Coordinates of Thought: topics
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If perception is free of concepts, as Dignāga says, how do I ever see a cup as a cup?
I've been reading an introduction to Buddhist epistemology on the train, and I'm stuck on Dignāga's definition of perception (pratyakṣa) as "free from conceptual construction". As I understand it, the object of perception is the bare particular, and anything general, like "cup",…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen1 reply -
Reading group: Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, three short chapters a week
Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) is short, about seventy pages, in twelve chapters. I have listened to people talk about it in lectures for years and never read it properly. So I propose four weeks, three chapters a week, starting…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu1 reply -
My students used the surprise test paradox against me. Where exactly does their argument fail?
On Friday I told my class XI section that there would be a surprise test some day next week, Monday to Friday, and that they would not know the evening before which day it was. By the end of the period one…
Started by Vikram Sethi3 replies -
Health cannot be defined without values, and Boorse’s statistical theory shows it by trying
Christopher Boorse's biostatistical theory is the most serious attempt to define health without any value judgements. Roughly: health is the absence of disease, and a disease is an internal state that reduces some function below what is statistically typical for your reference…
Started by Dima Nasser3 replies -
The rectification of names, from a translator’s desk: when words and things drift apart
In Analects 13.3 a disciple asks Confucius what he would do first if he were given charge of government. "Rectify names," he says. The disciple thinks this is impractical, and Confucius explains, in a famous chain: if names are not correct, speech…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo1 reply -
Autumn and mono no aware: an emotion, or a trained way of seeing?
The maples in the hills north of Osaka are only starting to turn, and I'm drawing autumn pages for a children's book. My editor wants "the feeling of autumn", and I keep reaching for mono no aware, which is usually translated as…
Started by Rin Matsuda2 replies -
What are the “objectives of the law” (maqāṣid) that people keep mentioning, and why do they matter?
In a discussion at our mosque youth group, one speaker kept saying that a ruling has to be understood "through the maqāṣid", the objectives or purposes of the sharia. Another person said this is exactly how people end up ignoring the texts.…
Started by Fajar Nugroho3 replies -
My cousin’s biopsy result already exists. Does it make sense to pray that it is benign?
My cousin had a biopsy on Friday. The results come on Wednesday. Whatever is in that tissue is already there; the lab will only tell us. Yet the whole family is praying that it will be benign, and so am I. A…
Started by Aoife Kilbride1 reply -
How would you tell a wise elder from a well-stocked memory? Odera Oruka’s problem, revisited
Odera Oruka went out to rural Kenya to talk with elders and recorded their answers to questions about God, justice, death and the good life. He drew a line between folk sages, who voice the received wisdom of their community well, and…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga3 replies -
A documentary can stage a scene and still be telling the truth
Every documentary editor eventually faces the question. A woman tells us about the night her brother left home. We have her voice. Do we film her walking the street again at night, knowing she is walking it for us? My thesis: staging,…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam4 replies -
Thanksgiving Monday: can gratitude be owed, or does owing it spoil it?
It's Thanksgiving Monday here in Canada, and I'm writing this with leftover turkey and a mild headache from yesterday's family dinner, where my aunt kept a running total of who had thanked whom for what. My cousin hadn't thanked her for a…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal3 replies -
Midterm on Thursday: if a Pyrrhonist suspends all judgement, how does she get out of bed?
I'm taking a philosophy elective alongside my psychology courses, and Thursday's midterm covers Hellenistic philosophy. One question on the past papers keeps coming up: "Can the Pyrrhonian skeptic live their skepticism?" My notes say Pyrrhonists suspend judgement about everything, and that their…
Started by Elif Yıldız3 replies -
In Aymara the past lies in front of us. Is that only a way of speaking, or a truer idea of time?
In Aymara, the word nayra means eye, and front, and also the past. The past is ahead of you, because you can see it. What is coming is qhipa, behind, at your back, because nobody can see it. My grandmother pointed forward…
Started by Lucía Mamani3 replies -
Freire’s “banking” model, seen from inside a capoeira roda
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire describes "banking" education: the teacher deposits knowledge, the students receive, file and store it. Against it he sets problem-posing education, where teacher and students investigate together, and the teacher is also taught. In capoeira Angola…
Started by Jorge Bonfim4 replies -
Aristotle was wrong to think that manual work unfits a person for citizenship
In Book III of the Politics Aristotle asks whether manual workers, the banausoi, should be citizens, and answers that in the best city they would not be. In Book VIII he says such work leaves the body and mind unfit for the…
Started by Hugo Marchetti4 replies -
Every cell in my body is replaced every seven years, so am I even the same person?
