Coordinates of Thought: topics
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Who was al-Ruhawi, and what does his Adab al-Tabib actually say about the physician?
At a hospital conference in Cairo, a speaker mentioned al-Ruhawi's Adab al-Tabib as one of the earliest systematic works on medical ethics, written in the ninth century, and then moved straight on to modern guidelines. I've been unable to find much more…
Started by Omar Ragab4 replies -
Strong Kleene, weak Kleene, Łukasiewicz: what actually differs between the tables?
I've been reading about how to reason with partially evaluated expressions, where some sub-expressions haven't been computed yet or failed. That led me to three-valued logics, and now I have three sets of truth tables on my desk that look almost identical.…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen4 replies -
Reading group: al-Bīrūnī’s India, the preface and the chapter on why understanding is hard
Around 1030 the scholar al-Bīrūnī completed a book usually known in English as India (or Alberuni's India). He had learned Sanskrit, read Indian works with pandits, and set out to describe Indian religion, philosophy and science as their adherents understood them. It…
Started by Layla Sfeir5 replies -
Reading group: Plato’s Gorgias in five weeks, one interlocutor at a time
I teach theology at a secondary school in Thessaloniki, and every year a student asks whether politicians are "just good at talking". I always want to hand them the Gorgias, and I have never read it closely with adults. Let's do that.…
Started by Nikos Theodoridis5 replies -
Bentham was right that natural rights are nonsense, but wrong about why
Bentham's attack on the French Declaration of Rights, usually published as Anarchical Fallacies, contains the most quoted insult in political philosophy: natural rights are simple nonsense, and natural and imprescriptible rights are "nonsense upon stilts". His reason: a right is the creature…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak5 replies -
Global scepticism refutes itself, and the famous escape routes do not work
The objection is old and short. If nothing can be known, then that nothing can be known cannot be known either. Global scepticism saws off the branch it sits on. Two escapes are usually offered, and I want to argue that neither…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak6 replies -
Two people with the same income and different lives: a wheelchair user’s case for capabilities
I want to make a case from my own life for why Amartya Sen's question, "equality of what?", is the right one. Imagine two people in Amman with exactly the same income. One walks. I don't. To get to the same meeting…
Started by Dima Nasser4 replies -
The Buddhist answer to ‘what makes a life go well’ refuses the shape of the question
Most theories of well-being name a good to pursue: pleasure, the satisfaction of desire, a list of objective goods, the development of human excellence, a life of virtuous activity. Even asceticism names one, freedom from appetite. The teaching I have followed for…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara5 replies -
Reading group: Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, one section a week for six weeks
"Two Dogmas of Empiricism" first appeared in The Philosophical Review in 1951 and was reprinted, revised, in From a Logical Point of View (1953). It is perhaps the most cited paper in twentieth-century analytic philosophy, and many people who cite it have…
Started by Oskar Nyberg5 replies -
Are talk therapy and antidepressants treating the same thing?
I have been in psychoanalysis for years in Buenos Aires, and like many people here I have also seen a psychiatrist and taken medication. At some point I started asking whether the two were working on the same problem from two sides…
Started by Martín Iriarte5 replies -
Outside a courtroom, who should carry the burden of proof?
In court the burden of proof is fixed by rules. In a criminal case the prosecution must prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt; in a civil case the claimant must win on the balance of probabilities. Islamic law has a well-known maxim to…
Started by Hamza Qureshi6 replies -
Predicate logic was discovered, not invented
Is logic discovered or invented? I want to argue that predicate logic is the strongest evidence that it is discovered. Consider the inference: every horse is an animal, so every horse's head is an animal's head. People knew for two thousand years…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak5 replies -
Reading group: Miskawayh’s Refinement of Character, and Tusi’s Persian reworking of it
I'd like to read Miskawayh's Tahdhib al-Akhlaq together over the next couple of months. It is one of the most systematic works of philosophical ethics in Arabic, and it is a good place to watch Greek ethics being made at home in…
Started by Layla Sfeir6 replies -
For ordinary speech, Aristotle was right: “All S are P” presupposes there are some S
Modern logic reads "All S are P" as "for anything, if it is S, it is P". If nothing is S, the statement comes out true automatically. So "All the unicorns in my garden are pink" is true, and so is "All…
Started by Oskar Nyberg6 replies -
What does Ibn Sina mean by a thing that is “possible in itself, necessary through another”?
