Category
Metaphysics
What exists, and what is it to be? Time, causes, freedom and necessity.
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Karma as moral causation: does the theory hold together?
The doctrine of karma says that actions have consequences for the agent that go beyond their visible effects, ripening in this life or future lives. It is shared, in different forms, by Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions. As an engineer I want…
Started by Arjun Iyer1 reply -
Advaita says the Self is not the doer. Is that an answer to the free will problem, or a way of leaving it?
I want to put my own tradition's answer on the free will question to the test, because I suspect it is either very deep or a polite evasion, and I can't decide which. The karmic traditions in India share a puzzle. Acts…
Started by Arjun IyerReply first (no replies yet) -
Naturalisms before the word: the Cārvākas, Wang Chong and Xunzi’s Heaven
I want to test the distinction this site keeps drawing between kinds of naturalism (ontological, methodological, ethical, epistemological) against three older figures who are often lumped together as "early naturalists". The Cārvākas (Lokāyata). Almost all of their own texts are lost; we…
Started by Arvind PoojaryReply first (no replies yet) -
Dōgen’s “being-time”: is time something things have, or something they are?
Dōgen (1200–1253), founder of the Sōtō Zen school in Japan, wrote a short and very strange essay in 1240 called "Uji", usually translated "Being-Time", which became part of his Shōbōgenzō. Its central claim is that time is not a container things exist…
Started by Reza Tehrani2 replies -
Does a deterministic program “choose”?
A chess engine searches millions of positions, scores them and plays the best move. We naturally say it "chose" the knight move. Yet it's fully deterministic: same position, same settings, same move every time. Spinoza thought our sense of free will comes…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen4 replies -
Łukasiewicz, the sea battle, and why three-valued logic was born in Lwów
In De Interpretatione 9 Aristotle considers the sentence "there will be a sea battle tomorrow". If it is already true today, isn't the battle already necessary? And if so, isn't deliberation pointless? Around 1920 Jan Łukasiewicz, working in the Lwów–Warsaw school founded…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak3 replies -
Emptiness is not nothingness: common misreadings of śūnyatā
I keep seeing "emptiness" in Buddhist philosophy explained as "nothing exists" or "everything is an illusion". That's exactly the view Nāgārjuna rejects as nihilism. For Madhyamaka, things are empty of intrinsic nature (svabhāva). They exist, but only dependently: on causes and conditions,…
Started by Meera Kulkarni3 replies -
Found the Master Argument in Epictetus, between two bus stops
Another find from my recordings. Last week it was Epictetus, Discourses Book 2, and in the middle of a chapter he mentions an argument by Diodorus Cronus that clever people used to show off with. I had to pull my attention back…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
Is Aquinas’s First Way really about a first moment in time?
Most of my friends assume Aquinas's arguments for God (Summa Theologiae I, q.2, a.3) are about the beginning of the universe: everything has a cause, so go back far enough and you find God at the start. But my lecturer says that's…
Started by Aoife Kilbride4 replies -
Essence and existence: why Ibn Sina’s distinction mattered to Aquinas
In the metaphysics of the Shifa', Ibn Sina distinguishes what a thing is, its essence or quiddity (mahiyya), from the fact that it is, its existence (wujud). You can understand what a triangle or a phoenix is without knowing whether any exists.…
Started by Layla Sfeir4 replies -
Does quantum indeterminacy help free will at all?
People sometimes argue that because quantum mechanics is indeterministic, there's room for free will. Having studied physics, I'm sceptical. First, randomness isn't freedom. If my decision depends on a random quantum event, it isn't more mine than if it were determined. Second,…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha4 replies -
Mulla Sadra’s substantial motion: is everything changing at the level of substance?
For Aristotle, motion happens in a few categories only: quantity (growth), quality (a leaf turning red), and place. Substance doesn't move; it's the stable subject of change. When one substance becomes another, that's generation and corruption, not motion. Mulla Sadra disagreed. His…
Started by Reza Tehrani4 replies -
A philosopher says there are no tables, only particles arranged tablewise. I make tables
A customer's son is studying philosophy in Rabat. While I was fitting their cedar ceiling he told me about a book called Material Beings by Peter van Inwagen. As far as I understood him, van Inwagen thinks that when many small things…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani5 replies -
Shankara’s rope and snake: what kind of “unreality” is maya?
The most famous image in Advaita Vedanta: at dusk a man sees a rope and takes it for a snake. He is frightened, he may even run. When a lamp is brought, the snake vanishes, and he sees that there was only…
Started by Arjun Iyer5 replies -
Guo Xiang said things are ‘self-so’. Does that mean uncaused, or caused by everything?
After my question about non-being, a friend at the park told me to read Guo Xiang, who wrote the commentary on the Zhuangzi that shaped every later edition. (There is an old story that he took much of it from an earlier…
Started by Liu Mingqiao5 replies -
A company can be sued but cannot be tripped over. In what sense does it exist?
Last month I sat through four hearings in my family's case against a company. It had a registered office, a seal, a board, and a lawyer almost as tiresome as ours. What it did not have was a body. You cannot trip…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
Nobody from our founding team is left. Is it still the same company?
I left the startup I co-founded about eighteen months ago, burnt out. Last week I visited. The twelve people who started it are all gone, including me. The product has been rewritten twice. The office moved from a flat in Andheri to…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies -
Orí and the Stoic cylinder: does a destiny you chose make you more free or less?
In Yoruba thought, before birth each person chooses an orí, literally a "head", meaning the inner self that carries one's destiny. One of the words for destiny, àkúnlẹ̀yàn, means something like "that which was chosen kneeling". You chose it, but you cannot…
Started by Titilayo Adeyemi5 replies -
Correlation is not causation, I tell my team. But what exactly is the missing ingredient?
Our credit-scoring models find patterns: people who top up airtime at regular times repay loans more often. Everyone on my team can recite "correlation is not causation". Nobody can say what causation adds. It matters practically. If regular top-ups merely correlate with…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga4 replies -
Margaret Cavendish’s thinking matter: a forgotten alternative to laws imposed from outside
Reading about Sor Juana and women claiming the right to think in the seventeenth century, I keep meeting her English contemporary Margaret Cavendish. I want to make a case that Cavendish's natural philosophy deserves attention not just as a curiosity but as…
Started by Valentina Ríos4 replies -
Translating “being” into Vietnamese: are some metaphysical disputes artefacts of grammar?
I translate French philosophy into Vietnamese, and the hardest word is être. French uses one verb for three jobs: "the sky is blue" (predication), "God is" (existence), and "Paris is the capital" (identity). Vietnamese splits them. For identity and classification we use…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo5 replies -
The tumour cases: why does a cause we can see on a scan excuse, when one we can’t see doesn’t?
At the hospital I have met patients whose personalities changed with a lesion: a meningioma, a frontal stroke. Families say "it's not him, it's the illness", and they are usually right to. There is a famous case reported in a neurology journal…
Started by Tsion Bekele6 replies -
Wang Chong against the omen-readers: a naturalist in the Han dynasty
Among the classics my father left me is one I did not expect to enjoy. Recently I have been reading Wang Chong's Lunheng, and I think he deserves to be far better known outside China. In the Han dynasty a powerful theory…
Started by Liu Mingqiao4 replies -
Fire and cotton in the Seventeenth Discussion, read beside Hume’s Enquiry
Causation is a practical problem for me most mornings. I've been reading the seventeenth discussion of al-Ghazālī's Incoherence of the Philosophers (in Michael Marmura's translation) next to Section VII of Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), and I want to set out…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam5 replies -
“I could have caught it sooner”: what is a carer’s regret actually claiming?
Something from work that I keep returning to. One of our residents got worse overnight. Looking back, there was a sign at 2 a.m. that, in hindsight, meant he was seriously ill. I noticed it, it didn't seem much, I did not…
Started by Elin Hedqvist5 replies -
If the past no longer exists, what exactly is my regret about?
I served twenty-two years in the army, the last part on the DMZ. There are a few decisions I regret, none of them dramatic, all of them still with me. Reading about the philosophy of time has given me a strange new…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun5 replies -
Wujūd, brahman, dao: are these even answers to the same question?
I keep returning to Mullā Ṣadrā. I've been looking at a comparative table of traditions' answers to "what is real?", and the Islamic row says: created being, contingent, distinct from a necessary existent. The key term is wujūd. That's fair for much…
Started by Reza Tehrani4 replies -
Is Yogācāra “consciousness-only” idealism? Three readings and a false friend
Every year someone in my reading group says "Yogācāra is Buddhist idealism, like Berkeley". It's one of the more interesting mistakes, because it's partly right. The Yogācāra school, systematised by Asaṅga and Vasubandhu in the fourth and fifth centuries and carried to…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 replies -
Heraclitus, Vasubandhu, Zhuangzi, Mulla Sadra: four routes to process, or four destinations?
It is often said that four thinkers, with no documented transmission between them, all arrived at a process view of reality: Heraclitus in Greece, Vasubandhu in India, Zhuangzi in China, and much later Mulla Sadra in Safavid Iran. The convergence is real.…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
A source that is not one of the things it produces: Anaximander’s apeiron and Plotinus’s One
In my library we keep a small display on the Alexandrian Neoplatonists, and I have been rereading Plotinus between cataloguing jobs. What strikes me is a move that appears, in different forms, at both ends of Greek philosophy. Anaximander, very early, said…
Started by Mona Fathy6 replies