Category
Consciousness
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Reading group: Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974)
A short classic, first published in The Philosophical Review. Nagel argues that an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism. Bats perceive by echolocation, a sense so different from ours…
Started by Priya Raghavan1 reply -
Reading group: the Mandukya Upanishad and Gaudapada’s Karika
The Māṇḍūkya is the shortest of the principal Upanishads, only twelve verses. It analyses the syllable AUM in terms of four "quarters" of the self: the waking state (vaiśvānara), the dream state (taijasa), deep sleep (prājña), and the "fourth" (turīya), which is…
Started by Arjun Iyer4 replies -
Reading group: the Elisabeth–Descartes letters of 1643, slowly
I have spent years reading Sor Juana, and one of the things she keeps teaching me is how much philosophy by women survives only in letters, prefaces and replies. So I would like to read the most famous case in early modern…
Started by Valentina Ríos6 replies -
Reading group: aboutness from Brentano to Husserl, with Xuanzang alongside
Yogācāra and Husserl are two traditions that share more vocabulary than either admits and differ more than enthusiasts claim. I propose a three-week reading on intentionality, the property of mental states of being about something, with one Buddhist text set beside the…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 replies -
Reading group: Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses, and whether ‘mind-only’ means idealism
Vasubandhu's Twenty Verses (Viṃśatikā), with his own short commentary, is the most compact argument for the Yogācāra claim that there is "only consciousness" (vijñaptimātra). It is also the text that most invites the question of whether Yogācāra is a form of idealism,…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 replies -
Reading group: Nagel’s bat, Chalmers’s hard problem and Dennett’s case against qualia
I write formal-verification tools for a living, and I like threads where the argument can be pinned down. Consciousness is the place where that's hardest, so let's read three short classics together, in the order that shows the debate developing. Week 1.…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies