Coordinates of Thought: topics
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Why a sad film consoles where good advice doesn’t
At work, after a night when we lose someone we were close to, some of us have a ritual. We go to someone's flat, open a bottle of something, and watch a particular old film that makes everyone cry. I have done…
Started by Elin Hedqvist4 replies -
My lecturer says the poet’s own explanation doesn’t count. Where does that idea come from?
In a seminar last week we were reading a Malayalam poem by a living poet, and I brought in an interview where she explains what one of the images means. My lecturer listened politely and then said that what the poet says…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
What are the three kinds of theory of well-being that Parfit distinguished?
For six years of running a company I thought I was optimising for happiness, mine and the team's. Now I'm not sure what I was optimising for. A friend pointed me to an appendix in Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984) called…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies -
A verdict that was right by accident: did the court know he was guilty?
Many years ago, early in my time as a court correspondent, I watched a magistrate convict a young man of a burglary largely on the identification of one witness. The identification was confident, the defence was weak, and I was as satisfied…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
Reading group: Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought, Part One, over four weeks
Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001) is long, so I suggest we read only Part One, which sets out the theory that the rest of the book applies to compassion and love. The book opens with Nussbaum's own…
Started by Femke Bosman5 replies -
The deviant causal chain shows the causal theory of action cannot be repaired
I care about analyses that can be stated precisely, and this one, I'll argue, can't be. Davidson's causal theory: a movement is an action when it's caused in the right way by the agent's reasons, a belief–desire pair. Davidson's own counterexample, the…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak6 replies -
If the past no longer exists, what exactly is my regret about?
I served twenty-two years in the army, the last part on the DMZ. There are a few decisions I regret, none of them dramatic, all of them still with me. Reading about the philosophy of time has given me a strange new…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun5 replies -
Fuller’s King Rex, read by someone who spent thirty-one years in the courts
Lon Fuller's The Morality of Law (1964) opens with a fable about an unhappy king called Rex who fails to make law in eight different ways. He decides cases without general rules. He makes rules but keeps them secret. He legislates retroactively.…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan4 replies -
Dharmottara’s mirage is not really a Gettier case, and calling it one flattens both traditions
Every year someone on a comparative course says "the Buddhists found the Gettier problem a thousand years early", and every year I nod and feel uneasy. Let me try to say why, and you can tell me where it breaks. The case:…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Epsilon-delta is two nested quantifiers, and that is why my students struggle
Every year I teach limits to senior secondary students in Delhi, and every year the same thing happens. They can compute limits perfectly well. Then I write the definition: For every ε > 0 there exists a δ > 0 such that…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies -
Lakatos found the right middle path between Popper and Kuhn
My physics students in Lagos always ask the same thing when we reach the history of astronomy: if a single failed prediction refutes a theory, why did astronomers keep Newton when Uranus misbehaved? Popper's falsificationism seems to say they shouldn't have. Kuhn's…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha5 replies -
Could a psychopath genuinely know that cruelty is wrong? The amoralist and the clinical literature
Meta-ethicists argue about the amoralist: someone who sincerely judges that cheating or cruelty is wrong and feels no motivation whatever to avoid it. Internalists say such a person is impossible, that someone wholly unmoved has not really made the judgement, only learned…
Started by Martín Iriarte5 replies -
Should the law impose a general duty to rescue a stranger?
Common law systems, including Pakistan's, traditionally impose no general duty to rescue. If I watch a stranger drown in shallow water and do nothing, I may be a moral monster, but unless I had some special relationship or created the danger, I've…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
Reading group: Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological
Georges Canguilhem's essay began as his medical thesis in 1943, written while he was also active in the Resistance, and was reissued in 1966 with a second part, "New Reflections". It is one of the founding texts of the philosophy of medicine,…
Started by Claire Dubois4 replies -
Memory preserves knowledge but never produces it: the Indian schools were right to exclude it
For forty years of reading Śaṅkara I have accepted, almost without noticing, a rule that most of the classical Indian schools share: memory is not a pramāṇa, not a means of valid knowledge in its own right. The Nyāya divide cognition into…
Started by Arjun Iyer5 replies -
Reading group: Nāgārjuna on causes and conditions, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 1, 20 and 24
The Nyāya–Madhyamaka debates all lead back to the opening of Nāgārjuna's Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, so I'd like to read three chapters of it together. Translation. Jay Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (1995), which has the verses…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Is “what is the meaning of life?” a modern European question?
