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When someone dies, whose loss is grief about: theirs or ours?
My father died in February. In Addis Ababa people come to the house for days, the lekso, and sit with you, and much of what is said is about him: how young he was, what he would have seen. Thomas Nagel's account…
Started by Tsion Bekele5 replies -
Zhaozhou’s dog, Dōgen, and a robotics engineer: does a robot have buddha-nature?
A small puzzle from my temple that connects to the threads here about machines. The first case of the Gateless Gate collection is the famous one: a monk asks Zhaozhou whether a dog has buddha-nature, and Zhaozhou answers "Mu" (in Chinese, wu).…
Started by Aiko Tanabe5 replies -
Before the Axial Age: the Nāsadīya hymn, Egyptian instructions and the gradualist objection
One of the first hymns my grandfather made me memorise was the Nāsadīya Sūkta of the Ṛgveda, the hymn of creation. It begins before being and non-being and ends with doubt: who truly knows how this arose? Perhaps the one who watches…
Started by Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya5 replies -
Can an institution be at fault when nobody inside it did anything wrong?
Years ago, in a unit I served with, a soldier died in a training accident. The inquiry took months. Every officer had followed the regulations. The equipment had passed inspection. The schedule had been approved at the proper level. The report concluded…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun5 replies -
Reading group: G. A. Cohen’s Why Not Socialism?, a short book for a long argument
The port doesn't leave me time for long books during the season, so I was glad to find this one: G. A. Cohen's Why Not Socialism? (2009), well under a hundred pages. Cohen asks us to imagine a camping trip. A group…
Started by Hugo Marchetti5 replies -
If many-sidedness is true only from a standpoint, then Jain anekāntavāda undermines itself
Here is the classic challenge, which I want to press as hard as I can before I hear the answer. Anekāntavāda says reality is many-sided, and every claim holds only from some standpoint. Now take that claim itself. Either it holds absolutely,…
Started by Oskar Nyberg5 replies -
After reading Hamblin, should I still teach my prison class the list of fallacies?
In my prison reading class, the men's favourite unit is the fallacies. They love catching each other: "That's ad hominem!" "Straw man!" Then I read about C. L. Hamblin's book Fallacies (1970). As I understand it, he looked at the standard catalogue…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma5 replies -
Do capabilities measure a good life better than happiness surveys do?
The donors I work with on accessible buildings want outcomes, and increasingly the outcome they ask for is "satisfaction": did people report being happier after the ramp was built? I find this maddening, and Amartya Sen's work explains why. Two of his…
Started by Dima Nasser5 replies -
Relativism about truth refutes itself, but relativism about morality does not, at least not so easily
There is a passage in Plato's Theaetetus where Socrates turns Protagoras's own doctrine against him. Protagoras says man is the measure of all things: what seems true to each person is true for that person. Socrates points out that most people believe…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
Not every coherent prior is rational: subjective Bayesianism is far too permissive
The subjective Bayesian line, roughly de Finetti's, is that any coherent prior is permissible and evidence does the rest. Start where you like, conditionalise honestly, and the data will eventually bring reasonable people together. I think this is too generous, for three…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Possibility lives in the powers of real things, not in other worlds
When I look at a plank of cedar I see what it can become: a panel, a frame, a box. That "can" is not in some other world. It is in the cedar: its grain, its weight, the way it takes a…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani5 replies -
The statue-and-clay puzzle is a verbal dispute, and metaphysicians should admit it
I coach high school debate. Half my job is stopping kids from winning arguments by quietly changing what a word means. So I'm primed to spot verbal disputes, and I think I've spotted a big one. The puzzle: a sculptor shapes a…
Started by Sam Ellery5 replies -
Species are drawn, not discovered: biology has already chosen nominalism
I dive in the kelp forests along the Chilean coast. In the years I have been diving there, the species boundaries in some kelp groups have been argued over and redrawn on the basis of genetic data, and biologists still disagree about…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo5 replies -
Why debates about first principles never end: notes from the high-school tournament circuit
I coach debate at a public high school in Portland, and after years of judging I've noticed a pattern. Rounds about facts resolve. Someone has better evidence, or the other side drops a point, and the judge can decide. Rounds about fundamentals…
Started by Sam Ellery5 replies -
Reading group: Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, one dialogue at a time
George Berkeley was born in County Kilkenny, studied at Trinity College Dublin, and spent the last part of his life as Bishop of Cloyne, about half an hour from where I'm writing. I've always felt we in Cork should know him better…
Started by Siobhán Keane5 replies -
Reading group: Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Part One on the body
I've read Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) in French more times than I can count, and I'd like to read the first part with people who come to it from bodies rather than from books: dancers, players, nurses, craftspeople. Translation: Donald Landes's…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
Did Plato’s Republic X really attack “art”, or is that a translation problem?
Every year in my class we reach the moment where a student says, "Wait, Plato wanted to ban poets?" I usually say yes, and we have a lively argument about censorship. But I've just read an argument that this framing misleads. Plato…
Started by Keisha Monroe5 replies -
Treating beauty as a matter of personal taste is the odd one out among the world’s traditions
I make hand-drawn batik in Yogyakarta, in a workshop my mother started. Our motifs carry Javanese ideas about harmony and Sufi ideas about longing. When foreign buyers ask me "which pattern do you like best?", I find the question strange. A motif…
Started by Ratna Wulandari5 replies -
Is Nāgārjuna’s conventional truth a kind of instrumentalism about science?
In the tea houses on the Annapurna circuit I have been reading Nāgārjuna's Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way with a commentary a monk in Manang gave me. Last season a client of mine, a physicist, explained over dal bhat that some…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung5 replies -
Knowledge as a building or a raft? Neurath’s boat, seen from a community organiser’s chair
I'm a community organiser in Chicago and used to teach in public schools. I've always loved pragmatism because it treats knowledge as something you do with other people. Lately I've been reading about the structure of justification and want to test the…
Started by Dana Whitfield5 replies -
Reading group: Christine de Pizan and Mary Astell, two arguments from reason three centuries apart
Women who claimed the right to think in earlier centuries kept reaching for the same tool against their opponents: argument from the opponents' own premises. I'd like to read two of them side by side. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the…
Started by Valentina Ríos5 replies -
Is Wheeler’s “it from bit” a physics proposal or a piece of metaphysics?
John Wheeler's slogan "it from bit" says that every physical thing derives its existence from answers to yes-or-no questions: that reality is informational at the bottom. Anyone who spends time around physicists hears versions of it constantly, usually late in the evening.…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
Why does mathematics invented for its own sake keep turning up in physics?
Every year a student asks me what the point of complex numbers is. I tell them that for a long time mathematicians themselves treated them as a formal convenience, a trick for solving cubic equations, and that today quantum mechanics cannot be…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies -
Where is Hart’s rule of recognition actually written down?
One of my debaters ran a case on constitutional law last month and I realized I couldn't answer a basic question her opponent asked, so here I am. I've been reading Hart's The Concept of Law (1961). I follow the outline: primary…
Started by Sam Ellery5 replies -
Twelve-pointed stars in cedar: what is Islamic geometric pattern actually for?
My father taught me to lay out a star pattern for a ceiling with nothing but a compass, a straightedge and a cord. You start with a circle, divide it, draw lines that pass through the divisions, and the twelve-pointed star appears…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani5 replies -
Yūgen is not a Japanese sublime, and translating it that way loses the point
I have seen yūgen glossed as "the Japanese sublime" in two English books and one museum caption this year. I want to argue that this is a mistake, not just a loose translation. Kant's sublime has a definite shape. Something overwhelms: magnitude…
Started by Aiko Tanabe5 replies -
Hume’s “true judges” are simply people with leisure, and Bourdieu showed it
Look at Hume's list of what makes a good critic: delicacy, practice, comparison, freedom from prejudice, good sense. Now ask who has the time to practise and compare. Not my father, who unloaded ships in Marseille for forty years and listened to…
Started by Hugo Marchetti5 replies -
Adab, and the humanism that rarely gets the name
Much of my working time goes to books from a culture that, in the ninth to twelfth centuries, was organised around an ideal called adab. The word is hard to translate. It can mean manners and etiquette, and it can mean literature.…
Started by Mona Fathy5 replies -
When the ventilators run out: lottery, first come first served, or most life-years saved?
During the pandemic a doctor friend in Nairobi described a night when her hospital had two ventilators and five patients who needed them. Since then I've been reading about allocation rules, and I'm surprised how much they disagree. The main options, as…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga5 replies -
Murdoch’s mother-in-law: is moral change mostly a matter of learning to see someone differently?
I've been rereading Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of Good (1970) and I keep coming back to the example in its first essay. A mother-in-law, M, finds her son's wife, D, tiresome: a bit common, too familiar, juvenile. M behaves perfectly correctly throughout.…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies