Coordinates of Thought: topics
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Reading group: the Analects, Books 1–4
After a year with Kant I want to read an ethics built on something other than rules. The Analects (Lunyu) were compiled by Confucius's disciples and their students after his death, and they read more like a notebook of conversations than a…
Started by Henrike Vogel4 replies -
Brain death is not death
I've seen the hospital handle brain death several times, and I'm told the clinical criteria are reliable. My question is philosophical: is a person who meets them actually dead? The 1968 Harvard ad hoc committee defined "irreversible coma" as a criterion of…
Started by Omar Ragab6 replies -
Is the Allegory of the Cave a theory of education first and a metaphysics second?
The cave in Republic VII is usually read as a story about two worlds: shadows down here, Forms up there. That's not wrong, but I've come to think it isn't the emphasis Plato gives it. Socrates introduces the image as a picture…
Started by Giulia Ferrante4 replies -
The institutional theory of art is circular, and it’s the vicious kind
A mate who did an art degree keeps telling me that whether my stand-up set is art depends on the "artworld". So I read up. George Dickie's later version of the institutional theory, from The Art Circle (1984), says roughly: a work…
Started by Gemma Pritchard5 replies -
Affirmative action is required by justice, not merely permitted
In 2023, the US Supreme Court effectively ended race-conscious admissions in SFFA v. Harvard. India has the opposite constitutional structure: Articles 15(4) and 16(4) allow special provisions and reservations for disadvantaged groups, and Indra Sawhney (1992) upheld reservations for Other Backward Classes,…
Started by Deepa Kartha6 replies -
Epictetus says some things are up to us. What did that depend on for him?
Epictetus is still my favourite. The Handbook begins by saying some things are up to us and some are not: our opinions, desires and aversions are up to us; our body, property, reputation and office are not. In traffic this is very…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu5 replies -
Compatibilism answers a question nobody was asking
I have now heard about four lectures defending compatibilism, and every time I feel the same thing: it changes the subject. Hume says liberty is just a power of acting or not acting according to the determinations of the will. Fine. When…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu6 replies -
I know the spider is harmless and I’m still terrified. Is my fear wrong, or just irrational?
I am very afraid of spiders. Last week one sat on my monitor for an hour. I knew it was a harmless house spider. I could have recited the facts about its venom. I still couldn't touch the keyboard. A friend who…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting5 replies -
I never agreed to obey the state. Why do I owe it anything?
This week's lecture was on the social contract, and since then one thought keeps coming back while I sit in traffic. I never signed anything. I was born here, like my parents. Nobody asked me if I agreed to the laws, the…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
What is the doctrine of double effect, and did Aquinas really come up with it?
Yesterday's lecture mentioned the "doctrine of double effect" and said it goes back to Thomas Aquinas. The lecturer moved on quickly and I didn't fully follow. Here's what I understood. If I swerve to avoid a child who runs into the road…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
What is the anthropic principle, and is it an explanation or a polite way of not explaining?
I drive a bus in Ankara and listen to lectures between stops. One lecture said that the physical constants of the universe seem "finely tuned" for life, and then mentioned "the anthropic principle", saying something like: of course we observe a universe…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
Why a joke dies in Leeds and kills in Salford: notes from a stand-up
I've started reading philosophy of humour because I want to know why the exact same bit, same words, same timing, can get silence in one room and a roar in another twenty miles away. The theory that has helped me most is…
Started by Gemma Pritchard6 replies -
My son says our choices can’t harm people who don’t exist yet. What is the non-identity problem?
There is a famous puzzle, my son tells me, the "non-identity problem", which shows that we cannot make future people worse off by damaging the environment, because different choices would mean different people being born. This makes no sense to me. My…
Started by Akosua Mensah3 replies -
What did Bell’s theorem actually prove? I keep hearing three different answers
I'm doing philosophy with some physics. In the space of one week I have been told by three different people that Bell's theorem proves: that the universe is non-local; that there are no hidden variables in quantum mechanics; that Einstein was wrong.…
Started by Ethan Mercer4 replies -
Kant says taste is subjective but everyone ought to agree with it. How is that not a contradiction?
