Format
Question
One question: Explain (can have an accepted answer) or Open (several argued answers)
-
Does translating philosophy change the philosophy?
Philosophical texts are the ones that keep translators 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 learn only from Hegel. Each choice…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
Did Indian mathematicians have a philosophy of zero?
Brahmagupta's Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta (628 CE) gives rules for arithmetic with zero as a number: adding zero to a number leaves it unchanged, multiplying by zero gives zero, and so on. He also tried to define division by zero, not quite successfully. Earlier, the…
Started by Vikram Sethi3 replies -
Who is morally responsible when an AI system causes harm?
Andreas Matthias coined the term "responsibility gap" in 2004: when a learning system behaves in ways its designers couldn't predict, it seems nobody is fully responsible. The designers didn't intend the outcome, the operators couldn't foresee it, and the system isn't a…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman3 replies -
What exactly is kasb (acquisition), and is it just compatibilism with God in it?
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 actions, but I am still responsible for them. When…
Started by Fajar Nugroho5 replies -
If a system passes every behavioural test, what would still be missing?
Suppose a future system passes every test we can think of. It holds conversations, explains its reasoning, makes jokes that land, learns new tasks quickly, and reacts appropriately to pain-like signals in a robot body. Some people would say there's nothing more…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen4 replies -
I know within ten seconds whether a room will laugh, but I can’t say how. Does that count as knowing?
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. Promoters have started asking me before they…
Started by Gemma Pritchard5 replies -
Why is saying “I promise” not true or false, like other sentences?
I found an idea I don't fully understand. The book says that when I tell my mother "I promise I'll be home by ten", I am not describing anything. I am not reporting a promise that exists somewhere else. Saying it is…
Started by Fajar Nugroho3 replies -
Do animals have conscious experiences, and how could we ever tell?
In 2012 a group of neuroscientists signed the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, stating that non-human animals, including all mammals and birds and some others such as octopuses, have the neurological substrates of conscious experience. In 2024 the New York Declaration on Animal…
Started by Priya Raghavan4 replies -
What’s the difference between Kant’s “mathematical” and “dynamical” sublime?
Last month I stood at the crater rim at Bromo before sunrise with the volcano smoking below and the sand sea all around, and I felt something I don't have a word for: scared, tiny, and very happy at the same time.…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies -
If Buddhism says there is no self, what exactly gets reborn?
This week's lecture was on Buddhism, and the speaker said two things that seem to contradict each other: there is no permanent self, and there is rebirth. If there's no self, what is reborn? Who carries the karma? If I do something…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
My bus kneels for wheelchairs. What is the difference between an impairment and a disability?
Our newer buses on the 413 can lower themselves at the kerb and put out a ramp, which takes about thirty seconds. Some of the older buses can't. A man I see most mornings uses a wheelchair, and on a new bus…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
Why can’t a shadow explain the height of a flagpole?
I'm reading an introduction to philosophy of science and got stuck on the flagpole example. The idea, as I understand it: Carl Hempel said that to explain something is to derive it from laws of nature plus the starting conditions. From the…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting4 replies -
What is the difference between jus ad bellum and jus in bello, and why keep them apart?
Reading history, I keep meeting two Latin phrases: jus ad bellum and jus in bello. I understand roughly that the first is about whether going to war is just, and the second about how the war is fought. What I don't understand…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies -
Is fana in Sufism the same as nirvana in Buddhism?
My grandmother used to read Sufi poetry about fana, the annihilation of the self in God. Now I've started reading about Buddhism and nirvana, which also seems to involve the end of the self. Are these basically the same experience described in…
Started by Elif Yıldız4 replies -
Is “objectivity” in journalism a coherent ideal?
