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Discussion
An open thread on any idea
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The Buddhist answer to ‘what makes a life go well’ refuses the shape of the question
Most theories of well-being name a good to pursue: pleasure, the satisfaction of desire, a list of objective goods, the development of human excellence, a life of virtuous activity. Even asceticism names one, freedom from appetite. The teaching I have followed for…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara5 replies -
“But for the defendant’s act”: thirty-one years of counterfactuals from the courtroom
For three decades I reported on judgments that turned on sentences of the form "had the accused not done X, the deceased would not have died". I never asked what such a sentence is. It cannot be checked: the accused did do…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
Qiyās, kal va-chomer and legal analogy: defeasible reasoning with centuries of rules
The reasoning I heard most often from the bench, in all my years in court, was neither deduction nor statistics. It was analogy: this case resembles that one in the respect that matters, so it should be decided the same way. Islamic…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
Freire’s “banking” model, seen from inside a capoeira roda
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire describes "banking" education: the teacher deposits knowledge, the students receive, file and store it. Against it he sets problem-posing education, where teacher and students investigate together, and the teacher is also taught. In capoeira Angola…
Started by Jorge Bonfim4 replies -
Does a deterministic program “choose”?
A chess engine searches millions of positions, scores them and plays the best move. We naturally say it "chose" the knight move. Yet it's fully deterministic: same position, same settings, same move every time. Spinoza thought our sense of free will comes…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen4 replies -
Camus begins with suicide. Was he right to start there?
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) opens by saying the fundamental philosophical question is whether life is worth living. Everything else, he says, comes afterwards. The absurd, for Camus, isn't in us or in the world but in the confrontation between our demand…
Started by Claire Dubois4 replies -
What Arendt actually meant by “the banality of evil”
The phrase comes from the subtitle of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). It is often misread as meaning that evil is ordinary, or unimportant, or that anyone would have done the same. As I read her,…
Started by Henrike Vogel4 replies -
Did al-Ghazali’s Incoherence kill philosophy in the Islamic world?
A story you'll still find in textbooks: al-Ghazali attacked philosophy around 1095, Ibn Rushd's defence was ignored in the East, and after that Islamic philosophy died while Europe picked up the torch. The story is false, and I want to collect the…
Started by Layla Sfeir4 replies -
Is love a choice, or something that happens to us?
In poetry, love is almost always something that happens to you: you "fall", you're struck, you're helpless. But in many families and religious traditions, love is described as a commitment you choose and keep choosing. Harry Frankfurt, in The Reasons of Love…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
Ubuntu and personhood: Menkiti’s communitarian view
I'm finally reading the African philosophy my physics course never mentioned. The Nguni saying behind ubuntu is usually translated as "a person is a person through other persons". John Mbiti's African Religions and Philosophy (1969) put the idea in the form: I…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha4 replies -
Founders and Stoicism: real philosophy or corporate self-help?
In the startup world, Stoicism is everywhere. Podcasts, newsletters, Marcus Aurelius quotes on office walls. I got into it during a bad year, and honestly it helped. But I'm starting to wonder if what we're doing is Stoicism at all. The startup…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies -
Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are constantly misused in philosophical arguments
A public service post, since I see this weekly. What the first theorem says, roughly: any consistent, effectively axiomatised formal system that contains enough arithmetic has true sentences in its language that it can't prove. The second says such a system can't…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak4 replies -
Persian gardens, proportion, and Plato’s Timaeus
The classical Persian garden, the chahar bagh, is divided into four parts by water channels meeting at a centre. Visit the Fin Garden in Kashan or Bagh-e Eram in Shiraz and you feel the order before you understand it. In the Timaeus,…
Started by Reza Tehrani4 replies -
Found the Master Argument in Epictetus, between two bus stops
Another find from my recordings. Last week it was Epictetus, Discourses Book 2, and in the middle of a chapter he mentions an argument by Diodorus Cronus that clever people used to show off with. I had to pull my attention back…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
Is Aquinas’s First Way really about a first moment in time?
Most of my friends assume Aquinas's arguments for God (Summa Theologiae I, q.2, a.3) are about the beginning of the universe: everything has a cause, so go back far enough and you find God at the start. But my lecturer says that's…
Started by Aoife Kilbride4 replies -
Kant and the murderer at the door: can the essay be rescued?
In 1797 Kant published "On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy", replying to Benjamin Constant. He maintains that you may not lie even to a murderer who asks where your friend is hiding. When I taught this, nearly every student found…
Started by Henrike Vogel4 replies -
Al-Ghazali’s Deliverance from Error as a story about information overload
I've been reading al-Ghazali's Deliverance from Error (al-Munqidh min al-Dalal), written late in his life. He describes his search for certain knowledge among four groups: the theologians, the Batinis (who relied on an infallible teacher), the philosophers, and the Sufis. Before that,…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman4 replies -
The hard problem from a psychology student’s point of view
In 1995 David Chalmers distinguished the "easy problems" of consciousness (explaining discrimination, attention, reportability, the control of behaviour) from the "hard problem": explaining why any of this is accompanied by subjective experience at all. In my psychology courses we study the easy…
Started by Elif Yıldız4 replies -
Is the Allegory of the Cave a theory of education first and a metaphysics second?
The cave in Republic VII is usually read as a story about two worlds: shadows down here, Forms up there. That's not wrong, but I've come to think it isn't the emphasis Plato gives it. Socrates introduces the image as a picture…
Started by Giulia Ferrante4 replies -
Ahimsa in Jainism: how far can non-harm be taken?
I grew up next door to a Jain family in Hyderabad. The grandmother wouldn't eat after sunset (to avoid harming insects attracted to light), and they avoided root vegetables, since pulling them up kills the whole plant and the many small organisms…
Started by Anand Kurup4 replies -
Essence and existence: why Ibn Sina’s distinction mattered to Aquinas
In the metaphysics of the Shifa', Ibn Sina distinguishes what a thing is, its essence or quiddity (mahiyya), from the fact that it is, its existence (wujud). You can understand what a triangle or a phoenix is without knowing whether any exists.…
Started by Layla Sfeir4 replies -
“That’s not what I meant”: a comic on jokes, apologies and who owns the meaning
Friday night in a club in Salford, I did a bit about my mum's driving. A bloke near the front decided it was about him, because he'd heckled about my accent earlier, and he came up afterwards furious. My first instinct was…
Started by Gemma Pritchard4 replies -
Nagarjuna’s tetralemma is not a rejection of logic
The catuṣkoṭi, or tetralemma, considers four options for any proposition: it is, it is not, both, neither. In the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, Nāgārjuna often rejects all four. For example, the Buddha after death neither exists, nor doesn't exist, nor both, nor neither. Some readers…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 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 -
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 -
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