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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 -
Consciousness is fundamental, not produced by the brain
Advaita Vedanta holds that consciousness is the one reality, and the material world appears within it. In recent years, several philosophers in the analytic tradition have defended views in the same family: Philip Goff's panpsychism (Galileo's Error, 2019), Bernardo Kastrup's analytic idealism.…
Started by Arjun Iyer9 replies -
Large language models understand nothing: the Chinese Room still applies
This isn't idle for anyone who builds software on these models. I'll argue the thesis and see if it survives. John Searle's 1980 paper "Minds, Brains, and Programs" imagines a man in a room who receives Chinese characters, follows an English rulebook…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen9 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 -
Free speech should protect offensive religious satire
I write this from a country with strict blasphemy laws, which have led to mob violence and killings. So I'm not neutral on this. The Jyllands-Posten cartoons in 2005, the Charlie Hebdo attack in 2015 and countless cases in Pakistan raise the…
Started by Sana Rizvi8 replies -
Al-Ghazali was right: causal necessity cannot be demonstrated
In the Seventeenth Discussion of The Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali argues that the connection between what is customarily believed to be a cause and its effect is not necessary. When cotton touches fire and burns, observation shows only that the burning…
Started by Layla Sfeir8 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 -
Reading group: al-Ghazālī’s Deliverance from Error, the chapters on doubt
Al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl, usually translated Deliverance from Error, is short enough to read in an evening and deep enough to read for a lifetime. I would like to read the first part, the account of his doubt, slowly over three weeks with…
Started by Bilal Rashid7 replies -
Barnes is right: being disabled is not in itself bad for you
I came to philosophy through effective altruism, where it's common to count disability as a reduction in wellbeing and to rank interventions accordingly. Elizabeth Barnes's The Minority Body changed my mind, and I want to defend her thesis. Thesis: disability is a…
Started by Ethan Mercer7 replies -
There is no self: the Buddhist and Humean bundle views are basically right
Hume, in the Treatise (Book 1, Part 4, Section 6), says that when he looks within he never catches "himself", only some particular perception: heat, cold, love, pain. The self is a bundle of perceptions in constant flux. The Buddhist doctrine of…
Started by Priya Raghavan7 replies -
Does philosophy make you better at your actual job, or just more annoying at it?
I'm a carpenter in Tetouan. I've been reading philosophy for a few years, mostly Aristotle, because he talks about carpenters and builders so much, and lately Ibn Bājja, who was from al-Andalus and thought hard about how a person can live well…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani7 replies -
An outsider can understand a culture, and sometimes better than its own members do
My walking tours go past the Mezquita-Catedral and through the old Jewish quarter of Córdoba, the city where both Ibn Rushd and Maimonides were born. Tourists want a story of three faiths living in harmony, the famous convivencia. I try to tell…
Started by Rafael Lucena Prieto7 replies -
Justice should start from dependency, not from independent adults making a deal
Every baby born on our ward is completely dependent, and so is the mother for a few hours, and so, at the end of life, most of us will be again. Reading Eva Kittay's Love's Labor this year, I felt someone had…
Started by Farhana Akter7 replies -
Whoever deploys an automated decision system should answer for its harms, fault or no fault
Take the standard case. A bank uses an automated system to assess loans. A creditworthy applicant is refused. The refusal rests on correlations in the training data that no engineer chose and nobody can fully reconstruct. Who answers for it? The engineers…
Started by Hamza Qureshi7 replies -
Dreyfus’s critique of AI has aged better than Searle’s Chinese Room
I want to defend an unfashionable ranking. Of the two classic objections to the idea of thinking machines, the one that has earned its keep is Hubert Dreyfus's, not John Searle's. Searle's argument rests on an intuition about what the man in…
Started by Derek Hollis7 replies -
Hountondji was right: a people’s worldview is not yet philosophy
Every year a student in my lycée class asks why we study Descartes and not ‘African philosophy’. I owe them a serious answer, and the most serious one I know is Paulin Hountondji's. In African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (originally 1976), Hountondji…
Started by Khady Sène7 replies -
If the Stoic technique works without the Stoic cosmos, the cosmos was never doing the work
Stoicism helped me back from a bad year. I read Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and practised separating what's in my control from what isn't. I don't believe in a rationally ordered cosmos governed by providence. The practice worked anyway. I keep reading…
Started by Rohan Desai7 replies -
Vitaṇḍā is not always illegitimate: a critic with no thesis can still be doing philosophy
There is one problem in Nāgārjuna I have been chewing on for a long time. The Nyāya tradition calls vitaṇḍā illegitimate: one party only attacks and never defends a position, so they risk nothing and cannot be wrong. That seems fair as…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung7 replies -
Some films do philosophy that prose cannot, rather than illustrating it
I'll argue a thesis my analytic friends here find indulgent: some films do philosophical work in their own right, work that can't be fully restated in prose. The sceptic's argument is simple. Whatever philosophical content a film has can be put into…
Started by Martín Iriarte7 replies -
Appiah is right: racial terms are empty, like ‘phlogiston’, and we should stop talking as if they named kinds
Appiah, whose father was Ghanaian, is someone young people in Accra claim with a certain pride, even when they disagree with him. I want to defend his eliminativism, at least for argument's sake. The argument, roughly: racial terms were introduced, in the…
Started by Kwame Asante7 replies -
‘What happens when we die?’ is a question most traditions would not have asked in that form
Here's a thesis about a table everyone likes. Comparative tables of ‘what happens when we die?’ line up the traditions in neat rows: Platonic immortal soul, Epicurean dissolution, Vedantic rebirth, Buddhist rebirth without self, Confucian deferral, Islamic resurrection. It looks like many…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho7 replies -
Haslanger’s ameliorative method changes the subject rather than answering the question
I come to this from the method rather than the politics. In her well-known paper asking what gender and race are and what we want them to be, Sally Haslanger distinguishes three projects. A conceptual project asks what our concept is. A…
Started by Oskar Nyberg7 replies -
The analytic/continental split is mostly an accident of the 1930s, not a philosophical divide
Reading logic in Kraków gives me a particular view of this. The Lwów–Warsaw school that Twardowski founded (Łukasiewicz, Leśniewski, Tarski and others) was doing rigorous analytic work in central Europe in the 1920s and 30s. Then the war destroyed it. Tarski was…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak7 replies -
Why did the rabbis write down the opinions they voted against?
I run a Talmud study group on Tuesday nights, and every year someone new asks the same thing: why does the text keep the losing side? When a law is decided, why preserve, often at length, the arguments of the sages who…
Started by Eliana Halpern7 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 -
Eighteen and on a gap year: should I read the philosophers themselves or an introduction first?
My parents still call my gap year wasting time. Last month I read al-Ghazālī's Deliverance from Error, his account of his crisis of doubt, and I haven't stopped thinking about it. It was the first time a book felt like it was…
Started by Fajar Nugroho6 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 -
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 -
‘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 -
I caught myself apologising to the chatbot that took over half my job
I work in a call centre, and since spring the first line of every complaint goes to a chatbot. I only get the callers it gives up on, who arrive already furious. Last week, on a dead night shift, I had a…
Started by Gemma Pritchard6 replies