Category
Knowledge & Truth
What can we know, and how? Belief, doubt, evidence and truth.
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The Cost of Being Understood: Why We Cannot Spend Our Whole Life Explaining Ourselves
To be understood is a human desire—not a human entitlementHuman beings do not merely want to speak. We want what we say to arrive intact in another mind. We want our reasons…
Started by COT-Admin0 replies3 views -
Arendt’s “Truth and Politics”, read in a newsroom
In 1967 Arendt published "Truth and Politics" in The New Yorker. She distinguishes rational truth (mathematics, philosophy) from factual truth (what happened). Factual truth is the more fragile, because it depends on…
Started by Sana Mir3 replies0 views -
Zhuangzi’s happy fish: can we know what others feel?
In chapter 17 of the Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi and his friend the logician Huizi are strolling on a bridge over the river Hao. Zhuangzi remarks that the minnows darting about are happy. Huizi…
Started by Claire Dubois3 replies0 views -
Dream arguments East and West: Descartes, Zhuangzi and the Yoga Vasistha
Three treatments of the same worry. Descartes, Meditations I (1641): there are no sure signs to distinguish waking from dreaming, so the senses can't give certain knowledge. He uses it as a…
Started by Arjun Iyer3 replies0 views -
Al-Ghazali’s Deliverance from Error as a story about information overload
I've been reading al-Ghazali's Deliverance from Error (al-Munqidh min al-Dalal), written late in his life. He describes his search for certain knowledge among four groups: the theologians, the Batinis (who relied on…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman4 replies0 views -
Is the Allegory of the Cave a theory of education first and a metaphysics second?
Every year my students read the cave in Republic VII as a story about two worlds: shadows down here, Forms up there. That's not wrong, but I've come to think it isn't…
Started by Giulia Ferrante4 replies0 views -
Jayarāśi and the Cārvāka skeptics: India’s most radical doubters
The Cārvāka or Lokāyata school is usually summarised as Indian materialism: only perception is a valid means of knowledge, there's no afterlife, enjoy life while it lasts. Most of what we know…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies0 views