Coordinates of Thought: topics
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What does Merleau-Ponty mean by the “lived body”?
I am reading Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) in French and I keep circling the expression le corps propre, usually translated "one's own body" or "the lived body". I understand that he…
Started by Claire Dubois3 replies0 views -
Reading group: Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
A short essay, easily read in two sittings. Seneca addresses it to Paulinus, who was in charge of Rome's grain supply. His thesis is that life is not short; we make it…
Started by Elin Lindqvist3 replies0 views -
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…
Started by Rohan Desai3 replies0 views -
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…
Started by Priya Raghavan3 replies0 views -
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…
Started by Hamza Qureshi3 replies0 views -
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…
Started by Emeka Nwosu3 replies0 views -
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…
Started by Reza Tehrani3 replies0 views -
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?…
Started by Tomasz Wójcik3 replies0 views -
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…
Started by Sana Mir3 replies0 views -
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…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman3 replies0 views -
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…
Started by Aoife Brennan3 replies0 views -
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…
Started by Layla Haddad3 replies0 views -
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,…
Started by Giulia Ferrante3 replies0 views -
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…
Started by Claire Dubois3 replies0 views -
What are the pramāṇas, and how do the schools disagree about them?
I grew up hearing words like "pramāṇa" in family discussions without really knowing what they meant. I've started reading Indian philosophy properly and keep running into lists of pramāṇas that differ between…
Started by Rohan Desai3 replies0 views -
Emptiness is not nothingness: common misreadings of śūnyatā
I keep seeing "emptiness" in Buddhist philosophy explained as "nothing exists" or "everything is an illusion". That's exactly the view Nāgārjuna rejects as nihilism. For Madhyamaka, things are empty of intrinsic nature…
Started by Meera Kulkarni3 replies0 views -
Is it irrational to want to be remembered after you die?
Founders talk a lot about "legacy". I've caught myself thinking about it too: building something that lasts after me. But I won't be around to enjoy being remembered. Epicurus argued that death…
Started by Rohan Desai3 replies0 views -
What is functionalism, and why do people think it supports machine consciousness?
People in AI discussions often say that "on a functionalist view" a machine could be conscious. I have a vague sense of what that means but I'd like to understand it properly.…
Started by Pieter de Jong3 replies0 views -
Gandhi’s satyagraha as philosophy, not just a tactic
Gandhi coined the word satyāgraha, "holding firmly to truth", in South Africa around 1906–08. He distinguished it from "passive resistance", which he saw as the weapon of the weak. Satyāgraha requires the…
Started by Anand Pillai3 replies0 views -
Dream arguments East and West: Descartes, Zhuangzi and the Yoga Vasistha
Three treatments of the same worry. Descartes, Meditations I (1641): there are no sure signs to distinguish waking from dreaming, so the senses can't give certain knowledge. He uses it as a…
Started by Arjun Iyer3 replies0 views -
Is the liar paradox a problem about language or about truth itself?
Take the sentence: this sentence is false. If true, it's false; if false, it's true. Tarski's response (1933) was that a language can't consistently contain its own truth predicate, so we need…
Started by Tomasz Wójcik3 replies0 views -
Did Indian mathematicians have a philosophy of zero?
Brahmagupta's Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta (628 CE) gives rules for arithmetic with zero as a number: adding zero to a number leaves it unchanged, multiplying by zero gives zero, and so on. He also tried…
Started by Vikram Sethi3 replies0 views -
Hart’s “internal point of view”, seen from a courtroom in Lahore
Hart distinguishes being obliged to do something (as when a gunman demands your money) from having an obligation (as under a legal rule). The difference lies in the internal point of view:…
Started by Hamza Qureshi3 replies0 views -
Who is morally responsible when an AI system causes harm?
Andreas Matthias coined the term "responsibility gap" in 2004: when a learning system behaves in ways its designers couldn't predict, it seems nobody is fully responsible. The designers didn't intend the outcome,…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman3 replies0 views -
Is “objectivity” in journalism a coherent ideal?
I was trained to be "objective": report the facts, present both sides, keep my opinions out. In practice, every choice is a judgment: what's a story, whose voice to include, which word…
Started by Sana Mir3 replies0 views -
Ibn Khaldun on taxation: a fourteenth-century Laffer curve?
In the Muqaddimah (1377) Ibn Khaldun observes that at the beginning of a dynasty, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments, while at the end of a dynasty it yields a…
Started by Javier Morales3 replies0 views -
What’s the difference between negative and positive liberty?
In constitutional law classes, Isaiah Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty" (1958) comes up constantly, but my professors use it in different ways. Some say negative liberty is freedom from interference and positive…
Started by Deepa Nair3 replies0 views -
Do future generations have rights over the climate we leave them?
In my work I see the long-term effects of decisions made decades ago: dams, drained wetlands, groundwater extraction. The people most affected weren't born when the decisions were made. Derek Parfit's "non-identity…
Started by Anand Pillai3 replies0 views -
What is ijtihad, and why did Iqbal call it the principle of movement in Islam?
In court I know ijtihad in its narrow legal sense: independent reasoning by a qualified jurist to derive a ruling where texts are silent or unclear. But Iqbal, in the sixth lecture…
Started by Hamza Qureshi3 replies0 views -
What does “primacy of existence” (asalat al-wujud) mean in plain terms?
I've read that Mulla Sadra's central doctrine is the primacy or "fundamentality" of existence over essence. I've also read that this is the opposite of a view held by Suhrawardi, or Mir…
Started by Reza Tehrani3 replies0 views