文字难度：★★
英文中的哲学（philosophy）一词源自希腊文philosophia，意即爱智慧。哲学，也应该正是研究“爱”与“智慧”的学说！我们常常思考死亡、探究真爱、询问自己到底是谁……哲学层面上的回答似乎能帮我们理清一些思绪……
Philosophers answer your questions about love, nothingness and everything else…
哲学家们现在为你一一解答关于爱、虚无以及其他等问题……
Logic 关于逻辑
Is there a logical reason why most people prefer their own opinions to someone else’s?
Louise Antony: Here’s a conceptual reason: if I “preferred” your opinion to my own, in the sense of thinking it is more likely to be true than the one I currently hold, then I presumably would change my opinion to match yours, and your opinion would become mine.
I was loading up to go on a trip the other day and asked my dad why he was taking a lot of extra stuff and he said: “Just in case the unexpected happens.”
So out of that comes my question: if you expect the unexpected, then doesn’t that make the unexpected expected and the expected unexpected?
Peter Lipton: Even if you expect the unexpected, you may still be surprised. I took my Swiss Army knife along, because I expected the unexpected, but I was still surprised when I had to use it to free a 1)hedgehog that got itself locked in the 2)glove compartment of my car. People who believe that life is full of surprises are often right.
问：为什么大多数人宁愿偏信于自己的观点，而不听别人的观点呢？有什么逻辑依据吗？
路易斯·安东尼：这是个概念上的解释——如果我更“偏爱”你的而非我自己的观点，也就是说，我觉得你的观点比我现有的想法可能更准确，然后我大概会扭转我的想法来契合你的观点，那你的观点就会成为我的了。
问：有天我在收拾行李准备出游，我问父亲为什么他要带那么多额外的东西，他说：“只是以防万一。”
于是，我的疑问来了：如果你能料到意料之外的事，那意料之外岂不成了意料之中，而意料之中岂不反成意料之外？
彼特·利普顿：即使你料到意外会发生，（意外出现的时候）你仍然会感到惊讶。虽然我随身带着瑞士军刀，就是以备不时之需，但那次在我车上得用它来解救困在仪表板抽屉里的那只刺猬时，我还是觉得很诧异。相信生命是充满意外的人往往是对的。
Happiness 关于幸福
Is it possible to measure sorrow or happiness? If so, can one person’s grief or joy be greater than another’s?
Mark Crimmins: This is one of those questions where your first impulse is to say “Of course!” and “Impossible!” at the same time(which is of course impossible). Of course! We have little trouble 3)discerning that the suicidal depressive is less cheery than the tiny 4)tot with her eyes all 5)aglow. We’re very confident even about much subtler discriminations: for instance, that runner who has finally achieved his personal best is more 6)elated than this chef who is satisfied that her new dish will maintain the restaurant’s reputation. But, impossible! We can never get the chef’s satisfaction into the same mind as the runner’s excitement. And don’t we have to be able to do that to compare them? Couldn’t it be that the chef’s joy is far greater, and yet she reacts to that level of joy in a far more subdued way than the runner would(perhaps her baseline mood would make the runner skip and sing)?
问：我们可以衡量悲伤或幸福吗？如果答案是肯定的，能不能说一个人的悲痛或快乐要比别人的要大呢？
马克·克里明：像这样的问题，你的第一反应是同时回答“当然！”和“不可能！”（当然不可能）。当然！我们轻而易举就能看出，那些抑郁寻死的人跟双眼晶亮的孩童相比当然是没那么快乐无忧。连更微妙的区别，我们也是有十足把握能看出来的：比如说，赛跑运动员最终取得了个人最佳成绩，厨师以新菜保住餐馆名声，赛跑运动员的喜悦兴奋肯定要比厨师的满足感更大。慢着，不可能！我们永远不可能将厨师的满足感和赛跑运动员的兴奋感加诸同一个人身上以求比较。要将两者一比高低，不是非得这么做吗？说不定厨师的快乐远大于赛跑运动员，只是面对此种程度的快乐她表现低调，不像赛跑运动员那么显露（也许以她的情绪基线来看，这位运动员得又跳又唱地来庆祝自己刷新记录了）。
Love 关于爱
Is it possible for one to be in love with the feeling of being in love, instead of with the person you believe you’re in love with?
Alexander George: We do speak of “loving the feeling of being clean”, but surely the sense of “loving” here must be different from the sense in which one loves one’s 7)spouse. The first seems more or less synonymous with “finding very
pleasurable”, while the latter, well, I don’t know how else to express what we mean in such cases, but I do know that we mean something different form “finding very pleasurable”. So, it’s of course quite possible that John is in love with Hilary and also finds being in that state very pleasurable.
But that’s not your question. You’re imagining a situation in which John thinks he’s in love with Hilary, but really isn’t. And you’re further wondering whether John might experience great pleasure from this 8)faux love. If he does, then of course he’s not in love with being in love, since he’s not in love. As you put it, he’s “in love with the feeling of being in love”.
Putting it this way does assume that love feels a particular way. This seems like a dubious assumption to me(recall that one can think one’s in love when one isn’t), but if we do assume it then your question amounts to this: could it be that John is not in love with Hilary, that John is having those experiences that regularly attend his being in love, that(perhaps as a consequence) John believes that he is in love with Hilary, and finally that John is taking great pleasure in having those experiences? I don’t see why not.
问：一个人爱上的只是恋爱的感觉，而不是你以为你所爱上的那个人，这可能吗？
亚历山大·乔治：我们会说“爱上干净的感觉”这样的话，但很肯定的是，这里所说的“爱”有别于夫妻之间的爱。前者似乎多多少少等于“觉得某事很令自己愉悦”，而后者，嗯，我不知道还能怎么解释它在这些情形之下的含义，但我的确知道我们是另有所指的，而非“觉得某事很令自己愉悦”。因此，如果甲爱上了乙，同时也觉得这爱恋的状态很让人惬意，这当然是非常可能的。
但是，你的疑问不在此。你是假设有这么一种情况：甲觉得自己爱上了乙，但现实却并非如此。你还进一步推想——甲从这场假情假爱中是否也体验到无穷快乐？如果他确实如此，那么，他爱上的就不是恋爱本身，因为他根本就没有恋爱。就像你说的，他“只是爱上了恋爱的感觉”。
你的说法其实是建立在“爱让人有一种特定的感觉”这样一个前提之下。这在我看来是站不住脚的（想想看，一个人可能没有恋爱，但觉得自己是在恋爱），但如果我们假设这是成立的，那你的问题就延伸为：甲没有爱上乙，甲只是体验着那些在他爱上别人时经常会发生的事，那么（也许，这就是结果），甲就相信了他是爱上了乙，最终甲在那些经历中感到了无限的快乐。这可能吗？我不觉得这有什么不可能的。
Mind 关于思想
What’s it like to be another person?
Mark Crimmins: That’s a really good question. I guess the answer is: it feels normal. Because it feels normal to them, and so if you are that person, then feeling like they do feels normal to you.
But what we really want to know is: how would it feel for me to feel what they are feeling? If I could “see” what a red apple looked like to them, would it look red to me? Or would it look green? If I could feel their sleepiness, would it feel like mine? Fortunately, philosophers have thought long and hard about this question. Unfortunately, we haven’t figured it out yet.
问：成为别人会是怎样一种感觉呢？
马克·克里明：那确实是个很好的问题。我认为答案是：这跟平常没什么两样。因为一个人做自己是很正常的事，所以如果你成为他/她，你会觉得他们对于你来说，确实再正常不过的。
但我们真正想知道的是：对别人的感觉感同身受，那会是怎样？如果我能够“看到”一个红苹果在他人眼中的样子，这个苹果对我来说是不是红色的呢？还是在我眼里，它是绿的？如果我能感受到别人的倦意，会不会跟我自己的那种倦意是一样的呢？可幸的是，哲学家们已经就这个问题思考了很久很深刻。而不幸的是，我们还找不到答案。
