I think it's hard to answer this question without going into the details of particular narrative or representational works. It's an important question, but maybe not one for which a decisive philosophical answer is possible. Let me point to one step in your message. You write of creating "characters that exemplify such stereotypes. Women are sometimes psychotic"; and so on. Now, in the step from the first of these sentences to the next, you show that you are using "stereotypes" as identical with "generalizations." It's true that many general statements one could say about women (or about any other group you choose to think about) are sometimes instantiated. Philosophy professors are sometimes self-obsessed; therefore, someone writing a screenplay about a philosophy professor (not as glamorous as the screenplay to "Gone Girl," I grant you) should be free to make that character self-obsessed. But these feel like different cases, don't they? I think the reason is that a stereotype is not...

For a lot of people who study Nietzsche it’s not clear that a connection exists. Nietzsche himself considered these his two most important contributions to philosophy, although I’m not aware of any explicit attempt on his part to unite them. And you have to bear in mind that even though he thought these were his most important ideas, it doesn’t follow that they were. I find much deep and valuable philosophical thinking in Nietzsche’s works, but not always where he thought the best ideas were. For instance, Nietzsche has an extremely high opinion of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, while he treats On the Genealogy of Morals as if it were a mere appendix to Beyond Good and Evil. Other readers may disagree with me (although plenty do not), but in my own opinion On the Genealogy of Morals is his greatest single work, one that yields up more insights on every reading; while Thus Spoke Zarathustra is uneven and at most a supplementary part of Nietzsche’s oeuvre. But that’s just an example, by way of...

In the full sense of the word this question is unanswerable. I don’t know a serious educated person who does not worry about it. On the one hand, if you do not read philosophers in the right order you are bound to miss the significance of something the later person says. I’m not saying you run the risk of missing that significance; you are guaranteed to do so. And yet this is a half-truth, because there is plenty you will miss if you start back at the beginning of philosophy and proceed to the end. First of all there’s the obvious problem of motivation that your question implies. If you have to read Descartes before Kant, and Aristotle before Descartes, and so on, you will have been lost or sidetracked before you ever reached the people like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard who first drew your attention. Demanding a strict chronological reading list is impractical. There’s another kind of problem that affects even industrious people who are incapable of being bored or sidetracked. In many cases we...

I can’t resist offering the follow-up to Miriam Solomon’s response, not because I’ll say what she would say, but precisely because I think I come at this question differently from her. So with any luck you’ll get a second perspective on the same fundamental thought. Your professors were right to insist on the clear articulation of ideas and on the careful argumentation that takes us from premises to conclusions. Clarity and validity are two of the most important tools that philosophers work with. Some philosophers will agree with me that other tools or techniques are essential as well, such as the method of philosophical interpretation; but calling for more attention to philosophical interpretation does not have to mean neglecting argumentation. But even if we stick to clear terms and valid arguments, there are going to be more fundamental questions that guide us. What terms are worth clarifying? The important ones, of course. What subjects do we make arguments about? Again, the important...

Any responsible answer to this question has to be highly qualified and surrounded by admissions of ignorance. I’ll try not to get bogged down by describing what we don’t know, but you should realize how inconclusive any answer to your excellent question has to be. I don’t know enough about non-Western philosophers to tackle that part of the question. Let me say a few words about Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras, and the rest. Not too long ago the standard claim about them was that they turned thinking decisively away from mythical thinking. Where myths described a world before the world we occupy, an earlier time in which different causes made things happen, these philosophers confined themselves to the world we know and the natural processes at work in this world. So, if they were to describe the origin of the universe, that origin would have to follow causal laws akin to the laws in effect today. This is our own scientific understanding of the universe today, incidentally. Whatever brought...

As long as you mean something straightforward by "sense of the aesthetic," like "sense of taste" or "discernment regarding beauty," I think most people would consider the answer to your first question obvious: Yes. That doesn't mean the answer "Yes" is true, only that it is a common assumption about beauty and one's ability to discern it. The common assumption lies behind arts-education programs for children. The thinking is that if children don’t get exposed to good music, visual art, film, and literature early enough in life, they will not come to take genuine pleasure in it. And where they do not take genuine pleasure in music or poetry, they will have more difficulty telling the fine examples of each from what is crude or catchy or otherwise vulgar. The process probably makes more sense in connection with such complex and difficult cultural productions as Beethoven’s late quartets and Ozu’s films than with natural phenomena. The person completely unexposed to such cultural productions might...

That looks like a straightforward question. And a reasonable person might expect some clear statement of the criterion that separates Homeric poetry (or any other poetry for that matter) from philosophical theory. So it’s interesting to realize, at the start, that even in antiquity it took some time for a consensus to emerge on the relationship between the two kinds of discourse. One of the first ancient Greeks to compile an intellectual history was Hippias the sophist, whom we know today from Plato’s rather unflattering portrayals of him in the Hippias Major and the Hippias Minor (titles that merely indicate, by the way, that the former dialogue is the longer of the two and the latter shorter). Socrates makes short work of Hippias in the dialogues, but in real life he was intellectually ambitious and enterprising. His history of thought is lost today, but it came before any history by Plato or Aristotle, and apparently contained philosophers and poets in comparable numbers. Plato, for his...

This feels like a question informed by Kant’s understanding of beauty. Whether it is or not, it’s certainly a question in tune with Kant; because, for Kant, natural beauty dominates his examples of beautiful objects and sets the tone for his analysis of beauty in general. There seems to be a constant suspicion in Kant that art we find beautiful is somehow a contrivance, something put together in a way that the artist knows will appear beautiful to human beings, or at least pleasant in appearance. And because the artist aims at pleasing the human senses, so-called beautiful art threatens to collapse into a species of the merely pleasant. A beautiful flower, on the other hand, has not been contrived. Kant seems to understand nature mechanistically – or rather, he thinks it is always open to a mechanistic interpretation. And given that it is, the spontaneous appearance of something in nature like a beautiful flower or a magnificent sunset gives one the sense of having discovered beauty, not just...

I'm not sure there is an answer to this question. Certainly you don't want to presuppose too much about one theory or another of Plato's dialogue form. In antiquity there were many philosophers before and after Plato who wrote dialogues, whether in order to be consistent Platonists or for another reason. But let's assume that the dialogue form is justified and accounted for by the passage in Plato's Phaedrus about the problems with writing. (A big assumption; not an assumption I would make. But it seems to be your assumption, so I'm accepting it for the sake of argument.) In that passage Socrates says that serious philosophers won't write their ideas down in a way that leaves them vulnerable to attack and misunderstanding, but at most will write "reminders" to themselves about what they think. The dialogue might then be seen as such a reminder. But already we run into a problem. What's to say that the writings of Plotinus are not reminders as well? Why call them by the anachronistic name of ...

Many answers have been given to this question. Before we try out such answers, consider one broad way to categorize them. Is experiencing beauty about getting us to do something, or is it about our thinking or feeling a certain way? In other words, if there’s a purpose or function to finding things beautiful, do you think that should be a pragmatic function issuing in action? Or can it be a contemplative function issuing in a kind of thinking (or feeling, etc.)? This might even come down to Yes or No regarding the first question. Sometimes people say something like “The instinct to find people and things beautiful originates in sexual desire. It begins with our wish to propagate.” An answer like that connects the judgment of beauty with action. All the way back to Aristotle, philosophers have objected that beauty can be understood without reference to sexual desire; and in fact it can get complicated to try to trace every sense of beauty to such desire. Consider landscapes, sunsets, etc. More...