Is marriage an artificial concept that has come into existence just because the life expectancy of humans is around 60 years. What if the life expectancy was 200 years or say just 15 years. Would we still have the concept of marriage in humans?

I rather expect that monogamous marriage is more the result of the agricultural revolution than an artifact of our life spans. It was when we changed from hunter-gatherers to "property-owners" (so that we could raise our crops and lay claim to the fruits of our agricultural labors), I suspect, that someone got the brilliant idea that we could own not only land and what it produces, but also start building private homes (since farmers don't need to keep moving around to hunt and gather) and having private families. That was when we began to "own" other people--including slaves, spouses, and children. In many early versions, this "ownership" was strictly one-way: it was not adultery (or a violation of marriage) for a man to have sex with some woman who was not owned by someone else (either as wife or daughter, for example), but was a violation of marriage if the wife engaged in such extra-marital activity. The institution has changed as human society has changed, but I still think it is an...

As far as I am aware, according to virtue ethics, we are supposed to cultivate a virtuous character. Suppose a person with a non-virtuous character engaged in an activity that expressed, but did not cultivate, his problematic character. Would it nevertheless be preferable for him to suppress this expression of his character, even if that suppression didn't contribute to improving his character? Or is virtue ethics only concerned with behavior that leads to a change in one's character?

Virtue ethics is not just interested in the characterological states of the agent , but also on those acted upon. So bad behavior does not just express bad character, it also has effects on those who are acted upon, and in the worst cases, it has the effect of damaging the characters of those who are victimized by the bad behavior. For example, part of what is wrong with treating me badly is that it is likely that I will become more defensive, less trusting, less friendly, than I waas before I was treated badly. These bad--but quite natural--reactions can become habitual if someone is victimized enough. And as the gravity of the offense becomes greater, it seems there is also greater potential for the victim to be greatly damaged in their own character--victims, in other words, can be made less virtuous themselves, as a result of being victimized. Indeed, in a virtue theory, this may be the very worst aspect of bad behavior.

Socrates (or perhaps Plato) seems to have been opposed to writing. As I understand it, the objection was twofold - first, that writing "offloads" mental effort (memory, communication, reasoning, etc.) into physical media rather than leaving it in the mind, and second, that writing is unable to react to the reader and thus aid the latter in the pursuit of truth. Both of those suggestions seem to hold true for writing, yet it seems that for the past several hundred years, we have consistently thought of writing as the intellectually superior form of communication. What has changed? What makes these earlier objections loose their power?

Most philosophers are still very much interested in, and try to engage regularly in, live discussions with others. You won't find many of us claiming, for example, that teaching philosophy can effectively be done remotely, for example. The direct exchange of ideas and the interplay of active minds in an immediate person-to-person context still seems to most of us to be critical. On the other hand, writing and reading make ideas more available than does simply speaking. You don't have to have known Kant to read his works and be engaged with and influenced by his thought. Reading and writing are the skills of our globalized age, and it allows us to transcend time by "speaking" to those who we can never meet, because of distance in space or time. By reading my colleagues' work (before I meet them in person), I can get to know which of them I want to speak with in person. So as important as speaking, listening and such are, writing and reading offer distinct advantages that we would be very...

Recently someone asked: I wonder about the notion of a masochist as somebody who enjoys suffering. Is it possible, logically, to enjoy suffering? Doesn't suffering necessarily preclude enjoyment and vice-versa? Would it be more accurate to say that a masochist enjoys something that non-masochists consider suffering? And a philosopher responded: I think that one definition of suffering is 'pain'. And someone could gain pleasure from pain, physical, or indeed psychological. So to say that a masochist enjoys suffering sees fine to me. Well.....I don't see much clarification here. Am I the only one? I think it might be just as hard for the question asker to imagine the relationship between suffering and pleasure and pain and pleasure. Maybe suffering is a larger category than pain that logically precludes pleasure so it's not hard to see a paradox there but with the narrower connotation of pain as a physical kind of suffering you can imagine that their can be an accompanying pleasure somehow. But the...

