Category
Society & culture
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Where do I start if I want philosophy beyond the European canon, not just Plato?
I teach at a Māori-language school in Rotorua. My students find it obvious that a river can be a person, and I'm trying to understand why so much of Western philosophy finds it strange, and what tikanga might say to philosophy in…
Started by Aroha Tipene5 replies132 views -
Why is a banknote money when a perfect copy of it is not?
When Ghana changed its currency in 2007 and took four zeros off the cedi, my mother kept a tin of the old notes. For a while you could exchange them. After that they were just paper. Same paper, same printing, same faces.…
Started by Akosua Mensah4 replies152 views -
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 replies242 views -
An outsider can understand a culture, and sometimes better than its own members do
I guide visitors around the Mezquita-Catedral in Córdoba and the old Jewish quarter, in 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 them…
Started by Rafael Moreno Gálvez7 replies265 views -
A researcher surveyed our village. Why does it matter what we meant by our answers?
I grow cocoa in the Ashanti Region. Last year a research team came 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…
Started by Akosua Mensah3 replies196 views -
My son’s course says ‘don’t judge other cultures’. Is that a rule for studying or a rule for living?
I farm cocoa near Kumasi. My son is at university and sends me articles from his anthropology course; I send him proverbs back. This week he sent me something on cultural relativism and we argued on the phone for an hour. His…
Started by Akosua Mensah5 replies207 views -
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 replies227 views -
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 replies180 views -
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 replies143 views -
Reading group: Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, three essays
My doctorate is on recognition theory and the welfare state, which in practice means sitting in job centres taking notes. I've realised I'm doing ethnography without having read the ethnographers properly, so I'm proposing three essays from Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of…
Started by Johanna Reinhardt6 replies208 views -
Hountondji was right: a people’s worldview is not yet philosophy
I teach philosophy in a Dakar lycée, and every year a student 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…
Started by Khady Faye7 replies209 views -
When a prediction changes what it predicts: reflexivity in my day job
I'm a data analyst in Kuala Lumpur. Last year we 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…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman4 replies120 views -
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 replies172 views -
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 replies276 views -
Winch on the Azande: who gets to call a practice irrational?
I teach Akan philosophy in Accra, and every year I set 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 replies164 views -
Searle’s “X counts as Y in C” leaves out the power that makes people accept it
My fieldwork is in job centres. A person walks in and, after one interview, counts as a jobseeker. The status comes with obligations (attend, apply, report), sanctions if they fail, and a set of things the officer may now do to them.…
Started by Johanna Reinhardt6 replies294 views -
Secular humanism needs no metaphysics, and that is its strength
I teach physics and spend weekends with a rationalist association, exposing tricks presented as miracles in villages around Mangaluru. I'm an atheist, and I call myself a humanist in the modern sense: ethics and meaning without religion. I keep being told that…
Started by Arvind Poojary5 replies266 views -
What did Weber actually mean by “value-free” social science?
I report on courts and human rights in Karachi. In arguments about whether journalism or research can be neutral, Max Weber gets quoted by both sides. One side says Weber proved social science must be value-free. The other says Weber admitted that…
Started by Sana Mir3 replies105 views -
Critical theory diagnoses domination brilliantly but cannot say why it is wrong
I lecture in economics in Valencia, and Marx, Rawls, Hobbes and Ibn Khaldun share a shelf in my office. I'd like to press an old objection to critical theory and see whether it still bites. Critical theory asks what a set of…
Started by Javier Morales5 replies158 views -
There can be no laws of human behaviour, only useful regularities
I lecture in economics in Valencia, and every year I tell students that the "law" of demand is not a law in the sense the law of gravitation is. Here is the thesis in full. Social science finds regularities. Some are robust:…
Started by Javier Morales5 replies219 views