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Discussion
An open thread on any idea
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A source that is not one of the things it produces: Anaximander’s apeiron and Plotinus’s One
In my library we keep a small display on the Alexandrian Neoplatonists, and I have been rereading Plotinus between cataloguing jobs. What strikes me is a move that appears, in different forms, at both ends of Greek philosophy. Anaximander, very early, said…
Started by Mona Fathy6 replies -
Al-Fārābī’s virtuous city looks different on a bad day in a bookshop
On quiet afternoons in the shop I read al-Farabi, who lived and taught in this city a thousand years before me. In The Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City he compares the excellent city to a healthy body, in which…
Started by Zainab Kadhim5 replies -
Mulla Sadra’s substantial motion: what if things change in their very substance?
I am an architect in Shiraz, and Mulla Sadra, who was born here, keeps pulling me back to questions about being. This one has been on my mind since I started reading about persistence. In Aristotle's framework, which Ibn Sina refined, a…
Started by Reza Tehrani4 replies -
“I know what I saw”: what is a witness actually claiming?
I cover courts and human rights in Karachi. The sentence I hear most often in witness boxes is "I know what I saw." It's said with total conviction, often by people who are mistaken. Psychologists have shown how fragile this is. Elizabeth…
Started by Sana Rizvi6 replies -
Kumārila said a cognition is valid until shown otherwise. Is that internalism or externalism?
The Mīmāṃsā school I follow holds a doctrine called svataḥ prāmāṇya, intrinsic validity. I have been reading the internalism and externalism debate in English, and I would like to know whether this doctrine belongs on one side, or whether the map does…
Started by Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya5 replies -
Is “depression” one condition or several? A reader’s doubts
One question has followed me through years of my own analysis and of reading psychiatry: when two people receive the same diagnosis of major depression, do they have the same thing? Consider how the diagnosis works. A person needs five of nine…
Started by Martín Iriarte4 replies -
“A hundred scriptures cannot make fire cold”: Śaṅkara’s rule for when scripture and perception collide
Discussions here of reason and revelation usually draw on Ibn Rushd and Maimonides. They deserve it. But the Advaita tradition worked out its own conflict rule, and I think it belongs in the same conversation. For Śaṅkara, scripture (śruti) is a means…
Started by Arjun Iyer5 replies -
My brother’s conversion: can an experience be real and its interpretation wrong?
My younger brother is an engineer, a careful and slightly dry man, raised like me without religion. Last spring he spent a week at a Benedictine abbey, mostly because a colleague recommended the silence. He came back saying that during the night…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
Navya-Nyāya’s language of limitors, and what it was built to do
Every few months someone tells me that Navya-Nyāya was "Indian predicate logic". I'd like to test that claim with people who know Frege better than I do. The school is usually dated from Gaṅgeśa's Tattvacintāmaṇi in the fourteenth century. What Gaṅgeśa and…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
What Ibn al-Haytham actually did, and why “father of the scientific method” overstates it
Every few weeks someone sends me a graphic declaring that Ibn al-Haytham invented the scientific method centuries before Bacon. I understand the impulse. The standard Western story did put the origins of experimental practice far too late. But the slogan replaces one…
Started by Layla Sfeir5 replies -
Trustee or plain citizen? Nasr’s khalifa and Leopold’s land community
A Persian garden is a strange object: entirely human-made, geometric, irrigated by channels that took enormous labour, and yet everyone who walks in feels that it is a picture of something given, not imposed. I've been reading two environmental thinkers who seem…
Started by Reza Tehrani5 replies -
The Abhidharma was the most thorough reductionism ever attempted. Was it right?
I taught chemistry for years, and when I first studied the Abhidhamma I recognised something familiar: a periodic table of experience. The Abhidharma traditions analyse everything a person is into ultimate constituents, dhammas: momentary events of consciousness, mental factors, material qualities. In…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara4 replies -
Prophet and philosopher in al-Fārābī: one truth in two languages, or a ranking of believers?
I teach history in Fes, and al-Fārābī is the author I give my older students when they tell me philosophy and religion must be enemies. But I've started to wonder whether his reconciliation is as friendly as it looks. As I understand…
Started by Youssef Berrada6 replies -
Al-Shaybani’s siyar and the scholastics reached civilian immunity separately
In retirement I have been reading Majid Khadduri's 1966 translation of al-Shaybani's siyar, published as The Islamic Law of Nations. Al-Shaybani (749–805) was a student of Abu Hanifa, and his work on the siyar is one of the earliest systematic treatments of…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
A scripture with no author: what Mīmāṃsā does to the intention debate
The Western argument about artistic intention assumes there is an author whose mind we either consult or ignore. My tradition has a case where, on its own account, there is no author at all. Pūrva Mīmāṃsā holds that the Veda is apauruṣeya:…
Started by Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya4 replies -
Integrity, proportion, radiance: does Aquinas have a theory of beauty or just three words?
In a seminar on Aquinas we hit the passage everyone quotes on beauty: Summa theologiae I, question 39, article 8, where he says beauty requires three things: integrity or perfection (things that are lacking are ugly for that reason), due proportion or…
Started by Aoife KilbrideReply first (no replies yet) -
Devadatta is fat but never eats by day: is Mīmāṃsā “postulation” just inference to the best explanation?
When I read about sources of knowledge comparatively, I like to point out that the European and Indian debates ask different questions. The European one asks which source does the real work, senses or reason. The Indian one asks how many irreducible…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
‘Illa, kāraṇa, gù: what each tradition’s word for ’cause’ lets it ask
I've been thinking about how the translators of the ninth and tenth centuries handled Aristotle's aitia. They used 'illa and sabab, and here is the interesting part: 'illa already had, or soon acquired, a second life in law. In Islamic jurisprudence, the…
Started by Layla Sfeir6 replies -
Thirty-one years in the courts: legal causation is not physical causation, and should not be
For thirty-one years I reported on the courts of Lahore for a newspaper, the last ten mostly from the sessions courts. In retirement I am reading the jurisprudence I only skimmed in those years, and causation is where philosophy and the courtroom…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan4 replies -
When rhetoric and poetry were counted as logic: the Arabic Organon and al-Jāḥiẓ on eloquence
I keep a secondhand bookshop off Mutanabbi Street. People come in for poetry far more often than for logic, and they are surprised when I tell them that for centuries the two were shelved together. In the Arabic tradition, following late-antique practice,…
Started by Zainab Kadhim5 replies -
Two people with the same income and different lives: a wheelchair user’s case for capabilities
I want to make a case from my own life for why Amartya Sen's question, "equality of what?", is the right one. Imagine two people in Amman with exactly the same income. One walks. I don't. To get to the same meeting…
Started by Dima Nasser4 replies -
The Buddhist answer to ‘what makes a life go well’ refuses the shape of the question
Most theories of well-being name a good to pursue: pleasure, the satisfaction of desire, a list of objective goods, the development of human excellence, a life of virtuous activity. Even asceticism names one, freedom from appetite. The teaching I have followed for…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara5 replies -
“But for the defendant’s act”: thirty-one years of counterfactuals from the courtroom
For three decades I reported on judgments that turned on sentences of the form "had the accused not done X, the deceased would not have died". I never asked what such a sentence is. It cannot be checked: the accused did do…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
Qiyās, kal va-chomer and legal analogy: defeasible reasoning with centuries of rules
The reasoning I heard most often from the bench, in all my years in court, was neither deduction nor statistics. It was analogy: this case resembles that one in the respect that matters, so it should be decided the same way. Islamic…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies