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Knowledge

Hi! I just read the five-part series New York Times published about anosognosia (the condition of not knowing what we don't know), written by Errol Morris. Since finishing the series, my existential angst is off the charts! I am haunted by the unknown unknowns, by questions I don't even know to ask. This is driving me nuts! So my question for the philosophers is: How do philosophers live with the great unknowable unknowns? Doesn't it drive you crazy that you don't even know that you don't know something? Does doing philosophy help anosognosia, or just make it worse? Throw me a lifeline here, guys!

You’ve posed an interesting set of questions. Philosophers generally go to the primary sources when dealing with any question. In this case, the research begins with the word "anosognosia" and the NY Times series. We quickly discover that "anosognosia" is a compound word coming from the transliterated Greek "nosos" meaning disease and "gnosis" meaning knowledge. The conventional connotation (dictionary definition) is medical rather than either psychological or philosophical. A patient suffering from anosognosia suffers from a physical impairment that she or he does not acknowledge. The NY Times series begins with an entertaining story of a bank robber who believed that he would become invisible to surveillance cameras by rubbing his face with lemon juice! His arrest was a forgone conclusion. So what explains such irrational behavior? Enter psychology into the picture, specifically the so-called Dunning-Kruger Effect, meaning "our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence."...
Philosophy

What makes a question a philosophical question precisely? For instance the question what makes a question a philosophical question" SOUNDS to me like a philosophical question But why? Is it that it's abstract? Well in what way does a question have to be abstract to qualify as abstract in a manner that makes it a philosophical question? Are there abstract questions that aren't philosophical? I suppose the question "Does so and so love me?" would be abstract in some sense since it deals with the abstract topic of love but it isn't a philosophical question. So then a philosophical question is more than simply an abstract question. Perhaps the question is philosophical because it was concerned in someway with what defines something. So the question "Do all mothers love?" seems very close to a philosophical question but it isn't since whether mothers love or not doesn't directly bear on what a mother is (or if it does it does so only by inference). But are there philosophical questions that are not concerned...

To use an analogy, one might say that the question and answer are like the diastolic and systolic action of the heart. Historically, as in the Platonic dialogues, we find the use of the pointed question to promote dialectical inquiry, in the Socratic sense. Socrates poses a series of questions to his conversational partners that essentially lead them, step-by-step, to answers. However, these end points are not always positive outcomes. Euthyphro, for example, after Socrates questions him, realizes that he actually knows nothing about the concept of piety despite his claim of positive knowledge. He leaves in a huff. Crito, to take another example, through a series of questions posed by Socrates, comes to understand that Socrates’ refusal to flee from an unjust sentence of death is grounded in a deeper understanding of his relation to the City and the Law itself. More recently, philosophers have explored the logic of question and answer. The basic idea is that a well-formed philosophical inquiry dealing...