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Discussion
An open thread on any idea
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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 -
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 -
My father knew which cedar beam would split. He could never say how. Did he know?
When I was a boy my father would walk past a stack of beams and tap one with his knuckle and say: not that one, it will split when we carve it. He was almost always right. If you asked him how…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani6 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 -
When I restore a panel painting, at what point is it no longer the original?
I restore Renaissance panel paintings in Florence. Every working day I decide how much of the past to bring back and how much to leave alone, and every decision touches a question I first met in philosophy as the ship of Theseus,…
Started by Chiara Bellandi4 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 -
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 “I’m sorry you feel that way” is not an apology
This term our prison reading class ran a short course on restorative justice. Part of it was writing a letter to the person you harmed. The letters were not meant to be sent unless the other person agreed, but the drafting was…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma4 replies -
‘With us or against us’ sounds like logic. Is it?
One sentence I've heard in Colombia from armed men of every stripe, and sometimes from people on the other side of the table, is "if you're not with us, you're against us". In villages that wanted nothing to do with any armed…
Started by Andrés Zuluaga4 replies -
When the woman in labour is your cousin: professional fairness and the ethics of care
Last month my cousin came in to our district hospital to deliver her second child. It was a busy night: four other women in labour, one of them in difficulty, and only two of us on the ward. Everyone expected things of…
Started by Farhana Akter4 replies -
At my office “Confucian values” means obey the boss. Where did the reciprocity go?
I translate for a publishing house in Hanoi. When managers here want staff to stay late without complaint, they speak of Confucian values: respect for seniors, loyalty, harmony. We have a common saying about honouring teachers and respecting the Way. I grew…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo4 replies -
Thirty years of coaching while colour-blind: whose experience of red is the accurate one?
I was diagnosed red-green colour-blind at fourteen, when I failed the dotted-number test at the school nurse's office. I then spent thirty years coaching under-16 rugby while unable to tell our maroon bibs from the opposition's green ones, which my boys found…
Started by Gerrit Venter4 replies -
Udayana, Ibn Sina and Leibniz: three arguments for a first cause that do not need a beginning
People often assume that arguments for a first cause depend on the universe having a beginning. I want to compare three that don't, from three traditions. Udayana (Nyāya, eleventh century). In the Nyāyakusumāñjali he gives a series of inferences for Īśvara, starting…
Started by Meera Kulkarni6 replies -
Correlation is not causation, I tell my team. But what exactly is the missing ingredient?
Our credit-scoring models find patterns: people who top up airtime at regular times repay loans more often. Everyone on my team can recite "correlation is not causation". Nobody can say what causation adds. It matters practically. If regular top-ups merely correlate with…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga4 replies -
My grandmother’s Jōdo Shinshū, and why “grace” is not quite the word for other-power
My grandmother was a devout Jōdo Shinshū Buddhist. When I was a teenager and got interested in meditation, she told me, kindly but firmly, that trying to become enlightened by my own effort was a subtle kind of pride. For her the…
Started by Rin Matsuda4 replies -
The crane logs were falsified and reporting them might shut the terminal: what each theory told me
Last spring, as union delegate, I found out that maintenance records for one of the older gantry cranes at our terminal had been filled in for inspections that never happened. The crane was probably fine. The risk was small but real: a…
Started by Hugo Marchetti6 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 -
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 -
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 -
Nishitani on nihilism: you have to go through it, not around it
This year I have been reading the Kyoto School slowly. The book that has helped me most this year is Nishitani Keiji's Religion and Nothingness, read slowly in Japanese with the English translation beside it. Nishitani, who studied with Heidegger in Freiburg…
Started by Aiko Tanabe4 replies -
Davos, 1929: was the split already visible in the room?
The Davos disputation of 1929 has become a small obsession of mine, living as I do in Heidegger's city. In the spring of that year, at a university course in the Swiss resort, Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger debated how to read…
Started by Henrike Vogel6 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 -
Ibn Khaldun’s impossible-army test, applied to the stories that go viral
There is a passage in the Muqaddimah where Ibn Khaldun complains about earlier chroniclers. They recorded enormous army numbers because a source had recorded them, without asking whether such an army could be fed, watered, marched and supplied. His point is that…
Started by Youssef Berrada4 replies -
Does a cut make an argument? Notes from an edit suite in Tehran
My working day is spent deciding which shot follows which, and I've started to wonder what exactly I'm doing to the audience when I do it. The classic story is the Kuleshov experiment in early Soviet cinema. As it's usually told, an…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam6 replies -
Margaret Cavendish’s thinking matter: a forgotten alternative to laws imposed from outside
Reading about Sor Juana and women claiming the right to think in the seventeenth century, I keep meeting her English contemporary Margaret Cavendish. I want to make a case that Cavendish's natural philosophy deserves attention not just as a curiosity but as…
Started by Valentina Ríos4 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 -
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 -
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 -
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