Two very difficult questions! Your first question about 'how arrogant are philosophers' suggests you are not asking whether philosophers are arrogant, but asking about the magnitude of arrogance. Before replying to your question, please allow me to back-up a bit. First, when is anyone arrogant? I suggest that someone is arrogant when he thinks, acts and/or feels with vanity or presumptuousness; typically an arrogant person may claim to know what is right or make assumptions about other persons or things without sensitivity or a properly humble effort to learn about others. When I picture an arrogant character, I imagine him or her as someone who is not at all self-critical; an arrogant person seems (in a typical case) someone who would never dream or imagine that he or she is wrong on some opinion or conviction. In keeping with the above account, I should add that the above portrait may be wrong and I am open to changing my mind in light of better suggestions. I imagine that the last thing you...

Thank you for this inquiry. You are on to a very important point. First, some thoughts on Descartes: Descartes set up the ultimate skeptical project: In an age of the emergence of modern science, he asked what we can really have unmistakable certainty about? To take your example, can we have absolute, uncorrectable (incorrigible) certainty that the rocks we see and study are as they appear? He proposed the massive skeptical hypothesis: Can we rule out that there is an all powerful evil genius who is making us appear (again, using your example) to see, observe, and study the movement, change, and location of rocks when, in fact there are no such rocks? In contemporary popular cultural terms, can we rule out that we are in the Matrix? Or to use terms that were popular in the 1980s, can you rule out that your brain is now in a vat at MIT and electrochemically stimulated such that you are having all the experiences you have now and so you are in a kind of virtual world, but not an actual world? ...

Thank you for this inquiry! First off, unless you and others are actually working for Satan (I am joking here), then it is at least unfortunate that your interlocutor suggests the devil is on your side! Seriously, the key issues include what you allude to: if someone requests (for example) a heavy dose of morphine that will eliminate pain but at the same time cause death due (for example) to heart failure, then it is relevant to consider the degree of suffering, whether or not the patient has voluntarily requested such an end-of-life scenario, and it is very understandable that an appeal to what is the current law does not (alone) settle matters. As for the analogy with dogs or other creatures we euthanize, I suggest it may be dangerous to appeal to such practices to justify human euthanasia; after all, in practice we do all kinds of things with doges (walk them on leash) we would not want to apply to humans. I suggest that you might make clear to your "opponent" that you (assuming you do) only would...

This is a very tough question! I think that it can be and you are raising a concern that is highly important today. In the USA technology (along with subsidies) has permitted farmers to produce far more goods and cheaper prices than some farmers in under developed nations. Persons in Africa are not able to produce as much corn or cotton as an American farmer and they therefore cannot compete as well in international markets. In some cases, the hardship that this causes African farmers can be quite severe. You asked about morality, not legality. It may (or may not) violate any international law for American farmers to out-compete African farmers, but cases are easily imagined in which American self-restraint or assistance in terms of exporting efficient technology to African farmers may be a more respectful course of action. Historically, there are a significant number of cases within a society when new technology has made many workers redundant. Some advocates of a free market system...

Very interesting! I suppose there are some libertarians who think that taking individual liberty seriously should permit you to go so far as to be able to sell yourself irrevocably into slavery to a master. Indeed, as some libertarians insist on persons having the right to take their own lives (self-killing or suicide), it may not be easy to avoid a slippery slope in which persons can do anything they wish (so long as it is not compromising the well being of others and meets other, base-line moral requirements). In that sense, you may be free to rationally or irrationally eat and work as you like. But for those who prize autonomy and self-determination as a great good, there will be resistance to think that "anything goes." Someone from that perspective, may well claim that contexts in which you are exploited involves serious wrong-doings on behalf of employers or contractors. From this vantage point, it may be understandable that you would "sell" your freedom in order to safeguard the more...

Not an easy question to respond to! If, by 'thought' you are referring to what persons think about (as in: I am thinking about math), then because it seems as though we thinking persons can think about the world around us and about ourselves and abstract objects (as in mathematics), then the truth of what we think about the world and ourselves and abstracta (e.g. math) will (I suggest) very much depend on how things are. I might think I am an expert in mathematics, but it turns out I am rubbish. The 'reality of [my] thought' that I am a math expert does not depend upon whether it is true or false, but the consequences of its being true or false might be quite significant in reality. Some philosophers (such as myself) are prepared to go in what must seem like a hopelessly mysterious direction. So, some of us treat the objects of our thinking to be propositions or abstract (non-concrete) states of affairs. For example, i hope to live in a universe in which there are unicorns, while my friend...

Excellent question(s). I suggest that in some areas of historical inquiry, trusting the "cutting-edge experts" in philosophy makes a great deal of sense (though not always). So, when it comes to dating and reconstructing which of Plato's dialogues were early or late, or what is the best available translations of texts, and the tracing of influence (how many ideas of Hume's were novel), it seems quite reasonable to "trust the experts." I suggest, however, that trusting expert philosophers on history is tricky when it comes to issues in which one's philosophical convictions might color one's judgment. So, a philosopher who is disposed to distrust utilitarianism, might be led to judge that the reason why Moism in China failed was because of the inherent limitations of such an abstract form of ethical teaching, when in fact that was not the reason why Moism did not have a longer life span. Moreover, when it comes to philosophers making claims that impact our daily lives, it may be that they are no less...

Great question! I believe that the contemporary philosophical community is so expanding in scope that our traditional categories of what counts as "Eastern" and "Western" will come under considerable pressure. Sure, we will never abandon the idea that Confucianism and Taoism emerged in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, and we will probably persist in thinking about Socrates as uniquely a vital figure in the Athens of Ancient Greece. But in an increasingly global and diverse setting, I suggest we will become less attached to the importance of individual, unique histories and geographical / regional points of origin. For quite some time, so-called Eastern or Asian philosophy has been advocated by non-Asian European and American philosophers, living in "the West." Significant numbers of philosophers in China, India, southeast Asia, Japan, and South Korea are practicing philosophy in a way that is very much in keeping with Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Brown, Princeton, and so on. Part of the doorway...

Very interesting! I think you have a point, but let me back up a bit. If it is necessarily the case that God is a Creator, then there is no possible world in which God does not create. In that case, if you have described a plausible state of affairs (there is a possible world in which God does not create), it seems that God is not necessarily a Creator. The claim that 'our cosmos is contingent' seems to mean that there there is no necessity that it exists: its existence is possible and its non-existence is possible. If our cosmos exists necessarily then (it seems that) there would be no possible world in which our cosmos does not exist or, putting things differently, our cosmos exists in all possible worlds. Off hand, that seems to be a tenuous claim as it seems we can imagine our cosmos not existing; we can imagine a lifeless cosmos or one in which there are no stable laws of nature that allow for suns, planets, galaxies. Maybe the following is promising: it seems unlikely that there is a...

Your question(s) / challenge(s) is/ are important and well put (no need to apologize for syntax!). Along with many (but by no means all) philosophers, I agree with what I think you are suggesting or open to in your second to last sentence: questions about the meaning and value of life involve more than calculating the amount of suffering and illusion. Indeed, I suggest that the concerns you address have a bearing on some rising cultural movements. Those of us who are theists affirm the overall goodness of there being a world such as ours (or at least we affirm the goodness of [a] God who permits evils that exist that will be overcome and redeemed by God's omnipotent love.) But a growing (though still small) group of philosophers have argued for a highly pessimistic view of life. Sometime inspired by Schopenhauer, these philosophers (and public intellectuals) have argued that it would be good if the human species ceased to be. Some have even gone further in concluding that it good for all sentient...