American Political Thought
The Fundamental Questions
1. Is There An Essential Human Nature?
 
"What kind of creatures are we? "There's an obvious biological basis for a common human nature, but how far does it go? Where is the line between biology and culture?

2. Are Mind And Body Distinct?

Are human beings simply minds that control bodies, or bodies that give rise to illusions of minds, and if we have both minds and bodies, how are they related?

3. Is There A Self?

Each of us feels that we have a self that continues from day to day and through a lifetime, yet we all also experience personal change, the sense of a new self emerging, the sense of old self lost. What is the nature of the self, and does it endure through time?"

4. The Self And Others

"For each person, selfhood is an experience in uniqueness, in separation, in isolation, comparable to how each body is sealed off in its own skin. But the question has two sides. On one side, we are so separate that we can wonder whether other minds even exist. But on the other side, we can wonder whether any self could ever develop except in relation to others."

5. What Is Real?

6. How Do We Know?

7. Are All Events Determined?

"In a mechanistic view of the universe every event follows causes that, however complex, determine what it will be and how it will influence subsequent events. Billiard balls and human beings participate in the same chain of causality. But do they?

8.Is Time Real?

"What is this THING we call time, in which we are immersed, which flows now slowly, now fast, which has a direction--an arrow--from past to present to future, which seems inescapable and
irreversible?"

9.Does God Exist?

All cultures have shared an impulse to religion. Indeed, the great monotheistic religions--Judaism, Christianity and Islam--have all shared the idea of a god who is omnipotent, omniscient, and good. But can the existence of such a God be proven?

10. Can We Know God Through Experience?

"For most people religious belief does not rest on rationalistic arguments for the existence of God. Instead, they believe because they feel that they have experienced contact with a God or divine dimension that transcends the realm of ordinary reality." How have such experiences been described? And how have philosophers viewed them?

12. What Is The Meaning Of Life?

Does life have meaning? The question has always been raised by death. By our mortality.