At Sunday lunch my uncle reminded me that I borrowed 20,000 shillings from him when I was fifteen. I said, as a joke, that every cell in my body has been replaced since then, so the boy who borrowed it is gone…
Started by Baraka Mwakyusa4 replies -
The lazy argument fails against tawakkul just as it failed against the Stoics
Every so often someone at work tells me not to bother with a contingency plan because "what is written is written". I want to argue that this is a philosophical mistake, and an old one. Cicero's On Fate reports what the ancients…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam5 replies -
Outcomes rightly change how much we blame someone, even when luck decided them
Two drivers leave the same wedding equally drunk and drive equally badly. One gets home. The other hits a child who ran into the road. In every court I have covered, the second driver faces something far heavier than the first, and…
Started by Sana Rizvi5 replies -
Is a promise to someone who has died still binding if no one living would know?
Before she died, my husband's grandmother made me promise that the recipe for our bakery's bread would stay in the family. It is not a secret of state. It is flour, water, salt, a little of something, and the way you fold…
Started by Dilnoza Karimova4 replies -
What does dependent origination actually claim? My daughter asked and I had no answer
My daughter is fourteen. Last week, stuck in traffic near Borella, she asked me what paṭicca samuppāda means. I have heard the word at the temple my whole life. I said "it means everything is connected", and she said that sounds like…
Started by Nuwan Perera4 replies -
Reading group: Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle, one set of dwelling places a week
I would like to read Teresa of Ávila's Interior Castle (1577) together over four weeks, starting Monday 19 October. It is short, vivid and much more argumentative than its reputation. Teresa wrote it for the nuns of her order, at the request…
Started by Agnieszka Malinowska4 replies -
Zeno’s arrow and what my students made of it
Zeno's arrow came up in class today. At any instant, the arrow occupies a space exactly its own size, so at that instant it is at rest. Time is made of instants. So the arrow is always at rest and never moves.…
Started by Giulia Ferrante1 reply -
Is human dignity a religious idea that secular law borrowed?
Article 1 of the German Basic Law (1949) declares human dignity inviolable. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) begins by recognising the inherent dignity of all members of the human family. Many constitutions since then have done the same. Kant gave…
Started by Hamza Qureshi1 reply -
Reading group: Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974)
A short classic, first published in The Philosophical Review. Nagel argues that an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism. Bats perceive by echolocation, a sense so different from ours…
Started by Priya Raghavan1 reply -
Are possible worlds real, or just a bookkeeping device?
David Lewis, in On the Plurality of Worlds (1986), argued that other possible worlds are just as real as ours. "Actual" is indexical, like "here". Our world is actual only in the sense that we are in it. Almost nobody follows him…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak1 reply -
Reading group: Hobbes, Leviathan, chapters 13–17
These five chapters of Leviathan (1651) contain the core of Hobbes's political argument. Ch. 13: the natural condition of mankind. Rough equality, competition, distrust and glory lead to a war of every man against every man, in which life is famously solitary,…
Started by Javier Ferrandis1 reply -
What’s the difference between deduction, induction and abduction?
My students know "deduction" and "induction" from school, though they often mix them up. I recently read that Charles Sanders Peirce added a third type of reasoning, abduction. Could someone explain all three clearly, with examples, and why Peirce thought abduction mattered…
Started by Vikram Sethi1 reply -
Compassion fatigue: does the duty to care have limits?
After a hard month at work I've been thinking about this. People in care work talk about "compassion fatigue": after enough exposure to suffering, you start to feel less. You become efficient and a little cold, and you hate yourself for it.…
Started by Elin Hedqvist1 reply -
Privacy as a virtue, not just a right
We usually talk about privacy as a right: something others shouldn't violate. But in my work I see people giving away their data voluntarily all the time, for convenience or a discount. The right isn't violated; it's waived, again and again. I've…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman1 reply -
What’s the difference between a valid argument and a sound one?
In a debate thread here someone said an argument was "valid but not sound" and I realised, being completely new to logic, that I didn't understand the difference. To me both words just sounded like "good". Could someone explain simply, with examples…
Started by Kavya Menon3 replies