Format
Discussion
An open thread on any idea
-
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
Natural, necessary and empty desires: running a small winery by Epicurus’s sorting
I make small-batch wine in the Adelaide Hills. The irony of an Epicurean in the wine trade isn't lost on me, but I've found his sorting of desires the most useful bit of ancient philosophy I've ever read. In the Letter to…
Started by Bec Doyle4 replies -
Sancho’s kinsmen and the key on the leather thong: Hume’s taste essay from a wine judge
Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste" is pinned to my shed wall, mostly for one story he borrows from Don Quixote. Two of Sancho's kinsmen are asked to judge a hogshead of wine. One tastes it and says it would be good…
Started by Bec Doyle4 replies -
Wang Yangming’s unity of knowing and acting, read alongside Anscombe
My students memorise Wang Yangming's slogan, the unity of knowing and acting (zhi xing he yi), without believing a word of it. Obviously, they say, you can know something and not do it. They know they should study. Wang's reply, in Instructions…
Started by Lin Pei-shan4 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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
Why trekkers weep at the top of the Thorong La, and whether Kant would understand
Eight months a year I take groups over the Thorong La on the Annapurna circuit. At the top, a little over 5,400 metres, something happens to about one person in five. They cry. Strong people, bankers, soldiers. They are exhausted and the…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung4 replies -
The last person and the kelp forest: does nature matter when no one is left to value it?
Last month, on a long dive in the kelp, I found myself thinking about Richard Routley's "last man" thought experiment from 1973. Imagine you are the last human being. You're dying; nobody will come after you. Before you go, you set out…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo4 replies -
What is a genuine consultation for? Consensus, shura and the contractualist test
Contractualism's core question, "could you justify this to everyone it affects?", is usually treated as a test you run in your head. I've been wondering what it looks like as a practice. Wiredu argued that traditional Akan politics was organised around consensus…
Started by Kwame Asante4 replies -
A patient believes she will recover against the odds. Is that irrational?
A situation I meet in different forms every month, described here as a composite. A woman with a serious illness has, by the best evidence we have, about a one in three chance of recovering. She tells her doctor, and me, calmly…
Started by Tsion Bekele4 replies -
Al-Fārābī’s virtuous city and Plato’s philosopher-king: the same answer for different reasons?
Baghdad is the city where al-Fārābī did much of his work a thousand years ago, and on bad days I find it hopeful that someone here once believed a city could be organised around wisdom. Al-Fārābī's Principles of the Opinions of the…
Started by Zainab Kadhim4 replies -
When a prediction changes what it predicts: reflexivity in my day job
Last year my team built a model to predict which small-business customers would fall behind on repayments. It worked well on historical data. Then the business acted on it: flagged customers got tighter terms and more calls. Some of them, squeezed, did…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman4 replies -
Playing at a funeral: han, Schopenhauer, and why sad music helps the grieving
Last month I played the sarabande from Bach's fifth cello suite at the funeral of a student's grandmother. I have played it many times, but never for people in the first days of grief. Afterwards the family thanked me in a way…
Started by Moon Ha-eun4 replies -
My student doubts the moon landing but trusts the bus timetable. Is that scepticism?
One of my brightest students has decided that the Apollo moon landings were staged. I have tried evidence: the retroreflectors left on the surface that observatories still bounce lasers off, the rock samples, the sheer number of people who would have had…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha4 replies -
Did Adam Smith change his mind between The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations?
Adam Smith is buried in the Canongate Kirkyard, and since retiring I've been reading him properly for the first time. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) opens by saying that however selfish we may suppose a man to be, there are principles…
Started by Alistair Gow4 replies