Category
Meaning, Art & the Good Life
Meaning, death, happiness, love and beauty.
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What did al-Ghazālī mean by beauty as a thing’s proper perfection?
I make hand-drawn batik in Yogyakarta, in a workshop my mother started. At a study circle last month, the teacher said that for al-Ghazālī everything has its own beauty, which lies in the perfection proper to it: a horse is beautiful as…
Started by Ratna Wulandari4 replies -
Preferred indifferents: a real distinction, or having your health and despising it too?
I volunteer on a palliative-care unit and my own sympathies are Epicurean, so I come to this a little sceptical. The Stoics say virtue is the only good. Health, wealth, reputation, even life itself, are "indifferent": neither good nor bad. But then,…
Started by Nadia Haddad4 replies -
What did Tolstoy mean when he called art an ‘infection’?
Last week one of the men in my prison class read out a verse he'd written in his cell and asked: "Is this art, or only feelings?" Someone suggested I look at Tolstoy, who apparently said that art is "infection" with the…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma5 replies -
Camus and Heidegger both rejected the label. So who actually counts as an existentialist?
I read Camus on breaks at the port, and I was surprised to learn he refused to be called an existentialist. Then I found out Heidegger rejected it too, in his ‘Letter on Humanism’, which seems to be partly an answer to…
Started by Hugo Marchetti5 replies -
Is the Sanskrit sahṛdaya the same ideal critic as Hume’s “true judge”?
In my poetics classes the ideal reader is the sahṛdaya, literally "one with heart", or one whose heart is in tune with the poet's. Abhinavagupta, commenting on Ānandavardhana, describes such readers as people whose minds have been made clear, like a polished…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
What is music for? Xunzi, Plato and my parish choir
I play the organ at a parish church in Kraków and teach music theory at a secondary school. Every Sunday I see music do something to a congregation that a sermon can't, and I want to know what philosophers have thought that…
Started by Agnieszka Malinowska5 replies -
Why does arguing about a song feel different from arguing about coriander?
I'm new to aesthetics, so bear with me. Last weekend a friend called a song I love "objectively bad", and I was genuinely hurt, more than I would be if she said she hated my cooking. When people disagree about coriander, nobody…
Started by Elif Yıldız5 replies -
Why does any list of qualities feel like the wrong answer to “why do you love me?”
I write love poems, and I'm new to reading philosophy about love, so forgive me if this is obvious. My partner asked me last month, half joking, "why do you love me?" I started to answer: you are kind, you are funny,…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
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 Ryu6 replies -
Is Susan Wolf’s account of meaning just “do what you love” with extra steps?
Every founder book I read on the way down said the same thing: find your passion and meaning will follow. I believed it. I was passionate. It didn't. Someone here recommended Susan Wolf, and the phrase I keep seeing is that meaning…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies -
Does it matter at the bedside whether the self is a soul, ātman or a process?
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, a contested thing in modern European thought. The…
Started by Omar Ragab6 replies -
My lecturer says the poet’s own explanation doesn’t count. Where does that idea come from?
In a seminar last week we were reading a Malayalam poem by a living poet, and I brought in an interview where she explains what one of the images means. My lecturer listened politely and then said that what the poet says…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
What are the three kinds of theory of well-being that Parfit distinguished?
For six years of running a company I thought I was optimising for happiness, mine and the team's. Now I'm not sure what I was optimising for. A friend pointed me to an appendix in Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984) called…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies -
Is a brilliantly made propaganda film a great film, or only a skilful one?
At a workshop for journalists on propaganda, we watched long stretches of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935), her film of the 1934 Nazi party rally at Nuremberg. Afterwards the room split badly. Some said: it is a great film made…
Started by Sana Rizvi5 replies -
How can death be bad for someone who no longer exists to be harmed?
We did Epicurus in my ancient philosophy module and I can't get past the argument, even though I don't believe the conclusion. As I understand it: harm requires a subject. While I'm alive, death isn't here. When death is here, I'm not.…
Started by Aoife Kilbride5 replies -
Is “aesthetic experience” one kind of experience, or a label for several unlike things?
Twice last month I lost track of time completely. Once was a late-night proof that came together with a kind of click, everything suddenly fitting. The other was a recording of the Goldberg Variations on a long drive. Both felt, from the…
Started by Derek Hollis4 replies