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Discussion
An open thread on any idea
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Wu wei for burnt-out founders: what did Laozi actually mean?
After Stoicism, I've been reading the Daodejing. One idea that hits hard is wu wei, usually translated "non-action" or "effortless action". Chapter 48 says that in pursuing learning you add something every day, but in pursuing the Dao you let something go…
Started by Rohan Desai1 reply -
Sanskrit grammar as philosophy: Bhartṛhari on word and meaning
Bhartṛhari (around the fifth century) wrote the Vākyapadīya, "On Sentences and Words", a work of grammar that became a full philosophy of language. Some key ideas: Sphoṭa: meaning isn't built up from individual sounds; there's an indivisible linguistic unit, manifested by the…
Started by Meera Kulkarni1 reply -
I’ve stopped translating qi as “energy”, and Zhang Zai is the reason
In our taiji group in the park, the younger members say qi means "energy". It sounds scientific and it is easy to say. I used to say it too. After a winter with Zhang Zai, I have stopped. Zhang Zai, in the…
Started by Liu MingqiaoReply first (no replies yet) -
The Cost of Being Understood: Why We Cannot Spend Our Whole Life Explaining Ourselves
To be understood is a human desire—not a human entitlement Human beings do not merely want to speak. We want what we say to arrive intact in another mind. We want our reasons to be seen in the proportion in which we…
Started by Syed Raheel ShahzadReply first (no replies yet) -
“But what if it was you?” Trying Hare’s universalisability test on my children
My two children are eight and eleven, and they argue about fairness constantly, mostly over the last piece of anything. Last week I read about R. M. Hare's prescriptivism in an introductory book, and I decided to try it at home. As…
Started by Thamarai RamanReply first (no replies yet) -
Zhuangzi and Huizi on the bridge: doubt about other minds, or a joke?
Every morning after taiji I sit by the river in the park, and this story comes back to me. It is in the "Autumn Floods" chapter of the Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi and his friend Huizi are strolling on a bridge over the Hao…
Started by Liu MingqiaoReply first (no replies yet) -
Mill’s harm principle: where does it actually draw the line?
Mill's On Liberty (1859) proposes one simple principle: the only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilised community, against their will, is to prevent harm to others. A person's own good is not a sufficient…
Started by Deepa KarthaReply first (no replies yet) -
Was plate tectonics a Kuhnian revolution? Geology as a test case
In discussions of Kuhn, the examples are nearly always from physics and astronomy. I wanted to test his picture on an earth-science revolution I know something about. Alfred Wegener proposed continental drift in the 1910s. He had real evidence: the fit of…
Started by Anand KurupReply first (no replies yet) -
Moral dumbfounding at a debate tournament: Haidt’s elephant and its rider
Most weekends I watch teenagers at debate tournaments decide what they believe in the first ten seconds and then spend forty minutes building reasons for it. Jonathan Haidt would not be surprised. His social intuitionist model, first set out in "The Emotional…
Started by Sam ElleryReply first (no replies yet) -
Davidson said there are no untranslatable conceptual schemes. A working translator is not so sure
A colleague recently sent me Donald Davidson's essay “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1974), with the note: “He proves your job is always possible.” As I understand it, Davidson attacks the idea that different languages or cultures might organise…
Started by Claire DuboisReply first (no replies yet) -
Diogenes was doing stand-up: the Cynic method as performance
I've just read the Diogenes stories in Diogenes Laertius, and I'm convinced the man was doing comedy, in the serious sense. Look at the famous ones. Plato defines a human as a featherless biped; Diogenes plucks a chicken, brings it to the…
Started by Gemma PritchardReply first (no replies yet) -
My kitchen friendships end when people change jobs. Were they only friendships of utility?
For fifteen years in kitchens the pattern has been the same. You work ten-hour services side by side with someone, you cover for each other, you eat together at midnight, you know about their kids and their visa problems. Then they move…
Started by Joel D'SouzaReply first (no replies yet) -
My agent called me an idealist. Which of the three idealisms was that?
Last week my agent told me I was "too much of an idealist" for turning down a corporate gig. Naturally I went home and looked the word up instead of reconsidering my finances. It turns out "idealist" has at least three meanings…
Started by Gemma PritchardReply first (no replies yet) -
Automated cranes at my port: freedom from drudgery, or the end of what gave the day shape?
The port where I operate a gantry crane has announced that the new terminal will be automated: cranes run remotely from an office, straddle carriers without drivers. Some of us will retrain to sit at screens. Most won't be needed. As a…
Started by Hugo MarchettiReply first (no replies yet) -
Mozi was wrong about music, but his question about it still stings
I play cello in a chamber ensemble in Seoul and teach children. I recently read the Mohist chapter "Against Music" and I can't stop arguing with it in my head. Mozi's argument, as I understand it: ordinary people have three great worries,…
Started by Moon Ha-eunReply first (no replies yet) -
Legal realism is not a claim about what exists, and lawyers should stop treating it as one
A small irritation from evenings spent arguing with lawyer friends in Lahore. They say "I'm a legal realist" to mean one of three things: that judges decide on their prejudices and then find reasons; that law is ultimately power; or that there…
Started by Hamza QureshiReply first (no replies yet) -
Translating śūnyatā into Vietnamese: why “không” keeps sliding into “nothing”
I translate philosophy into Vietnamese, and I have run into a problem that the English-language warnings about emptiness don't quite cover. The Sino-Vietnamese word for emptiness is không (空). In the Heart Sutra, which many Vietnamese Buddhists chant, form is emptiness and…
Started by Vũ Quốc BảoReply first (no replies yet) -
Advaita says the Self is not the doer. Is that an answer to the free will problem, or a way of leaving it?
I want to put my own tradition's answer on the free will question to the test, because I suspect it is either very deep or a polite evasion, and I can't decide which. The karmic traditions in India share a puzzle. Acts…
Started by Arjun IyerReply first (no replies yet) -
Naturalisms before the word: the Cārvākas, Wang Chong and Xunzi’s Heaven
I want to test the distinction this site keeps drawing between kinds of naturalism (ontological, methodological, ethical, epistemological) against three older figures who are often lumped together as "early naturalists". The Cārvākas (Lokāyata). Almost all of their own texts are lost; we…
Started by Arvind PoojaryReply first (no replies yet) -
Our neighborhood grant asked us to prove a mural was ‘art’, not ‘signage’
This spring our block association on the South Side applied for a small public-art grant to paint a mural on the side of a corner store. The design came from kids at the rec center and includes the store's name and the…
Started by Dana WhitfieldReply first (no replies yet) -
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) -
I use modal logic at work every day, and the engineers around me have no idea it was philosophy
Every day, the engineers I work with write properties like "on every path, whenever a request is issued, a grant eventually follows". In our notation that's something like AG(request → AF grant): A for "on all paths", G for "always", F for…
Started by Derek HollisReply first (no replies yet) -
Read the Republic with ‘citizen community’ in place of ‘state’ and the argument changes
Every year one of my students asks why we bother with Plato's Republic, since it's obviously a blueprint for a totalitarian state. I've started giving them an exercise that I'd like to share here. Take any English translation that renders polis as…
Started by Nikos TheodoridisReply first (no replies yet) -
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)
