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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 -
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