Format
Discussion
An open thread on any idea
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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 -
I do tax returns. When a colleague gets a different total, should I move halfway?
I prepare tax returns for small businesses. Last week a colleague and I each worked through the same client's figures. I got one total; she got a total about two hundred dollars higher. We are equally experienced, equally careful, neither of us…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal4 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 -
Testimony as an information channel: Nyāya’s śabda next to Dretske
I've been reading Dretske for a seminar alongside the Nyāya Sūtra, and I think they illuminate each other on testimony in a way neither does alone. Nyāya counts four means of knowing (pramāṇa): perception, inference, comparison, and śabda, word or testimony. The…
Started by Meera Kulkarni3 replies -
Does ‘atom’ in my physics class refer to what Dalton meant by it?
Last week one of the students I tutor for school-leaving exams asked, half joking, whether Dalton was "wrong about atoms or right about something else". It is a better question than it sounds. Dalton's atoms were indivisible. A few generations later Thomson…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha3 replies -
Iqbal’s khudi and Nietzsche’s Übermensch: influence or polemic?
Iqbal's Persian poem Asrar-i-Khudi (1915), translated by R. A. Nicholson as The Secrets of the Self (1920), makes the self, khudi, the centre of his philosophy. The self must be strengthened, disciplined and creatively asserted, not dissolved in mystical annihilation. Western readers…
Started by Hamza Qureshi4 replies -
The kalam cosmological argument: what the mutakallimun actually argued
The argument that William Lane Craig revived in The Kalam Cosmological Argument (1979) has three steps: whatever begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore the universe has a cause. The name comes from kalam, Islamic theology. Al-Kindi…
Started by Omar Ragab4 replies -
Does quantum indeterminacy help free will at all?
People sometimes argue that because quantum mechanics is indeterministic, there's room for free will. Having studied physics, I'm sceptical. First, randomness isn't freedom. If my decision depends on a random quantum event, it isn't more mine than if it were determined. Second,…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha4 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 -
Langar, the Shabbat table and Confucius’s sauce: what does eating together do?
The langar, where I help out at our gurdwara in Surrey, goes back to Guru Nanak and was made central by the gurus who followed: a free kitchen where everyone, whatever their caste, faith or status, sits on the floor in the…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal6 replies -
Mulla Sadra’s substantial motion: is everything changing at the level of substance?
For Aristotle, motion happens in a few categories only: quantity (growth), quality (a leaf turning red), and place. Substance doesn't move; it's the stable subject of change. When one substance becomes another, that's generation and corruption, not motion. Mulla Sadra disagreed. His…
Started by Reza Tehrani4 replies -
Ibn Khaldun’s asabiyya and the rise and fall of states
The central concept of the Muqaddimah is asabiyya, usually translated "group feeling" or "solidarity". Ibn Khaldun argues that groups living hard lives on the margins of civilisation, often nomadic or tribal, develop strong solidarity. That solidarity lets them conquer settled states. Once…
Started by Youssef Berrada4 replies -
Night shifts and Epictetus: the dichotomy of control in a care home
The Enchiridion opens by dividing things into those up to us (our judgments, impulses, desires and aversions) and those not up to us (our bodies, property, reputation, office). Epictetus says that suffering comes from treating the second kind as though it were…
Started by Elin Hedqvist4 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 -
Rasa and catharsis: is tasting an emotion the same as purging it?
I grew up with rasa theory the way some people grow up with grammar. Recently I read Aristotle's Poetics for a class and was told that catharsis is "the Greek version of rasa". I don't think it is, and I want to…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
The Nyaya five-membered syllogism versus Aristotle’s three
I've recently started comparing two traditions of logic. The Nyāya inference for others (parārthānumāna) has five members: Thesis (pratijñā): the hill has fire. Reason (hetu): because it has smoke. Example (udāharaṇa): wherever there is smoke, there is fire, as in a kitchen.…
Started by Vikram Sethi4 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 -
Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste as political philosophy
In 1936 B. R. Ambedkar was invited to give the presidential address at the annual conference of the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal, an anti-caste Hindu reform group in Lahore. When the organisers saw the text, they asked him to remove parts, he refused, and…
Started by Deepa Kartha4 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 -
Predictive processing and the Buddhist idea of constructed perception
In cognitive science, the predictive processing framework (Andy Clark's Surfing Uncertainty, 2016; Jakob Hohwy's The Predictive Mind, 2013) says the brain is constantly generating predictions about incoming sensory signals, and what we perceive is largely the brain's best guess, corrected by prediction…
Started by Priya Raghavan4 replies -
Jayarāśi and the Cārvāka skeptics: India’s most radical doubters
The Cārvāka or Lokāyata school is usually summarised as Indian materialism: only perception is a valid means of knowledge, there's no afterlife, enjoy life while it lasts. Most of what we know comes from their opponents' summaries. But one genuine Lokāyata text…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 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 -
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 -
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 -
Hacking’s test for reality: if you can spray it, it’s real. Does that work for genes?
Ian Hacking, in Representing and Intervening (1983), argued that we should stop expecting theories to settle what exists. Look at the laboratory instead. Experimenters spray electrons at a target to change its charge. They use electrons as tools, reliably, to investigate something…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo4 replies -
Plato called my trade a knack. Why did philosophy decide taste and smell don’t count?
I've started reading the philosophers on food because I'm tired of being told it's ‘just subjective’ by people who have never had to fix a split sauce on a Friday night. What I found surprised me. In the Gorgias, Socrates sorts cookery…
Started by Joel D'Souza6 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 -
Nine countries in one kitchen and no agreement on salt: can food be judged like art?
Every one of my cooks arrived knowing exactly how much salt, sour and heat a dish needs, and every one of them knew something different. My Keralite cooks find the Lebanese lentil soup timid. The Filipino cooks find my Goan vindaloo too…
Started by Joel D'Souza4 replies