Format
Discussion
An open thread on any idea
-
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 -
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 -
‘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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
“Because that’s how it works”: when is that an explanation and when is it a refusal?
New cooks ask why a lot. Why rest the meat? Why salt the pasta water and not the sauce at the start? Why does this sauce split if you rush it? When I was an apprentice in Goa my chef answered almost…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies -
My cooks are free to leave, in theory. What republican liberty sees in a kitchen
I came from Goa to cook in Dubai fifteen years ago, and I'm proud of how we treat people in my kitchen now. Nobody is shouted at. Overtime is paid. When someone's mother is ill, we find a way to send him…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies -
I have grown cocoa for thirty years and never seen chocolate made. How do I know that is where it goes?
Last week my son sent me an article that said most of what any of us knows, we know only because somebody told us. I laughed, then I thought about it while I was splitting pods. I have grown cocoa for thirty…
Started by Akosua Mensah5 replies -
Why does tax feel like theft to some of my clients and not to others?
Two of my tax clients run nearly identical businesses: same size, same bracket, similar families. Every April one of them tells me, only half joking, that the government is robbing him. The other says, with no irony, that tax is the membership…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal5 replies -
Monks take the great vows, I take the small ones: is a graded ethic a cop-out?
Jain ethics has five vows: non-harm, truthfulness, not stealing, sexual restraint and non-possession. Monks and nuns take them as the great vows, absolutely. Laypeople like me take them as the small vows, in a limited form suited to a householder's life. So…
Started by Hetal Shah5 replies -
Han Feizi’s case for clear law, read in Lahore
I've been reading Han Feizi with more sympathy than I expected. His central insight about law is one I see confirmed every week in our courts. Where the rules are unclear, or applied differently depending on who you are, the powerful win…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
Camus and the Buddhists: two ways of refusing the question of life’s meaning
I translate French philosophy into Vietnamese, and I'm finishing a new translation of The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). It opens with the famous sentence that there is only one really serious philosophical problem, suicide: judging whether life is worth living. And it…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo5 replies -
Kirat karni: is honest work a form of worship, or is that just a nice story about work?
This question follows me from the office to the langar. Guru Nanak's teaching is often summed up in three practices: naam japna, remembering the divine Name; kirat karni, earning by honest work; and vand chakna, sharing what you have. There's a story…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal5 replies -
A philosopher says there are no tables, only particles arranged tablewise. I make tables
A customer's son is studying philosophy in Rabat. While I was fitting their cedar ceiling he told me about a book called Material Beings by Peter van Inwagen. As far as I understood him, van Inwagen thinks that when many small things…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani5 replies -
The floating man is not the cogito: Ibn Sina and Descartes compared
Ibn Sina's "floating man" appears in the De Anima of the Shifa' and again in the Isharat. Imagine a person created all at once, fully mature, suspended in the air, eyes covered, limbs apart so they don't touch, with no sensation at…
Started by Layla Sfeir5 replies -
Marx’s alienation and the gig economy
In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx describes four aspects of alienated labour: the worker is alienated from the product, from the activity of working, from their "species-being" (our nature as freely creative producers), and from other people. Delivery riders…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
Shankara’s rope and snake: what kind of “unreality” is maya?
The most famous image in Advaita Vedanta: at dusk a man sees a rope and takes it for a snake. He is frightened, he may even run. When a lamp is brought, the snake vanishes, and he sees that there was only…
Started by Arjun Iyer5 replies -
Can I keep Stoic advice and leave Stoic determinism behind?
The first line of Epictetus's Handbook changed how I work: some things are up to us and some are not, and suffering comes from confusing the two. But I've just learned that Stoic ethics isn't separable from Stoic physics in the way…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies -
The recommendation letter that says nothing bad: Grice and the art of faint praise
Every autumn I write about forty college recommendation letters. This year a colleague showed me a letter she'd received for a student teacher. It said, in full, that the candidate was always punctual, that her handwriting on the board was very clear,…
Started by Keisha Monroe5 replies -
Guo Xiang said things are ‘self-so’. Does that mean uncaused, or caused by everything?
After my question about non-being, a friend at the park told me to read Guo Xiang, who wrote the commentary on the Zhuangzi that shaped every later edition. (There is an old story that he took much of it from an earlier…
Started by Liu Mingqiao5 replies -
Data is not knowledge: what Dretske’s account says about my credit-scoring models
At work we decide who gets a small loan from patterns in phone use: how regularly someone tops up airtime, how many contacts they call, how their balance moves through the month. Our marketing calls this "knowing the customer". I've been reading…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga5 replies -
Capoeira is a game, a fight, a dance and a memory: which of Caillois’s boxes does it go in?
In capoeira Angola we don't say we fight. We say we play: jogar capoeira. Two people enter the roda, the circle of players and musicians, and the berimbau sets the pace. Somebody once told me Huizinga thought play was older than culture,…
Started by Jorge Bonfim5 replies -
One night at the delivery bed, tested against five traditions’ answers to what makes an act right
Three weeks ago a mother I was sitting with delivered a baby who was clearly unwell. The doctor had been called and was twenty minutes away. The mother, exhausted, held my hand and asked: “Is my baby all right?” I did not…
Started by Farhana Akter5 replies -
I banned fallacy names from my debate team for a month. Here’s what happened
My high-school debaters can name about thirty fallacies, mostly in Latin. They use them the way some people use swear words: as a way of ending an exchange rather than continuing it. "That's ad hominem." "That's a slippery slope." Judges nod. Nobody…
Started by Sam Ellery5 replies -
Automated cranes at the port, and Ellul’s idea that efficiency decides for us
Terminals around the world, including mine in Marseille, are moving to cranes operated remotely from an office, and some yards are fully automated. Management's word for it is "inevitable". The union's word is "choice". I want to think about which word is…
Started by Hugo Marchetti5 replies -
Newton da Costa and why paraconsistency has a Brazilian accent
Newton da Costa died in 2024, and I've wanted to write something about him for the forum since. For anyone outside Brazil: he built the first systematic paraconsistent logics, logics in which a theory can contain a contradiction without every statement becoming…
Started by Ana Clara Ferreira5 replies -
Contextual integrity explains why my aunt’s clinic group chat felt wrong
My aunt is a nurse at a small clinic outside Kuala Lumpur. Last month she showed me the staff group chat, where a colleague had posted a photo of a patient's rash to ask the doctor whether it looked like shingles. No…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies -
A company can be sued but cannot be tripped over. In what sense does it exist?
Last month I sat through four hearings in my family's case against a company. It had a registered office, a seal, a board, and a lawyer almost as tiresome as ours. What it did not have was a body. You cannot trip…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
Kūkai and Bhartṛhari: when a word is part of what is real rather than a label for it
Last spring I visited Kōyasan, the mountain monastery Kūkai founded, and sat in on the morning chanting. I don't understand Sanskrit and barely understand the Sino-Japanese readings, but it was obvious the monks didn't treat the syllables as labels for something else.…
Started by Rin Matsuda5 replies