Program Description You study philosophy because you are interested in certain questions concerning our place in the world. What are our obligations to each other, or to the environment? Is there a method for gaining knowledge about the world? If so, what makes it a good one? Could a machine ever be consciously aware of its surroundings, or itself? What political arrangements are best from a moral point of view? Questions such as these can't be settled by scientific or historical inquiry, and perhaps they don't admit of conclusive answers. Nevertheless, some answers to them can be judged better than others: they are more logically consistent, or they are more fully articulated, or they accord better with what we do know from scientific or historical inquiry. Appraising answers according to such standards is doing philosophy. It improves one's ability to see relationships between different claims, and one's ability to state things clearly. Even if we can't have conclusive proof concerning these questions, by doing philosophy we can achieve useful clarification. In addition, learning about how these foundational questions have been answered by past thinkers is an important part not only of deeply understanding the answers that philosophers give (and debate!) nowadays, but of deeply understanding our culture as a whole.
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