Format
Question
One question: Explain (can have an accepted answer) or Open (several argued answers)
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Do civilisations really rise and fall in cycles, or do we just like the shape?
My shop is off Mutanabbi Street. 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…
Started by Zainab Kadhim6 replies242 views -
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 replies324 views -
Outside a courtroom, who should carry the burden of proof?
In court the burden of proof is fixed by rules. In a criminal case the prosecution must prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt; in a civil case the claimant must win on the balance of probabilities. Islamic law has a well-known maxim to…
Started by Hamza Qureshi6 replies134 views -
Can reason tell right from wrong on its own, or does it need revelation?
I spent thirty-one years on the bench in Lahore. I applied statutes, precedent and, where the law allowed, the principles of Islamic law. Many times a case was decided correctly by every rule and I went home feeling it had been decided…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan6 replies240 views -
If syllogistic logic couldn’t handle relations, why did it last two thousand years?
I write verification tools for a living, so I live inside predicate logic. Every so often I'm reminded how much it can do that the syllogism can't. The textbook example (usually credited to De Morgan) is: all horses are animals, therefore every…
Started by Derek Hollis6 replies194 views -
I have forgotten most of my childhood. On Locke’s view, am I still that child?
I am on a gap year and reading whatever I can find. This week it was a summary of Locke on personal identity. As I understood it, Locke says you are the same person as far back as your consciousness reaches to…
Started by Fajar Nugroho5 replies212 views -
Turing never said passing his test means a machine thinks? Then what was the test for?
I am on a gap year and reading whatever I want, which this month is computers and minds. My cousin studies informatics in Bandung and he told me the Turing test is simple: if a machine can fool you in a conversation,…
Started by Fajar Nugroho5 replies159 views -
Al-Ghazali says some knowledge has to be tasted. Is that an argument, or a way out of one?
Last month I read al-Ghazali's Deliverance from Error in an English translation I found online, and one part keeps bothering me. He goes through the theologians, the philosophers and the Batinites, finds each of them lacking, and then turns to the Sufis.…
Started by Fajar Nugroho5 replies163 views -
Does translating philosophy change the philosophy?
I translate for a living, and philosophical texts are the ones that keep me up at night. Heidegger's Dasein is left untranslated in English. Sartre's pour-soi becomes "for-itself", which sounds nothing like ordinary English. Hegel's Aufhebung becomes "sublation", a word English speakers…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies249 views -
What exactly is kasb (acquisition), and is it just compatibilism with God in it?
I am eighteen and taking a gap year, and I have been reading about free will because it is the question that will not leave me alone. In Indonesia the answer I grew up with is that God creates everything, including my…
Started by Fajar Nugroho5 replies131 views -
I know within ten seconds whether a room will laugh, but I can’t say how. Does that count as knowing?
I do stand-up on the northern circuit. After a few hundred gigs you develop a sense for a room. I walk on, say two lines, and I know whether tonight is going to work. I'm right far more often than I'm wrong.…
Started by Gemma Pritchard5 replies171 views -
What exactly is Aristotle’s “function argument” in Nicomachean Ethics I.7?
I teach this every year and I always feel I fumble it. My summary for students goes roughly like this: the good of anything that has a function lies in performing that function well human beings have a function it isn't nutrition…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies143 views -
Norman the clairvoyant is reliably right, yet most people say he doesn’t know. Why?
We did the Norman case in my epistemology tutorial this week and I came out more confused than I went in. The setup, as I understood it: Norman has a clairvoyant faculty that is completely reliable. He has no idea he has…
Started by Ethan Mercer5 replies277 views -
If consent of the governed is the newcomer, what did legitimacy rest on before it?
I teach at a Māori-language school, and my students are learning about government this term. I showed them a comparative table of answers to the question "how should we be governed?" across many traditions: Greek, Chinese, Indian, Islamic, European. The thing that…
Started by Aroha Tipene5 replies224 views -
My son says you can’t prove fairies don’t exist. Why is that a weakness, not a strength?
My nine-year-old has discovered the perfect argument. Fairies live in our garden, he says. When I ask how he knows, he says: “You can't prove they don't.” He is very pleased with this and uses it on his sister for everything from…
Started by Thamarai Selvi Raman5 replies166 views -
I know the spider is harmless and I’m still terrified. Is my fear wrong, or just irrational?
I design puzzle games, and I am also very afraid of spiders. Last week one sat on my monitor for an hour. I knew it was a harmless house spider. I could have recited the facts about its venom. I still couldn't…
Started by Huang Wei-ting5 replies190 views -
Epictetus says some things are up to us. What did that depend on for him?
I drive a city bus in Ankara and I listen to lectures between stops. Epictetus is my favourite. The Handbook begins by saying some things are up to us and some are not: our opinions, desires and aversions are up to us;…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu5 replies176 views -
What does “the right side of history” actually assume about history?
I coach high school debate, and at least once a tournament a kid closes a round with “my opponent is on the wrong side of history.” Judges love it. I've started to find it slippery, but I can't say exactly why. As…
Started by Sam Ellery5 replies240 views -
If the Big Bang marks the edge of a theory rather than a beginning, what is left of the kalām’s physics?
I'm a physicist, and I get asked about this a lot by friends who have watched debates online. Here is what I think the physics actually says. The hot Big Bang phase of the observable universe has a finite age, about 13.8…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies275 views -
I butcher pigs at work and my dog sleeps on my bed. Is that inconsistent?
I'm a chef from Goa, which means pork is close to the centre of the food I grew up with: sorpotel, vindaloo, chouriço. In my kitchen in Dubai I break down whole pigs when we can get them. At home I have…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies197 views -
Where do I start if I want philosophy beyond the European canon, not just Plato?
I teach at a Māori-language school in Rotorua. My students find it obvious that a river can be a person, and I'm trying to understand why so much of Western philosophy finds it strange, and what tikanga might say to philosophy in…
Started by Aroha Tipene5 replies133 views -
What do Prior’s four tense operators actually say, in plain words?
I design puzzle games, and the one I'm building now has a time loop: the player relives the same afternoon and has to work out what will happen, what already happened, and what has always been true in the loop. A friend…
Started by Huang Wei-ting5 replies163 views -
Can Kant’s rule against treating others merely as means be stretched to cover animals?
I work on wetlands, and in a project meeting last month we argued about whether the birds of a lake have any claim against being drained out of their habitat, or whether only the people who enjoy them do. A colleague, a…
Started by Anand Pillai5 replies195 views -
Running a kitchen, I never pick the best option, just the first good one. Is that irrational?
I run a kitchen of twenty-two people in Dubai. Every morning at six I make maybe fifty decisions before the first coffee: which supplier to call when the fish is late, who covers a sick cook, whether the tomatoes are good enough…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies190 views -
Is a mayonnaise emergent? A cook asks about weak and strong emergence
I run a kitchen in Dubai. Every morning someone on my team makes mayonnaise: egg yolk, a little mustard and lemon, then oil, drop by drop at first. Get it right and you have something thick, glossy and pale. Get it wrong…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies241 views -
Is the flame on my burner a thing, or something that keeps happening?
I run a kitchen in Dubai, twenty-two cooks, nine countries, and on a slow afternoon I was staring at a gas flame. It keeps the same shape and colour for hours, but nothing in it stays: the gas comes in, burns, and…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies134 views -
Why did al-Jahiz insist on mixing jest with earnest in serious books?
My shop is off Mutanabbi Street and the most stolen book on my shelves, I'm sorry to say, is al-Jāḥiẓ's Kitāb al-Bukhalāʾ, the Book of Misers. People pick it up, start laughing, and somehow forget to pay. It is a collection of…
Started by Zainab Kadhim5 replies222 views -
I design systems that steer behaviour. Where does my responsibility end?
I design games in Tainan. My job is to shape what players want to do next: rewards spaced so that the next one is always just ahead, social features that make leaving feel like letting friends down, events that expire so you…
Started by Huang Wei-ting5 replies123 views -
What exactly is Wang Yangming’s liangzhi, and is it just the Chinese word for conscience?
I grew up in Tainan and met Wang Yangming in high school, where he was something to memorise: “unity of knowledge and action”, “extend liangzhi”, three marks on the exam. Now I design puzzle games and suddenly find him interesting, because liangzhi…
Started by Huang Wei-ting5 replies282 views -
Teaching ethics to fifteen-year-olds: do I water sprouts or straighten warped wood?
I teach ethics at a secondary school in Seoul. Our school is arguing about a new behaviour policy, and I realised the argument is the old one between Mencius and Xunzi. Mencius says anyone who sees a child about to fall into…
Started by Ji-woo Park5 replies257 views