Coordinates of Thought: topics
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Split-brain cases and the unity of consciousness
In the 1960s, Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga studied patients whose corpus callosum had been cut to treat severe epilepsy. In experiments where information was shown to only one hemisphere, the patients sometimes acted as if there were two separate streams of…
Started by Priya Raghavan3 replies -
The Gita’s karma yoga: acting without attachment to results
The Bhagavad Gītā's teaching on karma yoga, especially in chapters 2 and 3, says roughly: you have a right to your action, but never to its fruits; don't let the fruits be your motive, and don't be attached to inaction either. Gandhi…
Started by Rohan Desai3 replies -
Does a constitution need a shared conception of the good?
Rawls, in Political Liberalism (1993), argued that a just constitution should not be based on any single comprehensive doctrine, religious or secular. Citizens can support it from within their own views through an "overlapping consensus". Pakistan's constitutional history begins from a different…
Started by Hamza Qureshi3 replies -
Łukasiewicz, the sea battle, and why three-valued logic was born in Lwów
In De Interpretatione 9 Aristotle considers the sentence "there will be a sea battle tomorrow". If it is already true today, isn't the battle already necessary? And if so, isn't deliberation pointless? Around 1920 Jan Łukasiewicz, working in the Lwów–Warsaw school founded…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak3 replies -
Is evolution compatible with objective morality?
Darwin argued in The Descent of Man (1871) that our moral sense evolved from social instincts. Sharon Street, in "A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value" (2006), turned this into a challenge for moral realism: evolution shaped our moral judgments to…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha3 replies -
Rumi and Spinoza: are they describing the same God?
People sometimes say Rumi and Spinoza are describing the same reality. Everything in God, God in everything, the self dissolving into a larger whole. But Rumi's God is a beloved who longs for us and whom we long for, the reed flute…
Started by Reza Tehrani3 replies -
Arendt’s “Truth and Politics”, read in a newsroom
In 1967 Arendt published "Truth and Politics" in The New Yorker. She distinguishes rational truth (mathematics, philosophy) from factual truth (what happened). Factual truth is the more fragile, because it depends on testimony and records, and it is always vulnerable to being…
Started by Sana Rizvi3 replies -
Kierkegaard’s leap of faith: irrational, or beyond reason?
In Fear and Trembling (1843), written under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard considers Abraham, who is ready to sacrifice Isaac at God's command. Johannes can't understand Abraham. He calls this a "teleological suspension of the ethical": Abraham's relation to God goes…
Started by Aoife Kilbride3 replies -
What is the “alignment problem” in philosophical terms?
At work people use "alignment" to mean very different things: making a chatbot polite, making it follow instructions, or making sure future systems don't pursue goals harmful to humans. What's the core philosophical problem underneath? Is it a problem about values (which…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman3 replies -
Reading group: Tagore’s The Religion of Man (1931)
Rabindranath Tagore gave the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford in 1930, and they were published the next year as The Religion of Man. It isn't a work of systematic philosophy but an extended reflection on the human being as the meeting point of…
Started by Kavya Menon2 replies -
Al-Farabi’s Virtuous City and Plato’s Republic
Al-Farabi (c. 870–950) is sometimes called the "Second Teacher", after Aristotle. His Principles of the Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City combines Neoplatonic metaphysics with a political philosophy that owes a great deal to Plato's Republic. The virtuous city is…
Started by Layla Sfeir3 replies -
Camus begins with suicide. Was he right to start there?
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) opens by saying the fundamental philosophical question is whether life is worth living. Everything else, he says, comes afterwards. The absurd, for Camus, isn't in us or in the world but in the confrontation between our demand…
Started by Claire Dubois4 replies -
How can I know nothing is red and green all over, when I’ve never checked every red thing?
A friend gave me this puzzle and I can't stop thinking about it. A surface cannot be completely red and completely green at the same time, in the same place. I am sure of this. But I have not checked every red…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies -
Markets are morally neutral tools
I'll argue a thesis I'm not sure I believe. Markets are mechanisms for coordinating exchange. They have no values of their own. When they produce injustice, the problem lies in the background conditions (unequal property, missing information, bad laws), not in buying…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
Knowledge-first epistemology is surrender dressed up as a theory
After Gettier, philosophers spent decades trying to find the missing ingredient that turns justified true belief into knowledge: no false lemmas, defeasibility, causal connection, reliability, safety. Each proposal met a counterexample. Timothy Williamson's response in Knowledge and Its Limits (2000) was to…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies -
Epictetus was a slave and I drive the 413. What counts as ‘up to us’ at work?
