Are most philosophers of religion theists? You may be right, but I don't actually know. And I also don't know whether most philosophers of religion are theists before they study philosophy of religion. I also don't know how many philosophers change their minds after they study philosophy of religion. My sense is that what you're really interested in is how much influence philosophical arguments have on people's religious beliefs—at least, if the people are people who study philosophy. It's an interesting question and all I have to offer are personal impressions, which may well be wrong. I'd guess that there are lots of philosophers who stopped believing partly because they studied various arguments for the existence of God and found them to be inadequate. I'd guess that because it fits a fair number of people I've known, but as they say: the plural of "anecdote" is not "data." I'd also guess that there are far fewer philosophers who started out as non-believers and became theists because of their...

It seems not. In any case, the discussion of this saying in Wikipedia is actually pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing

It's an interesting question, but especially at the meta-level. I've been thinking about how it should be answered and here's my tentative theory. One way someone can count as a philosopher is if people who count uncontroversially as philosophers by and large count the person as a philosopher. In this case: if philosophers generally counted MLK as a philosopher, that would be enough to settle the question. As it happens, this isn't the case for MLK (at least, not that I'm aware.) Another way is if the person's work is the kind of work that philosophers would generally count as philosophy. That's a bit vague, but here's a sort of operationalized version. Suppose we took samples of the person's work and presented them to lots of philosophers (ideally without telling them whose work it was.) If philosophers tended to agree that the work (however valuable it may be) isn't philosophy , that would make a good case for saying no; the person isn't a philosopher. If philosophers tended to agree that the...

Nothing prevents a layperson from calling herself a philosopher. Likewise, nothing prevents someone from calling himself a concert violinist, or a master gardener, or a novelist or a mathematician. Of course, whether someone who calls herself a philosopher or calls himself a master gardener actually has the skills and knowledge that would persuade the well-informed to agree is another matter, and someone who doesn't even know how to tune a fiddle isn't a concert violinist no matter what she calls herself. When we add the word "professional", things get more complicated. There's no law that stops me from simply calling myself a neurosurgeon. There are laws to stop me from performing neurosurgery on people—particularly if I charge for my "services." Having an unqualified person perform your brain surgery is likely to be bad for your health. Having an untrained cosmetologist give you a perm may be temporarily bad for your social life, but hair grows pretty quickly. We've decided (wisely in my view)...

Plato is not the only ancient author who refers to Socrates. For a quick summary, see this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates Note the section Socrates as a Figure , which comments on the question you ask.

I don't know if most philosophers would say that she's no philosopher at all, but I suspect many would say she's a marginal philosopher. One reason is that however influential she may have been, many philosophers don't think she's a very good philosopher—not very careful or original or analytically deep—even if they happen to be broadly sympathetic to her views. The fact that she came from outside the academy by itself wouldn't be disqualifying, but in one sense, philosophers are not just people who engage with philosophical issues; they're people who are part of a community whose members read and respond to one another (even when they disagree deeply) and interact in a variety of particular ways. Being outside the academy tends to put you outside the ongoing conversation of that community. Whether that's good, bad, or neutral is another story, but to whatever extent "philosopher" means "someone who's a member of a certain intellectual community," the fact that she was outside the academy is part,...

I fear I'm misunderstanding. The obvious answer is that Plato wrote books in which his teacher Socrates is the main character. There are many similar examples in literature. How much of what Plato attributes to Socrates was really said by Socrates is harder to say.

Perhaps you're putting more weight on the fable than fables are meant to bear. Fables are short, stylized ways of conveying a point, and the point here seems clear enough: if you come to be seen as a liar, you risk not being believed when it matters. Though I gather that there's a remark attributed to Aristotle that conveys much the same message, once again it may not be profitable to put too much weight on the fable as a device for exploring Aristotle's Ethics. The boy seems clearly to represent someone who lacks an important virtue: truthfulness. The fable doesn't really address the question of whether the townspeople also lack some virtue such as prudence or caution. In real life, we might wonder how many times the boy would have to lie before it become reasonable for the townspeople to ignore him; in the context of the fable, that's not really the point at issue.

I think there are two different issues here, so let me start with the simpler one. Suppose the lecturer said: "To the best of my knowledge—and I've read a great deal on the matter—no one has disproved Kant's claim. That seems the sort of thing one might reasonably be able to say, and might well be what the speaker meant. If so, no problem. If the speaker is claiming more or less a priori that no one has a disproof, this would be harder to swallow, but there's a way to understand it that makes it not just mere arrogance. Suppose I said: no one has disproved that 3+4 = 7. I might well mean not just that no one happens to have done this, but that no one could do it. And in fact, I'm quite sure that's right: no one could disprove it. So the speaker might have meant that Kant's claim had a status rather like "3+4=7": necessarily true, hence not disprovable. If so, I'm not sure he's right, but also not sure he's wrong. However, there's yet another possibility. To see it, ask what would count as a...

On one version of the Categorical Imperative, we're told to act only on maxims (roughly, principles of action) that we could will to be universal laws. That may or may not be the right way to think about morality; I don't have a settled opinion. However, there are philosophers who think Kant had the theory right, but fell down in applying it. Kant thought that lying is always wrong; whether the Categorical Imperative requires this is less clear. The question is whether there's a way of formulating an acceptable maxim that allows for lying in some circumstances. Kant's argument to the contrary isn't entirely convincing, to say the least. The case of homosexuality is arguably a case in point -- or more accurately, the case of homosexual sex may be a case in point. Kant thought, far as I know, that homosexual acts are always wrong. But when someone who's homosexual by orientation acts on that orientation, it's pretty implausible that their maxim, universalized, requires that heterosexuals have...