Archives: Posts
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Testing the theories of laughter on Nasreddin Hodja
Superiority, relief, incongruity, benign violation: I took the philosophers' theories of humour onto my bus route and tried them on the stories my grandfather told.
Started by Serkan AydoğduReply first (no replies yet) -
A person through other persons: what ubuntu actually asks of us
Ubuntu is printed on mugs and quoted in constitutional judgments; underneath the slogan is a demanding claim about what a person is, and African philosophers disagree sharply about how far to take it.
Started by Thandeka MokoenaReply first (no replies yet) -
How much should one result change your mind? Thinking in degrees of belief
Base rates, the Dutch book and an ancient sceptic's coil of rope: a data scientist's case for believing by degrees.
Started by Wanjiru NjengaReply first (no replies yet) -
Can a machine be your friend? Aristotle, Buber and the ethics of AI companions
Companion apps are sold as friends and partners. The oldest theory of friendship explains what they can and cannot be, and shows where the real ethical problem lies.
Started by Derek HollisReply first (no replies yet) -
What makes a job meaningful? Notes from a job centre
Philosophers have called work a curse, a calling and a site of alienation. Sitting in Berlin's job centres has convinced me that meaning in work is less a private feeling than a social structure.
Started by Johanna ReinhardtReply first (no replies yet) -
What the Stoics meant by ‘indifferent’, seen from a night shift
Health, life and death are 'indifferents' in Stoic ethics. That does not mean they don't matter, and getting the difference right changes how the Stoics read at a bedside.
Started by Elin HedqvistReply first (no replies yet) -
Philosophy of science for beginners: what makes a claim scientific?
An engineer's introduction to the big questions about science: how to tell it from pseudo-science, what a failed prediction proves, whether electrons are real, and what counts as an explanation.
Started by Lars EriksenReply first (no replies yet) -
What the tea room knows: Rikyū, wabi and taste as an aesthetic sense
European aesthetics long ranked taste below sight and hearing. A Japanese tea gathering suggests the ranking was answering the wrong question.
Started by Aiko TanabeReply first (no replies yet) -
A person through other persons: is ubuntu an ethics of care?
Ubuntu and care ethics both put relationships at the centre of morality. Working with both in housing-rights campaigns has convinced me they are allies, not twins.
Started by Thandeka MokoenaReply first (no replies yet) -
What is aesthetics? A beginner’s guide
Six questions that make up the philosophy of beauty and art, explained for someone meeting them for the first time, with a restorer's view of why they matter.
Started by Chiara BellandiReply first (no replies yet) -
Free will explained: the main positions, and what physics does and doesn’t settle
A physics reader's guide to the four classic answers, the options that don't fit the usual grid, and the question underneath them all.
Started by Lars EriksenReply first (no replies yet) -
Four generations to ruin: Ibn Khaldun on why institutions decay
The Muqaddimah's theory of dynastic decline is usually read as medieval history; read as a theory of institutions, it is uncomfortably current.
Started by Javier FerrandisReply first (no replies yet) -
These and these: what Talmudic argument can teach us about disagreeing with a peer
Philosophers ask whether you should change your mind when an equally capable person disagrees. The rabbis built a whole culture around a different answer.
Started by Eliana HalpernReply first (no replies yet) -
Where there’s smoke: the Cārvāka challenge to inference, and why it still matters
India's materialists asked how anyone could know that smoke always means fire. Their opponents' answers, and Hume's later version of the question, show what a sceptical empiricism can and cannot do.
Started by Arvind PoojaryReply first (no replies yet) -
Should a struggling state pay for music? Mozi and Xunzi’s quarrel
More than two thousand years before modern arts-funding debates, the Mohists argued that music wastes what the poor need, and Xunzi replied that a society without music cannot hold together. Both were partly right.
Started by Chen YutingReply first (no replies yet) -
Philosophy of religion: a beginner’s guide to the big arguments
What philosophers of religion actually do, the main arguments for and against God, and the questions that open up when you look beyond a single tradition, written for believers, doubters and the merely curious.
Started by Miriam AdlerReply first (no replies yet) -
Ethical theories explained: a beginner’s guide to how philosophers judge right and wrong
Consequences, duties, character, contracts, care, roles and community: what each theory tells you to look at, and why they agree more often than you'd think.
Started by Rowena AbellanaReply first (no replies yet) -
Why does sad art feel good? What the rasa theorists worked out
A Sanskrit argument that ran for two centuries gives the most careful answer I know to the old puzzle of enjoying grief on the stage.
Started by Meera KulkarniReply first (no replies yet) -
Seen with one’s own eyes: what Yoruba usage teaches about knowing and believing
Yoruba speech draws the line between knowledge and belief somewhere English does not. That line is a serious contribution to the epistemology of testimony.
Started by Titilayo AdeyemiReply first (no replies yet) -
Political philosophy in ten questions
A beginner's map of the questions political philosophers ask, from why anyone should obey a state to what we owe people beyond our borders, with answers drawn from several traditions.
Started by Hamza QureshiReply first (no replies yet) -
Two ways of holding no view: Nāgārjuna and Sextus Empiricus on suspending judgement
The Madhyamaka dialectician and the Pyrrhonist physician look like twins. Read closely, they are doing different things, and the difference is instructive.
Started by Meera KulkarniReply first (no replies yet) -
Not a warehouse: what the Baghdad translators actually did
The usual story says Arabic scholars kept Greek philosophy safe until Europe was ready for it; the translators themselves were doing something far more interesting.
Started by Layla SfeirReply first (no replies yet) -
Should you care for everyone equally? Mozi and the first great argument about impartiality
Two thousand years before utilitarianism, Mohists and Confucians fought over whether love should have degrees. They framed the question better than we usually do.
Started by Chen YutingReply first (no replies yet) -
The step or the leg? What the social model of disability really claims
The social model is often caricatured as saying bodies do not matter. Read properly, it is a claim about where responsibility lies, and its sharpest critics are disabled scholars themselves.
Started by Dima NasserReply first (no replies yet) -
The mind–body problem: a beginner’s guide
How can a thought move an arm? The main answers, from Descartes and Elisabeth to functionalism, with stops in classical India and eighteenth-century Wittenberg.
Started by Derek HollisReply first (no replies yet) -
The chariot and the bundle: why anattā is not Hume’s theory of the self
Hume looked for a self and could not find one. The Buddha's teaching of not-self is often called the same discovery. It is a different kind of claim, made for a different reason.
Started by Nirmala JayasekaraReply first (no replies yet) -
Logic for beginners: what makes an argument valid
A first introduction to the single most useful idea in logic, with the tests you can use on any argument and the mistakes almost everyone makes.
Started by Tomasz SzewczakReply first (no replies yet) -
Is morality objective? A beginner’s guide to meta-ethics
What are we doing when we call something wrong? A teacher's map of the main answers, from the Euthyphro to error theory.
Started by Giulia FerranteReply first (no replies yet) -
Innocent until proven false: Kumārila on why a cognition needs no certificate
The Mīmāṃsā doctrine of intrinsic validity is usually filed under scripture. It is first of all a general theory of knowledge, and a strong one.
Started by Govinda Prasad UpadhyayaReply first (no replies yet) -
What is epistemology? A beginner’s guide to the theory of knowledge
Four questions, two ways of asking them, and why a lucky guess is the best place to start.
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-hoReply first (no replies yet)