I think the matter is a little more complicated. There is a sense of "tolerance" that means "indifference," as in "I don't see why those parents tolerate that kind of behavior from their children." This is the sense I think people have in mind when they say, plausibly, that no one should tolerate racism, sexism, or, for that matter, intolerance. But this isn't the sense in which "tolerance" is a virtue. The kind of tolerance required for a civil society is the kind that acknowledges the rights of every person to make up her own mind, to form her own opinions, and that makes illegitimate any attempt to coerce anyone to change her mind. In this sense, there's no incompatibility between tolerating a racist belief, and trying, by all legitimate means of persuasion, to change the opinion of the person who holds it. In this sense, a tolerant person should tolerate intolerance -- but she doesn't need to ignore it or endorse it, and can do her best to argue against it at every opportunity.

To say that a condition is a "state of mind" is not to say that there is no objective fact as to whether someone is in that state of mind, so that thinking it so makes it so. So someone could easily come to believe that she's depressed without actually being depressed. Suppose that an otherwise reliable magazine publishes a quiz for the self-diagnosis of depression, but the quiz, unbeknownst to the editors, was written as a hoax. As part of the hoax, the quiz carries an introduction that "informs" readers that depression often be "hidden" beneath superficial signs of happiness, even elation. An unsuspecting reader, who is not in fact depressed, takes the quiz and scores "very depressed." The reader might well come to believe that he is depressed, even though he is not. Now while the hoax victim might, like a genuinely depressed person, might seek psychiatric help, there is no reason to think that the hoax victim would experience any of the actual symptoms of depression, like feelings of...

Many feminist philosophers have argued that a lot would be different if women had been equally involved with men in the generation of knowledge. These philosophers contend that science, philosophy, and other branches of knowledge are both incomplete and distorted for having neglected the perspectives of, not only women, but all socially marginalized people. They argue that social stratification, rather than inherent differences in the way men and women think, produces distortions of perspective that influence the way theories are conceived, developed, and tested, and that affect even the way we think about what knowledge is. Other feminist philosophers, like myself, take a alightly different view. We agree that social stratification has had many bad consequences for human knowledge, the worst being the way institutionalized science has increasingly come to serve the needs of the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the most vulnerable members of our human community. But we don't...

To properly answer your question, I'd need the help of a cognitive psychologist and a neuroscientist, more money than God has, and at least a hundred years. Make that two hundred years. To the extent that yours is a philosophical question, rather than a question for science, it's a question about what thoughts would have to be like in order to account for the known, everyday facts about beliefs, desires, imaginings, etc. There are a few different philosophical schools of thought on this question. One group of philosophers think that it's unlikely that there is any systematic correspondence between what we ordinarily think of as "thoughts" (?!?) and goings-on in the brain. According to these folks, our talk of beliefs and desires and such just reflects our apprehension of broad and complex patterns in our observable behavior. Philosophers in this group include Willard van Orman Quine, and Donald Davidson. According to another group -- a group to which I belong -- beliefs and desires...

"We" can call anyone we like a "philosopher". No one owns the term. The term "philosophy" has a broad meaning in public discourse -- it means something like "a systematic consideration of fundamental questions about meaning and existence." By that definition, Baudrillard (who I have never read) would certainly count as a philosopher. And I don't think his qualifying by that definition means that philosophy is "just a game." Now there's a reason why I haven't read Baudrillard that has to do with the academic practice of philosophy. I grew up in what's called the "analytic tradition" -- an approach to philosophy that takes analysis and rigorous argumentation as methodological norms, and that often focuses on the language in which philosophical questions are expressed. There are other traditions; the other main tradition descended from early modern European philosophy beside analytic philosophy is called the "continental tradition." Jean Baudrillard works in this tradition. People in the...

The question of the unity of the self is one that has engaged the attention of a lot of philosophers, particularly in light of phenomena such as the ones you cite. Advances in techniques for investigating the brain have also stimulated philosophical interest. This is all by way of stalling, because, in fact, the question you ask is devilishly difficult and I don't think anyone knows the answer. Some philosophers have interpreted the split-brain data as showing that there are always at least two seats of consciousness, one in each hemisphere, but that normal conditions make the two "selves" so well-coordinated that there is no evidence of the division. (And the fact that one self gets to do all the talking means that introspection is largely under the control of the left "self.") Other philosophers think that consciousness is unified in normal people, but "splits" if and when the corpus callosum is cut. I find this less plausible than the first position, since it entails either that the...

Let me add some comments to Mitch Green's and Gabriel Segal's. (And a quick plug: you might want to check out my entry on "Nativism" in the new edition of the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy, due out soon.) Two quick points, and then a longer one. First: Showing that a trait has a "biological basis" is not the same thing as showing that it is "natural" in any sense that can be opposed to "nurtural" (is that a word? It should be.) Unless you are a dualist, you shouldn't be surprised to find that psychological states are correlated with, depend upon, or are flatout identical with biological states. (Indeed, you shouldn't be surprised even if you are a dualist, but that's another story.) But that means that any acquired trait will have some biological effect. Showing, therefore, that the brains of musically accomplished individuals are different from people who aren't hardly shows (as one NPR story reported, I swear to God) that musical talent is innate. ...

I should say right at the outset that I am not speaking as a specialist in ethics. I am a parent. My husband is also a philosopher. Our considered view is that, basically, one should not tell children things that one believes to be untrue. Perhaps there are exceptions -- I'm not about to criticize the parents of a dying child who encourage the child to have hope. But if you're going to encourage a child to believe something you think is false, you need a really good reason. For one thing, it's imprudent: you risk your own credibility if the kid finds you out. So I wonder, in your case, what your reason fis or "inculcating" in your child a set of beliefs you think are false? Neither my husband nor I believes in Santa Claus, and therefore did not tell our children that there was a Santa Claus. We didn't go out of our way to tell them that there wasn't , but neither of our kids seemed inclined to believe that there was. They talked about Santa Claus pretty much the same way they...

The term "representation" is a very slippery one in philosophy. The U.S. philosopher H. P. Grice ( some info can be found at http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/grice.html ) distinguished two sense of the word "meaning," but his distinction has relevance to contemporary talk about "representation". Grice asks us to reflect on the difference between sentences like these two. 1 -- Those spots mean measles 2 -- The "occupied" sign means that someone is using the lavatory. He points out that if sentence 1 is true, then the occurrence of spots entails the existence of measles. Equivalently, if the occurrence of spots doesn't entail the existence of measles, then it's not correct to say that the spots mean measles. If, for example, the same sorts of spots can be produced by an allergic reaction to penicillin, then one should have said, "those spots mean either measles or an allergic reaction to penicillin." On the other hand, the truth of sentence 2 doesn't ...