Category
Knowledge & Truth
What can we know, and how? Belief, doubt, evidence and truth.
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Testimony is an independent source of knowledge, not reducible to perception or inference
The Nyāya school counts testimony (śabda) as a distinct means of valid knowledge (pramāṇa), alongside perception, inference and comparison. The Vaiśeṣikas and Buddhist epistemologists like Dignāga disagreed, reducing testimony to a form…
Started by Meera Kulkarni6 replies0 views -
Kant was wrong: we can know things as they are in themselves
I am posting this thesis partly to test my own reading of the first Critique. Kant holds that we know only appearances. Space and time are forms of our intuition, and the…
Started by Henrike Vogel5 replies0 views -
Does an engineer’s training help or hurt in metaphysics?
I spent thirty-five years as an electrical engineer. When I read metaphysics, I notice my habits. I want to know the system boundary, the inputs and outputs, the failure modes. Sometimes this…
Started by Arjun Iyer4 replies0 views -
Reading group: The Muqaddimah, the introduction on historians’ errors
Before the Muqaddimah proper begins, Ibn Khaldun explains why historians get things wrong. His list includes partisanship for opinions and schools, overconfidence in one's sources, failure to understand what was intended, mistaken…
Started by Youssef Benali4 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 -
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 -
What are the pramāṇas, and how do the schools disagree about them?
I grew up hearing words like "pramāṇa" in family discussions without really knowing what they meant. I've started reading Indian philosophy properly and keep running into lists of pramāṇas that differ between…
Started by Rohan Desai3 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 -
Is the liar paradox a problem about language or about truth itself?
Take the sentence: this sentence is false. If true, it's false; if false, it's true. Tarski's response (1933) was that a language can't consistently contain its own truth predicate, so we need…
Started by Tomasz Wójcik3 replies0 views -
Is “objectivity” in journalism a coherent ideal?
I was trained to be "objective": report the facts, present both sides, keep my opinions out. In practice, every choice is a judgment: what's a story, whose voice to include, which word…
Started by Sana Mir3 replies0 views -
Can you be religious and a philosophical skeptic at the same time?
This semester I took a module on scepticism, Pyrrhonism, Descartes' demon and so on, and I found some of the arguments hard to answer. Now I'm wondering whether serious scepticism is compatible…
Started by Aoife Brennan2 replies0 views -
Did Indian epistemologists anticipate the Gettier problem?
In 1963 Edmund Gettier's three-page paper showed that justified true belief isn't sufficient for knowledge. You can have a justified belief that's true by luck. Indian philosophers seem to have discussed cases…
Started by Meera Kulkarni2 replies0 views -
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 replies2 views