Format
Discussion
An open thread on any idea
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Syādvāda is not a seven-valued logic, and treating it as one loses the point
I grew up Jain, so I've been hearing about anekāntavāda since before I could read. Lately I keep seeing syādvāda described online as "the ancient Indian seven-valued logic", usually in the same breath as fuzzy logic. I'd like to explain why that…
Started by Hetal Shah5 replies -
I make cedar doors. Am I an artist, a craftsman, or is that the wrong question?
Tourists photograph my work and call it art. Gallery people, when they come, call it craft, and they say it a little differently. I read recently that this division is young. Before the eighteenth century in Europe, making was one category judged…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani5 replies -
Drug trials on animals, seen from behind a Jain pharmacy counter
Every few weeks a customer at our family pharmacy, usually an older Jain auntie, asks me whether a medicine was tested on animals. The honest answer is nearly always yes, somewhere along the line, because regulators have long required it. Ahimsa, as…
Started by Hetal Shah5 replies -
Wiredu’s consensus politics and the epistemology of disagreement: is agreement evidence?
Kwasi Wiredu argued that traditional Akan political decision-making aimed at consensus rather than majority rule. Councils of elders would talk, sometimes for a long time, until they reached a decision everyone could accept. He proposed that modern African states might learn from…
Started by Kwame Asante5 replies -
A door-maker reads Hume’s Dialogues: the design argument from the workshop
This one comes from the workshop. I have been reading Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in a French translation, because people kept telling me the design argument is about things like what I make. The argument says: the world is like a…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani5 replies -
Nobody from our founding team is left. Is it still the same company?
I left the startup I co-founded about eighteen months ago, burnt out. Last week I visited. The twelve people who started it are all gone, including me. The product has been rewritten twice. The office moved from a flat in Andheri to…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies -
Cārvāka and Epicurus, two ancient materialists at a deathbed
A question from the bedside. Epicurus helped me think about death without flinching: in the Letter to Menoeceus he says death is nothing to us, because where death is, we are not, and where we are, death is not. I've never repeated…
Started by Nadia Haddad5 replies -
Orí and the Stoic cylinder: does a destiny you chose make you more free or less?
In Yoruba thought, before birth each person chooses an orí, literally a "head", meaning the inner self that carries one's destiny. One of the words for destiny, àkúnlẹ̀yàn, means something like "that which was chosen kneeling". You chose it, but you cannot…
Started by Titilayo Adeyemi5 replies -
My model has ‘the average borrower’. Nobody is the average borrower. What am I talking about?
I build credit-scoring models for a mobile-money company in Nairobi. Every week I write sentences like "the average borrower in this segment repays within 23 days" or "the typical applicant has 2.4 active SIM cards". Everyone understands them. No borrower repays in…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga5 replies -
Tagore would not define art, and asked why we make it at all
My father sang Baul songs, and Tagore loved the Bauls: he collected their songs and admired Lalon. So I came to Tagore's lecture "What Is Art?" in his book Personality (1917) with my father's voice in my head. What I like is…
Started by Farhana Akter5 replies -
Zhaozhou’s dog, Dōgen, and a robotics engineer: does a robot have buddha-nature?
A small puzzle from my temple that connects to the threads here about machines. The first case of the Gateless Gate collection is the famous one: a monk asks Zhaozhou whether a dog has buddha-nature, and Zhaozhou answers "Mu" (in Chinese, wu).…
Started by Aiko Tanabe5 replies -
Before the Axial Age: the Nāsadīya hymn, Egyptian instructions and the gradualist objection
One of the first hymns my grandfather made me memorise was the Nāsadīya Sūkta of the Ṛgveda, the hymn of creation. It begins before being and non-being and ends with doubt: who truly knows how this arose? Perhaps the one who watches…
Started by Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya5 replies -
Why debates about first principles never end: notes from the high-school tournament circuit
I coach debate at a public high school in Portland, and after years of judging I've noticed a pattern. Rounds about facts resolve. Someone has better evidence, or the other side drops a point, and the judge can decide. Rounds about fundamentals…
Started by Sam Ellery5 replies -
Why does mathematics invented for its own sake keep turning up in physics?
Every year a student asks me what the point of complex numbers is. I tell them that for a long time mathematicians themselves treated them as a formal convenience, a trick for solving cubic equations, and that today quantum mechanics cannot be…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies -
Twelve-pointed stars in cedar: what is Islamic geometric pattern actually for?