I was trained to be "objective": report the facts, present both sides, keep my opinions out. In practice, every choice is a judgment: what's a story, whose voice to include, which word to use (killed or died, militant or freedom fighter). Some…
Started by Sana Rizvi3 replies -
Are the words of the Veda abstract objects? Mīmāṃsā’s eternal language and Frege’s third realm
I teach Sanskrit in Varanasi and read Pūrva Mīmāṃsā. My tradition holds that the Veda is authorless (apauruṣeya), that words (śabda) are eternal, and that the relation between a word and its meaning is not created by anyone. The Mīmāṃsā Sūtra says…
Started by Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya6 replies -
What exactly is Aristotle’s “function argument” in Nicomachean Ethics I.7?
This argument is easy to fumble when you explain it. My usual summary 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 and growth (plants…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
What’s the difference between negative and positive liberty?
In constitutional law classes, Isaiah Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty" (1958) comes up constantly, but my professors use it in different ways. Some say negative liberty is freedom from interference and positive liberty is having the resources to act. Others say positive…
Started by Deepa Kartha3 replies -
What is the principle of double effect, and when does it apply in medicine?
In palliative care, I often hear that giving high doses of morphine is permitted even if it might shorten life, because of the "principle of double effect". But I've realised I don't know exactly what the principle says or where it comes…
Started by Omar Ragab4 replies -
Do future generations have rights over the climate we leave them?
Around Hyderabad's lakes you can see the long-term effects of decisions made decades ago: dams, drained wetlands, groundwater extraction. The people most affected weren't born when the decisions were made. Derek Parfit's "non-identity problem" (Reasons and Persons, 1984) makes this hard. Our…
Started by Anand Kurup3 replies -
If a machine might have interests, what do we owe it before we know?
Of course the thing that has eaten my semester is the one I was most sceptical about: whether anything is owed to AI systems that might have interests. Here's my difficulty. On the question of whether there is something it is like…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies -
Can someone explain Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain argument and the strongest reply to it?
We did chapter 7 of Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) in a tutorial this week and I came out feeling slightly winded. As I understand it: start from whatever distribution you think is just. Call it D1. Now a famous basketball player,…
Started by Ethan Mercer4 replies -
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 replies -
How is Scanlon’s ‘reasonable rejection’ test different from asking what most people would agree to?
We read a chapter of Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other (1998) in my ethics tutorial this week, and it left me with more questions than answers. The idea, roughly, is that an act is wrong if it would be disallowed…
Started by Ethan Mercer4 replies -
How can a thought move an arm if physics already explains every movement?
Last week a lecturer said something I have been chewing on since. He said: decide to raise your arm, and it rises. Fine. But scientists say every movement of the arm has a complete physical cause, nerves, muscles, chemistry. So what is…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
My son says my rain forecasts could be “Dutch-booked”. What does that mean?
This week my son's course reading was about probability, sent, I think, to keep his mother humble. On the phone I told him I was sixty percent sure the rains would come early this year. When he asked about the dry season…
Started by Akosua Mensah4 replies -
Is ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ a real question or just a very good bit?
I do stand-up, mostly in northern clubs, and I've got a bit about "why is there something rather than nothing". The punchline is that the universe exists because somebody forgot to cancel the booking. It does all right. Afterwards a bloke in…
Started by Gemma Pritchard4 replies -
My daughter asked whether a square circle could exist on another planet. How do I answer?
My nine-year-old has decided that "anything could be true somewhere in space". Last week it was square circles, this week it is a planet where two and two make five. I said no, and she asked why a planet with no gravity…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
If I must file the return, must I file it or shred it? Ross’s paradox for a tax preparer
A client's son, who is studying philosophy, told me about something called Ross's paradox. As he explained it: in the standard logic of obligation, if you ought to do A, then it follows that you ought to do "A or B", for…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal3 replies -
If a stopped clock happens to show the right time, why don’t I know the time?
Yesterday's lecture was about knowledge. The lecturer said that for a long time philosophers agreed that knowledge is "justified true belief", and then a man called Gettier wrote three pages and the agreement fell apart. The example that stayed with me was…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies