Ask a Philosopher – Answers to Your Most Important – and Most Unexpected – Questions,Ian Olasov
-About this book
I started the Ask a Philosopher booth because I want philosophy to be responsive to the needs of ordinary people. It’s important to enable and encourage people to find out about the problems that preoccupy professional philosophers, but it’s at least as important to enable and encourage philosophers to find out about—and help with—the problems that preoccupy everyone else.
This book offers an answer—or a fragment of an answer—to a bunch of the stickiest questions posed by visitors to the booth. The questions reflect the enormous range of what we care about. Sidebars throughout paint the little scenes that help make each booth and each question memorable. You’ll occasionally see lines (d), which represent the responses of an imaginary interlocutor. Feel free to read the book in whatever order you want.
Some of the magic of the booth is hard to capture on the page—the spontaneity, the interactivity, the funky theater of springing philosophy on people who have other things on their minds. But the book captures something.
I hope the discussion below gives the sense that there’s a way of making philosophy work for each of us, that philosophy can be both perfectly continuous with everyday life and also utterly transporting.
-Contents
- Title Page
- Copyright Notice
- Dedication
- Preface
- PART I: Cosmic Questions
- What Is Philosophy?
- Why Is There Anything Instead of Nothing?
- Does God Exist?
- What Is the Meaning of Life?
- Do We Have Free Will?
- How Do We Know Anything About the World Outside of Our Own Heads?
- If the World Is Melting, Is It OK to Have Kids?
- How Do Brains Give Rise to Conscious Experience?
- Why Should I Care?
- What’s the Best Form of Government?
- Is Color Subjective?
- Is Time Travel Possible?
- Are People Innately Good or Bad?
- Which Came First, Thought or Language?
- How Well Do We Know What’s Good for Us?
- Is There Life after Death?
- Are Science and Religion Compatible?
- Is There Objective Truth?
- What Is Happiness?
- Is There an Unconscious?
- How Can We Overcome Dualism?
- Are Space and Time Objectively Real?
- Why?
- PART II: Personal Questions
- What Is Love?
- When Does It Make Sense for One Person to Love Another?
- Are People Born Straight or Gay?
- What Makes a Boy a Boy?
- If Someone Buys Me a Drink at the Bar, Do I Owe Them Anything?
- What Can Gentrifiers Do Not to Ruin Their New Neighborhoods?
- Should I Give Money to Homeless People?
- What’s the Point in Getting Upset About Things We Can’t Change?
- How Do You Cope with the Mortality of Your Own Parents?
- How Can You Live with Purpose in Retirement?
- What Makes Someone Mentally Ill?
- When You Buy Something from a Poor Country, Are You Exploiting Their Workers?
- Is It OK to Have a Pet Fish?
- When Should We Trust the Experts?
- How Can We Raise Children to Be Good People?
- What Makes a Word Sexist?
- What Can You Do When Nothing You Do Matters?
- Should We Live in the Present?
- PART III:Questions You Didn’t Know You Needed Answered
- Is Ketchup a Smoothie?
- If Humans Colonize Mars, Who Should Own the Land?
- How Do You Know that 1 + 1 = 2?
- Is Chicken Parmesan Authentic?
- Should You Kill Baby Hitler?
- Can Plants Think?
- Is Buddhism a Religion or a Philosophy?
- How Can Something Be So Bad It’s Good?
- Do Jelly Beans Taste the Same to People Who Like Them and to People Who Dislike Them?
- If You Try to Make a Sculpture of a Dragonfly and It Ends Up Looking Like a Bee, Is It a Sculpture of a Dragonfly or a Bee?
- What Makes Simpler Theories Better?
- If Superman Gets His Power from the Sun, Why Doesn’t He Have a Tan?
- Is Anything Really Random?
- What Makes a Work Derivative?
- What’s Your Favorite Animal?
- Bonus Question: What’s the Best Way to Teach Myself Philosophy?How Do I Start?
- Notes
-Caractéristiques
Date de parution : 16/09/2020
Editeur : Godsfield Press
ISBN : 978-1-84181-502-2
EAN : 9781841815022
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