I am an architect, not a trained philosopher, so forgive me if this is basic. In reading about Ibn Sina I keep meeting a three-way division: the Necessary Existent in itself, things possible in themselves, and things that are possible in themselves…
Started by Reza Tehrani5 replies -
Atheists should retire the logical problem of evil: Plantinga answered it
I'm an atheist, so this is a thesis against my own side's habits. In "Evil and Omnipotence" (1955), J. L. Mackie argued that theism is not just unlikely but inconsistent: an omnipotent, wholly good God and the existence of evil cannot all…
Started by Arvind Poojary5 replies -
Reading group: Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, over four weeks
"Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" is the essay where the phrase "the myth of the given" comes from. It is famous, hard and shorter than its reputation. I would like to read it slowly with whoever is willing. Text. The Harvard…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Al-Ghazālī was right: much of what philosophers call demonstration is only probable reasoning
I teach religious studies at a school in Bradford, and al-Ghazālī has been my companion for twenty years. I want to defend a claim about him that I think is often misunderstood. People remember al-Ghazālī as the man who attacked philosophy. But…
Started by Bilal Rashid6 replies -
Aquinas’s metaphysics is unintelligible without Ibn Sina
My students arrive believing that Aquinas is a Catholic synthesis of Aristotle and the Bible. That leaves out the man in the middle. My thesis is strong: Aquinas's metaphysics cannot be understood without Ibn Sina. The centre of Thomist metaphysics is the…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies -
Deflationism is right: “true” is a useful device, not the name of a property
Here is the view I want to defend, as plainly as I can. Take the schema: "snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white. Every reasonable theory of truth accepts instances of this. Deflationists say these instances are…
Started by Oskar Nyberg6 replies -
Wittgenstein said philosophy “leaves everything as it is”. Is quietism a position, or a refusal to have one?
I translate for a living, and this year I have been rereading a book about the Philosophical Investigations. I keep returning to §124: philosophy may not interfere with the actual use of language; it can only describe it; it "leaves everything as…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
Can trained meditative introspection count as evidence? Abhidhamma and William James
For years my study has been the Abhidhamma, the systematic part of our canon that analyses experience into momentary mental events and their factors. In the classical Theravada scheme there are fifty-two mental factors (cetasika), seven of which are said to accompany…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara4 replies -
“But for the defendant’s act”: thirty-one years of counterfactuals from the courtroom
For three decades I reported on judgments that turned on sentences of the form "had the accused not done X, the deceased would not have died". I never asked what such a sentence is. It cannot be checked: the accused did do…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
Accident or intent: how should a court decide what someone actually did?
The cases that kept me awake, in my years reporting from the courts, were not the ones where anyone doubted who struck the blow. They were the ones where we knew exactly what happened physically, and everything depended on what the accused…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan4 replies -
How can death be bad for someone who no longer exists to be harmed?
We did Epicurus in my ancient philosophy module and I can't get past the argument, even though I don't believe the conclusion. As I understand it: harm requires a subject. While I'm alive, death isn't here. When death is here, I'm not.…
Started by Aoife Kilbride5 replies -
Austin says a vow on stage is void. The jurists said some words bind even in jest. Who is right?
This one comes from the courtroom. Since retiring I have been reading Austin, and one of his remarks keeps returning me to my old law books. Austin says a performative is "hollow" when said by an actor on a stage or as…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan4 replies -
We enjoy tragic art because the grief belongs to no one in particular
Thesis: the best single explanation of why people seek out sad and terrible works is generalisation, the idea associated with Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka, that the work strips the emotion of its particular owner. The paradox: grief hurts, yet we pay for tragedies and…
Started by Arjun Iyer5 replies -
What is apoha, and does defining by exclusion help with the frog-and-fly problem?
I teach philosophy at an upper-secondary school in Lund, and my hobby is reading Sanskrit philosophers in translation and noticing where they reached our problems first. I would like a clear explanation of one idea I only half understand. Dignāga, the fifth-…
Started by Oskar Nyberg4 replies -
Novels give us moral knowledge that no argument can deliver
Every year in my classroom I watch the same thing happen. Students who have heard every argument about slavery, its cruelty, its injustice, its economics, read Toni Morrison's Beloved and come out changed in a way the arguments never managed. They don't…
Started by Keisha Monroe5 replies -
Why did the Vaiśeṣikas count direction as a substance?
I teach physics and spend weekends exposing miracle tricks for a rationalist association, so I like the Indian schools that tried to describe the world piece by piece. The Vaiśeṣika list of nine substances is a favourite of mine: earth, water, fire,…
Started by Arvind Poojary3 replies