Format
Discussion
An open thread on any idea
-
How should a journalist judge a study in a field she knows nothing about?
Last month, in a case I was covering, an expert witness gave evidence on a forensic technique I had never heard of, with total confidence and a long list of qualifications. The defence's expert said the technique was unreliable, with equal confidence…
Started by Sana Rizvi5 replies -
Objections first: what the scholastic quaestio could teach a modern seminar
This term I've been reading the Summa Theologiae properly for the first time, article by article, and what has struck me is not the conclusions but the shape. Every article begins with “It seems that…” followed by objections against the position Aquinas…
Started by Aoife Kilbride5 replies -
Neither filling nor drawing out: what the Analects and Xunzi think a learner is
My students in Taipei memorise the Analects for exams, which means they experience Confucian learning as the most extreme form of filling-up imaginable. I keep trying to show them that the texts themselves say something else. The Analects opens with learning and…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
One sustained note on the organ, and the case against beauty as proportion
This month I finally read Plotinus's treatise "On Beauty", the sixth of the first Ennead, and one argument has been sitting with me through every Mass. The old view, which my own tradition loved (Augustine's De Musica is full of it), says…
Started by Agnieszka Malinowska5 replies -
Genealogy and the genetic fallacy: can the history of a value ever count against it?
Every introductory logic course warns against the genetic fallacy: where a belief came from does not settle whether it is true. Your racist uncle may believe the earth is round, and it is. And yet a whole style of moral philosophy works…
Started by Johanna Reinhardt5 replies -
Do I see that an old woman is being humiliated, or do I infer it? Moral perception on a night shift
Last month, when I went with one of our residents to the hospital, a senior doctor spoke to her as if she were not there, discussing her bowels with a junior doctor across her bed. I did not reason my way to…
Started by Elin Hedqvist5 replies -
Frank Jackson gave up on Mary. Should the rest of us?
I came to philosophy from physics, and something about the knowledge argument has always interested me less than its history. Jackson's Mary knows every physical fact about colour vision, having lived her life in a black-and-white room. She leaves and sees a…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
Zakat is a claim on wealth, not a gift. What does that do to the charity versus justice debate?
Many debates about distributive justice I read, especially in English, assume a sharp line: justice is what can be demanded and enforced; charity is good but optional, a gift. Taxes for the first, donations for the second. Zakat doesn't sit comfortably on…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies -
Mencius’s child at the well, seen from a delivery room in Sylhet
I have worked on a maternity ward for nineteen years. Last month a friend lent me a translation of Mencius, and I stopped at the passage about the child at the well and read it three times. Mencius says that anyone who…
Started by Farhana Akter5 replies -
Is there a fact about how many people were in Fes one morning in 1200, if nobody recorded it?
My students love questions like this one. On a particular morning in the year 1200, there was some exact number of people inside the walls of our city. Nobody counted. No register survives, and no amount of future research will ever find…
Started by Youssef Berrada5 replies -
Anton Wilhelm Amo’s impassive mind: a better dualism than Descartes’s?
When the philosophy club I run at school reaches mind and body, I always start with Anton Wilhelm Amo, the philosopher born near Axim on the Gold Coast around 1703, taken to Germany as a child, educated at Halle and Wittenberg, and…
Started by Kwame Asante5 replies -
‘The Fact of Blackness’ or ‘The Lived Experience of the Black Man’? What a translation choice did to Fanon
Rereading Black Skin, White Masks (1952), I noticed something I'd missed for years: the fifth chapter has two different titles in English. Fanon's French is ‘L'expérience vécue du Noir’. The 1967 translation called it ‘The Fact of Blackness’. The 2008 translation calls…
Started by Sana Rizvi5 replies -
Reflective equilibrium or tidy prejudice? How a prison reading class changed my view on punishment
Two years ago I would have told you, without hesitation, that people should get what they deserve, and that a man who killed someone deserves to lose most of his life. I held that as a principle. I also had a strong…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma5 replies -
A thousand years of Buddhists and Vedāntins arguing about the self: failure or success?
Here is a question I keep returning to on long evenings. Something I read recently put it starkly. Vedānta says the innermost self is identical with ultimate reality. Buddhism says there is no permanent self at all. Two traditions, the same region,…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung5 replies -
Everyone already knew: what truth commissions teach about common knowledge
I spent eight years reporting on Colombia's peace process and the truth commission. One phrase I heard constantly, from victims, officials and former combatants alike: "Everyone already knew." And in a sense they did. People in the regions knew who had disappeared,…
Started by Andrés Zuluaga5 replies -
“Why did this happen to me?” What do we owe someone who asks?
Last month my cousin, a woman in her forties who has never smoked, was diagnosed with lung cancer. When I sat with her afterwards she asked: “Why did this happen to me?” I gave her a good answer, I thought, from what…
Started by Omar Ragab5 replies -
Every legal code I know contradicts itself somewhere, and courts still function
Every legal system I know contains provisions that conflict: a later statute that cuts across an earlier one, a general rule and a specific exception that both seem to apply, a constitutional provision in tension with an ordinary law. If classical logic…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
‘Killing robbers is not killing people’: the Later Mohists on inferences that fail
One passage in the Later Mohist texts seems to me to belong in any discussion of what predicate logic was invented to handle. In the chapter of the Mozi usually called the "Lesser Selection" (Xiaoqu), the Mohists discuss a kind of inference…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
Does a diagnosis name a real condition, or a useful bundle of symptoms?
I work as an interpreter at a hospital in Addis Ababa. Some diagnoses I translate every day feel like discoveries: a particular infection, caused by a particular organism, with a test that finds it. Others feel more like agreements. "Metabolic syndrome" is…
Started by Tsion Bekele5 replies -
Sincere and mistaken: what the memory research means for how we listen to victims
I have spent eight years covering the peace process in Colombia, which has meant listening to hundreds of people describe the worst days of their lives. Something has troubled me for a long time, and I'd like to think it through with…
Started by Andrés Zuluaga5 replies -
Fire and cotton in the Seventeenth Discussion, read beside Hume’s Enquiry
Causation is a practical problem for me most mornings. I've been reading the seventeenth discussion of al-Ghazālī's Incoherence of the Philosophers (in Michael Marmura's translation) next to Section VII of Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), and I want to set out…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam5 replies -
Who speaks for someone who cannot? Advance directives, surrogates and the family at three in the morning
Many of the people I care for at night can't speak for themselves when it matters most: confused, very ill, at the end. Decisions get made about them anyway, and I've watched how. The usual guidance gives two standards. Substituted judgement: decide…
Started by Elin Hedqvist5 replies -
Watsuji’s betweenness, ubuntu and relational autonomy: one discovery made three times, or three ideas?
I've been reading Watsuji Tetsurō's Ethics (Rinrigaku) slowly, with a friend from the temple who reads more Japanese philosophy than I do. Watsuji's starting point is that the Japanese word for a human being, ningen, is written with characters meaning "person" and…
Started by Aiko Tanabe5 replies -
Dharma, li, sharia, natural law: four words English keeps flattening into “duty” or “law”
Last week an engineering student in the evening class on Indian philosophy that I help with asked a good question: “If dharma is not duty, what is it like? Is there anything in other cultures that works the same way?” I tried…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
“I could have caught it sooner”: what is a carer’s regret actually claiming?
Something from work that I keep returning to. One of our residents got worse overnight. Looking back, there was a sign at 2 a.m. that, in hindsight, meant he was seriously ill. I noticed it, it didn't seem much, I did not…
Started by Elin Hedqvist5 replies -
Epistemic injustice, nearly two decades on: what has the idea actually changed?
I teach Yoruba at a secondary school in Ibadan and read a lot about Yoruba epistemic vocabulary, and one of the developments in philosophy since 1990 that matters most to me is the turn to testimony and the social side of knowledge.…
Started by Titilayo Adeyemi5 replies -
Does a language model mean anything by what it writes?
At work in Kuala Lumpur I evaluate text-generating systems for fairness. Last month a colleague said, half joking, that one of our models "meant" something offensive. Everyone laughed and then nobody could say whether that was false. The usual philosophical framing seems…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies -
The Cartesian circle: can clear and distinct perception vouch for itself?
Every year I read Descartes' Meditations with students who arrive expecting an enemy of faith and leave rather fond of him. And every year, around the Third Meditation, a sharp student raises the objection that Antoine Arnauld put to Descartes in 1641.…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies -
Dignāga cut the Nyāya inference from five members to three. What did the example member become?
I have been translating some passages on Buddhist logic for a seminar in Pune and keep getting stuck on one question. The Nyāya inference for others has five members: thesis, reason, example, application, conclusion ("this hill has fire, because it has smoke,…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Carneades at three in the morning: how much certainty does a decision need?
I have been reading what Sextus Empiricus reports of Carneades, the Academic sceptic, and I think he described night work better than any training course I've been sent on. Carneades, as far as we can reconstruct him, said we never have certainty,…
Started by Elin Hedqvist5 replies