Coordinates of Thought: topics
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What is Wakefield’s “harmful dysfunction” account, and why do psychiatrists still argue about it?
In our clinical module we spent a week on whether intense grief should ever be diagnosed as depression. When the diagnostic manual changed in 2013 and dropped the old exclusion for recent bereavement, there was a big argument, and one name kept…
Started by Elif Yıldız3 replies -
Reading group: the Elisabeth–Descartes letters of 1643, slowly
I have spent years reading Sor Juana, and one of the things she keeps teaching me is how much philosophy by women survives only in letters, prefaces and replies. So I would like to read the most famous case in early modern…
Started by Valentina Ríos6 replies -
Gödel’s “perception” of sets explains nothing about how we actually know mathematics
Rationalists from Plato onward have said that reason can simply see certain truths: that a surface cannot be red and green all over, that the axioms of geometry hold. The most famous modern version is Gödel's. In his essay on Cantor's continuum…
Started by Ana Clara Ferreira5 replies -
Reading group: the Hippocratic Oath and the ethical writings around it, then and now
Everyone cites the Hippocratic Oath; few have read it, and fewer have read the other ethical texts in the Hippocratic collection. I'd like to read them with doctors, nurses and anyone curious, and then compare them with a modern code. Texts. The…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
Reading group: A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (1936), chapters 1, 2, 4 and 6
Every year a student asks me whether mathematics "says anything about the world". Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic gives the boldest answer I know (no, it is all tautology) and the boldest dismissal of metaphysics. He was in his mid-twenties when he…
Started by Vikram Sethi6 replies -
Reading group: Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful, chapter by chapter
Eduard Hanslick's Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854) is short, polemical and still the book every philosopher of music has to answer. I teach music theory and play the organ, and I have argued with it for twenty years without reading it straight through with…
Started by Agnieszka Malinowska5 replies -
Does it matter at the bedside whether the self is a soul, ātman or a process?
I've been reading comparative accounts of the self: a created soul accountable to God in Islam, the self identical with brahman in Vedānta, no permanent self in Buddhism, a rational soul in the Greeks, a contested thing in modern European thought. The…
Started by Omar Ragab6 replies -
The Cartesian circle: can clear and distinct perception vouch for itself?
Every year I read Descartes' Meditations with students who arrive expecting an enemy of faith and leave rather fond of him. And every year, around the Third Meditation, a sharp student raises the objection that Antoine Arnauld put to Descartes in 1641.…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies -
Śrīharṣa against the Naiyāyikas: can every definition be refuted, and how did Nyāya answer him?
Definitions are my bread and butter. A good definition in geometry settles what you are talking about, and then the proofs can begin. I recently came across Śrīharṣa, the twelfth-century Advaitin, whose great work has a title usually translated as something like…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies -
Reading group: the Nāṭyaśāstra’s chapters on rasa and bhāva
Everyone in my literature classes mentions rasa, almost nobody has read the chapters where the theory is actually set out. I'd like to read them with company, and with people who know more Sanskrit than I do. Translation: Manomohan Ghosh's English translation…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
Taking the meditation without the metaphysics is fine: most people never wanted the path
Meditation helped me through a bad year more than anything else. I did it with an app, then a weekly class. Nobody mentioned rebirth, and nobody asked me to accept that there is no self. I keep reading that this is a…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies -
When should someone who isn’t an expert simply defer? What did al-Ghazālī say?
As a data analyst I defer to experts all day: to doctors about my health, to engineers about the bridges I drive over, to the people who built the statistical libraries I use. I can't check them. I'd like to understand when…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman4 replies -
Zhuangzi and Hui Shi on the bridge: an ancient argument about knowing what someone else knows
What does this part of the system know about what that part knows? I spent forty years on that question as a railway signalling engineer. I found the same question in the most famous conversation in Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi and Hui Shi are…
Started by Liu Mingqiao5 replies -
Hume was right: reason can choose the means, never the ends
Hume lived down the road from where I worked for thirty-four years, so I am biased. But I think his account of practical reason has never been bettered. In the Treatise, Book 2, Hume says that reason is, and ought only to…
Started by Alistair Gow6 replies -
Sellars was right that raw experience can cause a belief but never justify one
The more I read about visual perception, the more I think Wilfrid Sellars got something exactly right in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (1956). The foundationalist wants a floor: beliefs justified without leaning on other beliefs. The obvious candidate is experience…
Started by Priya Raghavan5 replies -
Teaching Descartes in Dakar with Peirce in my pocket: should doubt need a reason?
Every year my terminale students meet Descartes's methodical doubt. He resolves to treat as false anything he can find the slightest reason to doubt: the senses deceive, I might be dreaming, an evil genius might be fooling me. Then he finds the…
Started by Khady Sène6 replies -
Do civilisations really rise and fall in cycles, or do we just like the shape?
Customers who come in to browse almost always tell me the same story: Baghdad was the centre of the world under the Abbasids, it fell to the Mongols in 1258, and everything since has been a long decline with brief recoveries. Some…
Started by Zainab Kadhim6 replies -
Was the abolition of slavery a moral discovery or a moral change? A teacher’s test case
Every July my after-school reading circle reads Frederick Douglass's 1852 speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”. This year a student asked a question I could not answer cleanly: “When people stopped thinking slavery was okay, did they find…
Started by Keisha Monroe6 replies -
The contingency argument fails because a collection of contingent things needs no explanation of its own
The argument from contingency is one of the most elegant in philosophy, and because it comes apart cleanly into steps, I think I can show exactly where it breaks. Roughly: everything is either necessary or contingent; contingent things depend on something else;…
Started by Derek Hollis6 replies -
‘What happens when we die?’ is a question most traditions would not have asked in that form
Here's a thesis about a table everyone likes. Comparative tables of ‘what happens when we die?’ line up the traditions in neat rows: Platonic immortal soul, Epicurean dissolution, Vedantic rebirth, Buddhist rebirth without self, Confucian deferral, Islamic resurrection. It looks like many…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho7 replies -
Haslanger’s ameliorative method changes the subject rather than answering the question
I come to this from the method rather than the politics. In her well-known paper asking what gender and race are and what we want them to be, Sally Haslanger distinguishes three projects. A conceptual project asks what our concept is. A…
Started by Oskar Nyberg7 replies -
When a family says ‘it was always going to happen’, what are they claiming?
"It was always going to happen." I hear the sentence most weeks at work. Sometimes from a daughter, sometimes from a doctor, sometimes from me. I've started to think it means very different things in different mouths: Medical inevitability. Given the disease…
Started by Elin Hedqvist5 replies -
Reading group: the Mozi’s three chapters on impartial caring (jian’ai), one a week
The later Mohist canons get most of my attention, but I keep returning to the core chapters, the three on jian'ai, usually translated as “universal love” or, better, “impartial caring”. They are short, vigorous and argumentative, and they make the case that…
Started by Chen Yuting6 replies -
Carneades at three in the morning: how much certainty does a decision need?
I have been reading what Sextus Empiricus reports of Carneades, the Academic sceptic, and I think he described night work better than any training course I've been sent on. Carneades, as far as we can reconstruct him, said we never have certainty,…
Started by Elin Hedqvist5 replies -
Kim was right: non-reductive physicalism cannot give the mind any causal work
Here is a thesis many materialists find uncomfortable, and I want to defend it. Non-reductive physicalism says two things: everything is physical, and mental properties (believing, wanting, feeling pain) are not identical to physical properties. It's the most popular view among cognitive…
Started by Priya Raghavan5 replies -
If Nāgasena’s chariot argument removes the self, it removes the chariot too
The chariot argument in the Milindapañha is one of the most famous arguments about parts and wholes. King Milinda arrives by chariot. Nāgasena asks him: is the pole the chariot? The axle? The wheels? The frame? All of them together? Something apart…
Started by Arjun Iyer6 replies -
Dignāga cut the Nyāya inference from five members to three. What did the example member become?
I have been translating some passages on Buddhist logic for a seminar in Pune and keep getting stuck on one question. The Nyāya inference for others has five members: thesis, reason, example, application, conclusion ("this hill has fire, because it has smoke,…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Reading group: Gadamer’s Truth and Method, Part Two, on prejudice and the fusion of horizons
I taught German literature for thirty years without ever reading Wahrheit und Methode (1960) from cover to cover, which is a confession. I would like to read the central part of it slowly with anyone willing. I propose the second part, the…
Started by Henrike Vogel5 replies -
Dignāga’s apoha and Frege’s sense are answers to different questions
In a seminar this term somebody summarised apoha as "basically Frege's sense", and someone else said "no, it's Saussure: meaning by difference". I want to resist both, or at least slow them down. Dignāga's claim (c. 480–540) is that a word like…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies -
When we refuse to imagine that cruelty is admirable, the failure is the work’s, not ours
Hume noticed something odd near the end of his essay on taste. We forgive old poets for their speculative errors: the wrong science, the gods we no longer believe in. We read past them easily. But when a poet asks us to…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies