Category
Reason & experience
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Does an engineer’s training help or hurt in metaphysics?
When I read metaphysics, I notice an engineer's habits. I want to know the system boundary, the inputs and outputs, the failure modes. Sometimes this helps me see what an argument actually claims. Sometimes I think it makes me impatient with questions…
Started by Arjun Iyer4 replies -
How can I know nothing is red and green all over, when I’ve never checked every red thing?
A friend gave me this puzzle and I can't stop thinking about it. A surface cannot be completely red and completely green at the same time, in the same place. I am sure of this. But I have not checked every red…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies -
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 categories are forms of our understanding, so things as they…
Started by Henrike Vogel5 replies -
Wang Yangming stared at bamboo for seven days and fell ill. Was he refuting empiricism?
I teach ethics at a secondary school in Seoul, and the story my students remember best from the whole Neo-Confucian unit is the bamboo. As a young man, Wang Yangming tried to put Zhu Xi's teaching into practice. Zhu Xi said that…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu5 replies -
If almost nothing the Cārvākas wrote survives, how do we know what they thought?
I've been reading about the Cārvāka or Lokāyata school, the Indian materialists, and every introduction says something like "almost no Cārvāka text survives; the school is reconstructed from the summaries its opponents wrote." As someone who studies texts, this worries me. If…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
The Cartesian circle: can clear and distinct perception vouch for itself?
Every year I read Descartes' Meditations with students who arrive expecting an enemy of faith and leave rather fond of him. And every year, around the Third Meditation, a sharp student raises the objection that Antoine Arnauld put to Descartes in 1641.…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies -
Sellars was right that raw experience can cause a belief but never justify one
The more I read about visual perception, the more I think Wilfrid Sellars got something exactly right in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (1956). The foundationalist wants a floor: beliefs justified without leaning on other beliefs. The obvious candidate is experience…
Started by Priya Raghavan5 replies -
Locke was right that the mind starts without ideas, and the argument from the newborn’s hunger fails
I'm biased towards Locke, I admit. But I came across an argument for innate knowledge from the Nyāya tradition that I had never seen, and I want to test my bias against it. Locke's case in Book I of the Essay is…
Started by Arvind Poojary6 replies -
The self-defeat charge against the Cārvākas attacks a position they probably did not hold
I have a soft spot for the Cārvākas, India's materialists, who accepted perception as the only independent means of knowledge (pramāṇa) and rejected rebirth, the soul and the authority of scripture. Every rival school gave them the same knock-down reply: you reject…
Started by Arvind Poojary6 replies -
Devadatta is fat but never eats by day: is Mīmāṃsā “postulation” just inference to the best explanation?
When I read about sources of knowledge comparatively, I like to point out that the European and Indian debates ask different questions. The European one asks which source does the real work, senses or reason. The Indian one asks how many irreducible…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
Reading group: Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, one section a week for six weeks
"Two Dogmas of Empiricism" first appeared in The Philosophical Review in 1951 and was reprinted, revised, in From a Logical Point of View (1953). It is perhaps the most cited paper in twentieth-century analytic philosophy, and many people who cite it have…
Started by Oskar Nyberg5 replies -
Reading group: Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, over four weeks
"Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" is the essay where the phrase "the myth of the given" comes from. It is famous, hard and shorter than its reputation. I would like to read it slowly with whoever is willing. Text. The Harvard…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies