Coordinates of Thought: topics
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My son says my rain forecasts could be “Dutch-booked”. What does that mean?
This week my son's course reading was about probability, sent, I think, to keep his mother humble. On the phone I told him I was sixty percent sure the rains would come early this year. When he asked about the dry season…
Started by Akosua Mensah4 replies -
Is ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ a real question or just a very good bit?
I do stand-up, mostly in northern clubs, and I've got a bit about "why is there something rather than nothing". The punchline is that the universe exists because somebody forgot to cancel the booking. It does all right. Afterwards a bloke in…
Started by Gemma Pritchard4 replies -
My daughter asked whether a square circle could exist on another planet. How do I answer?
My nine-year-old has decided that "anything could be true somewhere in space". Last week it was square circles, this week it is a planet where two and two make five. I said no, and she asked why a planet with no gravity…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
Kant and the murderer at the door: can the essay be rescued?
In 1797 Kant published "On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy", replying to Benjamin Constant. He maintains that you may not lie even to a murderer who asks where your friend is hiding. When I taught this, nearly every student found…
Started by Henrike Vogel4 replies -
If I must file the return, must I file it or shred it? Ross’s paradox for a tax preparer
A client's son, who is studying philosophy, told me about something called Ross's paradox. As he explained it: in the standard logic of obligation, if you ought to do A, then it follows that you ought to do "A or B", for…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal3 replies -
If a stopped clock happens to show the right time, why don’t I know the time?
Yesterday's lecture was about knowledge. The lecturer said that for a long time philosophers agreed that knowledge is "justified true belief", and then a man called Gettier wrote three pages and the agreement fell apart. The example that stayed with me was…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
What is the “block universe”, and does relativity force it on us?
In physics classes we learned special relativity, including the relativity of simultaneity: observers in relative motion disagree about which distant events are simultaneous. Some philosophers argue this means the past, present and future are all equally real, the "block universe". Is that…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha4 replies -
Is Aquinas’s First Way really about a first moment in time?
Most of my friends assume Aquinas's arguments for God (Summa Theologiae I, q.2, a.3) are about the beginning of the universe: everything has a cause, so go back far enough and you find God at the start. But my lecturer says that's…
Started by Aoife Kilbride4 replies -
Al-Ghazali’s Deliverance from Error as a story about information overload
I've been reading al-Ghazali's Deliverance from Error (al-Munqidh min al-Dalal), written late in his life. He describes his search for certain knowledge among four groups: the theologians, the Batinis (who relied on an infallible teacher), the philosophers, and the Sufis. Before that,…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman4 replies -
Beauty is objective
I want to defend a thesis that's unfashionable in literature departments: beauty is not merely in the eye of the beholder. Hume, in "Of the Standard of Taste" (1757), argued that though beauty depends on sentiment, some judges are better than others:…
Started by Kavya Menon6 replies -
What is Mary’s Room actually supposed to show?
Frank Jackson's "Mary's Room" is easy to present badly, and I'd like to present it correctly at a study circle I'm leading. Mary is a brilliant neuroscientist who has lived her whole life in a black-and-white room. She knows every physical fact…
Started by Priya Raghavan4 replies -
If consent of the governed is the newcomer, what did legitimacy rest on before it?
My students are learning about government this term. I showed them a comparative table of answers to the question "how should we be governed?" across many traditions: Greek, Chinese, Indian, Islamic, European. The thing that surprised them most was that only the…
Started by Aroha Tipene5 replies -
My cooks are free to leave, in theory. What republican liberty sees in a kitchen
I came from Goa to cook in Dubai fifteen years ago, and I'm proud of how we treat people in my kitchen now. Nobody is shouted at. Overtime is paid. When someone's mother is ill, we find a way to send him…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies -
Parfit was right: identity is not what matters in survival
I'm the resident sceptic in my effective altruism group, but on this one I'm a believer, so bring your best objections. Parfit's argument in Part III of Reasons and Persons (1984), roughly: Suppose your brain is divided and each half placed in…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies -
What is ijtihad, and why did Iqbal call it the principle of movement in Islam?
