Format
Discussion
An open thread on any idea
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Fes, al-Qarawiyyin, and how medieval students learned to argue
Al-Qarawiyyin is a short walk from my school. Founded in 859 by Fatima al-Fihri, it's often described as one of the oldest continuously operating institutions of learning in the world. What interests me is how teaching worked. Students learned not only texts…
Started by Youssef Berrada2 replies -
Dōgen’s “being-time”: is time something things have, or something they are?
Dōgen (1200–1253), founder of the Sōtō Zen school in Japan, wrote a short and very strange essay in 1240 called "Uji", usually translated "Being-Time", which became part of his Shōbōgenzō. Its central claim is that time is not a container things exist…
Started by Reza Tehrani2 replies -
Does anger ever help? Seneca’s On Anger versus Aristotle
Aristotle, in Nicomachean Ethics IV.5, praises the person who gets angry at the right things, with the right people, to the right degree, at the right time. Not to be angry when you should be is a kind of slavishness. Seneca's On…
Started by Elif Yıldız3 replies -
The sorites paradox and my pile of exam scripts
It's marking season. A script with 33 marks out of 100 passes; one with 32 fails. My students ask: "Sir, what's the real difference between 32 and 33?" And I can't really answer. That's the sorites paradox, which goes back to Eubulides.…
Started by Vikram Sethi2 replies -
The translation movement: what was gained and lost between Greek, Syriac and Arabic?
Between the eighth and tenth centuries, a huge body of Greek philosophy, medicine and science was translated into Arabic, mostly in Baghdad. Many of the translators were Syriac-speaking Christians, and texts often passed through Syriac on the way. Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809–873)…
Started by Layla Sfeir3 replies -
Patients who pray: faith, placebo, and respect at the bedside
Many of the patients at my hospital pray. Some ask the staff to pray with them. Some refuse treatment until they've consulted a sheikh, or a priest. Some say their recovery is entirely God's will and the doctor's role is incidental. There…
Started by Omar Ragab2 replies -
Does a deterministic program “choose”?
A chess engine searches millions of positions, scores them and plays the best move. We naturally say it "chose" the knight move. Yet it's fully deterministic: same position, same settings, same move every time. Spinoza thought our sense of free will comes…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen4 replies -
Split-brain cases and the unity of consciousness
In the 1960s, Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga studied patients whose corpus callosum had been cut to treat severe epilepsy. In experiments where information was shown to only one hemisphere, the patients sometimes acted as if there were two separate streams of…
Started by Priya Raghavan3 replies -
The Gita’s karma yoga: acting without attachment to results
The Bhagavad Gītā's teaching on karma yoga, especially in chapters 2 and 3, says roughly: you have a right to your action, but never to its fruits; don't let the fruits be your motive, and don't be attached to inaction either. Gandhi…
Started by Rohan Desai3 replies -
Łukasiewicz, the sea battle, and why three-valued logic was born in Lwów
In De Interpretatione 9 Aristotle considers the sentence "there will be a sea battle tomorrow". If it is already true today, isn't the battle already necessary? And if so, isn't deliberation pointless? Around 1920 Jan Łukasiewicz, working in the Lwów–Warsaw school founded…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak3 replies -
Arendt’s “Truth and Politics”, read in a newsroom
In 1967 Arendt published "Truth and Politics" in The New Yorker. She distinguishes rational truth (mathematics, philosophy) from factual truth (what happened). Factual truth is the more fragile, because it depends on testimony and records, and it is always vulnerable to being…
Started by Sana Rizvi3 replies -
Kierkegaard’s leap of faith: irrational, or beyond reason?
In Fear and Trembling (1843), written under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard considers Abraham, who is ready to sacrifice Isaac at God's command. Johannes can't understand Abraham. He calls this a "teleological suspension of the ethical": Abraham's relation to God goes…
Started by Aoife Kilbride3 replies -
Al-Farabi’s Virtuous City and Plato’s Republic
Al-Farabi (c. 870–950) is sometimes called the "Second Teacher", after Aristotle. His Principles of the Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City combines Neoplatonic metaphysics with a political philosophy that owes a great deal to Plato's Republic. The virtuous city is…
Started by Layla Sfeir3 replies -
Camus begins with suicide. Was he right to start there?
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) opens by saying the fundamental philosophical question is whether life is worth living. Everything else, he says, comes afterwards. The absurd, for Camus, isn't in us or in the world but in the confrontation between our demand…
Started by Claire Dubois4 replies -
Epictetus was a slave and I drive the 413. What counts as ‘up to us’ at work?
I drive the 413 across Ankara. Eight hours, two breaks, roughly three hundred passengers a day. I listen to philosophy lectures between stops, and Epictetus is the one I keep coming back to. The Handbook opens by dividing things into what is…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu5 replies -
Diotima’s ladder: does loving the Form of Beauty make particular people disposable?
