Category
Metaphysics
What exists, and what is it to be? Time, causes, freedom and necessity.
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Al-Ghazali was right: causal necessity cannot be demonstrated
In the Seventeenth Discussion of The Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali argues that the connection between what is customarily believed to be a cause and its effect is not necessary. When cotton touches fire and burns, observation shows only that the burning…
Started by Layla Haddad8 replies332 views -
Compatibilism answers a question nobody was asking
I drive a bus across Ankara and listen to philosophy lectures between stops. I have now heard about four lectures defending compatibilism, and every time I feel the same thing: it changes the subject. Hume says liberty is just a power of…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu6 replies236 views -
What are we claiming when we call a wine, a food or a practice “natural”?
I make small-batch wine in the Adelaide Hills and judge at regional shows. "Natural wine" is the hottest phrase in my trade, and I've come to dislike it, not because the wines are bad (some are great) but because nobody can tell…
Started by Bec Doyle6 replies174 views -
Anscombe was right: we see causing all the time
I make cedar doors and ceilings in Tetouan. When I push a chisel through cedar I do not see a chisel, then a cut, and infer a connection. I see the chisel cutting. When my apprentice drops a plank and it cracks,…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani6 replies234 views -
If the One cannot be described, how did Plotinus manage to write so much about it?
I restore Renaissance panel paintings in Florence. Visitors to the workshop often tell me that this or that painting is "Neoplatonic", and I have learned to be wary of the word, because art historians argue fiercely about how much philosophy the painters…
Started by Chiara Bellandi6 replies162 views -
Splitting causation from explanation was a modern mistake, not an Aristotelian one
I study kelp forests on the Chilean coast. I came to philosophy through Maturana and Varela, the Chilean biologists who described living things as self-producing systems in the early 1970s, and I keep running into the same problem. To explain why a…
Started by Ignacio Fuenzalida6 replies212 views -
Reading group: Porphyry’s Isagoge and the three questions he refused to answer
Porphyry wrote the Isagoge, a short "Introduction" to Aristotle's Categories, in the late third century. In the opening lines he raises three questions about genera and species, and then declines to answer them because they need a deeper inquiry: Do they subsist,…
Started by Siobhán Keane6 replies138 views -
If there is no self, who has free will? Is there a Buddhist position at all?
I guide trekkers in the Annapurna region and read Madhyamaka in tea houses in the evenings. A Swiss client asked me last month what Buddhism says about free will. I said it depends what you mean, which was true but cowardly. Here…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung6 replies220 views -
The tumour cases: why does a cause we can see on a scan excuse, when one we can’t see doesn’t?
I am a physician in Addis Ababa. In clinic 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…
Started by Tsion Bekele6 replies204 views -
Reading group: Philip Anderson, “More Is Different” (Science, 1972)
I work on quantum many-body systems, which means I spend my days on exactly the phenomena Anderson's essay is about. It is four pages long, written by a physicist who later won the Nobel Prize, and it has probably done more to…
Started by Lars Eriksen6 replies316 views -
Rāmānuja’s question ‘whose ignorance?’ is the objection Advaita never answered
I teach Mīmāṃsā, which makes me a realist about the world of ritual, persons and things, and therefore no natural friend of either kind of Vedāntin. On one point, though, I side firmly with Rāmānuja against Śaṅkara. Advaita holds that brahman alone…
Started by Govinda Prasad Mishra6 replies236 views -
Reading group: P. F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment” (1962)
I teach a reading class at a men's prison twice a week, and free will comes up in nearly every session, never in the abstract. A man asks whether he deserves his sentence, or whether his father's violence "made him". I want…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma6 replies202 views -
Reading group: A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (1936), chapters 1, 2, 4 and 6
I teach mathematics, and every year a student asks me whether mathematics "says anything about the world". Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic gives the boldest answer I know (no, it is all tautology) and the boldest dismissal of metaphysics. He was in…
Started by Vikram Sethi6 replies160 views -
Is Yogācāra “consciousness-only” idealism? Three readings and a false friend
I teach comparative philosophy in Hong Kong, and every year a student writes "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…
Started by Kenneth Leung Chi-ho6 replies268 views -
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 replies280 views -
‘Illa, kāraṇa, gù: what each tradition’s word for ’cause’ lets it ask
I research classical Arabic philosophy in Beirut, and I've been thinking about how the translators of the ninth and tenth centuries handled Aristotle's aitia. They used 'illa and sabab, and here is the interesting part: 'illa already had, or soon acquired, a…
Started by Layla Haddad6 replies246 views -
S5 is the right logic for metaphysical necessity
I work on modal and many-valued logics in Kraków, so I'll state a view I hold and want tested. S5 says: whatever is possible is necessarily possible, and whatever is necessary is necessarily necessary. In Kripke's terms, every world is accessible from…
Started by Tomasz Wójcik6 replies190 views -
Unrestricted composition is the only principled answer to when parts make a whole
Thesis: any things whatever compose something. Here is why I think universalism is the only principled position. Restriction generates vagueness. If only some collections compose, there will be a sequence of cases, removing one particle at a time, in which composition goes…
Started by Derek Hollis6 replies294 views -
Reading group: David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (1986), chapters 1–4
Most people meet modal realism as a punchline: the man who believed every possible world is as real as ours. I want to read the book properly, because the argument is far better than its reputation, and because I think most of…
Started by Tomasz Wójcik6 replies232 views -
Reading group: Quine’s ‘On What There Is’, slowly, in three sittings
"On What There Is" first appeared in the Review of Metaphysics in 1948 and opens From a Logical Point of View (1953). It is short, funny in places, and much quoted by people who have not read it. I propose we read…
Started by Tomasz Wójcik6 replies186 views -
What exactly is kasb (acquisition), and is it just compatibilism with God in it?
I am eighteen and taking a gap year, and I have been reading about free will because it is the question that will not leave me alone. In Indonesia the answer I grew up with is that God creates everything, including my…
Started by Fajar Nugroho5 replies131 views -
Reading group: Epictetus, Discourses II.19, where the Master Argument meets a bus driver
I drive the 413 route across Ankara and listen to philosophy lectures between stops. Epictetus is my favourite. Last month a lecture mentioned that the only clear report we have of the "Master Argument" of Diodorus Cronus is at the start of…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu5 replies249 views -
Is a mayonnaise emergent? A cook asks about weak and strong emergence
I run a kitchen in Dubai. Every morning someone on my team makes mayonnaise: egg yolk, a little mustard and lemon, then oil, drop by drop at first. Get it right and you have something thick, glossy and pale. Get it wrong…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies241 views -
Is the flame on my burner a thing, or something that keeps happening?
I run a kitchen in Dubai, twenty-two cooks, nine countries, and on a slow afternoon I was staring at a gas flame. It keeps the same shape and colour for hours, but nothing in it stays: the gas comes in, burns, and…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies134 views -
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 replies217 views -
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 replies228 views -
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 Jianguo5 replies227 views -
Restoring a panel painting: is the painting one thing with its wood and pigment, or two?
I restore Renaissance panel paintings in Florence. This month I have a fifteenth-century Madonna on a poplar panel that split badly. The question in the workshop is whether to replace one of the boards, which would mean transferring a strip of the…
Started by Chiara Bellandi5 replies169 views -
A company can be sued but cannot be tripped over. In what sense does it exist?
Last month I spent four hearings arguing against a company. It had a registered office, a seal, a board, and a lawyer almost as tiresome as I am. What it did not have was a body. You cannot trip over it, and…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies243 views -
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 replies266 views