Format
Question
One question: Explain (can have an accepted answer) or Open (several argued answers)
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Why does any list of qualities feel like the wrong answer to “why do you love me?”
I write love poems, and I'm new to reading philosophy about love, so forgive me if this is obvious. My partner asked me last month, half joking, "why do you love me?" I started to answer: you are kind, you are funny,…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
Confucius refused to talk about death. Is declining a question a kind of answer?
In Book 11 of the Analects, the disciple Zilu asks how to serve ghosts and spirits. Confucius says: you are not yet able to serve people, how could you serve spirits? Zilu asks about death. Confucius replies: you do not yet understand…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu6 replies -
Do the laws of physics make things happen, or only describe what happens?
Last week a student asked me why the ball "obeys" Newton's second law. I started to answer and realised I did not know what I meant by "obeys". We talk as if laws are rules and objects follow them. But a ball…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha4 replies -
At three in the morning, does a first cause comfort anyone?
I work nights at a care home for older people in Uppsala. A few weeks ago, while his father was dying, a man asked me whether I thought there was a reason for everything. He didn't want an argument, I think. He…
Started by Elin Hedqvist5 replies -
Did Ibn Khaldun really say that labour is the source of value?
Every year at least one of my students comes back from the internet with the claim that Ibn Khaldun "invented the labour theory of value four centuries before Adam Smith and Marx". It's said with pride, and I share the pride, but…
Started by Youssef Berrada4 replies -
Is Susan Wolf’s account of meaning just “do what you love” with extra steps?
Every founder book I read on the way down said the same thing: find your passion and meaning will follow. I believed it. I was passionate. It didn't. Someone here recommended Susan Wolf, and the phrase I keep seeing is that meaning…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies -
Nāgārjuna and the Vienna Circle both attacked metaphysics. Were they doing the same thing?
Recently a trekking client who studied philosophy in Vienna told me Nāgārjuna sounded like a logical positivist: someone who shows that metaphysical claims collapse under analysis. I can see the resemblance. Nāgārjuna takes every position, that things exist intrinsically, that they don't,…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung5 replies -
What does Moore’s open question argument actually prove, and what is the standard reply to it?
Moore's open question argument from Principia Ethica (1903) keeps coming up as I work through ethics on my own, and I cannot tell whether it is a deep insight or a trick. Here is my understanding. Take any proposed definition of good…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha4 replies -
Does Sunzi have an ethics of war, or only an economics of it?
We read The Art of War in the army as a manual, which is how most soldiers meet it. Rereading it in retirement, I am struck by how much of it counsels restraint. It opens by calling war a matter of life…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun4 replies -
When someone says “that’s my truth”, what exactly are they claiming?
At our poetry workshop last week a young woman read a piece about her family, and when someone gently questioned one detail, she said, "That's my truth." The room went quiet. Nobody knew what to say next. I felt two things at…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies -
If everything is empty, is emptiness itself empty too? Or does that make the idea collapse?
I have been reading about Buddhist theories of mind. A friend who meditates explained that, according to Madhyamaka, everything is "empty". I understood (I think) that this does not mean things don't exist, only that they don't exist independently, on their own.…
Started by Elif Yıldız4 replies -
How is apoha supposed to work? ‘Cow’ means ‘not non-cow’ sounds circular to me
I teach mathematics, and when I read that Dignāga's theory of meaning says a word like "cow" works by exclusion, meaning roughly "not non-cow", my first reaction was the one I would have to a student's proof: this is circular. To exclude…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies -
What is Wakefield’s “harmful dysfunction” account, and why do psychiatrists still argue about it?
In our clinical module we spent a week on whether intense grief should ever be diagnosed as depression. When the diagnostic manual changed in 2013 and dropped the old exclusion for recent bereavement, there was a big argument, and one name kept…
Started by Elif Yıldız3 replies -
Does it matter at the bedside whether the self is a soul, ātman or a process?
I've been reading comparative accounts of the self: a created soul accountable to God in Islam, the self identical with brahman in Vedānta, no permanent self in Buddhism, a rational soul in the Greeks, a contested thing in modern European thought. The…
Started by Omar Ragab6 replies -
Śrīharṣa against the Naiyāyikas: can every definition be refuted, and how did Nyāya answer him?
Definitions are my bread and butter. A good definition in geometry settles what you are talking about, and then the proofs can begin. I recently came across Śrīharṣa, the twelfth-century Advaitin, whose great work has a title usually translated as something like…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies -
When should someone who isn’t an expert simply defer? What did al-Ghazālī say?
As a data analyst I defer to experts all day: to doctors about my health, to engineers about the bridges I drive over, to the people who built the statistical libraries I use. I can't check them. I'd like to understand when…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman4 replies -
Do civilisations really rise and fall in cycles, or do we just like the shape?
Customers who come in to browse almost always tell me the same story: Baghdad was the centre of the world under the Abbasids, it fell to the Mongols in 1258, and everything since has been a long decline with brief recoveries. Some…
Started by Zainab Kadhim6 replies -
Was the abolition of slavery a moral discovery or a moral change? A teacher’s test case
Every July my after-school reading circle reads Frederick Douglass's 1852 speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”. This year a student asked a question I could not answer cleanly: “When people stopped thinking slavery was okay, did they find…
Started by Keisha Monroe6 replies -
When a family says ‘it was always going to happen’, what are they claiming?
"It was always going to happen." I hear the sentence most weeks at work. Sometimes from a daughter, sometimes from a doctor, sometimes from me. I've started to think it means very different things in different mouths: Medical inevitability. Given the disease…
Started by Elin Hedqvist5 replies -
My lecturer says the poet’s own explanation doesn’t count. Where does that idea come from?
In a seminar last week we were reading a Malayalam poem by a living poet, and I brought in an interview where she explains what one of the images means. My lecturer listened politely and then said that what the poet says…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
What are the three kinds of theory of well-being that Parfit distinguished?
For six years of running a company I thought I was optimising for happiness, mine and the team's. Now I'm not sure what I was optimising for. A friend pointed me to an appendix in Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984) called…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies -
Could a psychopath genuinely know that cruelty is wrong? The amoralist and the clinical literature
Meta-ethicists argue about the amoralist: someone who sincerely judges that cheating or cruelty is wrong and feels no motivation whatever to avoid it. Internalists say such a person is impossible, that someone wholly unmoved has not really made the judgement, only learned…
Started by Martín Iriarte5 replies -
Should the law impose a general duty to rescue a stranger?
Common law systems, including Pakistan's, traditionally impose no general duty to rescue. If I watch a stranger drown in shallow water and do nothing, I may be a moral monster, but unless I had some special relationship or created the danger, I've…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
If objectivity belongs to communities, what happens when the community all looks the same?
Helen Longino argues that objectivity is not a property of individual scientists, who all have commitments and blind spots, but of communities. And not any community. Only one with public venues for criticism, shared standards, genuine uptake of criticism, and what she…
Started by Femke Bosman5 replies -
Arjuna sees the universal form and begs it to stop. Is that the sublime, or something else?
I reread the Bhagavad Gita when I burned out last year, and the chapter I keep returning to is the eleventh. Arjuna asks Krishna to show his universal form. Krishna gives him a divine eye, and what Arjuna sees is unbearable: countless…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies -
Xunzi on “obsession” and modern cognitive bias: the same diagnosis of irrationality?
I study psychology, and this term we covered heuristics and biases: anchoring, availability, confirmation bias, all the ways judgement goes systematically wrong. In the same month I read the chapter of the Xunzi usually translated "Dispelling Obsession" or "Undoing Fixation", and I…
Started by Elif Yıldız4 replies -
Al-Ghazali and Hume make the same argument about fire. Why do they end up so far apart?
I teach history in Fes, and my students love the story that al-Ghazali "anticipated Hume" by six centuries. I tell it too. But the more I read, the less I think "anticipated" is the right word, and I would like help explaining…
Started by Youssef Berrada4 replies -
Could a culture reason by different logical rules, or is that a colonial myth?
Every year a student in my lycée class asks me some version of this: "Is logic universal, or is it just how Europeans think?" The history makes the question sharp. In the early twentieth century, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl described so-called primitive peoples as…
Started by Khady Sène5 replies -
Who is left out when morality is a bargain?
I came to this question with a personal stake. I've used a wheelchair since I was fourteen. The Hobbesian strand of contract theory says morality is what rational, self-interested people would agree to for mutual advantage. David Gauthier's Morals by Agreement (1986)…
Started by Dima Nasser5 replies -
If I can conceive it without contradiction, is it possible? Ash’arites, Hume and Kripke
I started reading the Ash'ari theologians to understand occasionalism, and I noticed how much weight they put on one principle: whatever involves no contradiction is possible, at least for God. Al-Ghazali uses it in the Tahāfut when he says the cotton might…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam5 replies