Every year I teach Camus to my terminale class in Dakar, and every year the same thing happens. The students read The Myth of Sisyphus, which begins by saying that the only truly serious philosophical problem is suicide, whether life is worth…
Started by Khady Sène6 replies -
Usul al-fiqh and Dworkin’s integrity: two ways of saying law is more than its rules
I read Iqbal and Hart side by side, more or less as a hobby, and lately I have been adding Dworkin and al-Shafi'i to the pile. I want to test a comparison that I find tempting and suspect is partly false. Dworkin…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
Thirty-one years of watching courts decide what is ‘reasonable’, and no degrees of truth in sight
Here is something I watched every week in the courts of Punjab. A large part of the work was applying words that have no sharp edges: "reasonable doubt", "sudden provocation", "sufficient cause", "unsound mind". Now I read that fuzzy logic was invented…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
Reading group: Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan as a book about learning without teachers
I have spent years with Hayy ibn Yaqzan, and I would love company for a slow reading with one question in mind: what does this book think a teacher is for? Ibn Tufayl, writing in twelfth-century al-Andalus, imagines a child raised on…
Started by Hessa Al Mazrouei6 replies -
Illusionism is the only view of consciousness that takes neuroscience seriously
I'm a materialist who builds machine-perception software, and I'll defend the position most people here find hardest to swallow. Illusionism, associated with Dennett and developed by Keith Frankish, says the hard problem is generated by a misleading introspective model. When we introspect,…
Started by Priya Raghavan6 replies -
Reading group: Nāgasena’s chariot and flame in the Questions of King Milinda
The Milindapañha, the Questions of King Milinda, is a dialogue between a king usually identified with the Indo-Greek ruler Menander and a monk called Nāgasena. It is a composite text that grew over centuries, so I read Nāgasena as a literary interlocutor…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara6 replies -
If objectivity belongs to communities, what happens when the community all looks the same?
Helen Longino argues that objectivity is not a property of individual scientists, who all have commitments and blind spots, but of communities. And not any community. Only one with public venues for criticism, shared standards, genuine uptake of criticism, and what she…
Started by Femke Bosman5 replies -
Strong moral intuitions count as evidence, in the same way that perceptions count as evidence
In my ethics seminar we were told that appealing to intuitions is unscientific: they are just gut feelings shaped by upbringing. I want to argue the opposite. W. D. Ross, in The Right and the Good (1930), compared the considered moral convictions…
Started by Aoife Kilbride6 replies -
Why insight does not instantly change behaviour: an Abhidhamma account of knowing and not doing
I read the threads here about whether knowing what is right necessarily moves you, and I would like to add the account I have lived with in twelve years of practice. In the Pali discourses, the Buddha says that intention, cetanā, is…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara5 replies -
Soul as the form of a living body: does Aristotle help me teach the Igbo idea of chi, or get in the way?
I teach religious studies at a Catholic secondary school in Enugu and run a philosophy club for the senior students. Every year we read Aristotle's De Anima, where the soul is defined as the first actuality of a natural body that potentially…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies -
Ibn Sina begins the Canon by defining medicine. What does that definition assume about health?
I recently reread the opening of Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine for a reading group at the hospital, and I was struck by how much philosophy is packed into the first sentence. Paraphrasing: medicine is the knowledge of the states of the…
Started by Omar Ragab5 replies -
The fall of Qin refutes Legalism itself, not merely its excesses
I read Han Feizi mostly to understand why the most effective political theory of early China produced the shortest-lived dynasty. The Legalist tradition, from Shang Yang's reforms in the state of Qin in the fourth century BCE to Han Feizi's synthesis in…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
Arjuna sees the universal form and begs it to stop. Is that the sublime, or something else?
I reread the Bhagavad Gita when I burned out last year, and the chapter I keep returning to is the eleventh. Arjuna asks Krishna to show his universal form. Krishna gives him a divine eye, and what Arjuna sees is unbearable: countless…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies -
Xunzi on “obsession” and modern cognitive bias: the same diagnosis of irrationality?
I study psychology, and this term we covered heuristics and biases: anchoring, availability, confirmation bias, all the ways judgement goes systematically wrong. In the same month I read the chapter of the Xunzi usually translated "Dispelling Obsession" or "Undoing Fixation", and I…
Started by Elif Yıldız4 replies