School
Jainism
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Advaita says the Self is not the doer. Is that an answer to the free will problem, or a way of leaving it?
I'm a retired electrical engineer in Chennai and I have read Advaita for most of my adult life. I want to put my own tradition's answer on the free will question to the test, because I suspect it is either very deep…
Started by Arjun Iyer0 replies154 views -
If a machine might have interests, what do we owe it before we know?
I'm the resident sceptic in my university's effective altruism group, so 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.…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies227 views -
Can Kant’s rule against treating others merely as means be stretched to cover animals?
I work on wetlands, and in a project meeting last month we argued about whether the birds of a lake have any claim against being drained out of their habitat, or whether only the people who enjoy them do. A colleague, a…
Started by Anand Pillai5 replies195 views -
Monks take the great vows, I take the small ones: is a graded ethic a cop-out?
I run my family's pharmacy in Ahmedabad's old city, and I grew up Jain. Jain ethics has five vows: non-harm, truthfulness, not stealing, sexual restraint and non-possession. Monks and nuns take them as the great vows, absolutely. Laypeople like me take them…
Started by Hetal Shah5 replies272 views -
Once you know how a food was produced, you cannot honestly taste it the same way
I grew up Jain, which means I have strong views on honey, onions and root vegetables, and I run a pharmacy where I think every week about animal testing. So this is not a neutral thesis for me, but I want to…
Started by Hetal Shah6 replies214 views -
Diogenes and the naked Jain monk are not doing the same thing
I grew up Jain in Ahmedabad and run the family pharmacy. When I read about Diogenes, people kept saying he was like our Digambara monks: no possessions, no shame about the body, indifferent to comfort. There's even a historical thread: a writer…
Started by Hetal Shah4 replies246 views -
“Not necessarily” versus “necessarily not”: can someone explain the difference with an everyday example?
I left accountancy to raise two children, and the older one (nine) has started catching me out on words. Yesterday I said "it won't necessarily rain at the picnic". She said, "So it necessarily won't rain?" I said no, that's different. She…
Started by Thamarai Selvi Raman4 replies216 views -
Can a baby or an animal have a right if it cannot claim it? Interest theory versus will theory
I run a pharmacy and I grew up Jain, so I think about the ethics of drug trials on animals more than most of my customers would like. Someone at a talk recently said there are two main theories of what a…
Started by Hetal Shah3 replies208 views -
The Jains were right: a beginningless universe has no need of a creator
I grew up Jain in Ahmedabad and run the family pharmacy. Jain cosmology says the universe (loka) is uncreated and eternal. Time turns in great cycles of ascending and descending half-cycles, the utsarpiṇī and avasarpiṇī, and ages of improvement and decline repeat…
Started by Hetal Shah6 replies214 views -
One night at the delivery bed, tested against five traditions’ answers to what makes an act right
Three weeks ago a mother I was attending delivered a baby who was clearly unwell. The doctor had been called and was twenty minutes away. The mother, exhausted, held my hand and asked: “Is my baby all right?” I did not know…
Started by Farhana Akter5 replies187 views -
Natural, necessary and empty desires: running a small winery by Epicurus’s sorting
I make small-batch wine in the Adelaide Hills. The irony of an Epicurean in the wine trade isn't lost on me, but I've found his sorting of desires the most useful bit of ancient philosophy I've ever read. In the Letter to…
Started by Bec Doyle4 replies148 views -
Syādvāda is not a seven-valued logic, and treating it as one loses the point
I grew up Jain and run a pharmacy in Ahmedabad, so I've been hearing about anekāntavāda since before I could read. Lately I keep seeing syādvāda described online as "the ancient Indian seven-valued logic", usually in the same breath as fuzzy logic.…
Started by Hetal Shah5 replies185 views -
Drug trials on animals, seen from behind a Jain pharmacy counter
I run my family's pharmacy in the old city of Ahmedabad and I grew up Jain. Every few weeks a customer, usually an older Jain auntie, asks me whether a medicine was tested on animals. The honest answer is nearly always yes,…
Started by Hetal Shah5 replies113 views -
Cārvāka and Epicurus, two ancient materialists at a deathbed
I'm a palliative care nurse in Montreal. Epicurus helped me think about death without flinching: in the Letter to Menoeceus he says death is nothing to us, because where death is, we are not, and where we are, death is not. I've…
Started by Nadia Haddad5 replies242 views -
Pacifism is the most consistent ethics of war, not a refusal to have one
I grew up among Jain neighbours in Hyderabad and came to Gandhi through them. Gandhi credited Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894) with a large influence on him, so the pacifist line I have absorbed runs from Mahavira through…
Started by Anand Pillai6 replies280 views -
Relativism about truth refutes itself, but relativism about morality does not, at least not so easily
Every year I teach the passage in Plato's Theaetetus where Socrates turns Protagoras's own doctrine against him. Protagoras says man is the measure of all things: what seems true to each person is true for that person. Socrates points out that most…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies121 views -
If many-sidedness is true only from a standpoint, then Jain anekāntavāda undermines itself
Here is the classic challenge, which I want to press as hard as I can before I hear the answer. Anekāntavāda says reality is many-sided, and every claim holds only from some standpoint. Now take that claim itself. Either it holds absolutely,…
Started by Oskar Nyberg5 replies188 views -
‘With us or against us’ sounds like logic. Is it?
I've spent eight years reporting on the peace process in Colombia. One sentence I've heard from armed men of every stripe, and sometimes from people on the other side of the table, is "if you're not with us, you're against us". In…
Started by Andrés Zuluaga4 replies212 views -
Deafness: disease, disability, or difference? And who gets to decide?
I advocate for disability rights in Amman. Last month a family asked me to help them think about a cochlear implant for their deaf toddler. The surgeon spoke of "correcting hearing loss". A Deaf friend of mine, who signs and has a…
Started by Dima Nasser4 replies214 views -
What are the seven “in some respect” predications of syādvāda, and is it really a many-valued logic?
I work on many-valued and modal logics, and I keep meeting the Jain doctrine of syādvāda in footnotes that call it "an ancient three-valued logic" or "a seven-valued logic". I am suspicious of both descriptions, but I don't know enough to say…
Started by Tomasz Wójcik4 replies198 views -
When someone says “that’s my truth”, what exactly are they claiming?
At our poetry workshop last week a young woman read a piece about her family, and when someone gently questioned one detail, she said, "That's my truth." The room went quiet. Nobody knew what to say next. I felt two things at…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies167 views -
Mahavira
Mahāvīra, born Vardhamāna, is revered in Jainism as the twenty-fourth and last tīrthaṅkara of the present age. He taught in the Ganges plain in…