The remarks on the topic at the Philosophical Gourmet website seem to me to be generally on target. (For those remarks, click here .) Generally, I think that liberal arts colleges (such as Amherst, Williams, Oberlin, or the Claremont Colleges), or universities that do not have graduate students (e.g., Dartmouth), are better places not only for undergraduates interested in studying philosophy, but for undergraduates generally. (Full disclosure: I attended Amherst College as an undergraduate, and did my graduate work at Harvard, before moving on to Johns Hopkins and am now at UC Irvine.) I have been associated with a number of different kinds of institutions, from a small college, to a largish research university, to a small research university, to a very large research university. While I think that in principle, it is possible for an undergraduate to get a good education in philosophy--or any subject, for that matter--at any school. However, at a large research university, the student may...

Just on the basis of my own experience, it does indeed seem to be the case that a disproportionate number of undergraduate philosophy majors in coed institutions of higher education are male. (The same disproportion is to be found in the profession itself.) I'm not sure whether the data has been collected, although you might just do a simple Google search to see if anything comes up. I can only speculate why such a disproportion exists. It may in part have to do with the fact, noted above, that the overwhelming majority of faculty members in philosophy departments are male; it may have something to do with the nature of philosophy itself, which, on account of its focus on arguments, can often be seen as combative--although, of course, it need not be, and at its best, probably should not be--and such intellectual combat seems to be coded male. Philosophy courses may be seen as part of an 'argument culture' that puts off certain female students while attracting male students, therefore accounting for...

There are actually ongoing efforts, in Western Massachusetts, to teach philosophy to younger children. The practice was treated in a relatively recent New York Times article. (You might also check out the Philosophy for kids site.) On the basis of the work cited in the Times article, and on the basis of my own (relatively limited) experience with younger children, it seems to me that younger children are naturally inquisitive about philosophical questions. Whether teaching philosophy to young children would help or harm them in life, is, I think, more a matter of whether one thinks philosophy is helpful or harmful to life, which is itself a deep question about the nature of philosophy and its value that has provoked much disagreement from philosophers over the centuries. I myself am inclined to think that the kinds of inquiries that philosophy promotes can only be beneficial to anyone who engages in them, but I of course have a vested interest in holding that opinion!

Another relatively recent, good, general introduction to a variety of philosophical issues is Thomas Nagel, What Does it All Mean? , which I myself read in my first year of graduate school and found most illuminating. Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy is a classic from relatively early in the twentieth century. You might also consider reading some of the canonical texts of Western philosophy (in my ignorance, I don't know Eastern philosophy, and so am not in a position to recommend any works of Eastern philosophy): a good place to begin is with Plato's 'Socratic' dialogues, the Apology , Euthyphro , and Crito ; if you like those dialogues, you might move on to the Republic , which treats many of the problem areas of philosophy, including epistemology (the nature of knowledge), metaphysics (the nature of what there is), ethics, and aesthetics, among other areas; a couple of more 'modern' works that you might consider are Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy ...

The following story is recounted in John Aubry's Life of Thomas Hobbes : "He was forty years old before he looked on geometry; which happened accidentally. Being in a gentleman's library Euclid's Elements lay open, and 'twas the forty-seventh proposition in the first book. He read the proposition. 'By G ,' said he, 'this is impossible!' So he reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a proof; which referred him back to another, which he also read. Et sic deinceps, that at last he was demonstratively convinced of that truth. This made him in love with geometry. I have heard Sir Jonas Moore (and others) say that it was a great pity he had not begun the study of the mathematics sooner, for such a working head would have made great advancement in it. So had he done he would not have lain so open to his learned mathematical antagonists. But one may say of him, as one says of Jos. Scaliger, that where he errs, he errs so ingeniously, that one had rather err with him than hit the...

I don't think that the view that knowledge of the history of philosophy is important for doing contemporary work in philosophy is "very popular": in fact, until very recently, few philosophers would have subscribed to it. I'm not convinced that knowledge of the history of philosopy is important for doing contemporary work in philosophy. But I do think that the history of philosophy is philosophically valuable. One respect in which the history of philosophy is valuable is that it provides a worked-out laboratory of positions on various topics. Sometimes a position in the history of philosophy may be drawn on to resolve a contemporary question. Reflection on the shortcomings of positions in the history of philosophy may also lead one to articulate a new response to a contemporary philosophical problem. Second, in studying the history of philosophy, one can come to appreciate the contingency, or historicity, of philosophical questions themselves; studying the history of philosophy can therefore...

I'm inclined to think that what leads the questioner to worry about the changing estimation of particular philosophical approaches in the twentieth century is that s/he seems to think that the fact that philosophy is engaged in the hunt for eternal verities should imply that philosophical approaches (and maybe even philosophical questions) themselves are not historically situated. To be sure, philosophers seek to give reasons for their claims, and thereby to resolve philosophical problems. But what philosophical problems appear important, and what methods seem appropriate for resolving those problems, certainly change over time. Certain questions that were important for medieval philosophers--e.g., 'How many angels can fit on the head of a pin?' which actually had some relevance for medieval theories of place or space--seem ridiculous to certain philosophers today. Certain methods for resolving philosophical questions--e.g., the Rationalists' appeal to a pure intellect that could operate...

One might mark the difference between philosophy and religion by looking at the different bases given for claims in these two domains. Philosophical claims are justified by arguments, which provide reasons to believe those claims; religious claims need not rest on arguments, but appeal to faith. To be sure, philosophers have sought to give arguments for religious claims: such argument are part of what is called natural religion. Nevertheless, certain claims--such as the claim that Jesus is the son of God, or the doctrine of the Trinity--are recognized to lie outside the scope of rational justification, and therefore are considered to be part of revealed religion. Arguably, philosophy began to be distinguished from religion in the work of the Pre-Socratics, and one can track the emergence of rational justification for claims as one reads through their fragments.

In recent years, there has been an upsurge in interest among Anglo-American philosophers in such philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre. In a recent book, Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge , Richard Moran draws on Sartre's Being and Nothingness in order to give an account of first-person authority. I think that there is much in Being and Nothingness that could illuminate such questions as the nature of human freedom and the nature of our knowledge of other minds. Sartre's writings deserve further consideration from Anglo-American philosophers.