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I butcher pigs at work and my dog sleeps on my bed. Is that inconsistent?
I'm a chef from Goa, which means pork is close to the centre of the food I grew up with: sorpotel, vindaloo, chouriço. In my kitchen in Dubai I break down whole pigs when we can get them. At home I have…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies -
Reading group: Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, starting with ‘Nature and Significance of Play’
Huizinga has sat unread on my shelf for too long, and I'd like company to finally read him. Homo Ludens (1938) argues that play is older than culture, since animals play without anyone teaching them, and that law, war, poetry, philosophy and…
Started by Liu Mingqiao5 replies -
Reading group: Yājñavalkya, Maitreyī and Gārgī in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad
Reading Śaiva Siddhānta on my own, I want to go back behind the schools to the text they all argue over. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka is the oldest and, for me, the most alive of the Upaniṣads, mostly because of Yājñavalkya and the two…
Started by Thamarai Raman5 replies -
Can someone explain Ramanuja’s Vishishtadvaita fairly, from an Advaitin’s point of view?
I confess I have never given Rāmānuja the attention he deserves. My Vaishnava friends tell me I misrepresent him whenever I speak about him. So I ask, in good faith: what exactly is Vishishtadvaita, "qualified non-dualism"? How does it differ from Advaita…
Started by Arjun Iyer3 replies -
“That’s not what I meant”: a comic on jokes, apologies and who owns the meaning
Friday night in a club in Salford, I did a bit about my mum's driving. A bloke near the front decided it was about him, because he'd heckled about my accent earlier, and he came up afterwards furious. My first instinct was…
Started by Gemma Pritchard4 replies -
Why does tax feel like theft to some of my clients and not to others?
Two of my tax clients run nearly identical businesses: same size, same bracket, similar families. Every April one of them tells me, only half joking, that the government is robbing him. The other says, with no irony, that tax is the membership…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal5 replies -
Nagarjuna’s tetralemma is not a rejection of logic
The catuṣkoṭi, or tetralemma, considers four options for any proposition: it is, it is not, both, neither. In the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, Nāgārjuna often rejects all four. For example, the Buddha after death neither exists, nor doesn't exist, nor both, nor neither. Some readers…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies -
Han Feizi’s case for clear law, read in Lahore
I've been reading Han Feizi with more sympathy than I expected. His central insight about law is one I see confirmed every week in our courts. Where the rules are unclear, or applied differently depending on who you are, the powerful win…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
I do tax returns. When a colleague gets a different total, should I move halfway?
I prepare tax returns for small businesses. Last week a colleague and I each worked through the same client's figures. I got one total; she got a total about two hundred dollars higher. We are equally experienced, equally careful, neither of us…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal4 replies -
Can Kant’s rule against treating others merely as means be stretched to cover animals?
I work on wetlands, and in a project meeting last month we argued about whether the birds of a lake have any claim against being drained out of their habitat, or whether only the people who enjoy them do. A colleague, a…
Started by Anand Kurup5 replies -
Are Kant’s formulations of the categorical imperative really equivalent?
I am working through the Groundwork, slowly. Kant gives several formulations of the categorical imperative: act only on a maxim you could will as a universal law treat humanity, in yourself and others, always as an end and never merely as a…
Started by Henrike Vogel3 replies -
What did Bernard Williams mean by ‘one thought too many’?
A book on care ethics I borrowed keeps quoting Bernard Williams's phrase "one thought too many", and I think I understand it but I want to be sure. As I understand the case: a man can save only one of two drowning…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
Is a mayonnaise emergent? A cook asks about weak and strong emergence
Every morning someone in my kitchen makes mayonnaise: egg yolk, a little mustard and lemon, then oil, drop by drop at first. Get it right and you have something thick, glossy and pale. Get it wrong and you have greasy soup. None…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies -
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