From my law studies 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 of the Reconstruction, "The Principle of Movement in…
Started by Hamza Qureshi3 replies -
Barnes is right: being disabled is not in itself bad for you
I came to philosophy through effective altruism, where it's common to count disability as a reduction in wellbeing and to rank interventions accordingly. Elizabeth Barnes's The Minority Body changed my mind, and I want to defend her thesis. Thesis: disability is a…
Started by Ethan Mercer7 replies -
Free speech should protect offensive religious satire
I write this from a country with strict blasphemy laws, which have led to mob violence and killings. So I'm not neutral on this. The Jyllands-Posten cartoons in 2005, the Charlie Hebdo attack in 2015 and countless cases in Pakistan raise the…
Started by Sana Rizvi8 replies -
The hard problem from a psychology student’s point of view
In 1995 David Chalmers distinguished the "easy problems" of consciousness (explaining discrimination, attention, reportability, the control of behaviour) from the "hard problem": explaining why any of this is accompanied by subjective experience at all. In my psychology courses we study the easy…
Started by Elif Yıldız4 replies -
The argument from divine hiddenness is stronger than the argument from evil
Here's a thesis I want tested. The argument from evil gets all the attention, but theists have well-developed replies: free will, soul-making, goods we cannot see. Whatever you think of them, they at least make sense of suffering as part of a…
Started by Ethan Mercer5 replies -
Consciousness is fundamental, not produced by the brain
Advaita Vedanta holds that consciousness is the one reality, and the material world appears within it. In recent years, several philosophers in the analytic tradition have defended views in the same family: Philip Goff's panpsychism (Galileo's Error, 2019), Bernardo Kastrup's analytic idealism.…
Started by Arjun Iyer9 replies -
My daughter asked where her mind is kept. Is Ryle’s ‘category mistake’ the answer?
My daughter is seven. Last week, while I was plaiting her hair, she asked me where her mind is kept. "Is it in my head, like my brain? Or is it behind my eyes?" I said it was in her brain, and…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
My son says you can’t prove fairies don’t exist. Why is that a weakness, not a strength?
My nine-year-old has discovered the perfect argument. Fairies live in our garden, he says. When I ask how he knows, he says: “You can't prove they don't.” He is very pleased with this and uses it on his sister for everything from…
Started by Thamarai Raman5 replies -
Numbers exist independently of us: mathematical platonism is true
I'll defend platonism in its standard form: there are abstract mathematical objects, they don't depend on minds or language, and mathematical statements are true or false because of them. Main argument: indispensability, from Quine and Putnam. We ought to believe in the…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak5 replies -
What did Gorgias actually say about the power of speech in the Encomium of Helen?
Persuasion is literally my rent. A mate who did classics told me there's an ancient Greek speech where Gorgias argues that words work on people like drugs, and that it's all in a speech defending Helen of Troy, of all people. That…
Started by Gemma Pritchard4 replies -
Why does logic count ‘if the moon is cheese, then 2 + 2 = 5’ as true?
Half my jokes are conditionals. So I was pleased to find a whole branch of logic about "if". Then I hit the truth table and it broke my brain. Apparently in propositional logic "if P then Q" is false only when P…
Started by Gemma Pritchard4 replies -
Reading group: Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), chapter one
The question I keep asking my effective altruism friends is what “ought” means in “you ought to give”. Someone told me to read Mackie before I asked again. So here is a reading group, partly so I do not do it alone.…
Started by Ethan Mercer5 replies -
What is Rawls’s veil of ignorance actually supposed to show?
When I talk about Rawls with the younger economists at work, they treat the original position as a risk-aversion exercise. Behind the veil you don't know whether you'll be rich or poor, so you pick the society where the worst-off do best:…
Started by Javier Ferrandis4 replies -
Large language models understand nothing: the Chinese Room still applies
This isn't idle for anyone who builds software on these models. I'll argue the thesis and see if it survives. John Searle's 1980 paper "Minds, Brains, and Programs" imagines a man in a room who receives Chinese characters, follows an English rulebook…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen9 replies -
Reading group: Nagarjuna, Mulamadhyamakakarika chapter 1 (on conditions)
The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā opens with an examination of causal conditions (pratyaya). The first verse says that nothing arises from itself, from something else, from both, or without a cause. The chapter then examines the four types of condition recognised by the Abhidharma schools:…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies -
Al-Ghazali was right: causal necessity cannot be demonstrated
In the Seventeenth Discussion of The Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali argues that the connection between what is customarily believed to be a cause and its effect is not necessary. When cotton touches fire and burns, observation shows only that the burning…
Started by Layla Sfeir8 replies