Is courage a virtue or is is simply the ability to conquer fear?

Can a philosopher please help us understand why it is so painful when someone you acknowledge disregards you in turn? Thanks, from South Africa.

According to Socrates "An unexamined life is not worth living." How do you examine your life? (I have examined some of my strongly held opinions and tried to make arguments for the opposite opinion and have had a modicum of success but I feel that there must be something more to the process of examining my life.)

Can the well-documented placebo effect in medicine be applied to the comfort religious belief gives many? In the case of religion, should such an affect be encouraged, discouraged, or dismissed? You could argue that none of us will ever know until we die, and if we were wrong in being religious we will never know we got it wrong. If various monks or nuns in various religions (to take an extreme example of devotion) got it wrong - and some would have to have had if you subscribe to the logical view that only one religion can assure you an afterlife, what possible advice can be given? If you feel someone is wasting their life on a misguided religious quest should you just preserve silence, salute the meaning it lends their life and leave well alone? What duty do we have here, if any? Philosophers understand the points involved better than most and can see through many misconceptions in religious belief that believers are unaware of. Each-to-his-own is surely a tragic cop-out.

I've noticed a difference between some eastern and western approaches to philosophy. Some eastern traditions seem to emphasize personal serenity and enlightenment through meditation, while some western traditions emphasize wisdom through curiosity, questioning, and thinking. My question is, which is the higher human good: serenity or wisdom? More concretely, which image represents the best in humanity: Buddha meditating or Socrates thinking and conversing on philosophic questions?

When I look at the marvels in technology that mankind has produced in this past century I can't help but wonder: Why are we so proud of our accomplishments and in ourselves? What has mankind created that hasn't already been created in us and in nature, in an even more refined and excellent form? Is not what mankind has created on this earth a mock counterfeit of the human body? We have a governmental head that for millenniums has failed to bring peace, order and stability to the rest of the body. We have a left and right hand that cannot work together toward the same purpose such as universal peace. We have eyes that cannot focus on the the true underlying causes of all our problems. We have a mouth that cannot speak a cohesive sentence to express one unified thought. We have nerve endings that cannot sense the pain of hunger and disease that plague entire nations. We have ears that cannot listen past our religious differences to hear the unified, pleading cry for salvation. We have legs that can take us...

Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." Would my life be less valuable if I chose not to examine it? If I simply did everything according to the conventions and mores of my society, would my life be less valuable than someone who questioned these things deeply?

I am an Atheist, and a teacher of mine, got me to meditate on a paper-clip, his point being, that if you don't believe in an upper power, then unlike the paper-clip, which has a purpose, the human race is ultimately pointless. You live to die basically. What I want to know is, how would I combat such an argument? Thanks. Mark S.

Let's say I want to justify my work or vocation by citing virtue X. (X might be practical value, social utility, human happiness, etc.) Must my particular work effect virtue X, or is it sufficient that my line of work effect X generally, my personal lack of any contribution notwithstanding. For example: Let's say I'm a scientist who, despite a great deal of effort, never discovers or creates or accomplishes anything useful. Could I justify my work by saying, "Science is useful"? (After all, even if science is useful generally, nothing I've done personally is useful.) [You can imagine analogous scenarios involving any pursuit, e.g., poetry or investment banking.]

Space and time are measured in hours and metres, value is measured in utility. In these three fundamental scales, I have read that zero and the unit are arbitrary. I can see that there is no beginning of time, and no bottom to the universe and no absolutely valueless state of affairs, but it seems perfectly sensible to talk of two states of affairs being of equal value, in which case the difference in value would be zero. Two durations could be of equal length, as could two bodies. So is there a non-arbitrary zero in space, time and value that corresponds to the difference in length, duration or utility between the equally long, enduring or valuable?