Over at “gfp”:http://gfp.typepad.com/the_garden_of_forking_pat/2005/03/pvis_comments.html there is a discussion about whether most philosophers are libertarians or compatibalists about free will. When reading this I thought it would be fun to do a survey of my readership to find out their views on a range of topics. But I should first find out what questions to ask. I’ve started making a short list below the fold.

It’s important that the questions we ask be multiple choice, which obviously leaves out a lot of topics in philosophy. But here are some things I’d like to know where people stand on.

Free will – Libertarian or Compatibalist
Time – Eternalist or Presentist
Persistance – Perdurance or Endurance
Knowledge – Compatibalist or Anti-Compatibalist
Epistemic Justification – Internalist or Externalist
Ethics – Consequentialist, Kantian, Virtue Ethics or Other
Mind – Dualist or Physicalist

Further suggestions (or modifications to these ones) welcome. (Including suggestions like this is a really dumb idea and you should go back to doing more important things like worrying about spring training.)

Ideally I’d have 10 questions on broad important areas of philosophy where we can make fairly clear distinctions between some of the families of views people hold. (In every case the views in question will be families of views – there are plenty of ways to be a libertarian and plenty of ways to be a compatibalist, for example.) But I think that the need to ask simple questions in order to easily aggregate the answers means it will be hard to ask much about mental content, or causation, or political philosophy, or many other areas of philosophy.