Coordinates of Thought: topics
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Does a language model mean anything by what it writes?
At work in Kuala Lumpur I evaluate text-generating systems for fairness. Last month a colleague said, half joking, that one of our models "meant" something offensive. Everyone laughed and then nobody could say whether that was false. The usual philosophical framing seems…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies -
At three in the morning, does a first cause comfort anyone?
I work nights at a care home for older people in Uppsala. A few weeks ago, while his father was dying, a man asked me whether I thought there was a reason for everything. He didn't want an argument, I think. He…
Started by Elin Hedqvist5 replies -
Double effect is a genuine moral distinction, not a lawyer’s trick for doing harm with clean hands
Every year at least one of my students arrives having read online that the doctrine of double effect is Catholic casuistry: a way to do what you want and say you did not intend it. I want to defend it as a…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu6 replies -
The building has steps, my legs don’t work: which sentence names my disability?
I spend a lot of my working time measuring door widths and arguing with architects about gradients. When I can't get into a building, two descriptions are true. My legs don't work. The building has no ramp. For most of history the…
Started by Dima Nasser6 replies -
Did Ibn Khaldun really say that labour is the source of value?
Every year at least one of my students comes back from the internet with the claim that Ibn Khaldun "invented the labour theory of value four centuries before Adam Smith and Marx". It's said with pride, and I share the pride, but…
Started by Youssef Berrada4 replies -
Is Susan Wolf’s account of meaning just “do what you love” with extra steps?
Every founder book I read on the way down said the same thing: find your passion and meaning will follow. I believed it. I was passionate. It didn't. Someone here recommended Susan Wolf, and the phrase I keep seeing is that meaning…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies -
Where a claim came from is often the best evidence you have about it
Yoruba speech draws a careful line between what you have seen for yourself and what you have only heard. My grandmother's first question on hearing any news was "who told you?", and then "who told them?" I used to find it tiresome.…
Started by Titilayo Adeyemi6 replies -
Fire and cotton in the Seventeenth Discussion, read beside Hume’s Enquiry
Causation is a practical problem for me most mornings. I've been reading the seventeenth discussion of al-Ghazālī's Incoherence of the Philosophers (in Michael Marmura's translation) next to Section VII of Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), and I want to set out…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam5 replies -
Who speaks for someone who cannot? Advance directives, surrogates and the family at three in the morning
Many of the people I care for at night can't speak for themselves when it matters most: confused, very ill, at the end. Decisions get made about them anyway, and I've watched how. The usual guidance gives two standards. Substituted judgement: decide…
Started by Elin Hedqvist5 replies -
Watsuji’s betweenness, ubuntu and relational autonomy: one discovery made three times, or three ideas?
I've been reading Watsuji Tetsurō's Ethics (Rinrigaku) slowly, with a friend from the temple who reads more Japanese philosophy than I do. Watsuji's starting point is that the Japanese word for a human being, ningen, is written with characters meaning "person" and…
Started by Aiko Tanabe5 replies -
Reading group: McTaggart’s ‘The Unreality of Time’ and Prior’s ‘Thank Goodness That’s Over’
I spend most of my free time on modal and many-valued logics, and I owe a great deal to Arthur Prior, who founded tense logic partly because he thought the A-series was real and needed a logic of its own. So I…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak5 replies -
Dharma, li, sharia, natural law: four words English keeps flattening into “duty” or “law”
Last week an engineering student in the evening class on Indian philosophy that I help with asked a good question: “If dharma is not duty, what is it like? Is there anything in other cultures that works the same way?” I tried…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Rebirth without anyone reborn: the lamp that lights another lamp
In comparative tables of what happens at death, the Buddhist row always reads awkwardly: rebirth, but no self that transmigrates. Continuity, not identity. Many newcomers to the Dhamma, and many philosophers, hear a contradiction. If nobody is reborn, what is the rebirth…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara6 replies -
“I could have caught it sooner”: what is a carer’s regret actually claiming?
Something from work that I keep returning to. One of our residents got worse overnight. Looking back, there was a sign at 2 a.m. that, in hindsight, meant he was seriously ill. I noticed it, it didn't seem much, I did not…
Started by Elin Hedqvist5 replies -
Nāgārjuna and the Vienna Circle both attacked metaphysics. Were they doing the same thing?
