Category
Society & Politics
Justice, rights, power and law; how we live together.
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Why did the Latin scholastics call Ibn Rushd simply “the Commentator”?
Reading Aquinas for the first time, after years with Eriugena and Boethius, I keep meeting references to "the Philosopher", who is Aristotle, and "the Commentator", who turns out to be Ibn Rushd, Averroes. I'd like to understand how that happened. How did…
Started by Siobhán Keane4 replies -
Friedman’s billiard player: is predictive success really all a model owes us?
My models predict, quite well, who will repay a small loan, using patterns in phone and payment records. They do not describe why anyone repays. Some of the strongest predictors are things that have no plausible causal story at all. A colleague…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga4 replies -
At my office “Confucian values” means obey the boss. Where did the reciprocity go?
I translate for a publishing house in Hanoi. When managers here want staff to stay late without complaint, they speak of Confucian values: respect for seniors, loyalty, harmony. We have a common saying about honouring teachers and respecting the Way. I grew…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo4 replies -
Schmitt’s uncomfortable point survives: no constitution can fully govern its own emergencies
Carl Schmitt's Political Theology (1922) opens with a sentence that every journalist covering courts eventually meets: sovereign is he who decides on the exception. The argument goes like this. Constitutions specify normal procedures. Emergencies arise that those procedures did not anticipate. Someone…
Started by Sana Rizvi6 replies -
Can Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica be read against its own hierarchy?
I read Vasconcelos ‘with admiration and a long list of objections’, as my profile says, and this year the list got longer. La raza cósmica (1925) is often taught in Mexico as an anti-racist text, and in one sense it is. Against…
Started by Valentina Ríos6 replies -
Freire’s banking model is unfair to the lecture, and to the teachers who give good ones
Every few years a pedagogy course reminds me that I am a banker. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed Freire describes the "banking" concept of education: the teacher deposits, the students receive, file and store. The teacher talks, the students listen meekly. He…
Started by Giulia Ferrante6 replies -
Is Iris Marion Young right that most injustice is not about who gets what?
Whenever my reading group discusses Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990), the same split appears. Young argued that political philosophy had been captured by the "distributive paradigm": it treats justice as the fair division of a stock of goods, income,…
Started by Femke Bosman6 replies -
Skilled manual work demands more thinking than most office work
My cousin works in an office in Casablanca and earns three times what I do, and the family assumes his work is the one that uses the head. Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft argues the reverse, and I want to defend…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani6 replies -
Adab, and the humanism that rarely gets the name
Much of my working time goes to books from a culture that, in the ninth to twelfth centuries, was organised around an ideal called adab. The word is hard to translate. It can mean manners and etiquette, and it can mean literature.…
Started by Mona Fathy5 replies -
What did Horkheimer mean by ‘traditional’ versus ‘critical’ theory?
I operate a gantry crane at the container port in Marseille and I'm a union delegate. Someone at a union education weekend said the Frankfurt School started with an essay by Max Horkheimer called "Traditional and Critical Theory", from 1937, and that…
Started by Hugo Marchetti4 replies -
Davos, 1929: was the split already visible in the room?
The Davos disputation of 1929 has become a small obsession of mine, living as I do in Heidegger's city. In the spring of that year, at a university course in the Swiss resort, Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger debated how to read…
Started by Henrike Vogel6 replies -
Ibn Khaldun’s impossible-army test, applied to the stories that go viral
There is a passage in the Muqaddimah where Ibn Khaldun complains about earlier chroniclers. They recorded enormous army numbers because a source had recorded them, without asking whether such an army could be fed, watered, marched and supplied. His point is that…
Started by Youssef Berrada4 replies -
Where is Hart’s rule of recognition actually written down?
One of my debaters ran a case on constitutional law last month and I realized I couldn't answer a basic question her opponent asked, so here I am. I've been reading Hart's The Concept of Law (1961). I follow the outline: primary…
Started by Sam Ellery5 replies -
Did the Latin scholastics really receive Aristotle through Arabic?
Almost every group I walk around Córdoba wants the same simple story: the Arabs preserved Greek learning during Europe's dark ages and then handed it back, and that is how Europe got Aristotle. I tell it with less and less confidence. I…
Started by Rafael Lucena Prieto4 replies -
How did Buddhist ideas first get into Chinese, and why did Daoist words matter so much?
I'm a poet and translator in Kochi, mostly between Malayalam and English. I've been reading about how Buddhist texts were first translated into Chinese, and I keep seeing the claim that Buddhist concepts "entered through Daoist vocabulary". Apparently in the early centuries…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies -
Watsuji’s betweenness, Akan personhood and Confucian roles: is the relation more basic than the person?
