Not all philosophy begins as a search for a/the good life, though I suppose our interest in a/the good life may nonetheless play some role. As Aristotle says (in the beginning of his Metaphysics ), philosophy begins in wonder--and we can wonder about nearly anything. I certainly don't think that non-philosophers will automatically do a bad job of thinking about this subject--or even at achieving some semblance of a good life. Philosophers are smart people--but smart people can sometimes "outsmart" themselves by becoming enamored of their own thoughts to such a degree that they get devoted to their own errors. Granting this, however, philosophers who do think about this question (a central theme in ancient Greek philosophy, by the way) derive some real advantage from their learning. Part of what we do, as philosophers, is devote lots of time and energy thinking about what other smart people have said on the issues that interest us. So, we have the advantage of constant contact (through...

Like so many things in life and thought, many things have been called "philosophy" or "philosophies." Among academic philosophers, there remain several general approaches or "schools" of philosophy, and you're right to think that philosophers from different points of view might answer philosophical questions very differently. There are, as well, schools of thought outside of academia that are widely known as "philosophy" or "philosophical." Some of these are more or less extensions of academic philosophy. In other cases, non-academic "philosophies" are really very different enterprises. So I think if you put everything that is called "philosophy into a single container and then asked what is common to everything in that container...the best answer would probably be "nothing...other than they are all called 'philosophy' by someone or other. Even granting that, I think that one of the goals of academic philosophy is to try to guarantee some degree of "quality control" through our...

I am actually inclined to think your hypothesis is correct--though I also think that your question is really an empirical one, which would best be answered by the methods of the social sciences (e.g. with an appropriately designed public opinion poll). But to give just one example of what I suspect are many, I am inclined to think that younger people are more attracted to utopian thought and the more radical political theories--in part because such ways of thinking match well with a general youthful way of thinking according to which problems are supposed to have simpler solutions, whereas as we age, we become more convinced that life's problems are more complex and less likely to be amenable to very direct and simple solutions. Accordingly, I am inclined to think that undergraduates generally might not find Stoicism all that atractive--as so much of it looks like mechanisms for coping in a difficult or even hostile world. To people later in life, such philosophies may seem more attractive. But these...

Yours is a tough question and I doubt that you will find much to reassure you in my reply. I think that if there is any lesson to learn from the history of philosophy, it is that fully adequate conceptions of such things as justice--and for that matter everything else that philosophers have worried about for eons--are not likely to be forthcoming any time soon. That most certainly does not mean that there can be no fully adequate analyses of such things. But time has proven these things to be fabulously complex, and even as we make progress in the answers we supply to such questions--and I think we have made enormous progress--that progress has not yet (and does not promise any time soon) to bear the fruit of knowledge , to answer once and for all the questions we have asked for so long now. I think that if anything is likely to help us to do a better job in such areas (outside our profession as within it) it is to take very seriously and to be acutely aware of our own relative and...