Activity last six months
Debates 3
Questions 6
How does Ibn Sina’s proof of the Necessary Existent avoid the infinite regress problem?
Is the fine-tuning of physical constants evidence for design?
What is the principle of double effect, and when does it apply in medicine?
Does general anaesthesia remove experience, or only our memory of it?
Open question5 replies
Does it matter at the bedside whether the self is a soul, ātman or a process?
Who was al-Ruhawi, and what does his Adab al-Tabib actually say about the physician?
Discussions 5
Patients who pray: faith, placebo, and respect at the bedside
The kalam cosmological argument: what the mutakallimun actually argued
Affirming the consequent on a hospital ward
“Why did this happen to me?” What do we owe someone who asks?
Ibn Sina begins the Canon by defining medicine. What does that definition assume about health?
Recent replies
- Compassion fatigue: does the duty to care have limits?
Doctors and nurses face the same thing. I've come to think the limit is principled: if you burn out, you stop caring for anyone. So caring for yourself isn't a break from the duty to care, i…
- How does Ibn Sina’s proof of the Necessary Existent avoid the infinite regress problem?
Thank you, Layla! So the argument is about the whole collection, not the length of the chain. That's far more elegant than I'd understood.
- Teaching the Euthyphro to sixteen-year-olds: what works and what doesn’t?
Show them that their own traditions argued about it. In Islamic theology this was a live debate for centuries. Broadly, the Ash'arites held that good and bad are known through revelation, while t…
- Is evolution compatible with objective morality?
Religious traditions have an answer: God could have created the evolutionary process so that it yields a moral sense that tracks moral truth. That's not science, but it's a coherent answer t…
- Markets are morally neutral tools
Organs are the case I have followed most closely. Iran has had a regulated, compensated kidney donation system since 1988, and it has reduced the waiting list. But studies of donors show most are poor…