I drive the 413 across Ankara. Eight hours, two breaks, roughly three hundred passengers a day. I listen to philosophy lectures between stops, and Epictetus is the one I keep coming back to. The Handbook opens by dividing things into what is…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu5 replies -
The “double truth” doctrine was never Ibn Rushd’s view
In thirteenth-century Paris, some arts masters were accused of holding that something could be true in philosophy and false in faith, or the reverse: the so-called doctrine of double truth. These "Latin Averroists", including Siger of Brabant, were associated with Ibn Rushd,…
Started by Youssef Berrada5 replies -
Al-Ghazali says some knowledge has to be tasted. Is that an argument, or a way out of one?
Last month I read al-Ghazali's Deliverance from Error in an English translation I found online, and one part keeps bothering me. He goes through the theologians, the philosophers and the Batinites, finds each of them lacking, and then turns to the Sufis.…
Started by Fajar Nugroho5 replies -
Is “who are you to judge?” a moral position, or just a way of ending the conversation?
At a family dinner last week my older cousin said that a mutual friend had behaved badly by lying to his parents about failing a course. My other cousin said, “Who are you to judge? Morality is subjective anyway.” Everyone went quiet…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies -
I have forgotten most of my childhood. On Locke’s view, am I still that child?
I am on a gap year and reading whatever I can find. This week it was a summary of Locke on personal identity. As I understood it, Locke says you are the same person as far back as your consciousness reaches to…
Started by Fajar Nugroho5 replies -
Diotima’s ladder: does loving the Form of Beauty make particular people disposable?
In the Symposium (210a–212a), Socrates reports Diotima's account of the ascent of love. The lover moves from one beautiful body to all beautiful bodies, then to beautiful souls, to practices and laws, to kinds of knowledge, and finally to Beauty itself. Gregory…
Started by Giulia Ferrante3 replies -
Eliminative materialism: how can anyone claim that beliefs don’t exist?
Another beginner question from me, sorry. I read a short summary of Paul Churchland's eliminative materialism and I can't get past the first step. As I understand it, he says that our everyday way of explaining people ("she went to the shop…
Started by Fajar Nugroho3 replies -
What is the actual difference between Pyrrhonian and Academic sceptics?
I have been reading about doubt, mostly because of al-Ghazālī. Every book I pick up mentions two kinds of ancient sceptics, Pyrrhonians and Academics, and then moves on as if the difference were obvious. It is not obvious to me. From what…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies -
Should judges interpret constitutions by their original meaning?
Originalism, defended in the US by Antonin Scalia (for example, in A Matter of Interpretation, 1997), says the meaning of a constitutional text is fixed at the time it was adopted. Judges should apply that meaning, and changes should come through amendment,…
Started by Deepa Kartha2 replies -
What is the “no miracles” argument for believing electrons are real?
I've been reading al-Ghazālī's Deliverance from Error, where he doubts the senses and then doubts reason. After that I started wondering about things nobody can see at all. Nobody has ever seen an electron. My physics teacher says they are as real…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies -
How does one contradiction let you prove absolutely anything?
A friend studying computer science told me that in logic "a contradiction implies everything". If you accept one contradiction, you can prove the moon is green, that I'm a king, anything. This sounds like a trick. Contradictions are bad, sure, but why…
Started by Fajar Nugroho3 replies -
What do the strange names Barbara, Celarent and Darii actually mean?
I'm working through an old logic textbook my uncle left at our house. There is a page with a Latin verse that starts "Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferioque..." and then a lot of other names like Cesare and Baroco. The book just says…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies -
Introspection is too unreliable to ground a science of consciousness
Early experimental psychology relied on trained introspection, in the laboratories of Wundt and Titchener. It collapsed partly because labs couldn't agree: the "imageless thought" controversy couldn't be settled, because one lab's trained observers reported imageless thought and another's didn't. More recently, Nisbett…
Started by Elif Yıldız5 replies -
Turing never said passing his test means a machine thinks? Then what was the test for?
This month my reading is about computers and minds. My cousin studies informatics in Bandung and he told me the Turing test is simple: if a machine can fool you in a conversation, it thinks. Done. Then I read an introduction that…
Started by Fajar Nugroho5 replies -
Zhuangzi’s happy fish: can we know what others feel?
In chapter 17 of the Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi and his friend the logician Huizi are strolling on a bridge over the river Hao. Zhuangzi remarks that the minnows darting about are happy. Huizi objects: you're not a fish, so how do you know…
Started by Claire Dubois3 replies