Recently a trekking client who studied philosophy in Vienna told me Nāgārjuna sounded like a logical positivist: someone who shows that metaphysical claims collapse under analysis. I can see the resemblance. Nāgārjuna takes every position, that things exist intrinsically, that they don't,…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung5 replies -
Why the translators skipped Greek tragedy, and what Ibn Rushd made of Aristotle’s Poetics
At the statue of Ibn Rushd near Córdoba's old walls I often tell visitors about Borges's story "Averroes' Search". Borges imagines the great commentator puzzling over two words in Aristotle's Poetics, "tragedy" and "comedy", for which his world has no examples, while…
Started by Rafael Lucena Prieto4 replies -
Many-worlds is the most conservative reading of quantum mechanics, not the wildest
Many-worlds has a reputation as the science-fiction interpretation. I want to argue it is the opposite: the reading that adds least to the physics. Look at what the others add. Copenhagen-style views add a collapse whenever a "measurement" happens, without saying what…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen5 replies -
Doing harm and allowing harm differ morally, even when the outcome is the same
At the hospital where I work, the distinction between doing and allowing comes up every week. Withdrawing a ventilator from a patient with no prospect of recovery is treated very differently from giving a lethal injection, by law, by most religious authorities,…
Started by Omar Ragab5 replies -
Hume’s Dialogues had answered the watchmaker before Paley set it ticking
Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion were published in 1779, three years after his death, which is a fair measure of how risky he thought they were. William Paley's Natural Theology, with its famous watch found on a heath, appeared in 1802. My…
Started by Alistair Gow6 replies -
What does Moore’s open question argument actually prove, and what is the standard reply to it?
Moore's open question argument from Principia Ethica (1903) keeps coming up as I work through ethics on my own, and I cannot tell whether it is a deep insight or a trick. Here is my understanding. Take any proposed definition of good…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha4 replies -
Mackie’s argument from queerness proves too much: by its standards arithmetic is queer too
Mackie's argument from queerness says that if there were objective moral facts, they would be, in his words, of “a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe”, and we would need an equally strange faculty to know them.…
Started by Ana Clara Ferreira5 replies -
Does Sunzi have an ethics of war, or only an economics of it?
We read The Art of War in the army as a manual, which is how most soldiers meet it. Rereading it in retirement, I am struck by how much of it counsels restraint. It opens by calling war a matter of life…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun4 replies -
Mencius was unfair to Mozi: impartial care does not mean having no father
I've grown tired of how Mohism is introduced: through Mencius's insult. Mencius says that Yang Zhu's "each for himself" means having no ruler, and Mozi's impartial care means having no father, and that people without father or ruler are beasts. Most students…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
Most abortion arguments are really disputes about what grounds moral status, and we should say so
When abortion comes up in a class, the room divides quickly, each side convinced the other doesn't care about something important. I want to propose something modest. Almost everyone in my classes agrees that killing an innocent person is seriously wrong. The…
Started by Miriam Adler5 replies -
When someone says “that’s my truth”, what exactly are they claiming?
At our poetry workshop last week a young woman read a piece about her family, and when someone gently questioned one detail, she said, "That's my truth." The room went quiet. Nobody knew what to say next. I felt two things at…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies -
Winch on the Azande: who gets to call a practice irrational?
Every year the older students in my school's philosophy club read Peter Winch's essay "Understanding a Primitive Society" (1964). It is a reply to E. E. Evans-Pritchard's classic 1937 study of witchcraft and oracles among the Azande of central Africa. Evans-Pritchard took…
Started by Kwame Asante4 replies -
Mu’tazilis, al-Māturīdī and Aquinas: three ways of saying reason can see part of the moral law
I started reading kalām to understand my own faith better. The question that keeps pulling me back is whether moral knowledge needs revelation. The classical positions, as I understand them: Muʿtazila: good and bad (ḥusn and qubḥ) are knowable by reason. That…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam4 replies -
Kalam atomism did not anticipate quantum theory, however tempting the comparison
I read kalam for pleasure. Twice this year I have sat through talks claiming that the Ash'ari theologians "anticipated quantum mechanics": the world made of discrete atoms, accidents re-created at each instant, no necessary connection between cause and effect, and al-Ghazali's cotton…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam4 replies -
If everything is empty, is emptiness itself empty too? Or does that make the idea collapse?
I have been reading about Buddhist theories of mind. A friend who meditates explained that, according to Madhyamaka, everything is "empty". I understood (I think) that this does not mean things don't exist, only that they don't exist independently, on their own.…
Started by Elif Yıldız4 replies -
The Four-Seven Debate: what a sixteenth-century exchange of letters teaches about disagreeing well
My students know Toegye's face, not his argument. This year I tried teaching the Four-Seven Debate not as doctrine but as a model of how to disagree. The basics: from 1559 Yi Hwang (Toegye), already the most respected scholar in Korea, exchanged…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu4 replies