Yesterday a lecturer explained Kant's view of beauty and I nearly missed a stop. As far as I understood: when I call something beautiful, I am not reporting a property I can prove with concepts; it rests on my feeling of pleasure.…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
Reading group: Bergson’s Laughter (1900), one chapter a fortnight
Bergson's Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic is short, odd and still the most useful thing I've read as a working comic. His idea is that we laugh at ‘something mechanical encrusted on the living’: the moment a person…
Started by Gemma Pritchard5 replies -
“The ends justify the means”: obviously true or obviously false? I can’t decide which
I hear “the ends justify the means” constantly, at work and at gigs. My team leader says it when he wants us to hit targets by telling customers a tiny lie about wait times. A comic I know says it about stealing…
Started by Gemma Pritchard4 replies -
If numbers aren’t physical, how could we ever know anything about them?
I count tablets all day. Three tablets, thirty tablets, a strip of ten. The tablets are physical: I can drop them, and I do. But the three is not in any of them. You can't drop a three. My son's maths teacher…
Started by Hetal Shah4 replies -
What does Hume mean when he says reason is the slave of the passions?
Yesterday a lecturer quoted Hume saying that reason is the slave of the passions, and then the traffic got bad and I missed the explanation. It worries me. Epictetus is the philosopher who makes most sense to me in traffic, and he…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
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 Damad, or both. I understand the words but not the…
Started by Reza Tehrani3 replies -
Did Ibn Khaldun invent sociology, or is that a modern compliment?
Ibn Khaldun called his new science 'ilm al-'umran, the science of human social organisation or civilisation. He looked for regular causes behind historical events: climate, economy, group solidarity, the transition from nomadic to urban life. Many modern writers call him the founder…
Started by Youssef Berrada3 replies -
Falsifiability is not a good criterion for what counts as science
Karl Popper, in Logik der Forschung (1934; English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1959), proposed that a theory is scientific if and only if it's falsifiable: it makes predictions that could turn out false. As a physics teacher I used to…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha6 replies -
What makes a death a “good death”?
In end-of-life care people talk constantly about a "good death". Usually it means: pain controlled, the person not alone, their wishes known and respected, family prepared, no futile interventions at the end. That's a practical list, and I believe in it. But…
Started by Elin Hedqvist4 replies -
What does “the right side of history” actually assume about history?
At least once a tournament, one of the kids I coach closes a round with “my opponent is on the wrong side of history.” Judges love it. I've started to find it slippery, but I can't say exactly why. As far as…
Started by Sam Ellery5 replies -
Ahimsa in Jainism: how far can non-harm be taken?
I grew up next door to a Jain family in Hyderabad. The grandmother wouldn't eat after sunset (to avoid harming insects attracted to light), and they avoided root vegetables, since pulling them up kills the whole plant and the many small organisms…
Started by Anand Kurup4 replies -
Reading group: The Second Sex, Introduction and Part One (“Destiny”)
Let's begin The Second Sex (1949) with the Introduction and Part One of the first volume, the three chapters on biology, psychoanalysis and historical materialism. A note on translations. The 1953 English translation by H. M. Parshley was abridged and is unreliable…
Started by Claire Dubois4 replies -
An unjust law is not really law: legal positivism is mistaken
H. L. A. Hart's The Concept of Law (1961) defends the separation of law and morality: what the law is is one question, what it ought to be is another. Lon Fuller argued against this in their famous 1958 exchange in the…
Started by Hamza Qureshi6 replies -
Reading group: ‘The Culture Industry’ chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment
I do stand-up on the northern circuit and work in a call centre by day, which provides most of my material. A friend told me that Adorno and Horkheimer thought comedy on the radio was a form of social control, and I…
Started by Gemma Pritchard5 replies -
What’s the difference between the cosmological and the ontological argument?
First-year question, sorry. In my philosophy of religion module the lecturer moved fast through several arguments for God's existence and I came out mixing up two of them. I think one is about causes and one is about the concept of God,…
Started by Aoife Kilbride3 replies -
If the Big Bang marks the edge of a theory rather than a beginning, what is left of the kalām’s physics?
I studied physics, and I get asked about this a lot by friends who have watched debates online. Here is what I think the physics actually says. The hot Big Bang phase of the observable universe has a finite age, about 13.8…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies