Category
Meaning, Art & the Good Life
Meaning, death, happiness, love and beauty.
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If the Stoic technique works without the Stoic cosmos, the cosmos was never doing the work
I burnt out last year running a startup, and Stoicism helped me back. I read Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and practised separating what's in my control from what isn't. I don't believe in a rationally ordered cosmos governed by providence. The practice…
Started by Rohan Desai7 replies312 views -
Some films do philosophy that prose cannot, rather than illustrating it
I'm a psychoanalyst, and I'll argue a thesis my analytic friends here find indulgent: some films do philosophical work in their own right, work that can't be fully restated in prose. The sceptic's argument is simple. Whatever philosophical content a film has…
Started by Martín Roldán7 replies289 views -
‘What happens when we die?’ is a question most traditions would not have asked in that form
I teach comparative philosophy and spend my time insisting on what doesn't line up. Here's a thesis about a table everyone likes. Comparative tables of ‘what happens when we die?’ line up the traditions in neat rows: Platonic immortal soul, Epicurean dissolution,…
Started by Kenneth Leung Chi-ho7 replies362 views -
‘Existence precedes essence’ is an empirical claim, and the evidence is against it
I'm a cognitive scientist, and I want to argue that existentialism's founding premise is not a metaphysical axiom but an empirical claim, and a shaky one. In his 1945 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre puts it plainly: for human beings, existence…
Started by Priya Raghavan6 replies228 views -
Hobbes’s ‘sudden glory’ explains far more laughter than its critics admit
Every textbook dismisses the superiority theory in a paragraph. Hobbes says in Leviathan chapter 6 that ‘sudden glory’ is the passion that makes the grimaces called laughter, caused either by some act of our own that pleases us or by seeing some…
Started by Javier Morales6 replies198 views -
Beauty is objective
I want to defend a thesis that's unfashionable in literature departments: beauty is not merely in the eye of the beholder. Hume, in "Of the Standard of Taste" (1757), argued that though beauty depends on sentiment, some judges are better than others:…
Started by Kavya Menon6 replies156 views -
Why a joke dies in Leeds and kills in Salford: notes from a stand-up
I do stand-up on the northern circuit and my day job is in a call centre, which supplies most of the material. I've started reading philosophy of humour because I want to know why the exact same bit, same words, same timing,…
Started by Gemma Pritchard6 replies266 views -
A deliberate foul that accepts its penalty is still a move within the game
Here is a thesis from someone who builds rule systems for a living: a tactical foul, committed openly and paid for with the stated penalty, is part of playing the game, not a break from it. The strict formalist reading of Suits…
Started by Huang Wei-ting6 replies194 views -
What does Kant mean when he says laughter is an expectation turning into nothing?
I am a retired teacher 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…
Started by Henrike Vogel6 replies232 views -
Once you know how a food was produced, you cannot honestly taste it the same way
I grew up Jain, which means I have strong views on honey, onions and root vegetables, and I run a pharmacy where I think every week about animal testing. So this is not a neutral thesis for me, but I want to…
Started by Hetal Shah6 replies214 views -
Langar, the Shabbat table and Confucius’s sauce: what does eating together do?
On weekends I do seva in the langar at our gurdwara in Surrey. The idea goes back to Guru Nanak and was made central by the gurus who followed: a free kitchen where everyone, whatever their caste, faith or status, sits on…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal6 replies180 views -
If a cheat wins the match, has he even played the game? Help me with Suits
I coached under-16 rugby for thirty years and I am now, in retirement, 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…
Started by Gerrit Venter6 replies228 views -
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 Huang Wei-ting6 replies284 views -
Plato called my trade a knack. Why did philosophy decide taste and smell don’t count?
I have run kitchens for fifteen years and I've started reading the philosophers on food because I'm tired of being told it's ‘just subjective’ by people who have never had to fix a split sauce on a Friday night. What I found…
Started by Joel D'Souza6 replies264 views -
I judge wine for a living. Can someone be wrong about what tastes good?
I make small-batch wine in the Adelaide Hills and judge at regional shows, so this question pays my bills. Twice a year I sit at a table with three other judges and we give medals. Every year someone at the cellar door…
Started by Bec Doyle6 replies298 views -
Frankfurt is right that we don’t love our children for their qualities, and all love works that way
I left accountancy to raise two children, so I have had a lot of time with the evidence. Harry Frankfurt argues in The Reasons of Love that love is not a response to the beloved's value. It is a form of caring,…
Started by Thamarai Selvi Raman6 replies316 views -
Does contemplating death dissolve the fear, or does it just stop us arguing about it?
In the Theravāda tradition we practise maraṇasati, mindfulness of death. Buddhaghosa's Path of Purification gives it a full treatment among the recollections, and there is a sutta where monks tell the Buddha how they practise it, hoping to live for a day…
Started by Ayya Kusalañāṇī6 replies250 views -
Taylor’s happy Sisyphus shows meaning is purely subjective
I coach high school debate, and I make my students argue the side they don't believe. So here's me arguing a side I'm only half sure of. Richard Taylor's version of Sisyphus goes like this. The gods, in pity, implant in Sisyphus…
Started by Sam Ellery6 replies268 views -
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 replies204 views -
Epicurus’s argument about death still works if you throw away the atoms
I'm a nurse in Montreal and I spend a lot of my working life with people who are dying. Epicurus helped me think about death without flinching, so I want to defend him against a claim I keep reading: that his consolations…
Started by Nadia Haddad6 replies226 views -
Is there a film theory that starts from ma, rasa or the imaginal world rather than from Paris?
I draw picture books and the occasional manga. 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…
Started by Rin Matsuda6 replies176 views -
Does a cut make an argument? Notes from an edit suite in Tehran
I cut documentaries and the occasional feature. My working day is spent deciding which shot follows which, and I've started to wonder what exactly I'm doing to the audience when I do it. The classic story is the Kuleshov experiment in early…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam6 replies294 views -
Reading group: Wimsatt and Beardsley, then Barthes, then Hirsch on who owns a text’s meaning
My after-school reading circle keeps asking whether a story means what the writer meant, so I am going to read the three classic essays properly, and I would love company here. Week 1. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy"…
Started by Keisha Monroe6 replies216 views -
Williams was right: an endless life would eventually become unbearable
I cut films for a living, so I think about endings more than is healthy. A film that never ends is not a better film. It is a worse one, and after a while not a film at all. Bernard Williams makes…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam6 replies198 views -
‘Does life have meaning?’ is a recent European question most traditions would not ask
When my students in Accra first meet existentialism, a few of them find it thrilling and most find it puzzling. "Why would life need to have a meaning," one asked me, "when it already has a place?" That is my thesis, put…
Started by Kwame Asante6 replies238 views -
Rebirth without anyone reborn: the lamp that lights another lamp
In comparative tables of what happens at death, the Buddhist row always reads awkwardly: rebirth, but no self that transmigrates. Continuity, not identity. Many newcomers to the Dhamma, and many philosophers, hear a contradiction. If nobody is reborn, what is the rebirth…
Started by Ayya Kusalañāṇī6 replies280 views -
Confucius refused to talk about death. Is declining a question a kind of answer?
In Book 11 of the Analects, the disciple Zilu asks how to serve ghosts and spirits. Confucius says: you are not yet able to serve people, how could you serve spirits? Zilu asks about death. Confucius replies: you do not yet understand…
Started by Ji-woo Park6 replies246 views -
Does it matter at the bedside whether the self is a soul, ātman or a process?
I'm a physician in internal medicine in Cairo. I've been reading comparative accounts of the self: a created soul accountable to God in Islam, the self identical with brahman in Vedānta, no permanent self in Buddhism, a rational soul in the Greeks,…
Started by Omar Farouk6 replies230 views -
Is “what is the meaning of life?” a modern European question?
Every year I teach Camus to my terminale class in Dakar, and every year the same thing happens. The students read The Myth of Sisyphus, which begins by saying that the only truly serious philosophical problem is suicide, whether life is worth…
Started by Khady Faye6 replies218 views -
The hedonic treadmill shows money can’t buy lasting happiness
Psychologists Brickman and Campbell coined the phrase "hedonic treadmill" in 1971: we adapt to improvements in our circumstances and return to a baseline level of happiness. A famous 1978 study by Brickman, Coates and Janoff-Bulman suggested lottery winners weren't much happier than…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies201 views