Format
Discussion
An open thread on any idea
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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 -
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 -
Salazar Bondy asked if there is a philosophy of our America. Over fifty years on, what’s the answer?
In 1968, the Peruvian philosopher Augusto Salazar Bondy published a short book with an uncomfortable title: ¿Existe una filosofía de nuestra América? His answer was, roughly, not yet. Latin American philosophy, he argued, had been imitative: each generation importing the latest European…
Started by Mateo Quispe6 replies -
Rights by consistency: Sor Juana, Astell and Wollstonecraft on the same argument
I keep noticing the same argument shape in three women who never read one another. The shape is a consistency argument. If reason is what entitles men to education, liberty or rights, and women have reason, then you must either extend those…
Started by Valentina Ríos4 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 building has steps, my legs don’t work: which sentence names my disability?
I spend a lot of my working time measuring door widths and arguing with architects about gradients. When I can't get into a building, two descriptions are true. My legs don't work. The building has no ramp. For most of history the…
Started by Dima Nasser6 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 -
Rebirth without anyone reborn: the lamp that lights another lamp
In comparative tables of what happens at death, the Buddhist row always reads awkwardly: rebirth, but no self that transmigrates. Continuity, not identity. Many newcomers to the Dhamma, and many philosophers, hear a contradiction. If nobody is reborn, what is the rebirth…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara6 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 -
Why the translators skipped Greek tragedy, and what Ibn Rushd made of Aristotle’s Poetics
At the statue of Ibn Rushd near Córdoba's old walls I often tell visitors about Borges's story "Averroes' Search". Borges imagines the great commentator puzzling over two words in Aristotle's Poetics, "tragedy" and "comedy", for which his world has no examples, while…
Started by Rafael Lucena Prieto4 replies -
Winch on the Azande: who gets to call a practice irrational?
Every year the older students in my school's philosophy club read Peter Winch's essay "Understanding a Primitive Society" (1964). It is a reply to E. E. Evans-Pritchard's classic 1937 study of witchcraft and oracles among the Azande of central Africa. Evans-Pritchard took…
Started by Kwame Asante4 replies -
Mu’tazilis, al-Māturīdī and Aquinas: three ways of saying reason can see part of the moral law
I started reading kalām to understand my own faith better. The question that keeps pulling me back is whether moral knowledge needs revelation. The classical positions, as I understand them: Muʿtazila: good and bad (ḥusn and qubḥ) are knowable by reason. That…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam4 replies -
Kalam atomism did not anticipate quantum theory, however tempting the comparison
I read kalam for pleasure. Twice this year I have sat through talks claiming that the Ash'ari theologians "anticipated quantum mechanics": the world made of discrete atoms, accidents re-created at each instant, no necessary connection between cause and effect, and al-Ghazali's cotton…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam4 replies -
The Four-Seven Debate: what a sixteenth-century exchange of letters teaches about disagreeing well
My students know Toegye's face, not his argument. This year I tried teaching the Four-Seven Debate not as doctrine but as a model of how to disagree. The basics: from 1559 Yi Hwang (Toegye), already the most respected scholar in Korea, exchanged…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu4 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 -
Zhuangzi and Hui Shi on the bridge: an ancient argument about knowing what someone else knows
What does this part of the system know about what that part knows? I spent forty years on that question as a railway signalling engineer. I found the same question in the most famous conversation in Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi and Hui Shi are…
Started by Liu Mingqiao5 replies -
Teaching Descartes in Dakar with Peirce in my pocket: should doubt need a reason?
Every year my terminale students meet Descartes's methodical doubt. He resolves to treat as false anything he can find the slightest reason to doubt: the senses deceive, I might be dreaming, an evil genius might be fooling me. Then he finds the…
Started by Khady Sène6 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 -
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 -
Dignāga’s apoha and Frege’s sense are answers to different questions
In a seminar this term somebody summarised apoha as "basically Frege's sense", and someone else said "no, it's Saussure: meaning by difference". I want to resist both, or at least slow them down. Dignāga's claim (c. 480–540) is that a word like…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies -
Why a sad film consoles where good advice doesn’t
At work, after a night when we lose someone we were close to, some of us have a ritual. We go to someone's flat, open a bottle of something, and watch a particular old film that makes everyone cry. I have done…
Started by Elin Hedqvist4 replies