Coordinates of Thought: topics
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Can you be argued out of a feeling? What is therapy doing when it works?
Telling someone their fear is irrational almost never helps, even when it's true. And yet some therapies built on exactly that idea work. Cognitive behavioural therapy has a clear philosophical ancestor. Albert Ellis, one of its founders, credited Epictetus, whose line in…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
Slippery-slope arguments in medicine are usually predictions, not fallacies
Medicine runs on slippery-slope reasoning, and most of it is sound. A simple case. A patient with a cold asks for antibiotics. If the GP prescribes "just this once", she has taught them that colds get antibiotics, they will ask again, they…
Started by Alistair Gow6 replies -
‘The Fact of Blackness’ or ‘The Lived Experience of the Black Man’? What a translation choice did to Fanon
Rereading Black Skin, White Masks (1952), I noticed something I'd missed for years: the fifth chapter has two different titles in English. Fanon's French is ‘L'expérience vécue du Noir’. The 1967 translation called it ‘The Fact of Blackness’. The 2008 translation calls…
Started by Sana Rizvi5 replies -
Confucian ethics is a role ethics, and filing it under virtue ethics hides its best idea
In the national ethics curriculum I teach in Seoul, Confucius sits on the same page as Aristotle under the heading "virtue ethics". I used to accept that. I now think it is a mistake, or at least a costly simplification. Here is…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu6 replies -
Giving up excluded middle would cost school mathematics far too much
I've been reading about intuitionism. Brouwer denied that "P or not-P" holds for every mathematical statement, and so rejected proofs that rely on it. My thesis: whatever the merits for research mathematicians, the cost to the mathematics we actually teach is far…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies -
Find the structure under the argument first: I tried it on three stories I covered
A lecturer's handout I picked up says that most applied-ethics disputes turn on a handful of recurring structures: moral status, where to draw a line on a continuum, doing versus allowing, intended versus foreseen harm, distribution under scarcity, consent and capacity, and…
Started by Sana Rizvi4 replies -
Intuitionists are right to refuse the law of excluded middle for infinite collections
I lean intuitionist, so I declare my bias. Here's the case. For Brouwer, mathematical objects are mental constructions, and to assert that something exists is to be able to construct it. On that view, “P or not-P” is a claim that we…
Started by Ana Clara Ferreira5 replies -
A delusion can be more coherent than my own beliefs. What does that do to coherentism?
A well-organised delusional system, as clinicians describe it, can be strikingly coherent. Every apparent counter-example is absorbed and turned into further confirmation. The neighbour's friendliness proves the plot is subtle; the absence of evidence proves the conspirators are careful. As a structure…
Started by Martín Iriarte4 replies -
Smith’s butcher and Smith’s impartial spectator: is there really an ‘Adam Smith problem’?
I am reading the Scottish Enlightenment in order. I've just finished The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and started The Wealth of Nations (1776), and I can see why nineteenth-century German scholars talked about "das Adam Smith Problem". The first book is…
Started by Alistair Gow4 replies -
Reading group: al-Mawardi’s Ordinances of Government, on the conditions of legitimate rule
Al-Mawardi (972–1058) was a Shafi'i jurist and judge in Baghdad at a strange moment: the Abbasid caliph was the recognised head of the community, while real military power in the city belonged for most of his life to the Buyid emirs. His…
Started by Layla Sfeir5 replies -
Is negative utilitarianism the most compassionate moral theory, or the most dangerous one?
On the trekking routes I meet a lot of young Westerners who have read a little philosophy and a little Buddhism, and lately some of them talk about negative utilitarianism: the view that morality is about minimising suffering, not maximising happiness. Karl…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung4 replies -
Reading group: the chariot in the Milindapañha, read beside Hume’s “Of personal identity”
My working rule is that comparisons should be made text against text, not summary against summary. Here is a small experiment: read the most famous Buddhist passage on the self and the most famous Western one side by side, slowly, and see…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
A thousand years of Buddhists and Vedāntins arguing about the self: failure or success?
Here is a question I keep returning to on long evenings. Something I read recently put it starkly. Vedānta says the innermost self is identical with ultimate reality. Buddhism says there is no permanent self at all. Two traditions, the same region,…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung5 replies -
Everyone already knew: what truth commissions teach about common knowledge
I spent eight years reporting on Colombia's peace process and the truth commission. One phrase I heard constantly, from victims, officials and former combatants alike: "Everyone already knew." And in a sense they did. People in the regions knew who had disappeared,…
Started by Andrés Zuluaga5 replies -
The four-principles framework is too individualist for family-centred medicine
I first read Beauchamp and Childress as a student, and I admired it. But my work interpreting at the hospital keeps showing me where it doesn't fit. A typical case: an older man with a serious diagnosis. By the book, the doctor…
Started by Tsion Bekele6 replies -
“You are your relationships”: is that Confucius, or a modern reading of him?
I'm a retired teacher reading the Analects slowly with a commentary, and I keep meeting a claim in the secondary literature that I can't quite find in the text. The claim, associated with Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont and their "role ethics",…
Started by Henrike Vogel5 replies -
Reading group: Ibn Hazm’s The Ring of the Dove, four weeks through al-Andalus
Córdoba is the city where Ibn Hazm was born in 994 and which he watched being torn apart in the civil wars of his youth. Visitors know Ibn Rushd and Maimonides; almost nobody knows that the same city produced one of the…
Started by Rafael Lucena Prieto5 replies -
Does knowing what a kelp forest is make it more beautiful, or just different?
When I take visitors down into the kelp, most of them see brown weed swaying in murky water and come up politely bored. When I take students who have studied the system, who know that the kelp can grow astonishingly fast, that…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo4 replies -
Reading group: Hume’s Treatise on reason, passion and the source of moral distinctions
I have finally started reading Hume properly in retirement, and I would like company for the passages that underlie most modern arguments about moral motivation. Three short sections of A Treatise of Human Nature, one a week: Week 1. Book 2, Part…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
If I know myself “by presence”, why am I so bad at knowing my own motives? Suhrawardi meets psychology
In my psychology courses, self-knowledge is treated as a model the brain builds of itself, and a fairly unreliable one. People misreport their own motives all the time. So I was surprised to find, in a book about Persian philosophy, the claim…
Started by Elif Yıldız5 replies -
Reading group: van Fraassen’s The Scientific Image, on realism and explanation
The Scientific Image (1980) is the book that made anti-realism respectable again after a period when scientific realism seemed to have won. It's short, dense and often witty. I'd like to read the parts that matter most for the realism debate. Plan,…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak5 replies -
Reading group: William James’s Varieties, from ‘Religion and Neurology’ to the mysticism lectures
James gave the Gifford Lectures here in Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902, and they became The Varieties of Religious Experience. I have walked past the building for decades without reading the book, which seems a poor show for someone who spent his…
Started by Alistair Gow6 replies -
Reading group: Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, the first two chapters
Jonas published Das Prinzip Verantwortung in 1979 and the English version, which he prepared with David Herr, came out in 1984 as The Imperative of Responsibility. I taught ethics for years without reading it properly, and now that I have time I…
Started by Henrike Vogel5 replies -
Reading group: Rousseau’s Social Contract in four weeks, in French and English
Every year my terminale students in Dakar meet Rousseau on the syllabus, and every year I find something new in Du contrat social (1762). I'd like to read it slowly with people who will argue. Texts. I'll read the French. For English…
Started by Khady Sène6 replies -
Austin answered the argument from illusion, but the argument from hallucination survives him
Lately I have been rereading J. L. Austin's Sense and Sensibilia (1962), the lectures reconstructed after his death in which he takes apart A. J. Ayer's sense-datum theory. Austin's treatment of the stick in water is brilliant. The argument from illusion says:…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen5 replies -
“Why did this happen to me?” What do we owe someone who asks?
Last month my cousin, a woman in her forties who has never smoked, was diagnosed with lung cancer. When I sat with her afterwards she asked: “Why did this happen to me?” I gave her a good answer, I thought, from what…
Started by Omar Ragab5 replies -
Reading group: Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method, chapters 1 to 3
In my reading class at the prison, one of the men asked whether crime is “just normal” in every society. I said I would find out who had argued that. It turns out Durkheim did, in The Rules of Sociological Method (1895),…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma4 replies -
A role-based ethics gives too little protection to the person the roles are failing
I study constitutional law in Delhi, and Ambedkar is my lodestar. In Annihilation of Caste (1936) he attacked a social order in which a person's duties are fixed by the position they are born into, and argued that such an order leaves…
Started by Deepa Kartha6 replies -
Objectivity belongs to scientific communities, not to individual scientists
I work alongside physicists, and I have never met an objective one. I include myself. We all have pet ideas, we read data in their favour, we are slow to give up an interpretation we have published. And yet I believe physics…
Started by Lars Eriksen6 replies -
Take away the rational cosmos and Stoic ethics becomes a coping technique
My students discover Marcus Aurelius on their phones before they discover him in my classroom, usually as short videos about controlling what you can control. I am glad they find him. But I want to defend a thesis that spoils the mood…
Started by Giulia Ferrante6 replies