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If perception is free of concepts, as Dignāga says, how do I ever see a cup as a cup?
I've been reading an introduction to Buddhist epistemology on the train, and I'm stuck on Dignāga's definition of perception (pratyakṣa) as "free from conceptual construction". As I understand it, the object of perception is the bare particular, and anything general, like "cup",…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen1 reply -
Reading group: Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, three short chapters a week
Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) is short, about seventy pages, in twelve chapters. I have listened to people talk about it in lectures for years and never read it properly. So I propose four weeks, three chapters a week, starting…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu1 reply -
My students used the surprise test paradox against me. Where exactly does their argument fail?
On Friday I told my class XI section that there would be a surprise test some day next week, Monday to Friday, and that they would not know the evening before which day it was. By the end of the period one…
Started by Vikram Sethi3 replies -
Health cannot be defined without values, and Boorse’s statistical theory shows it by trying
Christopher Boorse's biostatistical theory is the most serious attempt to define health without any value judgements. Roughly: health is the absence of disease, and a disease is an internal state that reduces some function below what is statistically typical for your reference…
Started by Dima Nasser3 replies -
The rectification of names, from a translator’s desk: when words and things drift apart
In Analects 13.3 a disciple asks Confucius what he would do first if he were given charge of government. "Rectify names," he says. The disciple thinks this is impractical, and Confucius explains, in a famous chain: if names are not correct, speech…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo1 reply -
Autumn and mono no aware: an emotion, or a trained way of seeing?
The maples in the hills north of Osaka are only starting to turn, and I'm drawing autumn pages for a children's book. My editor wants "the feeling of autumn", and I keep reaching for mono no aware, which is usually translated as…
Started by Rin Matsuda2 replies -
I’ve stopped translating qi as “energy”, and Zhang Zai is the reason
In our taiji group in the park, the younger members say qi means "energy". It sounds scientific and it is easy to say. I used to say it too. After a winter with Zhang Zai, I have stopped. Zhang Zai, in the…
Started by Liu MingqiaoReply first (no replies yet) -
What are the “objectives of the law” (maqāṣid) that people keep mentioning, and why do they matter?
In a discussion at our mosque youth group, one speaker kept saying that a ruling has to be understood "through the maqāṣid", the objectives or purposes of the sharia. Another person said this is exactly how people end up ignoring the texts.…
Started by Fajar Nugroho3 replies -
My cousin’s biopsy result already exists. Does it make sense to pray that it is benign?
My cousin had a biopsy on Friday. The results come on Wednesday. Whatever is in that tissue is already there; the lab will only tell us. Yet the whole family is praying that it will be benign, and so am I. A…
Started by Aoife Kilbride1 reply -
How would you tell a wise elder from a well-stocked memory? Odera Oruka’s problem, revisited
Odera Oruka went out to rural Kenya to talk with elders and recorded their answers to questions about God, justice, death and the good life. He drew a line between folk sages, who voice the received wisdom of their community well, and…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga3 replies -
A documentary can stage a scene and still be telling the truth
Every documentary editor eventually faces the question. A woman tells us about the night her brother left home. We have her voice. Do we film her walking the street again at night, knowing she is walking it for us? My thesis: staging,…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam4 replies -
Thanksgiving Monday: can gratitude be owed, or does owing it spoil it?
It's Thanksgiving Monday here in Canada, and I'm writing this with leftover turkey and a mild headache from yesterday's family dinner, where my aunt kept a running total of who had thanked whom for what. My cousin hadn't thanked her for a…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal3 replies -
Midterm on Thursday: if a Pyrrhonist suspends all judgement, how does she get out of bed?
I'm taking a philosophy elective alongside my psychology courses, and Thursday's midterm covers Hellenistic philosophy. One question on the past papers keeps coming up: "Can the Pyrrhonian skeptic live their skepticism?" My notes say Pyrrhonists suspend judgement about everything, and that their…
Started by Elif Yıldız3 replies -
In Aymara the past lies in front of us. Is that only a way of speaking, or a truer idea of time?
In Aymara, the word nayra means eye, and front, and also the past. The past is ahead of you, because you can see it. What is coming is qhipa, behind, at your back, because nobody can see it. My grandmother pointed forward…
Started by Lucía Mamani3 replies -
Freire’s “banking” model, seen from inside a capoeira roda
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire describes "banking" education: the teacher deposits knowledge, the students receive, file and store it. Against it he sets problem-posing education, where teacher and students investigate together, and the teacher is also taught. In capoeira Angola…
Started by Jorge Bonfim4 replies -
Aristotle was wrong to think that manual work unfits a person for citizenship
In Book III of the Politics Aristotle asks whether manual workers, the banausoi, should be citizens, and answers that in the best city they would not be. In Book VIII he says such work leaves the body and mind unfit for the…
Started by Hugo Marchetti4 replies -
Every cell in my body is replaced every seven years, so am I even the same person?
At Sunday lunch my uncle reminded me that I borrowed 20,000 shillings from him when I was fifteen. I said, as a joke, that every cell in my body has been replaced since then, so the boy who borrowed it is gone…
Started by Baraka Mwakyusa4 replies -
The lazy argument fails against tawakkul just as it failed against the Stoics
Every so often someone at work tells me not to bother with a contingency plan because "what is written is written". I want to argue that this is a philosophical mistake, and an old one. Cicero's On Fate reports what the ancients…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam5 replies -
Outcomes rightly change how much we blame someone, even when luck decided them
Two drivers leave the same wedding equally drunk and drive equally badly. One gets home. The other hits a child who ran into the road. In every court I have covered, the second driver faces something far heavier than the first, and…
Started by Sana Rizvi5 replies -
Is a promise to someone who has died still binding if no one living would know?
Before she died, my husband's grandmother made me promise that the recipe for our bakery's bread would stay in the family. It is not a secret of state. It is flour, water, salt, a little of something, and the way you fold…
Started by Dilnoza Karimova4 replies -
What does dependent origination actually claim? My daughter asked and I had no answer
My daughter is fourteen. Last week, stuck in traffic near Borella, she asked me what paṭicca samuppāda means. I have heard the word at the temple my whole life. I said "it means everything is connected", and she said that sounds like…
Started by Nuwan Perera4 replies -
Reading group: Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle, one set of dwelling places a week
I would like to read Teresa of Ávila's Interior Castle (1577) together over four weeks, starting Monday 19 October. It is short, vivid and much more argumentative than its reputation. Teresa wrote it for the nuns of her order, at the request…
Started by Agnieszka Malinowska4 replies -
Reading group: The Coordinates of Thought
This is the reading group for The Coordinates of Thought, the book this site grew out of. The categories, parts and thinker profiles here follow its map. Use this thread for anything the book raises: a card you want to argue with,…
Started by Syed Raheel ShahzadReply first (no replies yet) -
The Cost of Being Understood: Why We Cannot Spend Our Whole Life Explaining Ourselves
To be understood is a human desire—not a human entitlement Human beings do not merely want to speak. We want what we say to arrive intact in another mind. We want our reasons to be seen in the proportion in which we…
Started by Syed Raheel ShahzadReply first (no replies yet) -
“But what if it was you?” Trying Hare’s universalisability test on my children
My two children are eight and eleven, and they argue about fairness constantly, mostly over the last piece of anything. Last week I read about R. M. Hare's prescriptivism in an introductory book, and I decided to try it at home. As…
Started by Thamarai RamanReply first (no replies yet) -
Zhuangzi and Huizi on the bridge: doubt about other minds, or a joke?
Every morning after taiji I sit by the river in the park, and this story comes back to me. It is in the "Autumn Floods" chapter of the Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi and his friend Huizi are strolling on a bridge over the Hao…
Started by Liu MingqiaoReply first (no replies yet) -
Is a controlled experiment a new source of knowledge, or only perception with discipline?
I have been reading A. I. Sabra's translation of the first books of Ibn al-Haytham's Optics with two of my tutoring students, and it has raised a question I can't settle. The standard lists of sources of knowledge, whether European or Indian,…
Started by Emeka AnyaohaAnswer first (no replies yet) -
You can believe the universe means nothing and that cruelty is still wrong. Most people do
I came to philosophy through al-Maʿarrī, the blind poet of Maʿarra who called himself a prisoner of two prisons, his blindness and his house. He was a pessimist about almost everything: about the value of being born, about the promises of religion…
Started by Dima NasserReply first (no replies yet) -
Reading group: Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
Thomas Kuhn's Structure is probably the most cited philosophy of science book ever. It describes science as moving through periods of "normal science" within a paradigm, the accumulation of anomalies, crisis, and revolution, where one paradigm replaces another. Kuhn argued that successive…
Started by Emeka AnyaohaReply first (no replies yet) -
Zeno’s arrow and what my students made of it
Zeno's arrow came up in class today. At any instant, the arrow occupies a space exactly its own size, so at that instant it is at rest. Time is made of instants. So the arrow is always at rest and never moves.…
Started by Giulia Ferrante1 reply