My father taught me to lay out a star pattern for a ceiling with nothing but a compass, a straightedge and a cord. You start with a circle, divide it, draw lines that pass through the divisions, and the twelve-pointed star appears…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani5 replies -
Adab, and the humanism that rarely gets the name
Much of my working time goes to books from a culture that, in the ninth to twelfth centuries, was organised around an ideal called adab. The word is hard to translate. It can mean manners and etiquette, and it can mean literature.…
Started by Mona Fathy5 replies -
Murdoch’s mother-in-law: is moral change mostly a matter of learning to see someone differently?
I've been rereading Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of Good (1970) and I keep coming back to the example in its first essay. A mother-in-law, M, finds her son's wife, D, tiresome: a bit common, too familiar, juvenile. M behaves perfectly correctly throughout.…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
We were taught “control what you can control” in the army. Was that Stoicism?
In my last years in the army, "resilience training" was introduced, and the instructors sometimes quoted Epictetus. Control what you can control. Let the rest go. Some officers had read about James Stockdale, the American pilot who was a prisoner of war…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun5 replies -
What a prison reading class taught me about reading an ancient text for the first time
Twice a week I volunteer at a men's prison in Nairobi, teaching a reading class. Over two years philosophy has quietly taken over the syllabus, and the text that changed everything was Plato's Apology: Socrates on trial for his life. I've learned…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma5 replies -
Frankfurt’s unwilling addict and the men in my prison reading class
Last month my prison reading class read a summary of Harry Frankfurt's essay "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person", and it landed harder than anything we've read. Frankfurt distinguishes first-order desires (I want a drink) from second-order desires…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma5 replies -
Gundissalinus didn’t read Arabic: philosophy translated through spoken Castilian
The mechanics of translation are my daily bread, so I can't stop thinking about a detail I've just learned about the twelfth-century Toledo translations. Dominicus Gundissalinus, the archdeacon who put Ibn Sina's work on the soul and parts of his Healing into…
Started by Tal Rosen5 replies -
Rasa and ordinary emotion: why can grief in a play be a kind of delight?
Rasa theory seems to answer a question the emotion threads here haven't asked: why do we enjoy sad things? In Bharata's Nāṭyaśāstra, rasa is produced when the causes of an emotion (the situation and characters), its outward expressions and its passing accompanying…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies -
In the five Confucian relationships, friendship is the odd one out. Why is it there?
My students memorise Mencius's list of the five relationships for exams: affection between father and son, rightness between ruler and minister, distinction between husband and wife, proper order between elder and younger, and trust (xin) between friends. They memorise it and never…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Watsuji’s betweenness, Akan personhood and Confucian roles: is the relation more basic than the person?
When I retired after forty years designing bridges, I was surprised by how much of “me” went with the job. I did not lose a role; I seemed to lose a person. A friend at the temple handed me Watsuji's Ethics and…
Started by Aiko Tanabe5 replies -
Affirming the consequent on a hospital ward
My nephew is a medical student in Cairo, and listening to him describe his ward rounds I've realised that his teachers spend a lot of their time correcting a logical fallacy, and also committing it. A student says: if this patient had…
Started by Omar Ragab5 replies -
Thirty-four years of anxious calls about screening results, and base rates still trip me up
At the Leith surgery where I worked for a long time, the call I dreaded most was not the one about a cancer diagnosis. It was the one about a positive screening test that probably meant nothing. The arithmetic is simple once…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
Translating “being” into Vietnamese: are some metaphysical disputes artefacts of grammar?
I translate French philosophy into Vietnamese, and the hardest word is être. French uses one verb for three jobs: "the sky is blue" (predication), "God is" (existence), and "Paris is the capital" (identity). Vietnamese splits them. For identity and classification we use…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo5 replies -
Knowledge by presence: does Suhrawardi show why experience resists description?
I edit films in Tehran, which means my working day is spent deciding what time and space should feel like to someone else. The one thing I cannot edit is what it feels like to be me watching the cut. Suhrawardi, the…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam5 replies -
Thirty-four years in a GP surgery: is a patient with advanced dementia still the same person?
I managed a GP surgery in Leith for thirty-four years, and the question I heard most often across the desk in the last decade was some version of "she isn't the person she was". It was said by husbands, daughters, neighbours, sometimes…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
Sextus, Nāgārjuna and Wang Chong within about a century: one sceptical moment, or three projects?
Between treks I read about the history of philosophy, and I came across a striking claim: that in roughly a century or so, around the second century CE, three traditions with no documented contact each produced a great critic of confident assertion.…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung5 replies