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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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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) -
The grounding revival brought metaphysics back without bringing back a method
For much of the twentieth century, substantive metaphysics was out of fashion. Carnap argued that many ontological questions were either trivial within a framework or merely practical choices about which framework to use. Quine brought ontology back, but in a tightly regimented…
Started by Oskar NybergReply first (no replies yet) -
“Chinese philosophy had no epistemology” is wrong, and the Mohists are the proof
Every comparative table I see gives the Chinese row the same apologetic note: less interest in formal proof, more in precedent and the classics, no real epistemology, but that's not a deficiency. The intention is kind, but the claim underneath is wrong.…
Started by Lin Pei-shanReply first (no replies yet) -
Boole, not Frege, deserves to be called the father of modern logic
I'll declare my bias at the start: George Boole was professor of mathematics at Queen's College here in Cork from 1849 until his death in 1864. There's a plaque. I walk past it. Philosophers tend to say that modern logic begins with…
Started by Siobhán KeaneReply first (no replies yet) -
Markets are morally neutral tools
I'll argue a thesis I'm not sure I believe. Markets are mechanisms for coordinating exchange. They have no values of their own. When they produce injustice, the problem lies in the background conditions (unequal property, missing information, bad laws), not in buying…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
Knowledge-first epistemology is surrender dressed up as a theory
After Gettier, philosophers spent decades trying to find the missing ingredient that turns justified true belief into knowledge: no false lemmas, defeasibility, causal connection, reliability, safety. Each proposal met a counterexample. Timothy Williamson's response in Knowledge and Its Limits (2000) was to…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies -
The “double truth” doctrine was never Ibn Rushd’s view
In thirteenth-century Paris, some arts masters were accused of holding that something could be true in philosophy and false in faith, or the reverse: the so-called doctrine of double truth. These "Latin Averroists", including Siger of Brabant, were associated with Ibn Rushd,…
Started by Youssef Berrada5 replies -
Introspection is too unreliable to ground a science of consciousness
Early experimental psychology relied on trained introspection, in the laboratories of Wundt and Titchener. It collapsed partly because labs couldn't agree: the "imageless thought" controversy couldn't be settled, because one lab's trained observers reported imageless thought and another's didn't. More recently, Nisbett…
Started by Elif Yıldız5 replies -
Holding firm on religion and ethics while deferring on arithmetic is a failure of nerve
Most people are conciliationists about arithmetic. If an equally competent friend gets a different answer to a sum, you check, and until you do, you are less confident. Almost nobody is a conciliationist about religion, ethics or politics. We know perfectly well…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies -
Mystical experience can count as evidence for what it reveals
William Alston, in Perceiving God (1991), argued that mystical experience is a form of perception, and that beliefs formed through it are prima facie justified in the same way perceptual beliefs are. Richard Swinburne's "principle of credulity" says that if it seems…
Started by Reza Tehrani7 replies -
Truth as ‘what inquiry converges on’ breaks down exactly where we most need it: ethics
Peirce wrote, in 1878, that the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth. I find that a beautiful idea for physics. Scientists disagree, run experiments, and over time opinions…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies -
The hedonic treadmill shows money can’t buy lasting happiness
Psychologists Brickman and Campbell coined the phrase "hedonic treadmill" in 1971: we adapt to improvements in our circumstances and return to a baseline level of happiness. A famous 1978 study by Brickman, Coates and Janoff-Bulman suggested lottery winners weren't much happier than…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies -
Aristotle’s account of friendship is still the best one we have
Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics distinguish three kinds of friendship: for utility, for pleasure, and for character. Only the third is complete. In it you wish your friend well for their own sake, and the friend becomes something like…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
The free will defence cannot explain natural evil
I'm Catholic, and I'm arguing this thesis because it's the one that troubles me most. Alvin Plantinga's free will defence (God, Freedom, and Evil, 1974) argues that it's logically possible that God couldn't create a world containing free creatures who never do…
Started by Aoife Kilbride9 replies -
Quine was right that even logic could be revised in the light of experience
Be gentle but not too gentle. We read the end of Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951) in a seminar last week, and I think its most radical claim is correct: no statement is immune to revision, logic included. The picture: our…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies -
‘Existence precedes essence’ is an empirical claim, and the evidence is against it
I want to argue that existentialism's founding premise is not a metaphysical axiom but an empirical claim, and a shaky one. In his 1945 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre puts it plainly: for human beings, existence precedes essence. There is no…
Started by Priya Raghavan6 replies -
Kant was wrong: we can know things as they are in themselves
I am posting this thesis partly to test my own reading of the first Critique. Kant holds that we know only appearances. Space and time are forms of our intuition, and the categories are forms of our understanding, so things as they…
Started by Henrike Vogel5 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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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