I think what may be tripping you up here is the vaguess of terms like "pleasure" and "enjoyment," which you seem to treat not only as equivalent, but also as univocal in their reference. There are lots and lots of different kinds of pleasures: sexual, gustatory, aesthetic, and so on. There are lots and lots of enjoyments: some are pleasures, and others have to do with doing things we like (even when they are not accompanied by pleasant sensation--think of playing tennis when your knee hurts, but you are in a really great game and playing well. So, one can have one kind of pleasure even when one is undergoing a different kind to pain. One can have one kind of enjoyment even when is undergoing another kind of suffering. A masochist (always measured by someone else's standard of what counts as a "healthy" or "wholesome" kind of enjoyment, mind you!) is thus one who has a certain kind of pleasure or enjoyment that is somehow linked to their also being in a certain (other) kind of pain or...

With regard to opening doors many women assert that men who do so are being "gentleman" and those who don't are ungentlemanly. Likewise some feminists assert that men are sexist if they open a door for them. I've tried to research this issue very thoroughly so I know what I am talking about but among the many many websites I've read about this none have ever said that it was wrong to assume why a person is or isn't opening a door for you, until ironically while I was writing this I came across this one video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coi1Sc5ss_s where a self-described feminist does in fact acknowledge that "[I] do recognize most people do it just to be polite." In fact all of the websites other than that Youtube video I read come down under two opposed factions- those who say that men who open doors for women are sexist and those that say that men who don't open doors for women are impolite- with no nuanced opinion standing in between. On the one hand I don't like to be thought of as...

I fear you may take my answer to be flippant, but I assure you that it is not. My own practice is to open any door for anyone who might need the door opened. I open doors for people who are going to ride in my car; I open the door to my own office when I am about to go in and have a chat with a student; I open the door for people I have never met when I get to the door first. This plainly has nothing to dowith sexism, since I take the politness of such gestures to apply to any and all, regardless of gender or circumstance. So it looks to me that practicing this minor bit of politesse is your answer: just be polite and open doors for anyone whenever it is feasible (without making a scene, of course!) to do so.

Many people bring forth the argument that the chances of life, especially intelligent human life, occurring are so ridiculously improbable that the only way to explain it is to bring a creator into the picture. I've heard various figures thrown around and grains of sand in the universe brought in to explain how unlikely it is. But is the actual science behind the probability sound? And do you think that this is a good reason to believe in a creator? And what about a rational, logical argument explaining how this is not a very good reason? Thanks.

First of all, it is nonsense to try to assess the probability of intelligent human life occurring unless we first stipulate what the prior conditions are. According to evolutionary theory, human beings and other living things are the result of genetic mutations that occur within prior life forms, which are then selected as a result of added fitness within a certain environment. Given the nature of this process, it is all but senseless to assess the (prior) probability that some specific life form would emerge from a (random) mutation in the prior life form, given all of the variables that are pertinent to fitness within a given environment. So if someone thinks they can calculate this as a real probability, I expect they are simply making up the values on which their calculations are based. This is no way to do things! Now, there may be calculations we can apply to very specific conditions at very specific places and times, with respect the the likelihood that some very specific string of...

What makes a philosophy program at a University better or worse than another program? I live in the Dallas area, where there are two philosophy programs in my area. One is at The University of North Texas, the other at Southern Methodist University. One's a public, state-funded school with a broad program in philosophy and religious studies, the other is a private school with about 15 different courses in their undergrad program. What would make one better than the other?

I think the practice of "rating" different departments is tricky at best, and at worst sheer fraud. So my answer will be very indirect. Obviously, students want professors who are engaging and interesting to teach them. But from a distance, I think it can be very difficult to assess whether either of the places you are looking at would be preferable on this score. The only access the general public has to student responses to teaching is something like ratemyprofessors.com, which I would use only with the most extreme caution. For one thing, it provide samples from only the tiniest fraction of students who have taken the professor--and only those who liked or disliked the professor so much that they wanted to put ion the effort of a review. Moreover, their editorial standards are quite lax--in my own case, there appears a crank response from a supposed student who says he/she took a course from me that does not exist in our curriculum, and the likes of which I was not teaching the term...

Dear Philosophers, We can differentiate between objects by two axii, their form, which is the shape they take, and their "thingness." Thingness refers to the reason for an object, its purpose that it is supposed to achieve. For example, the thingness of a guitar is to make music. We can differentiate it from a similar object like a banjo, because while they share similar purposes, they have different shapes. We hold in our minds this thingness in the form of a Concept. If you were to show me a picture of a guitar, I would match that image (its form and thingness) to my Concept of guitar, and so I could recognize that object. Now if we have a guitar, but remove the strings by this framework we could say that it is no longer a guitar, because while it has a shape of a guitar, it now lacks the "thingness" of a guitar, that is it can no longer be used to make music. So its new label becomes "an object that's almost a guitar." Another example. We have a Bic lighter. A lighter is used to...

Your question calls to mind Aristotle's so-called "four causes," which I prefer to think of as four sorts of explanation. "Material Cause": explaining a thing in terms of what it is made of (in the case of the Bic lighter, plastic, compressed gas, etc.) "Formal Cause": explaining a thing in terms of what it is (it's a Bic lighter!) "Efficient Cause": Explaining a thing in terms of how it came to be (this, I think, is our normal concept of cause--refer to the operations of the factory where the lighted was made) "Final Cause": Explaining a thing in virtue of what it characteristicallydoes or what purpose it may have. (Ignites cigarettes, cigars, or pipes for smokers to use.) In Aristotle's system, the Formal and Final Causes are linked, but not so tightly as in your more reduced conception: A thing can still be a Bic lighter, but no longer able to fulfill it's Final Cause, since these are distinct. So you might find Aristotle helpful here. If you want to see what he has...

Hey Philosophers, I was having a discussion with my girlfriend about what the "meaning of life" was. A tired, perhaps ultimately pointless, question... but suprisingly, we actually ended up both agreeing that the purpose of life is to "flourish." However, we sort of ran into a brick wall when we realized we couldn't even explain what that is. Like, what is "human flourishing?" We thought that was maybe to complex a question, so questioned what "plant flourishing" was; if a seed is planted with the capacity to flower, and it begins to grow, yet, some problem hinders it's growth and because of that it doesn't flower, it can be said that the plant didn't 'flourish' - the plant did not fulfill it's potential to flower. Would it be fair to say, then, that "human flourishing" comes down to humans fulfilling the potential they have in life? This is problematic, though, since humans are so complex, we simply can't put a finger on one thing and say "that's flourishing" like we can with the flower. The limits on...

Maybe you should read a little more Aristotle. Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics deals directly with this issue. So does the end of Book IV of Plato's Republic , from a somewhat different perspective. Plato also has Socrates talk about what it means to value "the most important things" in the Apology (see 22d-e, and then his famous statement about what makes life worth living at 38a). This same viewpoint may be echoed somewhat in the famous "intellectualism" of the last book of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics . To make a very clumsy summary of Aristotle: human beings are, for him, rational animals. That means that what is good for us will include what is good for all animals (such as nutrition and so on) but must also include something of the life of the mind. He thinks that human flurishing will be realized in acting in accordance with a rational principle, which is to say acting virtuosly--by which he does not simply mean doing what the virtuous person does, but doing it ...

It is generally acknowledged, especially by feminists, that men in general have behaviors and traits that are not good. Could a feminist name any general behaviors and traits that women have that are not good and that are also not the fault of men?

First a disclaimer--I don't speak for feminists in this response. But something in the question piqued me a bit, but then there is also something I wanted to pursue a bit. I think that talk about "men in general" and "women in general" is already likely to deal in the sorts of stereotypes that philosophers should try to avoid. I don't disagree that there are "behaviors and traits" worthy of criticism or blame, but the generality that these may be associated with "men in general" strikes me as prejudice--or at least a likely source of such. It is simply too easy to go from "men in general" to the presumption that the next man I might meet may be assumed to be guilty before I have any evidence of such guilt. This is how prejudice works. To pursue another line, however, I would recommend the work of feminist philosopher Claudia Card to the questioner. Much of Card's work has been focused on the nature and effects of victimization. It is to her (in modern times) that we owe the notion of the...

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