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
Stoicism helped me back from a bad year. 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 worked anyway. I keep reading…
Started by Rohan Desai7 replies -
One sustained note on the organ, and the case against beauty as proportion
This month I finally read Plotinus's treatise "On Beauty", the sixth of the first Ennead, and one argument has been sitting with me through every Mass. The old view, which my own tradition loved (Augustine's De Musica is full of it), says…
Started by Agnieszka Malinowska5 replies -
Playing at a funeral: han, Schopenhauer, and why sad music helps the grieving
Last month I played the sarabande from Bach's fifth cello suite at the funeral of a student's grandmother. I have played it many times, but never for people in the first days of grief. Afterwards the family thanked me in a way…
Started by Moon Ha-eun4 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 -
Williams was right: an endless life would eventually become unbearable
Editors 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 an argument like this about immortality, in…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam6 replies -
Bullough’s fog at sea, seen from an edit suite in Tehran
Edward Bullough's 1912 essay on "psychical distance" begins with a fog at sea. For the passengers it is mostly misery and anxiety: delays, danger, the foghorn. But if you can set the practical side aside, the fog becomes strange and beautiful: the…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam4 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 -
Crackle lines in batik: a flaw my mother taught me to keep
In hand-drawn batik, after the wax is applied and the cloth goes into the dye, the wax sometimes cracks. Dye seeps into the cracks and leaves fine veined lines across the pattern. Some makers try to avoid it. My mother taught me…
Started by Ratna Wulandari4 replies -
A translator cannot afford to be an anti-intentionalist
I want to defend a thesis that my academic friends find naive: translation makes anti-intentionalism impossible in practice, whatever its merits in theory. Here is why. Every page forces choices the source language does not force. German Sie or du maps onto…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
Some films do philosophy that prose cannot, rather than illustrating it
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 can be put into…
Started by Martín Iriarte7 replies -
Reading group: Ibn Hazm’s The Ring of the Dove, four weeks through al-Andalus
Córdoba is the city where Ibn Hazm was born in 994 and which he watched being torn apart in the civil wars of his youth. Visitors know Ibn Rushd and Maimonides; almost nobody knows that the same city produced one of the…
Started by Rafael Lucena Prieto5 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 -
Reading group: Weitz, Danto and Dickie on whether art can be defined
My students keep asking "but who decides what counts as art?", and I'd like to read the classic papers properly before I try to answer. Join me. Plan (three weeks): Week 1: Morris Weitz, "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics" (1956), with…
Started by Keisha Monroe4 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 -
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 Nirmala Jayasekara6 replies -
Reading group: Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful, chapter by chapter
Eduard Hanslick's Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854) is short, polemical and still the book every philosopher of music has to answer. I teach music theory and play the organ, and I have argued with it for twenty years without reading it straight through with…
Started by Agnieszka Malinowska5 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 -
Reading group: the Nāṭyaśāstra’s chapters on rasa and bhāva
Everyone in my literature classes mentions rasa, almost nobody has read the chapters where the theory is actually set out. I'd like to read them with company, and with people who know more Sanskrit than I do. Translation: Manomohan Ghosh's English translation…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
‘What happens when we die?’ is a question most traditions would not have asked in that form
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, Vedantic rebirth, Buddhist rebirth without self, Confucian deferral, Islamic resurrection. It looks like many…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho7 replies -
When we refuse to imagine that cruelty is admirable, the failure is the work’s, not ours
Hume noticed something odd near the end of his essay on taste. We forgive old poets for their speculative errors: the wrong science, the gods we no longer believe in. We read past them easily. But when a poet asks us to…
Started by Alistair Gow5 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 “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 Sène6 replies -
Ji Kang argued that music holds neither sorrow nor joy, sixteen centuries before Hanslick
My taiji group practises to recordings of the guqin, and one morning someone asked whether the music was sad. I said what my father would have said: sound has no sorrow or joy. It turns out that is not just my father's…
Started by Liu Mingqiao4 replies -
Reading group: Plotinus, “On Beauty” (Ennead I.6), the treatise he is said to have written first
I work in a library in Alexandria, and Plotinus studied philosophy here with Ammonius Saccas before he moved to Rome. That is reason enough for me to propose reading him together. "On Beauty" is the obvious place to start. It is short,…
Started by Mona Fathy5 replies -
Reading group: Longinus, On the Sublime, in four sittings
Before Burke and Kant there was a short Greek treatise, probably from the first century CE, by an author we do not really know. The manuscript names "Dionysius or Longinus", and scholars have argued about who wrote it and when ever since.…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
Reading group: Miskawayh, The Refinement of Character, on happiness
I keep a secondhand bookshop off Mutanabbi Street, and the book I most often press on young customers who say they want philosophy is Miskawayh's Tahdhīb al-akhlāq, The Refinement of Character. Miskawayh (c. 932–1030) worked as a librarian and treasurer in the…
Started by Zainab Kadhim5 replies -
Reading group: al-Ghazālī on the remembrance of death, the last book of the Revival
The book I return to most often when I visit the sick is the fortieth and final book of al-Ghazālī's Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, the Revival of the Religious Sciences: Kitāb dhikr al-mawt wa-mā baʿdahu, the book of the remembrance of death and…
Started by Bilal Rashid5 replies