Coordinates of Thought: topics
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Is love a choice, or something that happens to us?
In poetry, love is almost always something that happens to you: you "fall", you're struck, you're helpless. But in many families and religious traditions, love is described as a commitment you choose…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies0 views -
Dream arguments East and West: Descartes, Zhuangzi and the Yoga Vasistha
Three treatments of the same worry. Descartes, Meditations I (1641): there are no sure signs to distinguish waking from dreaming, so the senses can't give certain knowledge. He uses it as a…
Started by Arjun Iyer3 replies0 views -
Hart’s “internal point of view”, seen from a courtroom in Lahore
Hart distinguishes being obliged to do something (as when a gunman demands your money) from having an obligation (as under a legal rule). The difference lies in the internal point of view:…
Started by Hamza Qureshi3 replies0 views -
Ubuntu and personhood: Menkiti’s communitarian view
I'm finally reading the African philosophy my physics degree never mentioned. The Nguni saying behind ubuntu is usually translated as "a person is a person through other persons". John Mbiti's African Religions…
Started by Emeka Nwosu4 replies0 views -
Founders and Stoicism: real philosophy or corporate self-help?
In the startup world, Stoicism is everywhere. Podcasts, newsletters, Marcus Aurelius quotes on office walls. I got into it during a bad year, and honestly it helped. But I'm starting to wonder…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies0 views -
Ibn Khaldun on taxation: a fourteenth-century Laffer curve?
In the Muqaddimah (1377) Ibn Khaldun observes that at the beginning of a dynasty, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments, while at the end of a dynasty it yields a…
Started by Javier Morales3 replies0 views -
Spinoza’s God as Nature: an engineer’s reading of Ethics Part I
I came to the Ethics (published 1677, after Spinoza's death) because of the geometrical form: definitions, axioms, propositions, demonstrations. It looks like a specification document. Part I argues that substance is what…
Started by Pieter de Jong5 replies0 views -
Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are constantly misused in philosophical arguments
A public service post, since I see this weekly. What the first theorem says, roughly: any consistent, effectively axiomatised formal system that contains enough arithmetic has true sentences in its language that…
Started by Tomasz Wójcik4 replies0 views -
Persian gardens, proportion, and Plato’s Timaeus
The classical Persian garden, the chahar bagh, is divided into four parts by water channels meeting at a centre. Visit the Fin Garden in Kashan or Bagh-e Eram in Shiraz and you…
Started by Reza Tehrani4 replies0 views -
Kant and the murderer at the door: can the essay be rescued?
In 1797 Kant published "On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy", replying to Benjamin Constant. He maintains that you may not lie even to a murderer who asks where your friend…
Started by Henrike Vogel4 replies0 views -
Is Aquinas’s First Way really about a first moment in time?
Most of my friends assume Aquinas's arguments for God (Summa Theologiae I, q.2, a.3) are about the beginning of the universe: everything has a cause, so go back far enough and you…
Started by Aoife Brennan4 replies0 views -
Al-Ghazali’s Deliverance from Error as a story about information overload
I've been reading al-Ghazali's Deliverance from Error (al-Munqidh min al-Dalal), written late in his life. He describes his search for certain knowledge among four groups: the theologians, the Batinis (who relied on…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman4 replies0 views -
The hard problem from a psychology student’s point of view
In 1995 David Chalmers distinguished the "easy problems" of consciousness (explaining discrimination, attention, reportability, the control of behaviour) from the "hard problem": explaining why any of this is accompanied by subjective experience…
Started by Elif Yıldız4 replies0 views -
Is the Allegory of the Cave a theory of education first and a metaphysics second?
Every year my students read the cave in Republic VII as a story about two worlds: shadows down here, Forms up there. That's not wrong, but I've come to think it isn't…
Started by Giulia Ferrante4 replies0 views -
Ahimsa in Jainism: how far can non-harm be taken?
