Coordinates of Thought: topics
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Founders and Stoicism: real philosophy or corporate self-help?
In the startup world, Stoicism is everywhere. Podcasts, newsletters, Marcus Aurelius quotes on office walls. I got into it during a bad year, and honestly it helped. But I'm starting to wonder if what we're doing is Stoicism at all. The startup…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies -
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 to use (killed or died, militant or freedom fighter). Some…
Started by Sana Rizvi3 replies -
Testimony is an independent source of knowledge, not reducible to perception or inference
The Nyāya school counts testimony (śabda) as a distinct means of valid knowledge (pramāṇa), alongside perception, inference and comparison. The Vaiśeṣikas and Buddhist epistemologists like Dignāga disagreed, reducing testimony to a form of inference: I infer the truth of what you say…
Started by Meera Kulkarni6 replies -
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 small revenue from large assessments. Arthur Laffer himself credited Ibn…
Started by Javier Ferrandis3 replies -
Are the words of the Veda abstract objects? Mīmāṃsā’s eternal language and Frege’s third realm
I teach Sanskrit in Varanasi and read Pūrva Mīmāṃsā. My tradition holds that the Veda is authorless (apauruṣeya), that words (śabda) are eternal, and that the relation between a word and its meaning is not created by anyone. The Mīmāṃsā Sūtra says…
Started by Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya6 replies -
Political meritocracy is better than electoral democracy
I'll argue this to test it, not because I hold it. Daniel Bell's The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy (2015) draws on Confucian ideas to argue that political leaders should be selected and promoted on the basis of…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
Reading group: The Muqaddimah, the introduction on historians’ errors
Before the Muqaddimah proper begins, Ibn Khaldun explains why historians get things wrong. His list includes partisanship for opinions and schools, overconfidence in one's sources, failure to understand what was intended, mistaken belief in the truth of reports, and, above all, ignorance…
Started by Youssef Berrada4 replies -
Reading group: Epictetus, Discourses II.19, where the Master Argument meets a bus driver
Epictetus, as people here know by now, is my favourite. Last month a lecture mentioned that the only clear report we have of the "Master Argument" of Diodorus Cronus is at the start of one chapter of his Discourses (the lectures his…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu5 replies -
Reading group: the Mandukya Upanishad and Gaudapada’s Karika
The Māṇḍūkya is the shortest of the principal Upanishads, only twelve verses. It analyses the syllable AUM in terms of four "quarters" of the self: the waking state (vaiśvānara), the dream state (taijasa), deep sleep (prājña), and the "fourth" (turīya), which is…
Started by Arjun Iyer4 replies -
What exactly is Aristotle’s “function argument” in Nicomachean Ethics I.7?
This argument is easy to fumble when you explain it. My usual summary goes roughly like this: the good of anything that has a function lies in performing that function well human beings have a function it isn't nutrition and growth (plants…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
Spinoza’s God as Nature: an engineer’s reading of Ethics Part I
I came to the Ethics (published 1677, after Spinoza's death) because of the geometrical form: definitions, axioms, propositions, demonstrations. It looks like a specification document. Part I argues that substance is what is in itself and conceived through itself; that there can't…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen5 replies -
I would plug into the experience machine, and most refusals are just status quo bias
Robert Nozick's thought experiment in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974): a machine can give you any experiences you like, indistinguishable from reality. You'd believe you were writing a great novel or climbing a mountain, but you'd be floating in a tank. Would…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting5 replies -
Reading group: Ibn Rushd, The Decisive Treatise
The Faṣl al-Maqāl (c. 1178–80) is short and lucid. It's the best introduction to Ibn Rushd's thought, and it's written in the form of a legal opinion: what is the status, under the religious law, of studying philosophy? His answer: the Law…
Started by Layla Sfeir4 replies -
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 liberty is having the resources to act. Others say positive…
Started by Deepa Kartha3 replies -
Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are constantly misused in philosophical arguments
A public service post, since I see this weekly. What the first theorem says, roughly: any consistent, effectively axiomatised formal system that contains enough arithmetic has true sentences in its language that it can't prove. The second says such a system can't…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak4 replies -
What is the principle of double effect, and when does it apply in medicine?
In palliative care, I often hear that giving high doses of morphine is permitted even if it might shorten life, because of the "principle of double effect". But I've realised I don't know exactly what the principle says or where it comes…
Started by Omar Ragab4 replies -
Persian gardens, proportion, and Plato’s Timaeus
The classical Persian garden, the chahar bagh, is divided into four parts by water channels meeting at a centre. Visit the Fin Garden in Kashan or Bagh-e Eram in Shiraz and you feel the order before you understand it. In the Timaeus,…
Started by Reza Tehrani4 replies -
Existentialism can ground an ethics, and Beauvoir showed how
The standard charge is simple: if there are no given values, then anything goes. Sartre promised an ethics at the end of Being and Nothingness and never published one; the Notebooks for an Ethics came out only after his death. Beauvoir did…
Started by Claire Dubois6 replies -
Do future generations have rights over the climate we leave them?
Around Hyderabad's lakes you can 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 problem" (Reasons and Persons, 1984) makes this hard. Our…
Started by Anand Kurup3 replies -
Voluntary assisted dying should be legal for competent adults
Sweden doesn't allow it. I've worked alongside people from the Netherlands, where it has been legal under statute since 2002, and I've read about Canada, where it became legal in 2016. The argument for, as I understand it: competent adults have the…
Started by Elin Hedqvist8 replies -
Hobbes’s ‘sudden glory’ explains far more laughter than its critics admit
Every textbook dismisses the superiority theory in a paragraph. Hobbes says in Leviathan chapter 6 that ‘sudden glory’ is the passion that makes the grimaces called laughter, caused either by some act of our own that pleases us or by seeing some…
Started by Javier Ferrandis6 replies -
“Because that’s how it works”: when is that an explanation and when is it a refusal?
New cooks ask why a lot. Why rest the meat? Why salt the pasta water and not the sauce at the start? Why does this sauce split if you rush it? When I was an apprentice in Goa my chef answered almost…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies -
If a machine might have interests, what do we owe it before we know?
Of course the thing that has eaten my semester is the one I was most sceptical about: whether anything is owed to AI systems that might have interests. Here's my difficulty. On the question of whether there is something it is like…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies -
The argument from marginal cases has never been properly answered
It pains me to agree with my effective altruism group on anything. But on this I do. The argument runs like this. Name the property that gives humans moral status. If it's rationality, language or moral agency, some humans lack it (newborns,…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies -
Can someone explain Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain argument and the strongest reply to it?
We did chapter 7 of Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) in a tutorial this week and I came out feeling slightly winded. As I understand it: start from whatever distribution you think is just. Call it D1. Now a famous basketball player,…
Started by Ethan Mercer4 replies -
The actual infinite is a useful fiction, not something real
Aristotle, in Physics III, allowed only the potential infinite: you can always count one more, but there's never a completed infinite totality. For two thousand years, most mathematicians agreed. Then Cantor, in the late nineteenth century, treated infinite sets as completed objects…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies -
Norman the clairvoyant is reliably right, yet most people say he doesn’t know. Why?
We did the Norman case in my epistemology tutorial this week and I came out more confused than I went in. The setup, as I understood it: Norman has a clairvoyant faculty that is completely reliable. He has no idea he has…
Started by Ethan Mercer5 replies -
Found the Master Argument in Epictetus, between two bus stops
Another find from my recordings. Last week it was Epictetus, Discourses Book 2, and in the middle of a chapter he mentions an argument by Diodorus Cronus that clever people used to show off with. I had to pull my attention back…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
How is Scanlon’s ‘reasonable rejection’ test different from asking what most people would agree to?
We read a chapter of Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other (1998) in my ethics tutorial this week, and it left me with more questions than answers. The idea, roughly, is that an act is wrong if it would be disallowed…
Started by Ethan Mercer4 replies -
How can a thought move an arm if physics already explains every movement?
Last week a lecturer said something I have been chewing on since. He said: decide to raise your arm, and it rises. Fine. But scientists say every movement of the arm has a complete physical cause, nerves, muscles, chemistry. So what is…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies