Coordinates of Thought: topics
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Why did Confucian thinkers rarely ask whether the will is free?
A colleague who teaches European philosophy asked me what the Confucians said about free will versus determinism. I realised I had nothing to give him. The tradition talks constantly about effort and cultivation. Xunzi says goodness is the product of deliberate effort.…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu5 replies -
The Axial Age is defined by its exclusions, and that makes the thesis unfalsifiable
Every survey of world philosophy I've read includes the Axial Age: between about 800 and 200 BCE, in Greece, India, China and Israel, with no documented contact between them, something similar happened. People began defending claims against stated objections, named individuals disagreed…
Started by Mateo Quispe6 replies -
Every legal code I know contradicts itself somewhere, and courts still function
Every legal system I know contains provisions that conflict: a later statute that cuts across an earlier one, a general rule and a specific exception that both seem to apply, a constitutional provision in tension with an ordinary law. If classical logic…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
‘Killing robbers is not killing people’: the Later Mohists on inferences that fail
One passage in the Later Mohist texts seems to me to belong in any discussion of what predicate logic was invented to handle. In the chapter of the Mozi usually called the "Lesser Selection" (Xiaoqu), the Mohists discuss a kind of inference…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
Xunzi says the sages invented ritual and rightness. Does that make him a moral anti-realist?
I came to Xunzi through the debate with Mencius about human nature. That debate is usually told as optimism against pessimism: Mencius thinks we are born with the sprouts of goodness, Xunzi thinks our nature is crooked and goodness comes from deliberate…
Started by Elif Yıldız5 replies -
How did Frederick Douglass argue against the race science of the 1850s on its own terms?
I know Douglass from the Narrative and the Fourth of July speech, but someone here mentioned that he also gave a commencement address in 1854, ‘The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered’, taking on the scientists of his day. I've started reading…
Started by Dana Whitfield5 replies -
Calling al-Jahiz a forerunner of Darwin does him no favours
Every few months someone sends me a graphic headed "Evolution, 1,000 years before Darwin", with a portrait of al-Jahiz (c. 776–869) that nobody painted from life. I work on classical Arabic texts, and I want to argue that the "forerunner" label shrinks…
Started by Layla Sfeir5 replies -
Does a diagnosis name a real condition, or a useful bundle of symptoms?
I work as an interpreter at a hospital in Addis Ababa. Some diagnoses I translate every day feel like discoveries: a particular infection, caused by a particular organism, with a test that finds it. Others feel more like agreements. "Metabolic syndrome" is…
Started by Tsion Bekele5 replies -
When Sor Juana protests her own ignorance, is that rhetoric or argument, and does it matter?
One question about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz keeps returning to me. In 1691 she wrote the Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, her reply to the Bishop of Puebla, who had published her critique of a famous sermon with…
Started by Valentina Ríos4 replies -
Why does any list of qualities feel like the wrong answer to “why do you love me?”
I write love poems, and I'm new to reading philosophy about love, so forgive me if this is obvious. My partner asked me last month, half joking, "why do you love me?" I started to answer: you are kind, you are funny,…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
Reading group: Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), five chapters over five weeks
The Souls of Black Folk is the book I keep pushing onto the philosophy syllabus, because it was doing philosophy all along. Du Bois wrote much of it in my city, at Atlanta University. The ‘Forethought’ announces that the problem of the…
Started by Keisha Monroe5 replies -
Reading group: Augustine’s Confessions Book X, the books of memory, in Chadwick’s translation
There are already threads here on Book XI (time) and Book IV (the death of a friend), so I'd like to propose Book X, which sits between them and which I think is the most philosophical book of the Confessions. Having told…
Started by Aoife Kilbride5 replies -
Nobody deserves their talents, and that settles more about pay than people admit
I am paid a lot for my work in machine learning, mostly because a fairly rare combination of mathematical aptitude and programming skill is in demand right now. I want to argue a thesis that applies to me personally. I did not…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen6 replies -
Reading group: Weitz, Danto and Dickie on whether art can be defined
My students keep asking "but who decides what counts as art?", and I'd like to read the classic papers properly before I try to answer. Join me. Plan (three weeks): Week 1: Morris Weitz, "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics" (1956), with…
Started by Keisha Monroe4 replies -
Reading group: Searle’s “Minds, Brains, and Programs” with the replies, over three weeks
The Chinese Room is cited constantly and read rarely, and most people who have opinions on it have only met the thought experiment, not the paper. So let's read it properly. Text: John Searle, "Minds, Brains, and Programs", Behavioral and Brain Sciences…
Started by Oskar Nyberg6 replies -
Sincere and mistaken: what the memory research means for how we listen to victims
I have spent eight years covering the peace process in Colombia, which has meant listening to hundreds of people describe the worst days of their lives. Something has troubled me for a long time, and I'd like to think it through with…
Started by Andrés Zuluaga5 replies -
Emanation cannot be squared with a God who freely creates, and al-Ghazālī saw exactly why
I spend my working days with systems where outputs follow necessarily from inputs, and perhaps that's why the Neoplatonic picture of the world troubles me. In that picture, everything flows from the One the way light flows from the sun: necessarily, eternally,…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam6 replies -
Reading group: Mencius Book 1, the conversations with the kings
Every year I tell my students that Mencius was a political philosopher before he was a theorist of human nature. They don't believe me, because the textbook only gives them the child at the well. So I'd like to read the opening…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu5 replies -
Nishida’s pure experience dissolves the hard problem rather than solving it
I came to Nishida late, through zazen at a small temple near my house in Kyoto, after a career designing structures. Here is my thesis, stated as sharply as I can. The hard problem assumes a split. On one side, a physical…
Started by Aiko Tanabe6 replies -
Epistemic injustice, nearly two decades on: what has the idea actually changed?
I teach Yoruba at a secondary school in Ibadan and read a lot about Yoruba epistemic vocabulary, and one of the developments in philosophy since 1990 that matters most to me is the turn to testimony and the social side of knowledge.…
Started by Titilayo Adeyemi5 replies -
Leibniz had the better of the argument with Clarke
I've been reading the Leibniz–Clarke correspondence of 1715–16, in which Samuel Clarke defended Newton's absolute space and Leibniz argued that space is only the order of coexisting things. My thesis: Leibniz won. His central argument: suppose God had created the whole universe…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam5 replies -
Confucius refused to talk about death. Is declining a question a kind of answer?
In Book 11 of the Analects, the disciple Zilu asks how to serve ghosts and spirits. Confucius says: you are not yet able to serve people, how could you serve spirits? Zilu asks about death. Confucius replies: you do not yet understand…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu6 replies -
Salazar Bondy asked if there is a philosophy of our America. Over fifty years on, what’s the answer?
In 1968, the Peruvian philosopher Augusto Salazar Bondy published a short book with an uncomfortable title: ¿Existe una filosofía de nuestra América? His answer was, roughly, not yet. Latin American philosophy, he argued, had been imitative: each generation importing the latest European…
Started by Mateo Quispe6 replies -
Appiah is right: racial terms are empty, like ‘phlogiston’, and we should stop talking as if they named kinds
Appiah, whose father was Ghanaian, is someone young people in Accra claim with a certain pride, even when they disagree with him. I want to defend his eliminativism, at least for argument's sake. The argument, roughly: racial terms were introduced, in the…
Started by Kwame Asante7 replies -
Classical phenomenology described one kind of body and called it the structure of experience
This term my reading circle read the fifth chapter of Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, the one translated as "The Fact of Blackness" in the older English edition and "The Lived Experience of the Black Man" in the newer. My students understood…
Started by Keisha Monroe5 replies -
William James was wrong: an emotion is not the perception of a bodily change
Our psychology textbooks still teach the James–Lange theory with a kind of affection. William James's essay "What Is an Emotion?" (1884) proposes that the order we assume is backwards. We don't tremble because we're afraid; the bodily change comes first, and the…
Started by Elif Yıldız6 replies -
Rights by consistency: Sor Juana, Astell and Wollstonecraft on the same argument
I keep noticing the same argument shape in three women who never read one another. The shape is a consistency argument. If reason is what entitles men to education, liberty or rights, and women have reason, then you must either extend those…
Started by Valentina Ríos4 replies -
Reading Nāgārjuna as a dialetheist imports a problem he did not have
I keep running into Graham Priest's reading of Nāgārjuna, partly in his own books and partly in the paper he wrote with Jay Garfield on Nāgārjuna and the limits of thought. On that reading, some of Nāgārjuna's claims are true contradictions: the…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Being a realist about electrons commits me to nothing about moral or mathematical facts
I'm a scientific realist in the ordinary way: I think electrons, quantum fields and the like really exist, and that our best theories are approximately true of them. People sometimes assume this makes me a realist about everything else too. It doesn't,…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
Do the laws of physics make things happen, or only describe what happens?
Last week a student asked me why the ball "obeys" Newton's second law. I started to answer and realised I did not know what I meant by "obeys". We talk as if laws are rules and objects follow them. But a ball…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha4 replies