There are things that I want (badly) that I certainly don't need. I might very much desire to get an iPhone (say), but by no stretch of the imagination do I need one -- nothing is going to go wrong with me and my life if I don't get one. Equally, there can be things that I need (badly) that I don't want. Perhaps, for a start, because I just don't know about them. The child needs zinc in her diet to keep healthy. But she doesn't want zinc: she doesn't know anything about it, has no thoughts about zinc. Other things I might in fact know about, and know that I need, but still not want them. The anorexic might know that she needs a full balanced diet; but she doesn't want to eat. Needs are connected to what is required to flourish; wants can exceed needs, and can also come adrift from needs through ignorance and malfunction.

I suspect Oliver Leaman has to be teasing. Good wine is -- of course -- a lot more expensive than soda pop because it is a very great deal finer (and that takes effort to produce!), not finer because it is more expensive. The long cultivation of vines over many seasons at a good estate in the Chianti or Bordeaux, the careful harvesting, the long stages of production from vats to barriques to bottles, the cellaring, ... all that is not a cheap business, so of course decent wines are necessarily more expensive than industrially produced soda gunk. But we happily pay the price for the result of the loving labour of good producers as the wines are indeed one of the great achievements of human civilization. We appreciate good wine for the elusive complexity we find in the aromas released in the glass, the intricately structured tastes, the very feel in the mouth, the lingering aftertastes. We delight in the delicious intoxication that it brings. As we experience more good wine, we learn to...

The dictionary, then, is a bad one. Courage is not a matter of lack of fear. It is a matter of not letting even justified and appropriate fear stand in the way of doing the right thing -- such as rescuing your injured friend from a burning building, standing up for the innocent man in the face of the baying mob, refusing to betray the whereabouts of the resistance fighter. Not to feel fear of the fire (or the mob, or the Gestapo, or whatever) would be a sign of a kind of reckless madness, not of virtue: the virtue of courage comes in knowing when it is appropriate to let the fear guide your actions and when you have to master it -- and being able to do so.

The implication in the question, that Tolstoy was straightforwardly among the pessimists and thought that life is a sick joke, should perhaps not be let pass without comment. In A Confession , Tolstoy looks back at the period of his greatest worldly success. War and Peace and Anna Karenina had been received with immense acclaim. "I was not yet fifty, I had a kind, loving and beloved wife, lovely children, and a large estate that was growing and expanding with no effort on my part. I was respected by relatives and friends far more than ever before. I was praised by strangers and could consider myself a celebrity without deceiving myself." Yet despite all that, as Tolstoy eloquently reports, he found himself at a loss to find meaning in it all, and "gave up taking a rifle with me on hunting trips so as not to be tempted to end my life in such an all too easy function". In sum -- and I imagine that this is the passage that the questioner is alluding to -- Tolstoy writes "This spiritual...

Not surprisingly, philosophers have always had a tendency to wildly overrate philosophizing. Let me strike a cheerfully skeptical note! Just before the "unexamined life" remark, Socrates says "this is the greatest good for a man, to talk every day about virtue and the other things you hear me converse about examining both myself and others". Which is, frankly, absurd. Sure, a few people have a taste for philosophical discussion about virtue (and no doubt it is a good thing that some people are given to think about such things). But it is just daft to suggest that if philosophizing isn't your scene, then you are missing out on "the greatest good", and somehow your life isn't really worth living. Maybe you just prefer to spend time with your friends, or having sex, or going to the opera, or sailing, or hill-walking, or working as a doctor, or bringing up a family, or acting, or gardening, or raising money for Oxfam, or playing string quartets, or doing any of the myriad other things that...

There is a lot of questions here. Let me pick up on just one. Suppose Jill has devoted all her energies to her family, has centred her whole life around them. And suppose her husband, unknown to her, is a serial deceiver, holding her in contempt; one child is a crooked fraudster; the other (again, still all unknown to Jill) is a wastrel and drug-addict. In this sad situation, even if her ignorance is bliss, Jill's life is not going well. The meaning she thinks she finds in her endeavours is in fact an illusion. In this case, we could hardly "salute the meaning" her devotion lends her life, for that meaning just isn't there. Yet it could still, for all that, be the right thing to leave her in ignorance -- there will be cases and cases. What is our relation to Jill? How strong is she? What would befall her if she wakes up and smells the coffee? We can't possibly give a general rule here. But even if we think we should in the particular case leave things be, we wouldn't be "leaving well alone". That...