I'm with Mitch and Peter, so far as what they've said goes. But neither of them answered your first question: Why do philosophers go in for this kind of thing in the first place? The answer is that philosophers who do go in for this kind of thing think that, if we could articulate the rules we tacitly follow in using the concept of intention, say, then that would be a way of saying what the concept of intention is , that is, of characterizing that concept. It is a much debated question whether this way of proceeding is best. Jerry Fodor, for example, has been arguing for some time that concepts simply don't have "rules" associated with them in the way Wright's project presumes. See his book Concepts for his most complete presentation of this idea.

Philosophy tends not to move terribly quickly, and it's always difficult to tell, from "up close", what will prove to have been important. That said, however, there have been some important developments in philosophy of language (one area you mentioned over the last decade). It's less a matter of individual pieces of work and more a matter of orientation and general progress. As a result of several forces, the question how the meaning of an utterance depends upon the circumstances in which that utterance is made has become very hot, and it seems that enough has been learned in surrounding areas to make this exceedingly difficult question discussable at this point. Ernie Lepore and Herman Cappelen recently published a book, Insensitive Semantics , that discusses this issue. I don't find their view convincing, but they do a very nice job of laying out the options, so it would make a good introduction to the state of the art.

It's certainly true that people have said this kind of thing about Wittgenstein. But if his work did mark the "end of philosophy", not very many people seem to have paid that fact much attention. I suppose someone might say that, if only we understood Wittgenstein's work properly and appreciated it sufficiently well, then we would be inclined not to continue doing this stuff. But I don't myself see any plausibility in that claim. Perhaps that is because my conception of what philosophy is is so distant from Wittgenstein's. Wittgenstein repeatedly expresses the view that there is a sharp divide between "scientific" questions, on the one hand, and "philosophical" questions, on the other hand. But I see no reason to believe there is any such principled division. The idea that there is such a division appears to be a very recent one, born (it would seem) some time in the 19th century. And much of the best philosophy done since the end of World War II has hewn very close to scientific questions. Perhaps one...

I'm not sure that any particular philosophical orientation would dictate a position on the use of drugs and alcohol. Philosophical theories, especially in ethics, tend to operate at a high level of abstraction, and their impications for such practical questions tend to be very difficult to determine.

Even the Great Dualist, Descartes, who regarded mind and body as two completely different kinds of substances, did not want to regard the relation between the mind and the body as like that (his analogy) between a captain and a ship. A person, according to Descartes, is a "union" of mind and body, where a "union" is supposed to be something more than just a body and a mind. In what way precisely the "union" is more than a body and a mind, in what way the mind and body are "bound together" in the union, is a question with which Descartes struggled throughout his career, and I don't know that anyone thinks they really understand what he meant or, for that matter, that Descartes really understood what he meant. Nowadays, dualism isn't very popular, but your question shows that similar questions can arise about the relationship between a brain and a person. It doesn't seem happy to identify a person with his or her brain and then to regard the relation between the brain and the body as like that between...

I believe that the answer to this question is "No". But it's a question for a physicist, really, not one for a philosopher nor even for a mathematician. One can certainly describe metrics on spaces that behave in the kind of way you suggest. But whether the universe is such a space is an empirical question.

I don't understand this question. To say that there is equal opportunity doesn't imply that one can't make distinctions based upon "merit".

I tend to be opposed to the death penalty myself, but one needs a more subtle argument. Is imprisoning someone who has kidnapped someone kidnapping them for kidnapping? If you don't think so, then you need to ask what the difference is between that case and capital punishment.

We need to keep some things straight here. The "picture" that occurs in your mind, if there is such a thing, is a representation . You don't have a single object, the bridge say, which has two sizes. The bridge isn't both in the external world and in your mind. It's just in the external world. If there is a "picture" of the bridge in your mind, then it is a picture of the bridge, not the bridge, and the fact that it has a different size from the bridge is hardly surprising. More generally, whether the representation is three-dimensional or not (and there is some empirical evidence that it is, actually) has nothing particular to do with whether it is capable of representing three dimensions. Think of a map. On the map, dots represent towns and the relative distances between little dots represent distances. If it's a topographic map, then there may be lines that represent height. The map represents three dimensions even though it is essentially two dimensional. It's important to be...

I doubt many people would consider low-level gambling unethical in itself, say, entering an office pool. There are stronger objections to state-sponsored gambling and to the extent to which states have become addicted to revenue so generated. The objection derives from the extremely regressive form of taxation such an addiction constitutes. One can then imagine an objection to participation in such a system grounded on its unfairness. There are, of course, people who do object to any form of gambling on moral grounds. I expect that objection derives from some kind of "slippery slope" concern. Larger scale gambling has been a serious problem in some communities, and so one can understand why someone might think it better simply not to go there.