Category
Meaning, Art & the Good Life
Meaning, death, happiness, love and beauty.
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Aristotle says a young person can’t be happy. I’m twenty-two. Is he insulting me or does he have a point?
My uncle (the one who quotes Nyerere) has started quoting Aristotle as well, which is worse. At dinner he said Aristotle proved I am too young to be happy, and everybody laughed. I looked it up. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Book I,…
Started by Baraka Mwakyusa3 replies -
Your late mother’s diary: is reading it remembrance or trespass?
After a parent dies, someone has to clear the drawers. Sometimes one of them holds a diary. Suppose she never asked for it to be burned, and never said you could read it. It may explain things you always wondered about. It…
Started by The Editors2 replies -
Spinoza says the free man thinks of death least of all. Is that advice, or a description?
Ethics Part IV, Proposition 67, in Elwes's translation: "A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life." I keep reading it two ways. As advice: don't brood; turn your…
Started by Pieter van DijkhuizenAnswer first (no replies yet) -
Would games really be the only thing left worth doing in utopia?
Bernard Suits ends The Grasshopper with a strange and wonderful claim. Imagine a utopia where every instrumental need is met: machines do all the work, nobody needs to earn, build, heal or cook. What would people do? Suits's Grasshopper argues that they…
Started by Sasha KovalenkoAnswer first (no replies yet) -
Is it irrational to want to be remembered after you die?
Founders talk a lot about "legacy". I've caught myself thinking about it too: building something that lasts after me. But I won't be around to enjoy being remembered. Epicurus argued that death is nothing to us, because when we exist death isn't…
Started by Rohan Desai3 replies -
What’s the difference between Kant’s “mathematical” and “dynamical” sublime?
Last month I stood at the crater rim at Bromo before sunrise with the volcano smoking below and the sand sea all around, and I felt something I don't have a word for: scared, tiny, and very happy at the same time.…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies -
What exactly is Aristotle’s “function argument” in Nicomachean Ethics I.7?
This argument is easy to fumble when you explain it. My usual summary goes roughly like this: the good of anything that has a function lies in performing that function well human beings have a function it isn't nutrition and growth (plants…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
Epictetus says some things are up to us. What did that depend on for him?
Epictetus is still my favourite. The Handbook begins by saying some things are up to us and some are not: our opinions, desires and aversions are up to us; our body, property, reputation and office are not. In traffic this is very…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu5 replies -
Kant says taste is subjective but everyone ought to agree with it. How is that not a contradiction?
Yesterday a lecturer explained Kant's view of beauty and I nearly missed a stop. As far as I understood: when I call something beautiful, I am not reporting a property I can prove with concepts; it rests on my feeling of pleasure.…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
What makes a death a “good death”?
In end-of-life care people talk constantly about a "good death". Usually it means: pain controlled, the person not alone, their wishes known and respected, family prepared, no futile interventions at the end. That's a practical list, and I believe in it. But…
Started by Elin Hedqvist4 replies -
What does Kant mean when he says laughter is an expectation turning into nothing?
I am reading the Critique of the Power of Judgment slowly, with a pencil, and I have reached the remark after section 54, where Kant suddenly starts telling jokes. I did not expect this from him. His formula, in one standard English…
Started by Henrike Vogel6 replies -
How can a piece of music be sad when it has no feelings to have?
We have just finished the soundtrack for our new game. In the final level the player has to leave a companion character behind, and our composer wrote a slow piece for it. Playtesters keep telling us the music is "so sad". Some…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting4 replies -
How does rasa theory compare with Aristotle’s catharsis?
I studied rasa theory in my literature classes and Aristotle's Poetics in a single comparative class. My professor said they're answering the same question: why do we enjoy art that shows painful emotions? But I'm not sure. Can someone explain what rasa…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
Is the “flow state” players reach in a good game the same thing as wu wei, or a false friend?
I design puzzle games for a small studio in Tainan. Our whole craft is building challenges that match a player's skill closely enough that they lose track of time. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this "flow": deep absorption, loss of self-consciousness, action…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting6 replies -
Half my class says they are nihilists. What exactly are they claiming?
I teach Introduction to the Philosophy of the Human Person to sixteen-year-olds in Davao. This term, about half the class announced they were nihilists. When I asked what that meant, I got: "nothing matters", "there's no right or wrong", "we can't really…
Started by Rowena Abellana4 replies -
If a cheat wins the match, has he even played the game? Help me with Suits
I am working through a book my grandson gave me: Bernard Suits's The Grasshopper. I like it, but I keep losing the thread on one point. Suits says a game is an attempt to reach some goal using only the means the…
Started by Gerrit Venter6 replies -
Can a tidy ledger be beautiful? What is “everyday aesthetics” about?
There is a moment near the end of every tax return I prepare, when the columns reconcile and the ledger is clean and everything is where it should be, that gives me a feeling I can only call aesthetic. My husband laughs…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal4 replies -
Why did al-Jahiz insist on mixing jest with earnest in serious books?
My shop is off Mutanabbi Street and the most stolen book on my shelves, I'm sorry to say, is al-Jāḥiẓ's Kitāb al-Bukhalāʾ, the Book of Misers. People pick it up, start laughing, and somehow forget to pay. It is a collection of…
Started by Zainab Kadhim5 replies -
Can someone explain Danto’s Brillo boxes to a capoeira teacher?
At our community centre in Salvador, an exhibition opened last month. On one wall was a berimbau, hung up with a small label: the same instrument I play every week in the roda. People stood in front of it quietly, the way…
Started by Jorge Bonfim4 replies -
Should knowing that Caravaggio killed a man change how we see his paintings?
Every year someone on a guided tour asks me the same question in front of a Caravaggio. In 1606 he killed Ranuccio Tomassoni in a fight in Rome and fled, and spent his last years on the run under a death sentence.…
Started by Chiara Bellandi4 replies -
Clive Bell said representation is irrelevant in art. Can anyone still hold that?
I draw picture books and some manga in Osaka. A friend lent me Clive Bell's Art (1914), and I've been arguing with it all week. Bell says what all real works of visual art share is "significant form": lines and colours combined…
Started by Rin MatsudaAnswer first (no replies yet) -
If striving can never be satisfied, can any life be meaningful? A cellist reads Schopenhauer
I came to philosophy through Schopenhauer on music, and stayed out of a kind of dread. His picture is that we are expressions of a blind will that strives without end. Every satisfied desire gives way to a new one, and in…
Started by Moon Ha-eun5 replies -
Wine shows hand out medals. Can someone be wrong about what tastes good?
This question pays my bills. Twice a year I sit at a regional wine show with three other judges and we give medals. Every year someone at the cellar door tells me taste is subjective and my medals are just my opinion…
Started by Bec Doyle6 replies -
When someone dies, whose loss is grief about: theirs or ours?
My father died in February. In Addis Ababa people come to the house for days, the lekso, and sit with you, and much of what is said is about him: how young he was, what he would have seen. Thomas Nagel's account…
Started by Tsion Bekele5 replies -
If a life has a place rather than a meaning, what happens when the place is unjust?
I've been reading discussions of how different traditions answer "does life have meaning?", and one idea keeps coming up: most traditions say a life has a place rather than a meaning. Your meaning comes from your role in a family, a lineage,…
Started by Keisha Monroe6 replies -
What did McLuhan mean by ‘the medium is the message’? It sounds like a slogan
Colleagues at work quote ‘the medium is the message’ at least once a week, usually when they want to sound deep about social media. I finally looked it up: it's the title of the first chapter of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media (1964).…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies -
Do capabilities measure a good life better than happiness surveys do?
The donors I work with on accessible buildings want outcomes, and increasingly the outcome they ask for is "satisfaction": did people report being happier after the ramp was built? I find this maddening, and Amartya Sen's work explains why. Two of his…
Started by Dima Nasser5 replies -
Did Plato’s Republic X really attack “art”, or is that a translation problem?
Every year in my class we reach the moment where a student says, "Wait, Plato wanted to ban poets?" I usually say yes, and we have a lively argument about censorship. But I've just read an argument that this framing misleads. Plato…
Started by Keisha Monroe5 replies -
Epicureans and Cārvākas: two ancient materialisms, two ideas of pleasure?
I have spent years arguing that the Cārvāka or Lokāyata materialists deserved a fairer hearing than their opponents gave them. Reading Epicurus, I keep seeing the comparison, and I want to test it. Both schools hold that there is no soul that…
Started by Arvind Poojary4 replies -
Is there a film theory that starts from ma, rasa or the imaginal world rather than from Paris?
Almost every film theory I've read starts from France, Russia or America: Eisenstein, Bazin, Cavell, Carroll. They're wonderful, but when I watch Ozu, I feel the most important things happen in what those theories treat as gaps. In Japanese aesthetics there's ma,…
Started by Rin Matsuda6 replies