I grew up next door to a Jain family in Hyderabad. The grandmother wouldn't eat after sunset (to avoid harming insects attracted to light), and they avoided root vegetables, since pulling them…
Started by Anand Pillai4 replies0 views -
Essence and existence: why Ibn Sina’s distinction mattered to Aquinas
In the metaphysics of the Shifa', Ibn Sina distinguishes what a thing is, its essence or quiddity (mahiyya), from the fact that it is, its existence (wujud). You can understand what a…
Started by Layla Haddad4 replies0 views -
Nagarjuna’s tetralemma is not a rejection of logic
The catuṣkoṭi, or tetralemma, considers four options for any proposition: it is, it is not, both, neither. In the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, Nāgārjuna often rejects all four. For example, the Buddha after death neither…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies0 views -
Iqbal’s khudi and Nietzsche’s Übermensch: influence or polemic?
Iqbal's Persian poem Asrar-i-Khudi (1915), translated by R. A. Nicholson as The Secrets of the Self (1920), makes the self, khudi, the centre of his philosophy. The self must be strengthened, disciplined…
Started by Hamza Qureshi4 replies0 views -
The kalam cosmological argument: what the mutakallimun actually argued
The argument that William Lane Craig revived in The Kalam Cosmological Argument (1979) has three steps: whatever begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore the universe has…
Started by Omar Farouk4 replies0 views -
Does quantum indeterminacy help free will at all?
People sometimes argue that because quantum mechanics is indeterministic, there's room for free will. As a physicist, I'm sceptical. First, randomness isn't freedom. If my decision depends on a random quantum event,…
Started by Emeka Nwosu4 replies0 views -
Mulla Sadra’s substantial motion: is everything changing at the level of substance?
For Aristotle, motion happens in a few categories only: quantity (growth), quality (a leaf turning red), and place. Substance doesn't move; it's the stable subject of change. When one substance becomes another,…
Started by Reza Tehrani4 replies0 views -
Ibn Khaldun’s asabiyya and the rise and fall of states
The central concept of the Muqaddimah is asabiyya, usually translated "group feeling" or "solidarity". Ibn Khaldun argues that groups living hard lives on the margins of civilisation, often nomadic or tribal, develop…
Started by Youssef Benali4 replies0 views -
Night shifts and Epictetus: the dichotomy of control on a hospital ward
The Enchiridion opens by dividing things into those up to us (our judgments, impulses, desires and aversions) and those not up to us (our bodies, property, reputation, office). Epictetus says that suffering…
Started by Elin Lindqvist4 replies0 views -
The Nyaya five-membered syllogism versus Aristotle’s three
I teach logic to sixteen-year-olds and recently started comparing two traditions. The Nyāya inference for others (parārthānumāna) has five members: Thesis (pratijñā): the hill has fire. Reason (hetu): because it has smoke.…
Started by Vikram Sethi4 replies0 views -
The floating man is not the cogito: Ibn Sina and Descartes compared
Ibn Sina's "floating man" appears in the De Anima of the Shifa' and again in the Isharat. Imagine a person created all at once, fully mature, suspended in the air, eyes covered,…
Started by Layla Haddad5 replies0 views -
Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste as political philosophy
In 1936 B. R. Ambedkar was invited to give the presidential address at the annual conference of the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal, an anti-caste Hindu reform group in Lahore. When the organisers saw the…
Started by Deepa Nair4 replies0 views -
Marx’s alienation and the gig economy
In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx describes four aspects of alienated labour: the worker is alienated from the product, from the activity of working, from their "species-being" (our nature…
Started by Javier Morales5 replies0 views -
Predictive processing and the Buddhist idea of constructed perception
In cognitive science, the predictive processing framework (Andy Clark's Surfing Uncertainty, 2016; Jakob Hohwy's The Predictive Mind, 2013) says the brain is constantly generating predictions about incoming sensory signals, and what we…
Started by Priya Raghavan4 replies0 views -
Jayarāśi and the Cārvāka skeptics: India’s most radical doubters
The Cārvāka or Lokāyata school is usually summarised as Indian materialism: only perception is a valid means of knowledge, there's no afterlife, enjoy life while it lasts. Most of what we know…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies0 views -
Shankara’s rope and snake: what kind of “unreality” is maya?
The most famous image in Advaita Vedanta: at dusk a man sees a rope and takes it for a snake. He is frightened, he may even run. When a lamp is brought,…
Started by Arjun Iyer5 replies0 views