Category
Metaphysics
What exists, and what is it to be? Time, causes, freedom and necessity.
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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 replies263 views -
Possibility lives in the powers of real things, not in other worlds
I make cedar doors and ceilings. When I look at a plank 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…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani5 replies204 views -
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 replies182 views -
What does ziran, “self-so”, actually mean, and why do people call it the centre of Daoism?
I study kelp forests on the Chilean coast, and I came to philosophy through Maturana and Varela, who 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…
Started by Ignacio Fuenzalida5 replies146 views -
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. In medicine we…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies180 views -
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 Phạm Quốc Bảo5 replies229 views -
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 Nwosu5 replies149 views -
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 replies182 views -
The al-Ghazali–Hume parallel is shallower than the textbooks suggest
I teach comparative philosophy, and the sentence I most often have to correct in student essays 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…
Started by Kenneth Leung Chi-ho5 replies254 views -
What does Fazang mean when he says the rafter simply is the building?
I was a structural engineer for thirty-eight 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 replies181 views -
The deepest split in metaphysics is substance versus process, not matter versus mind
I'm a physicist in Copenhagen, and 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,…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies236 views -
Is Zhu Xi’s li a universal? What does ‘principle is one, manifestations many’ mean?
I teach ethics at a secondary school in Seoul. Toegye is on the 1,000-won note and my students can tell you he was a Neo-Confucian, but not what that means. This term I am trying to explain li (理, "principle" or "pattern")…
Started by Ji-woo Park5 replies205 views -
Why did Confucian thinkers rarely ask whether the will is free?
I teach ethics in a Seoul secondary school, mostly through the Korean Neo-Confucian tradition. A colleague who teaches European philosophy asked me what the Confucians said about free will versus determinism. I realised I had nothing to give him. The tradition talks…
Started by Ji-woo Park5 replies170 views -
Fire and cotton in the Seventeenth Discussion, read beside Hume’s Enquiry
I model oil reservoirs for a living, so causation is a practical problem for me before breakfast. 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…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Qahtani5 replies170 views -
“I could have caught it sooner”: what is a nurse’s regret actually claiming?
Something from work that I keep returning to. A patient deteriorated overnight. Looking back, there was a sign at 2 a.m. that, in hindsight, pointed to sepsis. I noted it, it was within range, I did not escalate. By six he was…
Started by Elin Lindqvist5 replies203 views -
Nāgārjuna and the Vienna Circle both attacked metaphysics. Were they doing the same thing?
A monk in Manang gave me a commentary on Nāgārjuna years ago, and I have been reading him slowly ever since. Recently a trekking client who studied philosophy in Vienna told me Nāgārjuna sounded like a logical positivist: someone who shows that…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung5 replies266 views -
Leibniz had the better of the argument with Clarke
I model oil reservoirs for a living, so space and what fills it is a professional concern. I've been reading the Leibniz–Clarke correspondence of 1715–16, in which Samuel Clarke defended Newton's absolute space and Leibniz argued that space is only the order…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Qahtani5 replies244 views -
When a family says ‘it was always going to happen’, what are they claiming?
I work in intensive care, and I hear the same sentence most weeks: "It was always going to happen." Sometimes from a daughter, sometimes from a doctor, sometimes from me. I've started to think it means very different things in different mouths:…
Started by Elin Lindqvist5 replies259 views -
Kim was right: non-reductive physicalism cannot give the mind any causal work
I'm a cognitive scientist and a materialist, and I want to defend a thesis many materialists find uncomfortable. Non-reductive physicalism says two things: everything is physical, and mental properties (believing, wanting, feeling pain) are not identical to physical properties. It's the most…
Started by Priya Raghavan5 replies205 views -
Reading group: McTaggart’s ‘The Unreality of Time’ and Prior’s ‘Thank Goodness That’s Over’
I work on modal and many-valued logics in Kraków, and I owe a great deal to Arthur Prior, who founded tense logic partly because he thought the A-series was real and needed a logic of its own. So I propose reading the…
Started by Tomasz Wójcik5 replies196 views -
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 replies148 views -
If I can conceive it without contradiction, is it possible? Ash’arites, Hume and Kripke
I started reading the Ash'ari theologians to understand occasionalism, and I noticed how much weight they put on one principle: whatever involves no contradiction is possible, at least for God. Al-Ghazali uses it in the Tahāfut when he says the cotton might…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Qahtani5 replies167 views -
Reading group: Nāgārjuna on causes and conditions, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 1, 20 and 24
For my MA in Pune I work on Nyāya–Madhyamaka debates, and the opening of Nāgārjuna's Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way is where those debates start. I'd like to read three chapters together. Translation. Jay Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies136 views -
Kasb is a real distinction, not a verbal escape: the Ash’ari answer deserves a hearing
Within Islamic theology the free will question produced two sharply opposed answers, and I think one of them gets a worse press than it deserves. The Mu'tazila said that human beings genuinely create their own acts. God is just; he would not…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Qahtani5 replies207 views -
Reading group: Nāgārjuna’s Middle Verses, chapter 24, where emptiness is accused of nihilism
If you want to know what Nāgārjuna means by emptiness, the best place to look is the chapter where he is accused of destroying everything. Chapter 24 of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā opens with an opponent's objection: if all things are empty, nothing arises…
Started by Kenneth Leung Chi-ho5 replies212 views -
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 Leung Chi-ho5 replies218 views -
When philosophers ask what exists, what would even count as an answer?
I come to this from literature, so forgive me if the question is naive. In a seminar last week someone said ontology is "the study of what there is". I nodded along, and then on the bus home I realised I had…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies279 views -
What does Ibn Sina mean by a thing that is “possible in itself, necessary through another”?
I am an architect, not a trained philosopher, so forgive me if this is basic. In reading about Ibn Sina I keep meeting a three-way division: the Necessary Existent in itself, things possible in themselves, and things that are possible in themselves…
Started by Reza Tehrani5 replies240 views -
Aquinas’s metaphysics is unintelligible without Ibn Sina
I teach metaphysics at a seminary in Enugu, and my students arrive believing that Aquinas is a Catholic synthesis of Aristotle and the Bible. That leaves out the man in the middle. My thesis is strong: Aquinas's metaphysics cannot be understood without…
Started by Fr. Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies127 views -
Wittgenstein said philosophy “leaves everything as it is”. Is quietism a position, or a refusal to have one?
I translate philosophy into French for a living, and I spent this year on a new edition of a book about the Philosophical Investigations. I keep returning to §124: philosophy may not interfere with the actual use of language; it can only…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies193 views