Ian Olasov

A collection of answers to the philosophical questions on people's minds-from the big to the personal to the ones you didn't know you needed answered. Based on real-life questions from his Ask a Philosopher series, Ian Olasov offers his answers to questions such as: - Are people innately good or bad? - Is it okay to have a pet fish? - Is it okay to have kids? - Is color subjective? - If humans colonize Mars, who will own the land? - Is ketchup a smoothie? - Is there life after death? - Should I give money to homeless people? Ask a Philosopher shows that there's a way of making philosophy work for each of us, and that philosophy can be both perfectly continuous with everyday life, and also utterly transporting. From questions that we all wrestle with in private to questions that you never thought to ask, Ask a Philosopher will get you thinking.

Spaces can make certain forms of philosophical activity more likely or more fruitful among the people who occupy them, and many public philosophers aim to promote one or another form of fruitful philosophical activity. It's helpful to distinguish four ways in which spaces can facilitate philosophical reflection and interaction: domain‐general cognitive facilitation, domain‐specific cognitive facilitation, affective facilitation, and relational facilitation. This chapter shows how philosophical spaces shape the activity of their occupants in ways of interest to public philosophers. Groups can be unjustly excluded from philosophical communities for any number of reasons, but some of that exclusion is territorial. There are a number of challenges facing the would‐be designer of a philosophical space. The chapter presents three such challenges and offers some suggestions for how designers of philosophical spaces might address them. These include: the problem of rapport, the problem of urban social psychology, and the problem of the outsider.

Public philosophers have tended to think of their audience as the public, or perhaps a public or counterpublic. In my work on the Ask a Philosopher booth, however, it’s been helpful to think of our audience as made up of a handful of characters—types defined by the way in which they engage with the booth. I describe the characters I’ve encountered at the booth: orbiters, appreciaters, readers, monologuists, freethinkers, scholars, and peers. By reflecting on these characters and their needs, we can both imagine other forms of public philosophy that might better serve them, and better articulate the values that inhere in public philosophy projects like the Ask a Philosopher booth. I conclude with a brief case for the philosophy of public philosophy.