Format
Question
One question: Explain (can have an accepted answer) or Open (several argued answers)
-
My model was right for the wrong reason. Which answer to Gettier explains why that matters?
Last quarter one of our credit models flagged a small trader as high risk. She did default. But when we looked at the case, the default came from a long hospital stay, and the features the model had leaned on, irregular airtime…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga5 replies -
When someone dies, whose loss is grief about: theirs or ours?
My father died in February. In Addis Ababa people come to the house for days, the lekso, and sit with you, and much of what is said is about him: how young he was, what he would have seen. Thomas Nagel's account…
Started by Tsion Bekele5 replies -
If a life has a place rather than a meaning, what happens when the place is unjust?
I've been reading discussions of how different traditions answer "does life have meaning?", and one idea keeps coming up: most traditions say a life has a place rather than a meaning. Your meaning comes from your role in a family, a lineage,…
Started by Keisha Monroe6 replies -
Can an institution be at fault when nobody inside it did anything wrong?
Years ago, in a unit I served with, a soldier died in a training accident. The inquiry took months. Every officer had followed the regulations. The equipment had passed inspection. The schedule had been approved at the proper level. The report concluded…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun5 replies -
After reading Hamblin, should I still teach my prison class the list of fallacies?
In my prison reading class, the men's favourite unit is the fallacies. They love catching each other: "That's ad hominem!" "Straw man!" Then I read about C. L. Hamblin's book Fallacies (1970). As I understand it, he looked at the standard catalogue…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma5 replies -
Is the circularity objection to identity-based accounts of gender fatal, or a misunderstanding?
Logic is what I think about most, so circularity is the kind of objection I find myself taking seriously by reflex. I'd like help understanding whether it lands here. An identity-based account says: what makes someone a member of a gender category…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak6 replies -
Why did the Latin scholastics call Ibn Rushd simply “the Commentator”?
Reading Aquinas for the first time, after years with Eriugena and Boethius, I keep meeting references to "the Philosopher", who is Aristotle, and "the Commentator", who turns out to be Ibn Rushd, Averroes. I'd like to understand how that happened. How did…
Started by Siobhán Keane4 replies -
Friedman’s billiard player: is predictive success really all a model owes us?
My models predict, quite well, who will repay a small loan, using patterns in phone and payment records. They do not describe why anyone repays. Some of the strongest predictors are things that have no plausible causal story at all. A colleague…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga4 replies -
How do you choose a translation when you can’t read the original?
Speaking Irish as well as English, I know how much changes between languages. I've been reading Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy on the train, and I recently noticed that the two translations I own feel like different books. One is stately and archaic,…
Started by Siobhán Keane6 replies -
What did McLuhan mean by ‘the medium is the message’? It sounds like a slogan
Colleagues at work quote ‘the medium is the message’ at least once a week, usually when they want to sound deep about social media. I finally looked it up: it's the title of the first chapter of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media (1964).…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies -
What do Sufis mean by “tasting” (dhawq) as a way of knowing?
I love the Sufi poetry that has been sung in Yogyakarta for centuries. My teacher, an old woman who learned from her father, often says that certain things cannot be known from books, only "tasted". I always took this as a beautiful…
Started by Ratna Wulandari4 replies -
Do capabilities measure a good life better than happiness surveys do?
The donors I work with on accessible buildings want outcomes, and increasingly the outcome they ask for is "satisfaction": did people report being happier after the ramp was built? I find this maddening, and Amartya Sen's work explains why. Two of his…
Started by Dima Nasser5 replies -
Why did Philippa Foot invent the trolley case, and what did Judith Jarvis Thomson change?
The trolley problem comes up at every debate tournament, usually as a gotcha: "so you'd push the fat man?" My students treat it as a puzzle with a trick answer. I'd like to teach it properly, which means knowing where it came…
Started by Sam Ellery4 replies -
Hume’s bundle and the Buddha’s no-self sound identical to me. What is the real difference?
I've just read two things in the same week and they seemed to say the same thing. Hume, in the Treatise, looks inward for his self and reports that he never catches himself without a perception, and never observes anything but the…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
What were Mozi’s three tests for judging whether a doctrine is right?
I've been reading about early Chinese philosophy for fun. Several books mention that Mozi proposed "three tests" or "three standards" for judging a doctrine, and one claims this was the first explicit methodology in Chinese thought. I'd like to know what the…
Started by Vikram Sethi3 replies -
Did Plato’s Republic X really attack “art”, or is that a translation problem?
Every year in my class we reach the moment where a student says, "Wait, Plato wanted to ban poets?" I usually say yes, and we have a lively argument about censorship. But I've just read an argument that this framing misleads. Plato…
Started by Keisha Monroe5 replies -
Epicureans and Cārvākas: two ancient materialisms, two ideas of pleasure?
I have spent years arguing that the Cārvāka or Lokāyata materialists deserved a fairer hearing than their opponents gave them. Reading Epicurus, I keep seeing the comparison, and I want to test it. Both schools hold that there is no soul that…
Started by Arvind Poojary4 replies -
Is Nāgārjuna’s conventional truth a kind of instrumentalism about science?
In the tea houses on the Annapurna circuit I have been reading Nāgārjuna's Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way with a commentary a monk in Manang gave me. Last season a client of mine, a physicist, explained over dal bhat that some…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung5 replies -
Is there a film theory that starts from ma, rasa or the imaginal world rather than from Paris?
Almost every film theory I've read starts from France, Russia or America: Eisenstein, Bazin, Cavell, Carroll. They're wonderful, but when I watch Ozu, I feel the most important things happen in what those theories treat as gaps. In Japanese aesthetics there's ma,…
Started by Rin Matsuda6 replies -
Can Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica be read against its own hierarchy?
I read Vasconcelos ‘with admiration and a long list of objections’, as my profile says, and this year the list got longer. La raza cósmica (1925) is often taught in Mexico as an anti-racist text, and in one sense it is. Against…
Started by Valentina Ríos6 replies -
Deafness: disease, disability, or difference? And who gets to decide?
Last month a family in Amman asked me to help them think about a cochlear implant for their deaf toddler. The surgeon spoke of "correcting hearing loss". A Deaf friend of mine, who signs and has a rich social life in the…
Started by Dima Nasser4 replies -
What exactly is Odera Oruka’s sage philosophy, and how is it different from ethnophilosophy?
I live in Nairobi, and Henry Odera Oruka taught at the University of Nairobi, so I feel I should understand his work better than I do. I build credit models for a living and came to philosophy through statistics, so I know…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga4 replies -
What did al-Ghazālī mean by beauty as a thing’s proper perfection?
I make hand-drawn batik in Yogyakarta, in a workshop my mother started. At a study circle last month, the teacher said that for al-Ghazālī everything has its own beauty, which lies in the perfection proper to it: a horse is beautiful as…
Started by Ratna Wulandari4 replies -
Our safety manual tells us what to do after we’ve broken a safety rule. Is that a paradox?
Working the cranes, I read our safety manual more carefully than most. Rule 1: never enter the exclusion zone under a suspended load. Rule 2: if you find yourself in the exclusion zone, do not move; radio the operator and wait for…
Started by Hugo Marchetti4 replies -
What are the seven “in some respect” predications of syādvāda, and is it really a many-valued logic?
Reading about many-valued and modal logics, I keep meeting the Jain doctrine of syādvāda in footnotes that call it "an ancient three-valued logic" or "a seven-valued logic". I am suspicious of both descriptions, but I don't know enough to say why. From…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak4 replies -
Wang Yangming stared at bamboo for seven days and fell ill. Was he refuting empiricism?
I teach ethics at a secondary school in Seoul, and the story my students remember best from the whole Neo-Confucian unit is the bamboo. As a young man, Wang Yangming tried to put Zhu Xi's teaching into practice. Zhu Xi said that…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu5 replies -
Is Iris Marion Young right that most injustice is not about who gets what?
Whenever my reading group discusses Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990), the same split appears. Young argued that political philosophy had been captured by the "distributive paradigm": it treats justice as the fair division of a stock of goods, income,…
Started by Femke Bosman6 replies -
Knowledge as a building or a raft? Neurath’s boat, seen from a community organiser’s chair
I'm a community organiser in Chicago and used to teach in public schools. I've always loved pragmatism because it treats knowledge as something you do with other people. Lately I've been reading about the structure of justification and want to test the…
Started by Dana Whitfield5 replies -
Is Wheeler’s “it from bit” a physics proposal or a piece of metaphysics?
John Wheeler's slogan "it from bit" says that every physical thing derives its existence from answers to yes-or-no questions: that reality is informational at the bottom. Anyone who spends time around physicists hears versions of it constantly, usually late in the evening.…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
If you had to give up one classical principle, which would you choose?
I've been working through a list of non-classical logics, and each one gives up something different: bivalence (every statement true or false), excluded middle (P or not-P), explosion (from a contradiction, anything), or the assumption that every name refers to something. Thought…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha6 replies