Format
Question
One question: Explain (can have an accepted answer) or Open (several argued answers)
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Is a controlled experiment a new source of knowledge, or only perception with discipline?
I have been reading A. I. Sabra's translation of the first books of Ibn al-Haytham's Optics with two of my tutoring students, and it has raised a question I can't settle. The standard lists of sources of knowledge, whether European or Indian,…
Started by Emeka Nwosu0 replies63 views -
I keep reading summaries of philosophers instead of the books. Is that so bad?
Confession: in the year since I burnt out and started reading philosophy, I've read maybe three actual books and hundreds of summaries, threads, videos and ‘ten ideas from Stoicism’ posts. I can tell you what Kant, Nietzsche and the Gita say in…
Started by Rohan Desai0 replies58 views -
How can you talk about non-being without turning it into a something?
Every morning I practise taiji in the park and every evening I read a few lines of the Laozi with my grandson's dictionary. Chapter 40 says, roughly, that the things of the world are born from being, and being is born from…
Started by Liu Jianguo0 replies80 views -
If only the transformed can know, how could a mystic ever be shown to be wrong?
I teach science in Mangaluru and campaign against superstition, so let me say first that I'm not asking this to sneer. I read Sufi poetry with real pleasure, and I've learned from discussions here that the Sufi claim is subtler than "feelings…
Started by Arvind Poojary0 replies103 views -
Did non-Euclidean geometry sink Kant’s view of space?
I am a retired teacher in Freiburg, finally reading the Critique of Pure Reason properly, and I am stuck on the Transcendental Aesthetic. Kant says space is not a thing in itself and not a set of relations among things in themselves.…
Started by Henrike Vogel0 replies67 views -
Could the constants have been different? Spinoza says no; the Ashʿarites say God could change them tomorrow
I model oil reservoirs. Every model has parameters, and every morning I change some of them to see what would have happened. So the question "could the physical constants have been different?" feels very concrete to me, and I've found two answers…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Qahtani0 replies66 views -
Would games really be the only thing left worth doing in utopia?
Bernard Suits ends The Grasshopper with a strange and wonderful claim. Imagine a utopia where every instrumental need is met: machines do all the work, nobody needs to earn, build, heal or cook. What would people do? Suits's Grasshopper argues that they…
Started by Sasha Kovalenko0 replies100 views -
Is an economy more than the people in it?
I lecture in economics in Valencia, and every year I teach the same tension without resolving it. On one side, methodological individualism: social phenomena should be explained, ultimately, by individuals' choices and interactions. Prices, unemployment and recessions are patterns of individual behaviour.…
Started by Javier Morales0 replies100 views -
Bundle theory or bare particulars: which embarrassment would you rather live with?
I tutor logic and keep running into this in office hours, so I'd like to hear people argue it properly. Bundle theory: an object is nothing but a bundle of properties. There is no underlying thing that "has" the redness and the…
Started by Ana Clara Ferreira0 replies93 views -
Plantinga’s proper function: does warrant need a designer, or will evolution do?
I teach metaphysics at a seminary, and this term a student asked a question I could not answer cleanly, so I bring it here. Alvin Plantinga's account of warrant, in Warrant and Proper Function (1993), says roughly that a belief has warrant…
Started by Fr. Ikechukwu Anyanwu0 replies78 views -
Capabilities or the social model: which better tells a city what it owes disabled residents?
I'm a final-year law student in Delhi. In a moot this term we had to argue about what a municipal corporation owes disabled residents under India's disability-rights legislation. I found myself reaching for two frameworks that don't fit together as neatly as…
Started by Deepa Nair0 replies93 views -
Nozick gave up closure to beat the sceptic. Isn’t that too high a price?
I've been reading al-Ghazālī's Deliverance from Error during my gap year, especially the part where he doubts the senses and then even reason, because in dreams everything seems real until you wake. It got me into modern scepticism, and now I'm stuck…
Started by Fajar Nugroho0 replies105 views -
Clive Bell said representation is irrelevant in art. Can anyone still hold that?
I draw picture books and some manga in Osaka. A friend lent me Clive Bell's Art (1914), and I've been arguing with it all week. Bell says what all real works of visual art share is "significant form": lines and colours combined…
Started by Rin Matsuda0 replies122 views -
Adab, li and hexis: is character trained the same way in three traditions?
I make hand-drawn batik in a workshop my mother started in Yogyakarta. When a girl comes to learn, she doesn't begin by drawing. She begins by preparing cloth, heating wax, watching. She learns how to sit, how to hold the canting, how…
Started by Ratna Wulandari0 replies84 views -
Where do Zhu Xi’s li and qi fall in the substance-versus-process divide?
I teach classical Chinese at a senior high school in Taipei, and I recently saw a comparative table that sorted traditions by their answer to "what is real?". It placed Neo-Confucianism under "pattern and material force, inseparable in every thing" and left…
Started by Lin Pei-shan0 replies60 views