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Discussion
An open thread on any idea
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A verdict that was right by accident: did the court know he was guilty?
Many years ago, early in my time as a court correspondent, I watched a magistrate convict a young man of a burglary largely on the identification of one witness. The identification was confident, the defence was weak, and I was as satisfied…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
If the past no longer exists, what exactly is my regret about?
I served twenty-two years in the army, the last part on the DMZ. There are a few decisions I regret, none of them dramatic, all of them still with me. Reading about the philosophy of time has given me a strange new…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun5 replies -
Fuller’s King Rex, read by someone who spent thirty-one years in the courts
Lon Fuller's The Morality of Law (1964) opens with a fable about an unhappy king called Rex who fails to make law in eight different ways. He decides cases without general rules. He makes rules but keeps them secret. He legislates retroactively.…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan4 replies -
Epsilon-delta is two nested quantifiers, and that is why my students struggle
Every year I teach limits to senior secondary students in Delhi, and every year the same thing happens. They can compute limits perfectly well. Then I write the definition: For every ε > 0 there exists a δ > 0 such that…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies -
Is “what is the meaning of life?” a modern European question?
Every year I teach Camus to my terminale class in Dakar, and every year the same thing happens. The students read The Myth of Sisyphus, which begins by saying that the only truly serious philosophical problem is suicide, whether life is worth…
Started by Khady Sène6 replies -
Usul al-fiqh and Dworkin’s integrity: two ways of saying law is more than its rules
I read Iqbal and Hart side by side, more or less as a hobby, and lately I have been adding Dworkin and al-Shafi'i to the pile. I want to test a comparison that I find tempting and suspect is partly false. Dworkin…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
Thirty-one years of watching courts decide what is ‘reasonable’, and no degrees of truth in sight
Here is something I watched every week in the courts of Punjab. A large part of the work was applying words that have no sharp edges: "reasonable doubt", "sudden provocation", "sufficient cause", "unsound mind". Now I read that fuzzy logic was invented…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
Why insight does not instantly change behaviour: an Abhidhamma account of knowing and not doing
I read the threads here about whether knowing what is right necessarily moves you, and I would like to add the account I have lived with in twelve years of practice. In the Pali discourses, the Buddha says that intention, cetanā, is…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara5 replies -
Soul as the form of a living body: does Aristotle help me teach the Igbo idea of chi, or get in the way?
I teach religious studies at a Catholic secondary school in Enugu and run a philosophy club for the senior students. Every year we read Aristotle's De Anima, where the soul is defined as the first actuality of a natural body that potentially…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies -
Ibn Sina begins the Canon by defining medicine. What does that definition assume about health?
I recently reread the opening of Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine for a reading group at the hospital, and I was struck by how much philosophy is packed into the first sentence. Paraphrasing: medicine is the knowledge of the states of the…
Started by Omar Ragab5 replies -
I use modal logic at work every day, and the engineers around me have no idea it was philosophy
Every day, the engineers I work with write properties like "on every path, whenever a request is issued, a grant eventually follows". In our notation that's something like AG(request → AF grant): A for "on all paths", G for "always", F for…
Started by Derek HollisReply first (no replies yet) -
Ji Kang argued that music holds neither sorrow nor joy, sixteen centuries before Hanslick
My taiji group practises to recordings of the guqin, and one morning someone asked whether the music was sad. I said what my father would have said: sound has no sorrow or joy. It turns out that is not just my father's…
Started by Liu Mingqiao4 replies -
Do the world’s ethical traditions really agree about how to live, or does it only look that way from far off?
There is a claim one often meets in comparative philosophy courses: traditions that disagree completely about metaphysics agree substantially about how to live. Aristotelian virtue, Confucian self-cultivation, Buddhist training and Islamic adab all say character is shaped by repeated action, habit makes…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 replies -
What do I owe a source I don’t believe? Notes from a court reporter
I cover courts and human rights in Karachi. Every week someone tells me something I am not sure I believe: a family about a disappeared relative, an official about a raid, a lawyer about what his client said. I have to decide…
Started by Sana Rizvi5 replies -
Seeing before naming: are Dignāga and Merleau-Ponty saying the same thing about perception?
Two accounts of perception seem to me to speak to the moment just before a word arrives, which is where a translator spends her days. Dignāga, the Buddhist epistemologist of the late fifth and early sixth centuries, defines perception as cognition free…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
The five rulings, from obligatory to forbidden: why the middle categories are not just extra boxes
Standard deontic logic has three basic statuses: obligatory, forbidden, and permitted. Anything neither obligatory nor forbidden is simply permitted, and that's the end of it. Islamic jurisprudence has five rulings (al-aḥkām al-khamsa). An act is obligatory (wājib), recommended (mandūb), permissible (mubāḥ), disliked…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
Al-Ma’arri gave up meat, milk and honey, and wrote a poem telling us why
Abu al-'Ala al-Ma'arri (973–1057) lost his sight to smallpox as a child and called himself the prisoner of two prisons, his blindness and his house in Ma'arrat al-Nu'man. I read him first for his fury. I stayed for his ethics. In his…
Started by Dima Nasser5 replies -
Keeping the losing opinion on the page: is disagreement inside a tradition as deep as disagreement between traditions?
In my Tuesday Talmud study group we recently read the story in tractate Eruvin about the houses of Hillel and Shammai, who argued for years until a heavenly voice declared that "these and these are the words of the living God", and…
Started by Eliana Halpern5 replies -
Yorùbá separates what you have seen from what you were told. What does that do to testimony?
Let me offer something from Yorùbá for comparison and see what others make of it. In a well-known study from the 1980s, the philosophers Barry Hallen and J. Olubi Sodipo worked with Yorùbá healers and argued that the verb mọ̀, usually translated…
Started by Titilayo Adeyemi4 replies -
Heidegger’s standing-reserve and Zhuangzi’s machine heart are two different worries
People often put two passages side by side as if they said the same thing, and I think the comparison hides more than it shows. In chapter 12, Confucius's disciple Zigong meets an old man watering his garden by carrying jars from…
Started by Liu Mingqiao4 replies -
Read the Republic with ‘citizen community’ in place of ‘state’ and the argument changes
Every year one of my students asks why we bother with Plato's Republic, since it's obviously a blueprint for a totalitarian state. I've started giving them an exercise that I'd like to share here. Take any English translation that renders polis as…
Started by Nikos TheodoridisReply first (no replies yet) -
Can students learn something from a teacher who doesn’t believe it herself?
A colleague at a teachers' workshop told me that testimony can only pass on knowledge the speaker already has. It is a tidy principle, and it is how most of us picture teaching: I know something, I tell my students, now they…
Started by Rowena Abellana6 replies -
Wujūd, brahman, dao: are these even answers to the same question?
I keep returning to Mullā Ṣadrā. I've been looking at a comparative table of traditions' answers to "what is real?", and the Islamic row says: created being, contingent, distinct from a necessary existent. The key term is wujūd. That's fair for much…
Started by Reza Tehrani4 replies -
Is Yogācāra “consciousness-only” idealism? Three readings and a false friend
Every year someone in my reading group says "Yogācāra is Buddhist idealism, like Berkeley". It's one of the more interesting mistakes, because it's partly right. The Yogācāra school, systematised by Asaṅga and Vasubandhu in the fourth and fifth centuries and carried to…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 replies -
Heraclitus, Vasubandhu, Zhuangzi, Mulla Sadra: four routes to process, or four destinations?
It is often said that four thinkers, with no documented transmission between them, all arrived at a process view of reality: Heraclitus in Greece, Vasubandhu in India, Zhuangzi in China, and much later Mulla Sadra in Safavid Iran. The convergence is real.…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
If the comparison table had a Yoruba row: mọ̀, gbàgbọ́ and the gap between seeing and hearing
Comparative tables of how traditions answer "how do we know anything?" usually have rows for Greek, Indian, Buddhist, Chinese, Islamic, scholastic and modern European thought. My doctorate is on Yoruba epistemic vocabulary, so I want to sketch the row that is usually…
Started by Titilayo Adeyemi5 replies -
Nāgārjuna says he has no thesis. Is “I have no thesis” itself a thesis?
There is a question I keep returning to, the oldest one in the long argument between Advaitins and Mādhyamikas. In the Vigrahavyāvartanī, answering a critic who says his claim that all things are empty refutes itself, Nāgārjuna says (I paraphrase): if I…
Started by Arjun Iyer5 replies -
Even if the proof works, whose God has it reached? The gap from “first cause” to God
I teach adults in Jerusalem who often arrive believing that philosophy and religion are enemies. One thing I show them early is that even a successful argument for a first cause or a necessary being leaves a large question open: why call…
Started by Miriam Adler5 replies -
Nāgasena’s condition for talking with a king: argue as scholars do, not as kings do
Early in the Milindapañha, the Questions of King Milinda, the king asks the monk Nāgasena to discuss with him. Nāgasena answers with a condition. He will talk if the king will talk as scholars do, not as kings do. What's the difference?…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara5 replies -
Does every culture have a word for ‘art’? Technē, kalā and the Japanese ‘ways’
I spend a lot of time warning people about false friends in comparison. One of the biggest sits under the whole debate about defining art. Greek technē is usually translated "art", but it means skilled making of any kind: medicine, shoemaking, navigation,…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies