "defense mechanism." That does seem like cheating. After all, one could use this technique to "prove" just about anything. In the last couple of decades...

Thanks for your question. According to the standard technical definition of a sound argument (defined as a valid argument with all true premises, and where a valid argument is defined as an argument such that there is no way for the conclusion to be false while all the premises are true), it is possible for an argument to be sound but fallacious. For instance, we would normally call a circular argument (where the conclusion appears as one of the premises) fallacious, but according to the definition of a sound argument I just gave it is obviously sound. Second, appealing to authorities as you describe in your question may be rational, justified, and the like, but it is not sound if put in the form: "The authorities claim that P, therefore P", or something slightly less trivial. Obviously, and alas, all the authories might agree on an issue, and back up their view with evidence, and still be wrong. Now this might just show that the standard definition of a sound argument as used in...

Thank you very much for your contribution. I'm not a specialist on issues of free will, or on the psychology or neuroscience of addiction. I hope that other panelists will add their comments here as well. However, one thought that comes to mind in response to your question is that there is *a* sense in which drug addicts and alcoholics are in the condition they are in as a result of their own choice: With the exception of those who gained an addiction in utero (I have the impression that this is possible), these individuals made choices that resulted in their addictions. There would have to have been many such choices, since it is only in this way that an addiction can be created; and those choices might not have been made in the awareness that an addiction would likely result. Nevertheless, the housing authority perhaps would suggest that people can be expected to know that certain choices will likely result in an addiction over time. Of course that will not satisfy you and your colleagues,...