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Language
Philosophy

It is said that language poses a problem in the study of philosophy because, for example in the English language, of the different meanings a single word can have and because there are no words to describe certain concepts, mixed thoughts, mixed emotions, etc. However, some languages are supposed to be better than others (for the purpose of understanding / teaching philosophy) Sanskrit apparently being the best / one of the best. Is this true and is it worthwhile learning Sanskrit for the purpose of greater understanding of philosophy?

Suppose that you have a conceptual problem about e.g. your notion of moral responsibility (or justice, or freedom, or causation, or whatever). How could doing your philosophical thinking in Sanskrit terms possibly help? Either the concepts available in Sanskrit are the same as yours -- in which case, they will raise the same problems, and the move gains you nothing. Or they are different concepts -- in which case, thinking about them won't resolve the problems you started off with, which were problems to do with your concepts, and again the move gains you nothing (except additional problems).
Education
Philosophy

I'm not sure if this is the right place for a question about an introductory, and supposedly non-academic, philosophy course, rather than for an actual philosophical question, but here goes. There's an organisation in the UK called the School of Economic Science that is offering a 10 week Practical Philosophy course (www.practicalphilosophy.co.uk), which on the surface appears to cover all the kinds of (high level) introductory subjects that you'd expect from a Western philosophy course. However the history of the School seems to be based on Indian philosophy, and specifically Advaita Vedanta, so I was wondering if anyone knew of the school or its teachings, and specifically is the course one to attend for someone interested in Western philosophy please?

Certainly not one to attend for someone interested in Western philosophy. You'll do vastly better to check out courses run by the extra-mural departments of local universities.
Education
Philosophy
Religion

I attend a weekly "Philosophy" class which teaches us that this life is a dream and that following re-incarnations (until we are "realized") we will end up in an eternity of bliss. This philosophy is being taught by an organization which runs a junior and secondary school and is presumably teaching this same philosophy to the students. My children do not attend these schools nor would I want them to as I am especially opposed to the theory of karma and the idea that a person who suffers misfortune in this life is paying for past misdeeds. I feel that it is wrong for the school to be teaching these ideas under the guise of "philosophy" as I feel that the school in in fact teaching a religion. Am I right or wrong to be suspicious?

You are quite right to be suspicious. This has nothing to do with philosophy. In fact you should be more than suspicious. Peddling dingbat fantasies to children according to which "a person who suffers misfortune in this life is paying for past misdeeds" is simply child-abuse.
Mathematics
Philosophy
Science

Two questions. It seems that no one has figured out good standards for acceptance or rejection of philosophical arguments. In science, observation is king. If evidence contradicts a theory under careful conditions, the theory is false. In math, we justify things formally; we cannot expect more certainty. So would you agree that philosophy, as a field that aims at knowledge and not something else like evoking emotions, suffers from a lack of standards? And since at the moment I suspect it does, I want to ask also, why do philosophers act so certain? To them their arguments are true or correct (or whatever) without empirical evidence or rigorous proof. They should be the most uncertain people of all, even more so than scientists. And they are pretty darn humble. (A better way to ask this might be, aren't proof and evidence the two best ways to knowledge? If so, shouldn't philosophers be much more uncertain than they appear (to me)? I now realize it's dependent on how I see things, so I only hope you can...

Just a footnote to Marc Lange's response (which seems spot on to me). It is worth adding that in serious analytical philosophy there is actually a good deal more agreement on arguments than there might appear to be at first sight, and there is a good deal of pretty secure knowledge. For what often emerges from the to and fro of debate is essentially something of the form "If you accept A, B and C, then you'd better accept D too". Then one party might endorse A, B and C and conclude that D; and another party might think D is unacceptable, and conclude that one of A, B, or C must be wrong. And another party again (me, often!) might not know how to respond. [A trite example. If you accept act utilitarianism plus some other things, it seems that you should sanction the sheriff hanging an innocent man if that is the way to stop a riot in which more innocent people are killed. Some bite the bullett, some think so much the worse for utilitarianism.] Now, there may indeed be a loud disagreement between...
Philosophy

Why should an average, run of the mill, person care about philosophy? The vast majority of people I know don't give a damn whether a given action is "a priori" or "a posteriori," for example. The closest they come to philosophy are stupid questions that any beginning philosophy major could solve, like "Can God make a rock so heavy He can't lift it?" And these are merely bait to get an emotional reaction out of me, not a true question about philosophy!

Well, why should an "average" person (whoever she is) care about the history of Venetian convents in the sixteenth century, or about the genetics of mice, or about large cardinal axioms in set theory, or the geology of the Caucasus mountains, or Italian linguistics? No special reason! Why should it be any different for philosophy? Why indeed should the man in the street care about the limits of a priori knowledge, or about whether we should be structuralists about the natural numbers, or what the correct theory of conditionals is, or whether the theory-theory is better than the simulation theory about how we ascribe mental contents, or ... Again, no special reason at all. Of course, philosophers' in-house questions can have their roots in "what is ..?/how is it possible that...?/can we know whether ...?/what should we do ...?" questions of broader appeal. But then in-house questions from historians and scientists, say, ultimately have similar roots. And there is no particular reason...
Philosophy

I have an intellectual appreciation for the answers on this site, but at an emotional level I can't help but feel like vast heaps of it are nothing more than BS. Why do I feel this way? Why is philosophy so confounding?

One thing that can happen is this. Someone asks an inchoate, perhaps rather muddled, question. A respondent -- operating in the approved housestyle of analytical philosophy -- disentangles the issues, and having separated out a crisply formulated question or two, responds briskly to them with clinical precision (well, we try!). And, it can be tempting to think, something important is lost in the process. What lay behind the question -- the depths, so to speak -- are somehow being ignored, and the response doesn't really address the posed worry. So it can seem that the questioner is being fobbed off with BS. Maybe that is your feeling? But one of the hard lessons when you start philosophy is the realization that behind one's inchoate and confused half-formed questions is often just ... confusion. It is usually not so much a question of hidden depths as muddy shallows. And it can take some time before the penny drops that the analytical philosopher's answers are disentangling the real issues. Are...
Mathematics
Philosophy

Much of philosophy is concerned with providing a rigorous foundation to truths which are otherwise intuitive and uncontroversial; think of philosophy of math, for instance. Do philosophers believe that, absent an appreciation of such foundational principles, laymen don't actually "know" such truths, e.g., that 1+1=2; and if laymen do know such truths, how do they know them?

Actually, the presumption here is wrong. It isn't the case that "much of philosophy is concerned with providinga rigorous foundation to truths which are otherwise intuitive anduncontroversial". In particular, that isn't the case in the philosophy of mathematics. Of course, famously, Frege tried to show that the basic laws of arithmetic (and hence the proposition 1+1 = 2) can be derived from the laws of logic plus definitions. But he did this in order to defend the claim that arithmetical truths are analytic, true in virtue of logic alone, and so explain why those truths are necessarily true and why they necessarily apply to everything. He didn't claim that, prior to his attempted derivation of 1+1 = 2 from pure logic, no one knew it to be true. Rather we weren't in a good position to see clearly the sort of truth that it is, analytic according to Frege. Unfortunately, one of Frege's putative laws of logic turned out to lead to contradiction, and his foundational edifice crumbled (though neo...
History
Philosophy

How useful do you feel an understanding of philosophy is to the study of history? I am a history graduate on my way to completing a MA and PhD in this field. More and more my studies have got me contemplating philosophical issues, particularly morality. Sometimes it is difficult to not be overwhelmed with the horrors that history holds, to wonder how people can possibly act in such fundamentaly immoral ways towards each other. I find myself struggling with the debate long-standing in history as to whether as a historian it is inherent in my role to morally condemn certain actions in history or whether I should accept that I can never understand the position these people were in, therefore have no right to judge their consequent actions. While I'm still struggling to decide on this (perhaps somebody could help me?), I have slowly begun to think that an understanding of philosophy is as crucial to being a good historian as the other traditional techniques. I was wondering how many philosophers would agree...

There is a number of different issues here. Let me comment on just one of them. We may indeed wonder how people, in certain situations, can come to act in appalling ways. The question as asked perhaps suggests that arm-chair philosophy might help in understanding this. But not so. This "how come?" question is an empirical one. What is needed is e.g. a knowledge of empirical work in social psychology, such as the Milgram experiment , which explored the willingness of subjects to inflict (apparent) suffering at the behest of an authoritative figure. The results of such work are highly alarming but also, I take it, highly salient for the historian. For they suggest something of the ready possibility of authority structures that might facilitate widespread evil behaviour. We can oh-so-easily be led to do terrible things.
Education
Philosophy

Dear sirs and madams, I recently met my cousin, who is a very bright biologist. When she learned that I studied political science and philosophy at university, she asked respectfully me why I would study a self-perpetuating field. I know what my reasons are, but I would be interested in reading what some of the professionals have to say: Why study philosophy? Moreover, why study it since there is an impracticality associated with it? Have you ever gotten any flack from loved ones for philosophizing? Thank you for your time, -Justin

I wonder what is meant in the question by talking of philosophy as a self-perpetuating field ? In what sense is philosophy supposed to be "self-perpetuating" while biology isn't? Perhaps the idea is supposed to be that philosophy is self-perpetuating because, unlike biology, it just goes round in circles for ever and never settles anything. If that is the implicit claim, then I think it should be resisted vigorously. It would be just absurd to deny that we now know a vast deal more about issues about language, meaning and reference than we did before the time of (say) Frege; it would absurd to deny that we now know a vast deal more about the nature of the mind than we did before the time of (say) William James. Again, think about the philosophy of space and time: it would crazy to suggest that we are stuck where Newton was. And so it goes, through area after area. Of course, "settling a question" in philosophy isn't exactly like settling a question in biology (though that too, as the...
Education
Philosophy

If you were to build an introductory philosophy course for community college kids, would you choose to focus more on the philosophers and their theories or would you focus more on philosophical questions (what is being, is there a god, is there a soul). Which do you think would be more effective for struggling or non-traditional learners?

To understand "the philosophers and their theories" you have to understand what philosophical questions were bugging them -- and understand the arguments they give for their theories (since the theories are worth no more than the arguments that support them). So it's not a really an issue of where to start, philosophers vs. questions. It's more an issue of whose list of questions to start with. An agenda set by some of the great dead philosophers? Or an agenda set by a class of students? Or perhaps somewhere in between -- an agenda set by the author of a good introductory book (like Simon Blackburn's Think ) which raises questions that look likely to have immediate "relevance" to the students, but which relates some of the responses and arguments to those of the great dead philosophers? In general I'd go for the third option. I certainly wouldn't go for the first.

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