When I retired after forty years designing bridges, I was surprised by how much of “me” went with the job. I did not lose a role; I seemed to lose a person. A friend at the temple handed me Watsuji's Ethics and…
Started by Aiko Tanabe5 replies -
Should a health service record race? Notes on the hardest practical case
In thirty-four years at a surgery in Leith I filled in ethnicity boxes on more forms than I can count, and rarely thought about what they were for. Retirement has given me time to. Here's the dilemma as I now see it.…
Started by Alistair Gow6 replies -
Who was Hunayn ibn Ishaq, and what was new about the way he translated?
Visitors to my shop often ask me about the "House of Wisdom" and the translators of the Abbasid age, and I realise I repeat the same few sentences I learned at school. The name I hear most is Hunayn ibn Ishaq. I…
Started by Zainab Kadhim4 replies -
What a prison reading class taught me about reading an ancient text for the first time
Twice a week I volunteer at a men's prison in Nairobi, teaching a reading class. Over two years philosophy has quietly taken over the syllabus, and the text that changed everything was Plato's Apology: Socrates on trial for his life. I've learned…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma5 replies -
A firm that closes a site owes its workers more than the law requires
Over the years I've watched three firms in our district of Marseille close sites. In each case the company did what the law required: notice, severance at the legal rate, the formal consultation. In each case people who had given twenty or…
Started by Hugo Marchetti5 replies -
What is Beauvoir actually claiming with ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’?
The line from The Second Sex gets quoted at me constantly, by people who think it settles every argument about gender in one direction and by people who think it's obviously false. I've realised I don't actually know what Beauvoir meant by…
Started by Aoife Kilbride5 replies -
Were the Renaissance humanists secular? My paintings say otherwise
Visitors to the studio often tell me, kindly, that the Renaissance was when "humanism" replaced religion, when people stopped looking at God and started looking at man. Then they look at what's on my easel, which is almost always a Madonna, a…
Started by Chiara Bellandi4 replies -
Rousseau said the English were free only at election time. Was he right about the rest of us?
In Book III of The Social Contract, Rousseau has a line that hit me hard: the English people think they are free, but they are badly mistaken; they are free only during the election of members of Parliament, and once those are…
Started by Dana WhitfieldReply first (no replies yet) -
Reading group: Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, three essays
Sitting in job centres and taking notes, as I often do, I've realised I'm doing amateur ethnography without having read the ethnographers properly, so I'm proposing three essays from Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). Week 1: ‘Thick Description: Toward an…
Started by Johanna Reinhardt6 replies -
Do exams measure anything worth measuring? A view from the bac philo
Exam season is coming round again in Dakar. In June my students sit four hours to write a dissertation on a subject of the kind "Is it reasonable to fear death?", "Can one be free without laws?", and so on. The exam…
Started by Khady Sène5 replies -
Reading group: Ibn Khaldun on making a living, crafts and taxes in the Muqaddimah
Ibn Khaldun spent formative years at the Marinid court here in Fes. His Muqaddimah (1377) is famous for its theory of the rise and fall of dynasties, but the chapters on economic life are often skipped, and I think they're among the…
Started by Youssef Berrada5 replies -
Hountondji was right: a people’s worldview is not yet philosophy
Every year a student in my lycée class asks why we study Descartes and not ‘African philosophy’. I owe them a serious answer, and the most serious one I know is Paulin Hountondji's. In African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (originally 1976), Hountondji…
Started by Khady Sène7 replies -
Al-Fārābī’s virtuous city and Plato’s philosopher-king: the same answer for different reasons?
Baghdad is the city where al-Fārābī did much of his work a thousand years ago, and on bad days I find it hopeful that someone here once believed a city could be organised around wisdom. Al-Fārābī's Principles of the Opinions of the…
Started by Zainab Kadhim4 replies -
When a prediction changes what it predicts: reflexivity in my day job
Last year my team built a model to predict which small-business customers would fall behind on repayments. It worked well on historical data. Then the business acted on it: flagged customers got tighter terms and more calls. Some of them, squeezed, did…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman4 replies -
Reading group: Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (1998)
The question I'm asked most by students at the library is some version of "why did the Abbasids translate the Greeks?" The usual answers are curiosity, or the generosity of an enlightened caliph, or the House of Wisdom. Dimitri Gutas's short book…
Started by Mona Fathy5 replies