I’m going to say ‘no’. But before answering your challenge to saying 'no', a comment on your challenge to saying ‘yes’. You assume that in order to know that all beautiful paintings are good paintings, I must view all beautiful paintings. But this assumes, in turn, that the only way we can establish a connection between being beautiful and being good is through repeated experience, i.e. empirically. That’s not, I think, true. There could be – indeed, I think there is – a conceptual connection between beauty and aesthetic goodness. Compare: to know that all vixens are foxes, I don’t need to find all the vixens in the world, and check that they are foxes. I just need to understand the word ‘vixen’, meaning ‘female fox’. So if we could show that ‘beauty’ is, conceptually, a type of aesthetic goodness, a standard of what is good, aesthetically speaking, then we can know – without checking – that all beautiful paintings will be good. But I’m not satisfied with this answer. Beauty is one kind of aesthetic good...

I think that the philosophy in the first instance should be learned by engaging with the puzzles that it discusses. It is only after one has got into a sense of the puzzles and how philosophers tackle them that it really makes sense to study the chronology or schools of philosophy. I think this is because at the heart of philosophy is philosophising, doing philosophy rather than studying philosophy. Philosophy is about making sense of ourselves and our situation. To do philosophy is to approach the goal of making sense in a particular way, to engage in a certain kind of practice of enquiry. Philosophical questions aren’t solved by empirical investigation (though that doesn’t mean such investigation is irrelevant), there is a particular emphasis on conceptual clarification, many distinctive marks of philosophizing derive from the enquiries of Socrates, such as an unwillingness to sit with easy or superficial answers, a careful attention to language, the insistent development of a point in both depth and...

It's probably hard to generalise, since there are any number of other traits that make someone a good lawyer, apart from those shared with doing philosophy. However, I understand that law firms are very interested in taking people who have done a philosophy degree, and a good number of philosophy students show an interest in studying law. Several skills that are very important to philosophy are also important to law, in particular the abilities to make sense of abstract information and convoluted sentences, to construct arguments on both sides of a case, to anticipate objections and prepare replies, to spot fallacies and weaknesses in arguments, to integrate a wide range of different kinds of relevant information, and to write and speak clearly and persuasively, breaking down complexity into simple components. There may be other relevant traits that help as well, such as an interest in what is right or just, a good memory, motivation for hard work, and so on. On the other hand, IF philosophers are...

Morality must, I think, be something that can guide our choices and actions. And to do this, it must take account of what is realistic - morality needs to be morality for human beings, with the kind of psychology and concerns that we have. But what is 'realistic'? It's not the same as how we find many people behaving, but how it is possible for them to behave. What we can realistically hope for from people is less than utopian behaviour, but it is much more than a more pessimistic view of 'the real world'. Your example about majority rule is a case in point. Democracy respects majority rule more than any other political system, and yet from its beginnings, at least in modern times, it has also incorporated restrictions on what the majority can do. And that is because we can not only hope, but expect, people to take account of the interests of those they disagree with (altruism is just as much part of human nature as selfishness - the trouble is usually with how the two balance out). I think it is...

This is a difficult question! In fact, two difficult questions. I'm just going to tackle the second one, and leave aside how we should think about political obligation. In the end, I think the answer is that legitimacy and civil disobedience are compatible. But it's going to take a while to get there. I’ll start with a working definition of civil disobedience, taken from perhaps the most influential political philosopher of the 20th century, John Rawls. He says civil disobedience is ‘a public, non-violent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law usually done with the aim of bringing about a change in the law or policies of the government’ (A Theory of Justice, p. 363). A couple of brief comments on this definition that will help us answer your question. If you don't agree with these, then you won't agree with where I end up. 1. Civil disobedience always involves doing something illegal. However, in most democratic countries, such as the US, civil disobedience is not itself a crime. If arrested...

Nicely put! I think the answer rather depends on what we mean by 'I', or again, what it is for me to be me (and you to be you), as well as what we mean by 'dead'. Here are some options: 1. If what I am is, as you imply, a psychological subject of experience, then I cease to exist at the point of death (assuming, with you, that dualism is false and there is no afterlife). Because I don't exist any longer, you are right that it doesn't make sense to say that I 'am' anything (even dead). As I don't exist, I no longer have any properties at all. It's this sense of 'I' and 'dead' that gives rise to your puzzle. 2. But perhaps what we mean by saying 'X is dead' is precisely that they have ceased to exist. 'Death', understood like this, isn't a condition someone can be in; it is non-existence. 'X is dead' means 'X does not exist any more'; to 'be dead' is not to be at all. So how can I 'be' dead? Well, one day it will be true for other people to say of me (and each of us) that I am dead. I, however, will never...

I can answer the second part of this question, but not the first (sorry!). The claim that 'everything happens for a reason' is known as the Principle of Sufficient Reason. It is commonly associated with Leibniz (and before him, Spinoza), but played an important role in German idealism, and was the topic of Schopenhauer's doctoral dissertation. You can find the references for these and other discussions in this article from the Stanford Encyclopedia: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sufficient-reason/

This is not an easy question to answer! Part of the difficulty is that quasi-realism is a very technical theory. So I can start by saying that Wikipedia is not quite right… Quasi-realism can be understood as a descendant of emotivism, and both theories claim that ethical sentences express emotional attitudes. They agree that these attitudes are not representations of how the world is; they can’t be true or false. But the two theories disagree on further details about ethical language and how it functions. There is even disagreement within emotivism. Ayer’s emotivism takes the expression of emotion as central: in saying that an action is wrong, I’m not making any further factual claim about it, but expressing my moral disapproval, he says. Stevenson’s emotivism argued that the purpose of ethical language is not merely to express how we feel but to influence how we and others behave, to motivate us to act in certain ways and not others. Blackburn’s quasi-realism argues that ethical language is rather more...

I think that you are right that there are no clear, definite rules about exactly when one may break a promise. But I don't think that this shows that whether or not it is acceptable is based on your whim. Aristotle argued that there are only very rarely fixed rules in ethics, but there are nevertheless objective reasons for why (and when) actions are right and wrong. It just means that reasoning in ethics doesn't take the form of discovering rules. There aren't laws of ethics the way there are laws of nature. He argued that to know what is the right thing to do, at least in complex and unpredictable situations like this, you have to be good. So 'you'll just know it when you see it' is only true if you are a good person; if you aren't, you will probably think it is okay to break a promise when, really, it isn't (e.g. not being good, you might be swayed by selfishness to disregard the harm that breaking the promise would do to someone else). Knowing when to break a promise is a matter of weighing up the...