Category
Society & Politics
Justice, rights, power and law; how we live together.
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Reading group: Sima Qian’s postface and his letter to Ren An
My students meet Sima Qian as a name in a list of Han dynasty achievements. I would like to read him properly, as someone who thought hard about what a historian is for. The plan, three weeks: Week 1. The postface to…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Four generations to ruin: Ibn Khaldun on why institutions decay
The Muqaddimah's theory of dynastic decline is usually read as medieval history; read as a theory of institutions, it is uncomfortably current.
Started by Javier FerrandisReply first (no replies yet) -
Did Adam Smith change his mind between The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations?
Adam Smith is buried in the Canongate Kirkyard, and since retiring I've been reading him properly for the first time. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) opens by saying that however selfish we may suppose a man to be, there are principles…
Started by Alistair Gow4 replies -
“The best ruler is barely noticed” is compatible with abandonment, and the Legalists exploited exactly that
Chapter 17 of the Daodejing ranks rulers. The best are those whose people barely know they exist. Next come those the people love and praise; then those they fear; then those they despise. And when the work is done, the people all…
Started by Chen Yuting6 replies -
If nobody deserves punishment, could a court actually run on Pereboom’s quarantine model?
I studied law in Lahore and have never quite stopped reading it. Lately I have been reading Derk Pereboom, who argues that free will in the sense needed for basic desert does not exist, whether determinism is true or not. He does…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
Reading group: Eva Kittay’s Love’s Labor and the dependency critique of Rawls
Eva Kittay's Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (1999) is one of the books that turned care ethics from a set of intuitions into a challenge to political philosophy. I have dipped into parts of it for years, but I've…
Started by Femke Bosman5 replies -
Norms are neither true nor false, so there is no logic of obligation, only a logic about obligations
This puzzle has bothered me since I read Kelsen as a law student in Lahore. Logic, as usually understood, is about relations between things that can be true or false: if the premises are true, the conclusion must be. But norms ("you…
Started by Hamza Qureshi4 replies -
Can freedom as non-domination survive at the scale of millions?
I grew up hearing my grandmother speak Quechua at the market in Lima, and I spent summers in her village, where the community, the ayllu, still assigned duties by rotation. Every household took its turn at the offices of the community, at…
Started by Mateo Quispe5 replies -
Judges make law in hard cases, and pretending they discover it does more harm than good
Here is my thesis, from someone who has read too many judgments. Hart's famous example is a rule forbidding vehicles in the park. Cars are clearly covered. But a bicycle? A child's electric toy? A decommissioned tank set up as a war…
Started by Deepa Kartha6 replies -
Was gender always the organising category? Oyěwùmí and the Yoruba argument
I keep returning to a book that divides everyone I discuss it with: Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí's The Invention of Women (1997). Her claim is that in precolonial Yoruba society, the primary principle of social organisation was not gender but seniority, relative age. She…
Started by Titilayo Adeyemi6 replies -
Was Laozi the first laissez-faire economist? Why wu wei is not the invisible hand
Every few years a younger colleague at work brings me a quotation from the Laozi with great excitement. "The more prohibitions there are, the poorer the people." "Governing a large state is like cooking a small fish": don't keep poking it. And…
Started by Javier Ferrandis6 replies -
‘The Fact of Blackness’ or ‘The Lived Experience of the Black Man’? What a translation choice did to Fanon
Rereading Black Skin, White Masks (1952), I noticed something I'd missed for years: the fifth chapter has two different titles in English. Fanon's French is ‘L'expérience vécue du Noir’. The 1967 translation called it ‘The Fact of Blackness’. The 2008 translation calls…
Started by Sana Rizvi5 replies -
Smith’s butcher and Smith’s impartial spectator: is there really an ‘Adam Smith problem’?
