Coordinates of Thought: topics
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Mencius’s child at the well, seen from a delivery room in Sylhet
I have worked on a maternity ward for nineteen years. Last month a friend lent me a translation of Mencius, and I stopped at the passage about the child at the well and read it three times. Mencius says that anyone who…
Started by Farhana Akter5 replies -
Does “wrong” mean the same thing in every language, or does each language build in a moral theory?
In the last year I have spent more time translating the word “wrong” than any other. In ordinary Vietnamese, the word we would use most often for “wrong”, sai, also means simply “incorrect”: a wrong answer on a test, a wrong turn.…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo5 replies -
Frege said logic is not psychology. A materialist would like a word
In the introduction to The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884), Frege lays down as his first principle that the psychological must be sharply separated from the logical, the subjective from the objective. Husserl later made the anti-psychologism case at length in the Prolegomena…
Started by Priya Raghavan4 replies -
Care ethics has no convincing account of what we owe to strangers far away
Working alongside GPs persuaded me that care is morally basic in the consulting room. What I'm not persuaded of is that it can be a whole ethics. The thesis: if moral obligation is grounded in particular relationships and the responsiveness they call…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
Bullough’s fog at sea, seen from an edit suite in Tehran
Edward Bullough's 1912 essay on "psychical distance" begins with a fog at sea. For the passengers it is mostly misery and anxiety: delays, danger, the foghorn. But if you can set the practical side aside, the fog becomes strange and beautiful: the…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam4 replies -
Is Zhu Xi’s li a universal? What does ‘principle is one, manifestations many’ mean?
I teach ethics at a secondary school in Seoul. Toegye is on the 1,000-won note and my students can tell you he was a Neo-Confucian, but not what that means. This term I am trying to explain li (理, "principle" or "pattern")…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu5 replies -
Reading group: Eva Kittay’s Love’s Labor and the dependency critique of Rawls
Eva Kittay's Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (1999) is one of the books that turned care ethics from a set of intuitions into a challenge to political philosophy. I have dipped into parts of it for years, but I've…
Started by Femke Bosman5 replies -
Reading group: Émilie du Châtelet’s Foundations of Physics, the opening chapters
Reading women in early modern philosophy, I keep meeting Émilie du Châtelet (1706–1749) in footnotes as Voltaire's companion and as the translator of Newton's Principia into French. Both true, and both shrink her. Her own book, the Institutions de physique (1740), is…
Started by Valentina Ríos4 replies -
Reading group: Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief” and James’s “The Will to Believe” side by side
These two essays are a classic pairing and they are both short, so I'd like to read them together over four weeks. The question they share is the one at the center of debates about rationality: should you believe only what the…
Started by Dana Whitfield6 replies -
Twenty years of translating have convinced me that meaning is use
Every day at work I meet words that the dictionary claims to define and that my clients use in ways the definition doesn't cover. Heimat is the famous German case, but the ordinary words are worse. “Fair” in English. Geist. The French…
Started by Claire Dubois6 replies -
Anton Wilhelm Amo’s impassive mind: a better dualism than Descartes’s?
When the philosophy club I run at school reaches mind and body, I always start with Anton Wilhelm Amo, the philosopher born near Axim on the Gold Coast around 1703, taken to Germany as a child, educated at Halle and Wittenberg, and…
Started by Kwame Asante5 replies -
Why does arguing about a song feel different from arguing about coriander?
I'm new to aesthetics, so bear with me. Last weekend a friend called a song I love "objectively bad", and I was genuinely hurt, more than I would be if she said she hated my cooking. When people disagree about coriander, nobody…
Started by Elif Yıldız5 replies -
Norms are neither true nor false, so there is no logic of obligation, only a logic about obligations
This puzzle has bothered me since I read Kelsen as a law student in Lahore. Logic, as usually understood, is about relations between things that can be true or false: if the premises are true, the conclusion must be. But norms ("you…
Started by Hamza Qureshi4 replies -
Crackle lines in batik: a flaw my mother taught me to keep
In hand-drawn batik, after the wax is applied and the cloth goes into the dye, the wax sometimes cracks. Dye seeps into the cracks and leaves fine veined lines across the pattern. Some makers try to avoid it. My mother taught me…
Started by Ratna Wulandari4 replies -
“Seventy faces” and “no verse leaves its plain sense”: the rabbis held both at once
This tripped up my Tuesday study group last month and I have not stopped thinking about it. On one side, there is the midrashic saying that the Torah has seventy faces. A verse can bear many readings, and the tradition records them…
Started by Eliana Halpern4 replies -
Reading group: Gould and Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco” (1979)
Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin's paper, published in 1979 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, is one of the few biology papers whose title became a philosophical term. Its target is what they called the adaptationist programme: the habit of…
Started by Priya Raghavan4 replies -
Why did Maimonides say he could have read Genesis figuratively, if eternity had been proved?
I guide visitors around the old Jewish quarter in Córdoba, where there is a statue of Maimonides in a small square. Visitors photograph it and ask me what he believed. Usually I say something about reason and faith and move on. A…
Started by Rafael Lucena Prieto5 replies -
Reading group: Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Parts I and III
Having started with Hume, I have moved on to Adam Smith, working through the Scottish Enlightenment in local order. Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments first appeared in 1759 and he kept revising it until the sixth edition of 1790, the year he…
Started by Alistair Gow4 replies -
Reid said we are built to believe what we are told. Was he right, or was Hume?
Most of what I know, I was told. For decades at a Leith surgery, patients and doctors told me things and I believed most of them; I told them things and they believed most of those. It never occurred to me to…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
Can freedom as non-domination survive at the scale of millions?
I grew up hearing my grandmother speak Quechua at the market in Lima, and I spent summers in her village, where the community, the ayllu, still assigned duties by rotation. Every household took its turn at the offices of the community, at…
Started by Mateo Quispe5 replies -
Judges make law in hard cases, and pretending they discover it does more harm than good
Here is my thesis, from someone who has read too many judgments. Hart's famous example is a rule forbidding vehicles in the park. Cars are clearly covered. But a bicycle? A child's electric toy? A decommissioned tank set up as a war…
Started by Deepa Kartha6 replies -
Does general anaesthesia switch experience off, or only the memory of it?
Last month, a patient I was interpreting for asked before surgery whether she would "be there" during the operation and simply forget it, or whether she would not be there at all. I passed on the reassuring answer she was given. Afterwards…
Started by Tsion Bekele6 replies -
A translator cannot afford to be an anti-intentionalist
I want to defend a thesis that my academic friends find naive: translation makes anti-intentionalism impossible in practice, whatever its merits in theory. Here is why. Every page forces choices the source language does not force. German Sie or du maps onto…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
Did classical Chinese philosophers have a concept of truth, or only of the “admissible”?
This question sits at the centre of my reading of the Later Mohist canons, and I would welcome other views. In 1985 Chad Hansen published an influential paper arguing, roughly, that classical Chinese philosophy did not use a semantic concept of truth,…
Started by Chen Yuting6 replies -
Was gender always the organising category? Oyěwùmí and the Yoruba argument
I keep returning to a book that divides everyone I discuss it with: Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí's The Invention of Women (1997). Her claim is that in precolonial Yoruba society, the primary principle of social organisation was not gender but seniority, relative age. She…
Started by Titilayo Adeyemi6 replies -
Was Laozi the first laissez-faire economist? Why wu wei is not the invisible hand
Every few years a younger colleague at work brings me a quotation from the Laozi with great excitement. "The more prohibitions there are, the poorer the people." "Governing a large state is like cooking a small fish": don't keep poking it. And…
Started by Javier Ferrandis6 replies -
Wang Chong against the omen-readers: a naturalist in the Han dynasty
Among the classics my father left me is one I did not expect to enjoy. Recently I have been reading Wang Chong's Lunheng, and I think he deserves to be far better known outside China. In the Han dynasty a powerful theory…
Started by Liu Mingqiao4 replies -
Some films do philosophy that prose cannot, rather than illustrating it
I'll argue a thesis my analytic friends here find indulgent: some films do philosophical work in their own right, work that can't be fully restated in prose. The sceptic's argument is simple. Whatever philosophical content a film has can be put into…
Started by Martín Iriarte7 replies -
Reflective equilibrium or tidy prejudice? How a prison reading class changed my view on punishment
Two years ago I would have told you, without hesitation, that people should get what they deserve, and that a man who killed someone deserves to lose most of his life. I held that as a principle. I also had a strong…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma5 replies -
Rāmānuja’s question ‘whose ignorance?’ is the objection Advaita never answered
I read Mīmāṃsā, which makes me a realist about the world of ritual, persons and things, and therefore no natural friend of either kind of Vedāntin. On one point, though, I side firmly with Rāmānuja against Śaṅkara. Advaita holds that brahman alone…
Started by Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya6 replies