Yes, this makes sense: philosophy as clear articulation of certain insights. I'd add two qualifications, though. First, sometimes what feels like a compelling insight disintegrates under scrutiny. Think, for example, of some of the apparent insights Socrates is described as demolishing in the Platonic dialogues. Second, philosophy does much more than merely seek to articulate what people already know from insight. For example, some of the most brilliant philosophical writings ask new questions that had never occurred to anyone before. Thus Kant, for instance, asks how time consciousness is possible. All I am aware of stands together in one mental state. So how do I so much as get the idea that things happen (follow one another) in time? His predecessors took this for granted -- Hume, for example, who sought to explain our sense of causal connection as based on repeated experiences with some A-event followed by some B-event. Kant's response is that, in order for us to take events to belong to...

I am on your side, see response to question 1075 .

I agree that philosophers -- and not just professors of logic but especially also moral and political philosophers -- ought to play a much greater role in public political debate in the US. Our country contrasts here with many European countries where -- thanks to extensive media access -- the name recognition of the leading philosophers (e.g., Juergen Habermas) is vastly higher than that of our leading philosophers (e.g., John Rawls) is in the US. The reasons are complex. I don't think it's merely a matter of getting academics to submit OpEds to the New York Times and similar outlets. Another important factor is that the US media will simply decline to print academic comentary outside the mainstream. Here again the contrast to Europe is interesting. I have tried on numerous occasions to get important comments published in the media. I have found this to be difficult in Europe (including the UK) and vastly more difficult in the US. The reason given for rejection is typically that, while the point...

Since the beginnings of philosophy, asking new interesting questions has been central to the enterprise. Asking such questions is often more creative, more difficult, and of greater educational value than coming up with novel answers to old questions. And of course (speaking for myself, at least) we panelists are learning from many of the questions posed. That's why it is so much fun to be part of this enterprise. As for our own intellectual inquiries, these are easy to track these days through plentiful web resources. Most of us have websites (reachable by clicking our names on the right) as well as papers accessible electronically. So you would not find it hard to find the questions we have posed in our work and to which we devote much of our professional lives. Reproducing such question here would not add much, I fear, to what is already out there. What might be more productive, though, and perhaps closer to what you have in mind, is to ask panelists to come up with some questions that fall...

I have written something about what philosophy ought to be in my response to question 1075 . Insofar as philosophers have lived up to this mission they have contributed greatly to society. They have given us clearer, richer, fuller ideas of justice, virtue, friendship, exploitation, democracy, human rights, art, reasons, truth, time, causality, personal identity, death, love, well-being, and so on. These ideas have enlightened public discourse and enriched many individual lives. Because the effects of what philosophers do are far more indirect than the effects of the work of inventors or politicians, any hypothesis about how much of a difference they have made to human history is highly conjectural. But human history would surely have gone quite differently if Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, or Kant had not broadcast their ideas and arguments. To be sure, there are many grave defects in our lives and social institutions. But, with the aid of philosophy, we can better understand these defects and, if there...

Not rude at all -- just uninformed. Well understood, philosophy does not pretend to be "a way to truth," nor does it ask to be classified with science. First coined in ancient Greek, "philosophy" means "love of wisdom." So, it is not truth but wisdom we are after. And we don't pretend to deliver it to you, but merely invite you to love and seek it with us. So what is wisdom, you will ask. A decent first answer may be: understanding what matters. Here I mean "what matters" not in an empirical sense -- as in "it matters to Mr. Smith that his dog should win the beauty pageant." What matters is not what Smith or I or you or anyone happens to care about. Rather, what matters is what is worth caring about, what is important. Persons are wise insofar as they understand what is worth caring about. I speak of understanding rather than knowledge to indicate two points. First, that XYZ matters is not a fact out there which, with "something like case-control or cohort methodology" (Question 1071...

"Thick" and "thin" are generally applied to predicates such as "is a person", "is wrong", and "harms". (The first of these can be applied to living organisms, the second to pieces of conduct, and the third -- a two-place predicate -- to ordered pairs of agents.) Often, such predicates are used in different senses or meanings. Two such senses of the same predicate are related as thicker and thinner just in case all the marks or meaning elements contained in the latter sense are also contained in the former, but not the other way around. In this case, anything that qualifies for the predicate in its thicker sense must also qualify for it in its thinner sense: If the predicate in its thicker sense is true of anything, then the predicate in its thinner sense is also true of that thing. If the predicate in its thinner sense is false of anything, then the predicate in its thicker sense cannot be true of that thing. (These sentences must be modified in obvious ways for multi-place predicates, e.g.: If a...