I am reading the Scottish Enlightenment in order. I've just finished The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and started The Wealth of Nations (1776), and I can see why nineteenth-century German scholars talked about "das Adam Smith Problem". The first book is…
Started by Alistair Gow4 replies -
Reading group: al-Mawardi’s Ordinances of Government, on the conditions of legitimate rule
Al-Mawardi (972–1058) was a Shafi'i jurist and judge in Baghdad at a strange moment: the Abbasid caliph was the recognised head of the community, while real military power in the city belonged for most of his life to the Buyid emirs. His…
Started by Layla Sfeir5 replies -
Reading group: Rousseau’s Social Contract in four weeks, in French and English
Every year my terminale students in Dakar meet Rousseau on the syllabus, and every year I find something new in Du contrat social (1762). I'd like to read it slowly with people who will argue. Texts. I'll read the French. For English…
Started by Khady Sène6 replies -
Reading group: Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method, chapters 1 to 3
In my reading class at the prison, one of the men asked whether crime is “just normal” in every society. I said I would find out who had argued that. It turns out Durkheim did, in The Rules of Sociological Method (1895),…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma4 replies -
The Axial Age is defined by its exclusions, and that makes the thesis unfalsifiable
Every survey of world philosophy I've read includes the Axial Age: between about 800 and 200 BCE, in Greece, India, China and Israel, with no documented contact between them, something similar happened. People began defending claims against stated objections, named individuals disagreed…
Started by Mateo Quispe6 replies -
Every legal code I know contradicts itself somewhere, and courts still function
Every legal system I know contains provisions that conflict: a later statute that cuts across an earlier one, a general rule and a specific exception that both seem to apply, a constitutional provision in tension with an ordinary law. If classical logic…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
How did Frederick Douglass argue against the race science of the 1850s on its own terms?
I know Douglass from the Narrative and the Fourth of July speech, but someone here mentioned that he also gave a commencement address in 1854, ‘The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered’, taking on the scientists of his day. I've started reading…
Started by Dana Whitfield5 replies -
Reading group: Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), five chapters over five weeks
The Souls of Black Folk is the book I keep pushing onto the philosophy syllabus, because it was doing philosophy all along. Du Bois wrote much of it in my city, at Atlanta University. The ‘Forethought’ announces that the problem of the…
Started by Keisha Monroe5 replies -
Nobody deserves their talents, and that settles more about pay than people admit
I am paid a lot for my work in machine learning, mostly because a fairly rare combination of mathematical aptitude and programming skill is in demand right now. I want to argue a thesis that applies to me personally. I did not…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen6 replies -
Reading group: Mencius Book 1, the conversations with the kings
Every year I tell my students that Mencius was a political philosopher before he was a theorist of human nature. They don't believe me, because the textbook only gives them the child at the well. So I'd like to read the opening…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu5 replies -
Salazar Bondy asked if there is a philosophy of our America. Over fifty years on, what’s the answer?
In 1968, the Peruvian philosopher Augusto Salazar Bondy published a short book with an uncomfortable title: ¿Existe una filosofía de nuestra América? His answer was, roughly, not yet. Latin American philosophy, he argued, had been imitative: each generation importing the latest European…
Started by Mateo Quispe6 replies -
Appiah is right: racial terms are empty, like ‘phlogiston’, and we should stop talking as if they named kinds
Appiah, whose father was Ghanaian, is someone young people in Accra claim with a certain pride, even when they disagree with him. I want to defend his eliminativism, at least for argument's sake. The argument, roughly: racial terms were introduced, in the…
Started by Kwame Asante7 replies -
Classical phenomenology described one kind of body and called it the structure of experience
This term my reading circle read the fifth chapter of Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, the one translated as "The Fact of Blackness" in the older English edition and "The Lived Experience of the Black Man" in the newer. My students understood…
Started by Keisha Monroe5 replies -
Rights by consistency: Sor Juana, Astell and Wollstonecraft on the same argument
I keep noticing the same argument shape in three women who never read one another. The shape is a consistency argument. If reason is what entitles men to education, liberty or rights, and women have reason, then you must either extend those…
Started by Valentina Ríos4 replies -
The building has steps, my legs don’t work: which sentence names my disability?
I spend a lot of my working time measuring door widths and arguing with architects about gradients. When I can't get into a building, two descriptions are true. My legs don't work. The building has no ramp. For most of history the…
Started by Dima Nasser6 replies -
Did Ibn Khaldun really say that labour is the source of value?
Every year at least one of my students comes back from the internet with the claim that Ibn Khaldun "invented the labour theory of value four centuries before Adam Smith and Marx". It's said with pride, and I share the pride, but…
Started by Youssef Berrada4 replies -
Why the translators skipped Greek tragedy, and what Ibn Rushd made of Aristotle’s Poetics
At the statue of Ibn Rushd near Córdoba's old walls I often tell visitors about Borges's story "Averroes' Search". Borges imagines the great commentator puzzling over two words in Aristotle's Poetics, "tragedy" and "comedy", for which his world has no examples, while…
Started by Rafael Lucena Prieto4 replies -
Winch on the Azande: who gets to call a practice irrational?
Every year the older students in my school's philosophy club read Peter Winch's essay "Understanding a Primitive Society" (1964). It is a reply to E. E. Evans-Pritchard's classic 1937 study of witchcraft and oracles among the Azande of central Africa. Evans-Pritchard took…
Started by Kwame Asante4 replies