In the Symposium (210a–212a), Socrates reports Diotima's account of the ascent of love. The lover moves from one beautiful body to all beautiful bodies, then to beautiful souls, to practices and laws, to kinds of knowledge, and finally to Beauty itself. Gregory…
Started by Giulia Ferrante3 replies -
Zhuangzi’s happy fish: can we know what others feel?
In chapter 17 of the Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi and his friend the logician Huizi are strolling on a bridge over the river Hao. Zhuangzi remarks that the minnows darting about are happy. Huizi objects: you're not a fish, so how do you know…
Started by Claire Dubois3 replies -
What Arendt actually meant by “the banality of evil”
The phrase comes from the subtitle of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). It is often misread as meaning that evil is ordinary, or unimportant, or that anyone would have done the same. As I read her,…
Started by Henrike Vogel4 replies -
Emptiness is not nothingness: common misreadings of śūnyatā
I keep seeing "emptiness" in Buddhist philosophy explained as "nothing exists" or "everything is an illusion". That's exactly the view Nāgārjuna rejects as nihilism. For Madhyamaka, things are empty of intrinsic nature (svabhāva). They exist, but only dependently: on causes and conditions,…
Started by Meera Kulkarni3 replies -
Gandhi’s satyagraha as philosophy, not just a tactic
Gandhi coined the word satyāgraha, "holding firmly to truth", in South Africa around 1906–08. He distinguished it from "passive resistance", which he saw as the weapon of the weak. Satyāgraha requires the resister to accept suffering without retaliating, aiming to convert the…
Started by Anand Kurup3 replies -
Did al-Ghazali’s Incoherence kill philosophy in the Islamic world?
A story you'll still find in textbooks: al-Ghazali attacked philosophy around 1095, Ibn Rushd's defence was ignored in the East, and after that Islamic philosophy died while Europe picked up the torch. The story is false, and I want to collect the…
Started by Layla Sfeir4 replies -
Is love a choice, or something that happens to us?
In poetry, love is almost always something that happens to you: you "fall", you're struck, you're helpless. But in many families and religious traditions, love is described as a commitment you choose and keep choosing. Harry Frankfurt, in The Reasons of Love…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
Dream arguments East and West: Descartes, Zhuangzi and the Yoga Vasistha
Three treatments of the same worry. Descartes, Meditations I (1641): there are no sure signs to distinguish waking from dreaming, so the senses can't give certain knowledge. He uses it as a method, a step towards certainty. Zhuangzi, chapter 2: Zhuangzi dreams…
Started by Arjun Iyer3 replies -
Hart’s “internal point of view”, seen from a courtroom in Lahore
Hart distinguishes being obliged to do something (as when a gunman demands your money) from having an obligation (as under a legal rule). The difference lies in the internal point of view: officials, especially judges, accept the rule of recognition as a…
Started by Hamza Qureshi3 replies -
Ubuntu and personhood: Menkiti’s communitarian view
I'm finally reading the African philosophy my physics course never mentioned. The Nguni saying behind ubuntu is usually translated as "a person is a person through other persons". John Mbiti's African Religions and Philosophy (1969) put the idea in the form: I…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha4 replies -
The firing squad and my loan defaults: when does surviving need explaining?
In credit scoring we have a problem called reject inference. We only ever see repayment data for people we approved. The people we rejected never got a loan, so we never learn whether they would have repaid. If you're not careful, your…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga5 replies -
I caught myself apologising to the chatbot that took over half my job
I work in a call centre, and since spring the first line of every complaint goes to a chatbot. I only get the callers it gives up on, who arrive already furious. Last week, on a dead night shift, I had a…
Started by Gemma Pritchard6 replies -
Founders and Stoicism: real philosophy or corporate self-help?
In the startup world, Stoicism is everywhere. Podcasts, newsletters, Marcus Aurelius quotes on office walls. I got into it during a bad year, and honestly it helped. But I'm starting to wonder if what we're doing is Stoicism at all. The startup…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies -
Ibn Khaldun on taxation: a fourteenth-century Laffer curve?
In the Muqaddimah (1377) Ibn Khaldun observes that at the beginning of a dynasty, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments, while at the end of a dynasty it yields a small revenue from large assessments. Arthur Laffer himself credited Ibn…
Started by Javier Ferrandis3 replies -
Spinoza’s God as Nature: an engineer’s reading of Ethics Part I
I came to the Ethics (published 1677, after Spinoza's death) because of the geometrical form: definitions, axioms, propositions, demonstrations. It looks like a specification document. Part I argues that substance is what is in itself and conceived through itself; that there can't…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen5 replies