Category
Society & Politics
Justice, rights, power and law; how we live together.
-
Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste as political philosophy
In 1936 B. R. Ambedkar was invited to give the presidential address at the annual conference of the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal, an anti-caste Hindu reform group in Lahore. When the organisers saw the text, they asked him to remove parts, he refused, and…
Started by Deepa Kartha4 replies -
Marx’s alienation and the gig economy
In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx describes four aspects of alienated labour: the worker is alienated from the product, from the activity of working, from their "species-being" (our nature as freely creative producers), and from other people. Delivery riders…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
If I try to understand a practice from the inside first, have I signed up to relativism?
I teach at a Māori-language school. When visitors come, I always ask them to understand our practices on their own terms before judging them: why we greet the way we do, why the river is treated as an ancestor, why some places…
Started by Aroha Tipene5 replies -
Can a baby or an animal have a right if it cannot claim it? Interest theory versus will theory
I think about the ethics of drug trials on animals more than most of our customers would like. Someone at a talk recently said there are two main theories of what a right is: the "will" theory and the "interest" theory, and…
Started by Hetal Shah3 replies -
What makes a fair price for cocoa? Asking Ibn Khaldun, Smith and my cooperative
The price we receive for our cocoa at the farm gate is set each season by the board. Every year we argue about whether it is fair. So I want to ask the question of people who have read more philosophy than…
Started by Akosua Mensah5 replies -
Writing an eligibility rule taught me that metaphysics doesn’t settle policy
For some years I served on the committee that wrote eligibility rules for our regional school competitions. I'm not going to argue here about any current controversy, and I'd ask others not to. I want to share something I learned that I…
Started by Gerrit Venter6 replies -
An outsider can understand a culture, and sometimes better than its own members do
My walking tours go past the Mezquita-Catedral and through the old Jewish quarter of Córdoba, the city where both Ibn Rushd and Maimonides were born. Tourists want a story of three faiths living in harmony, the famous convivencia. I try to tell…
Started by Rafael Lucena Prieto7 replies -
Does philosophy make you better at your actual job, or just more annoying at it?
I'm a carpenter in Tetouan. I've been reading philosophy for a few years, mostly Aristotle, because he talks about carpenters and builders so much, and lately Ibn Bājja, who was from al-Andalus and thought hard about how a person can live well…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani7 replies -
A student in my prison class asked why anyone should obey an unjust law. What did Aquinas say?
This came up in my prison reading class. Last week we read part of Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail, where he says, following Augustine, that an unjust law is no law at all, and appeals to Aquinas for how to…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma4 replies -
A researcher surveyed our village. Why does it matter what we meant by our answers?
Last year a research team came to our village with tablets and asked everyone the same questions. How many hours a day do you work? Do you trust your neighbours? How much land do you own? The questions were polite, but our…
Started by Akosua Mensah3 replies -
When sovereignty belongs to God, are rulers more limited or less?
Hebrew and Arabic, the two languages I work between, carry traditions that both, at various points, said that sovereignty ultimately belongs to God. I've noticed that the same premise has been used to reach opposite conclusions. In 1 Samuel 8 the people…
Started by Tal Rosen5 replies -
My son’s course says ‘don’t judge other cultures’. Is that a rule for studying or a rule for living?
This week my son sent me something on cultural relativism from his anthropology course, and we argued on the phone for an hour. His course says that to understand a people you must not judge their customs by your own standards, and…
Started by Akosua Mensah5 replies -
Hayden White was right: the historian chooses the plot before the facts mean anything
Last year I worked on a documentary about a factory closure, and I made two rough cuts from the same footage for the director. In one the closing of the gates is a tragedy: a community undone by forces it could not…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam6 replies -
What makes a job meaningful? Notes from a job centre
Philosophers have called work a curse, a calling and a site of alienation. Sitting in Berlin's job centres has convinced me that meaning in work is less a private feeling than a social structure.
Started by Johanna ReinhardtReply first (no replies yet) -
Teaching non-European philosophy as live positions, not museum pieces
I teach the terminale philosophy class at a lycée in Dakar, where Descartes and Senghor sit on the same exam paper. One of the clearest changes in philosophy since 1990 is that traditions outside Europe have begun entering curricula and journals as…
Started by Khady Sène6 replies -
Why did Hobbes think sovereignty could not be divided?
I have no formal background in politics, so this is train reading. I've been going through a history of the English Civil War and then dipped into Leviathan, and I'm puzzled. Everything I learned at school says separation of powers is obviously…
Started by Siobhán Keane4 replies -
Neither filling nor drawing out: what the Analects and Xunzi think a learner is
My students in Taipei memorise the Analects for exams, which means they experience Confucian learning as the most extreme form of filling-up imaginable. I keep trying to show them that the texts themselves say something else. The Analects opens with learning and…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
My son asked whether race is real. How can ‘race isn’t biological’ and ‘racism is real’ both be true?
My children ask the questions that keep me reading. Last week my nine-year-old came home from school in Penang, where his classmates are Malay, Chinese, Indian and mixed, and asked me if race is real. His teacher had said scientists have shown…
Started by Thamarai Raman5 replies -
My debaters keep talking past each other on gender. Are they even answering the same question?
Last season a practice round with my debate team on a gender-related resolution went off the rails, not because the students were rude (they weren't) but because after forty minutes nobody had engaged anybody. One side kept saying the category is grounded…
Started by Sam Ellery4 replies -
What do fa, shu and shi mean in Han Feizi?
Zhuangzi sat unread on my father's shelf for most of my life. Next to him was a battered copy of Han Feizi, which I've now started on as well. I'm not a scholar, so please be patient with me. I keep meeting…
Started by Liu Mingqiao4 replies -
Aristotle was right that distributive justice is proportion; every quarrel is about what counts as merit
The fiercest arguments I ever heard as a school coach were about team selection. So I've been reading Aristotle to find out whether I was teaching justice or just picking teams. In Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics he says distributive justice…
Started by Gerrit Venter6 replies -
Justice should start from dependency, not from independent adults making a deal
Every baby born on our ward is completely dependent, and so is the mother for a few hours, and so, at the end of life, most of us will be again. Reading Eva Kittay's Love's Labor this year, I felt someone had…
Started by Farhana Akter7 replies -
Zakat is a claim on wealth, not a gift. What does that do to the charity versus justice debate?
Many debates about distributive justice I read, especially in English, assume a sharp line: justice is what can be demanded and enforced; charity is good but optional, a gift. Taxes for the first, donations for the second. Zakat doesn't sit comfortably on…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies -
My daughter asked why Plato wanted to ban stories. What exactly did he ban?
I read to my children every night, a mix of the Panchatantra, Tamil folk tales and whatever they bring home from the library. My eight-year-old saw a book on my shelf and asked what it was about. I said, a little carelessly,…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
Reading group: G. A. Cohen’s Why Not Socialism?, a short book for a long argument
The port doesn't leave me time for long books during the season, so I was glad to find this one: G. A. Cohen's Why Not Socialism? (2009), well under a hundred pages. Cohen asks us to imagine a camping trip. A group…
Started by Hugo Marchetti5 replies -
Is Wiredu’s consensus democracy what Habermas’s discourse principle looks like in a council?
This term I have been reading Wiredu's essays on consensus alongside Habermas with a few older students, and they keep asking a question I want to put to a wider group. Wiredu argued that traditional Ashanti politics, at least at the level…
Started by Kwame Asante5 replies -
Reading group: Christine de Pizan and Mary Astell, two arguments from reason three centuries apart
Women who claimed the right to think in earlier centuries kept reaching for the same tool against their opponents: argument from the opponents' own premises. I'd like to read two of them side by side. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the…
Started by Valentina Ríos5 replies -
Before the Axial Age: the Nāsadīya hymn, Egyptian instructions and the gradualist objection
One of the first hymns my grandfather made me memorise was the Nāsadīya Sūkta of the Ṛgveda, the hymn of creation. It begins before being and non-being and ends with doubt: who truly knows how this arose? Perhaps the one who watches…
Started by Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya5 replies -
Can an institution be at fault when nobody inside it did anything wrong?
Years ago, in a unit I served with, a soldier died in a training accident. The inquiry took months. Every officer had followed the regulations. The equipment had passed inspection. The schedule had been approved at the proper level. The report concluded…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun5 replies -
Is the circularity objection to identity-based accounts of gender fatal, or a misunderstanding?
Logic is what I think about most, so circularity is the kind of objection I find myself taking seriously by reflex. I'd like help understanding whether it lands here. An identity-based account says: what makes someone a member of a gender category…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak6 replies