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Monks take the great vows, I take the small ones: is a graded ethic a cop-out?
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 as the small vows, in a limited form suited to a householder's life. So…
Started by Hetal Shah5 replies -
What is the difference between my arm rising and my raising it? A capoeirista asks
One of my capoeira students brought me a question from her philosophy class that I can't stop thinking about: what is the difference between your arm rising and you raising your arm? In the roda this matters all the time. A good…
Started by Jorge Bonfim4 replies -
Where do I start if I want philosophy beyond the European canon, not just Plato?
My students find it obvious that a river can be a person, and I'm trying to understand why so much of Western philosophy finds it strange, and what tikanga might say to philosophy in return. But when I look for a place…
Started by Aroha Tipene5 replies -
What does Kant mean when he says laughter is an expectation turning into nothing?
I am reading the Critique of the Power of Judgment slowly, with a pencil, and I have reached the remark after section 54, where Kant suddenly starts telling jokes. I did not expect this from him. His formula, in one standard English…
Started by Henrike Vogel6 replies -
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 think every week about animal testing. So this is not a neutral thesis for me, but I want to argue it on terms anyone…
Started by Hetal Shah6 replies -
Why is a banknote money when a perfect copy of it is not?
When Ghana changed its currency in 2007 and took four zeros off the cedi, my mother kept a tin of the old notes. For a while you could exchange them. After that they were just paper. Same paper, same printing, same faces.…
Started by Akosua Mensah4 replies -
Is the flame on my burner a thing, or something that keeps happening?
I run a kitchen in Dubai, twenty-two cooks, nine countries, and on a slow afternoon I was staring at a gas flame. It keeps the same shape and colour for hours, but nothing in it stays: the gas comes in, burns, and…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies -
Is farming labour or work? Trying to understand Arendt’s distinction
This month my son sent me a chapter about Hannah Arendt, who says English uses "work" for three different things: labour, work and action. I wanted to know which one I do on my farm. From what I understood, labour is what…
Started by Akosua Mensah4 replies -
Testimony as an information channel: Nyāya’s śabda next to Dretske
I've been reading Dretske for a seminar alongside the Nyāya Sūtra, and I think they illuminate each other on testimony in a way neither does alone. Nyāya counts four means of knowing (pramāṇa): perception, inference, comparison, and śabda, word or testimony. The…
Started by Meera Kulkarni3 replies -
What do Prior’s four tense operators actually say, in plain words?
The game I'm building now has a time loop: the player relives the same afternoon and has to work out what will happen, what already happened, and what has always been true in the loop. A friend who did a logic minor…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting5 replies -
Running a kitchen, I never pick the best option, just the first good one. Is that irrational?
Every morning at six I make maybe fifty decisions before the first coffee: which supplier to call when the fish is late, who covers a sick cook, whether the tomatoes are good enough or go to sauce. I never compare all the…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies -
Diogenes and the naked Jain monk are not doing the same thing
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 called Onesicritus, said to have been a pupil of Diogenes, went…
Started by Hetal Shah4 replies -
I know I shouldn’t shout at drivers who cut me off, and I still do. How is that possible?
When someone cuts in front of my bus at a stop, I shout. I know it does nothing. I know it is bad for my heart, bad for the passengers, and that the other driver cannot hear me. I have decided, many…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
“Natural birth”: does an evolutionary story about a trait tell us whether it is good?
On the maternity ward I hear the word "natural" all day, pulling in opposite directions. Some women are told that birth without intervention is best because "your body evolved to do this". Others are told that labour pain is natural and therefore…
Started by Farhana Akter4 replies -
Are emotions judgments, feelings, or both?
In my emotion psychology course we covered three families of theories: feeling theories, like the James–Lange theory (1880s): an emotion is our perception of bodily changes, so we're afraid because we tremble, not the other way round cognitive or judgment theories, like…
Started by Elif Yıldız4 replies -
Bridges too low for buses: what did Winner mean by “artifacts have politics”?
In a short article about philosophy of technology I read about a bridge built too low for buses to pass under, so that the people who travel by bus could not easily reach what lay beyond it. The article said a philosopher…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu3 replies -
Does ‘atom’ in my physics class refer to what Dalton meant by it?
Last week one of the students I tutor for school-leaving exams asked, half joking, whether Dalton was "wrong about atoms or right about something else". It is a better question than it sounds. Dalton's atoms were indivisible. A few generations later Thomson…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha3 replies -
Why do philosophers say “in some possible world” instead of just “possibly”?
I design puzzle games, so I spend my days building small worlds with rules. When I started reading about modality I kept seeing sentences like "there is a possible world in which you became a dentist." Why not just say "you could…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting4 replies -
When I stir stock the surface dips. What did Newton’s spinning bucket prove?
I run a kitchen in Dubai. When I stir a big pot of stock, the surface goes down in the middle and up at the sides. I never thought about it until I read that Newton used a bucket of water doing…
Started by Joel D'Souza3 replies -
How can a piece of music be sad when it has no feelings to have?
We have just finished the soundtrack for our new game. In the final level the player has to leave a companion character behind, and our composer wrote a slow piece for it. Playtesters keep telling us the music is "so sad". Some…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting4 replies -
My daughter says the thermostat wants the room warmer. Is she wrong?
I spend my days answering my children's questions, and this one stumped me. We were cold, the heating clicked on, and my seven-year-old said, "The thermostat wants it warmer." Her brother said machines can't want anything. They looked at me. I said…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
What is “defeasible” reasoning, and why do people say most good arguments aren’t valid?
I read philosophy on the bus home. Last week I read that "most good real-world reasoning is not valid at all", and the word that kept coming up was defeasible. Here is my problem. In the kitchen I reason all day. The…
Started by Joel D'Souza4 replies -
How does rasa theory compare with Aristotle’s catharsis?
I studied rasa theory in my literature classes and Aristotle's Poetics in a single comparative class. My professor said they're answering the same question: why do we enjoy art that shows painful emotions? But I'm not sure. Can someone explain what rasa…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
Reading group: J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words
Austin gave these as the William James Lectures at Harvard in 1955, and they were published after his death, in 1962, from his notes. Twelve short lectures. It is one of the most readable classics in philosophy of language, and it has…
Started by Sam Ellery5 replies -
My new cooks believe everything I tell them about safe temperatures. Do they actually know it?
Every few months a new commis arrives in my kitchen, often very young, and the first week is mostly me telling them things. Chicken has to reach a certain core temperature. Rice left out too long is dangerous. This knife is for…
Started by Joel D'Souza4 replies -
Iqbal’s khudi and Nietzsche’s Übermensch: influence or polemic?
Iqbal's Persian poem Asrar-i-Khudi (1915), translated by R. A. Nicholson as The Secrets of the Self (1920), makes the self, khudi, the centre of his philosophy. The self must be strengthened, disciplined and creatively asserted, not dissolved in mystical annihilation. Western readers…
Started by Hamza Qureshi4 replies -
The kalam cosmological argument: what the mutakallimun actually argued
The argument that William Lane Craig revived in The Kalam Cosmological Argument (1979) has three steps: whatever begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore the universe has a cause. The name comes from kalam, Islamic theology. Al-Kindi…
Started by Omar Ragab4 replies -
Does quantum indeterminacy help free will at all?
People sometimes argue that because quantum mechanics is indeterministic, there's room for free will. Having studied physics, I'm sceptical. First, randomness isn't freedom. If my decision depends on a random quantum event, it isn't more mine than if it were determined. Second,…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha4 replies -
Reading group: Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, “On Violence”
The Wretched of the Earth was published in 1961, the year Fanon died of leukaemia at thirty-six. The first chapter, "On Violence", is the most famous and the most misunderstood. Fanon argues that colonialism is itself violence: it establishes and maintains a…
Started by Sana Rizvi5 replies -
Reading group: Plato’s Phaedo, weeks 1–3
I'd like to read the Phaedo slowly with anyone who is interested. It is the dialogue I return to most, and it reads differently every decade. Proposed plan: Week 1: the frame story and Socrates' claim that philosophers spend their lives practising…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies