Category
Metaphysics
What exists, and what is it to be? Time, causes, freedom and necessity.
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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 -
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 replies -
My son says a philosopher proved time is unreal. What are the A-series and B-series?
I farm cocoa near Kumasi. My son is at university and sends me articles from his course, and I send him back proverbs. This week he sent me something by McTaggart, who he says proved that time is not real. I told…
Started by Akosua Mensah4 replies -
Why does ‘the shape caused the door’ sound so wrong if Aristotle meant it?
When I was an apprentice my father explained Aristotle's four causes to me with a door: the cedar is what it is made of, the design is its form, I am the one who makes it, and it exists to be a…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani4 replies -
Was Kant an idealist in the same sense as Berkeley?
I mostly read medieval philosophy, so the eighteenth century is a foreign country to me. A friend in my book club said, rather confidently, that Kant is "just Berkeley with extra steps": both say the world is in the mind, Kant just…
Started by Siobhán Keane4 replies -
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 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 -
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 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 -
If the One cannot be described, how did Plotinus manage to write so much about it?
Visitors to my 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 actually knew. So I decided to go…
Started by Chiara Bellandi6 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 -
Possibility lives in the powers of real things, not in other worlds
When I look at a plank of cedar I see what it can become: a panel, a frame, a box. That "can" is not in some other world. It is in the cedar: its grain, its weight, the way it takes a…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani5 replies -
The statue-and-clay puzzle is a verbal dispute, and metaphysicians should admit it
I coach high school debate. Half my job is stopping kids from winning arguments by quietly changing what a word means. So I'm primed to spot verbal disputes, and I think I've spotted a big one. The puzzle: a sculptor shapes a…
Started by Sam Ellery5 replies -
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 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 -
Splitting causation from explanation was a modern mistake, not an Aristotelian one
Reading Maturana and Varela, the Chilean biologists who described living things as self-producing systems in the early 1970s, I keep running into the same problem. To explain why a kelp forest is the way it is, I need to say what it's…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo6 replies -
What does ziran, “self-so”, actually mean, and why do people call it the centre of Daoism?
Maturana and Varela described living things as autopoietic, self-making: a cell produces the very components that produce it. A friend in Santiago told me that Daoism had a word for something similar, ziran, which she translated as “self-so” or “of itself so”.…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo5 replies -
Is Vasubandhu’s doctrine of momentariness the same as modern stage theory?
I guide trekkers in the Annapurna region and have read about Buddhist philosophy for years, mostly in tea houses. Recently a friend showed me a chart of Western theories of persistence and pointed to one called exdurantism or stage theory: nothing strictly…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung4 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 -
Perdurantism fits modern physics better than endurantism does
I trained in physics in Lagos and now tutor it, and I've been reading Theodore Sider's case for four-dimensionalism. I'm persuaded, and I want to put the argument from physics as strongly as I can. Relativity treats spacetime as a single four-dimensional…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha5 replies -
If there is no self, who has free will? Is there a Buddhist position at all?
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 is my confusion. Buddhism teaches anattā, no self. Everything arises from causes and conditions; nothing is…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung6 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 -
Calling Wang Fuzhi a materialist hides more than it reveals
Some older textbooks my students find online still call Wang Fuzhi (Chuanshan) a "materialist". The label comes mostly from twentieth-century scholarship that wanted ancestors for a materialist philosophy, and it has a respectable basis: Wang made qi the sole reality and treated…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
The incredulous stare is a perfectly respectable argument against modal realism
I have been reading the threads on Lewis and his infinitely many concrete worlds. I am told the standard response, the "incredulous stare", is not an argument, and that Lewis himself said so. I want to defend the stare. Doctors routinely reject…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
Reading group: Philip Anderson, “More Is Different” (Science, 1972)
Anderson's essay is about exactly the phenomena that drew me into physics as a student. It is four pages long, written by a physicist who later won the Nobel Prize, and it has probably done more to shape physicists' attitudes to reductionism…
Started by Lars Eriksen6 replies -
The al-Ghazali–Hume parallel is shallower than the textbooks suggest
The sentence I most often find myself correcting in discussions is "al-Ghazālī anticipated Hume". I'd like to argue that the parallel, though real, is shallower than it is usually made to look. The shared step is this: we observe one event accompanying…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 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 -
What does Fazang mean when he says the rafter simply is the building?
I was a structural engineer for forty years, so I came to Fazang's writings expecting to find something about parts and wholes I could recognise. Instead I found the dialogue about the rafter and the building, in which the claim is made…
Started by Aiko Tanabe5 replies -
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 replies -
The deepest split in metaphysics is substance versus process, not matter versus mind
I want to defend a claim I came across in a comparative table of answers to "what is real?" across traditions. Most introductions organise metaphysics around matter versus mind: materialism, idealism, dualism. That division is real, but it's largely a European early-modern…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies