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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 -
Calling an outcome ‘efficient’ always smuggles in a value judgement
When people evaluate algorithms that allocate small loans, the word "efficient" comes up constantly. An allocation is efficient, a policy is inefficient, this change would improve efficiency. It is spoken as if it were a neutral technical description. I want to argue…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies -
Camus and the Buddhists: two ways of refusing the question of life’s meaning
I translate French philosophy into Vietnamese, and I'm finishing a new translation of The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). It opens with the famous sentence that there is only one really serious philosophical problem, suicide: judging whether life is worth living. And it…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo5 replies -
Langar, the Shabbat table and Confucius’s sauce: what does eating together do?
The langar, where I help out at our gurdwara in Surrey, goes back to Guru Nanak and was made central by the gurus who followed: a free kitchen where everyone, whatever their caste, faith or status, sits on the floor in the…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal6 replies -
Mulla Sadra’s substantial motion: is everything changing at the level of substance?
For Aristotle, motion happens in a few categories only: quantity (growth), quality (a leaf turning red), and place. Substance doesn't move; it's the stable subject of change. When one substance becomes another, that's generation and corruption, not motion. Mulla Sadra disagreed. His…
Started by Reza Tehrani4 replies -
Animals have moral rights, not just interests to be weighed
Peter Singer's Animal Liberation (1975) is often called the founding text of the animal rights movement, but Singer is a utilitarian: he argues animals' interests should be given equal consideration, which allows trading them off against others' interests. Tom Regan's The Case…
Started by Anand Kurup6 replies -
Ibn Khaldun’s asabiyya and the rise and fall of states
The central concept of the Muqaddimah is asabiyya, usually translated "group feeling" or "solidarity". Ibn Khaldun argues that groups living hard lives on the margins of civilisation, often nomadic or tribal, develop strong solidarity. That solidarity lets them conquer settled states. Once…
Started by Youssef Berrada4 replies -
Night shifts and Epictetus: the dichotomy of control in a care home
The Enchiridion opens by dividing things into those up to us (our judgments, impulses, desires and aversions) and those not up to us (our bodies, property, reputation, office). Epictetus says that suffering comes from treating the second kind as though it were…
Started by Elin Hedqvist4 replies -
What did R. S. Peters mean by calling education an initiation?
I have started reading philosophy of education because I want to understand what I am doing when I teach them at home in the evenings. An introductory book I borrowed says R. S. Peters, in the 1960s, described education as "initiation into…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
Kirat karni: is honest work a form of worship, or is that just a nice story about work?
This question follows me from the office to the langar. Guru Nanak's teaching is often summed up in three practices: naam japna, remembering the divine Name; kirat karni, earning by honest work; and vand chakna, sharing what you have. There's a story…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal5 replies -
I design systems that steer behaviour. Where does my responsibility end?
My job is to shape what players want to do next: rewards spaced so that the next one is always just ahead, social features that make leaving feel like letting friends down, events that expire so you return tomorrow. Some of it…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting5 replies -
Is the “flow state” players reach in a good game the same thing as wu wei, or a false friend?
I design puzzle games for a small studio in Tainan. Our whole craft is building challenges that match a player's skill closely enough that they lose track of time. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this "flow": deep absorption, loss of self-consciousness, action…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting6 replies -
Rasa and catharsis: is tasting an emotion the same as purging it?
I grew up with rasa theory the way some people grow up with grammar. Recently I read Aristotle's Poetics for a class and was told that catharsis is "the Greek version of rasa". I don't think it is, and I want to…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
The Nyaya five-membered syllogism versus Aristotle’s three
I've recently started comparing two traditions of logic. The Nyāya inference for others (parārthānumāna) has five members: Thesis (pratijñā): the hill has fire. Reason (hetu): because it has smoke. Example (udāharaṇa): wherever there is smoke, there is fire, as in a kitchen.…
Started by Vikram Sethi4 replies -
What exactly is Wang Yangming’s liangzhi, and is it just the Chinese word for conscience?
I grew up in Tainan and met Wang Yangming in high school, where he was something to memorise: “unity of knowledge and action”, “extend liangzhi”, three marks on the exam. Now I design puzzle games and suddenly find him interesting, because liangzhi…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting5 replies -
A philosopher says there are no tables, only particles arranged tablewise. I make tables
A customer's son is studying philosophy in Rabat. While I was fitting their cedar ceiling he told me about a book called Material Beings by Peter van Inwagen. As far as I understood him, van Inwagen thinks that when many small things…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani5 replies -
Half my class says they are nihilists. What exactly are they claiming?
I teach Introduction to the Philosophy of the Human Person to sixteen-year-olds in Davao. This term, about half the class announced they were nihilists. When I asked what that meant, I got: "nothing matters", "there's no right or wrong", "we can't really…
Started by Rowena Abellana4 replies -
If a cheat wins the match, has he even played the game? Help me with Suits
I am working through a book my grandson gave me: Bernard Suits's The Grasshopper. I like it, but I keep losing the thread on one point. Suits says a game is an attempt to reach some goal using only the means the…
Started by Gerrit Venter6 replies -
The floating man is not the cogito: Ibn Sina and Descartes compared
Ibn Sina's "floating man" appears in the De Anima of the Shifa' and again in the Isharat. Imagine a person created all at once, fully mature, suspended in the air, eyes covered, limbs apart so they don't touch, with no sensation at…
Started by Layla Sfeir5 replies -
What is the epoché, and why would bracketing whether the world exists help anyone?
A friend who did philosophy says what I do at the wine-show judging table is "basically phenomenology", which flattered me until I tried to read about it. The bit I'm stuck on is the epoché, or "bracketing". As far as I can…
Started by Bec Doyle4 replies -
Can a tidy ledger be beautiful? What is “everyday aesthetics” about?
There is a moment near the end of every tax return I prepare, when the columns reconcile and the ledger is clean and everything is where it should be, that gives me a feeling I can only call aesthetic. My husband laughs…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal4 replies -
Why did al-Jahiz insist on mixing jest with earnest in serious books?
My shop is off Mutanabbi Street and the most stolen book on my shelves, I'm sorry to say, is al-Jāḥiẓ's Kitāb al-Bukhalāʾ, the Book of Misers. People pick it up, start laughing, and somehow forget to pay. It is a collection of…
Started by Zainab Kadhim5 replies -
My rice cooker says ‘fuzzy logic’. Is that just probability with a nicer name?
We bought a Japanese rice cooker with "Fuzzy Logic" printed on the front, and it has become a running joke in the kitchen. The Filipino line cook says the rice is "fuzzy done". The pastry chef says everything in the kitchen is…
Started by Joel D'Souza4 replies -
Our CEO keeps announcing “paradigm shifts”. Is that what Kuhn meant?
I have sat through a lot of pitch meetings where someone announced a paradigm shift. A new app for ordering groceries: paradigm shift. Moving the team to four-day weeks: paradigm shift. My last investor used it three times in one call. I…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies -
“Not necessarily” versus “necessarily not”: can someone explain the difference with an everyday example?
My older child, who is nine, has started catching me out on words. Yesterday I said "it won't necessarily rain at the picnic". She said, "So it necessarily won't rain?" I said no, that's different. She said, "How?" and I realised I…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
Why does Cora Diamond say we don’t eat our dead, and what does that have to do with animals?
My son, who is eight, asked me last week whether the cat knows it is a cat, and then whether it is wrong to eat chicken if the chicken does not know it is a chicken. I did not have a good…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies