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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 -
Bent when sitting, straight when standing: what is the problem of temporary intrinsics?
I hit a passage in my weekend metaphysics reading I could not follow, about something David Lewis called the problem of temporary intrinsics. The example: I am bent when I sit and straight when I stand. Both are true of me. But…
Started by Vikram Sethi3 replies -
Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste as political philosophy
In 1936 B. R. Ambedkar was invited to give the presidential address at the annual conference of the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal, an anti-caste Hindu reform group in Lahore. When the organisers saw the text, they asked him to remove parts, he refused, and…
Started by Deepa Kartha4 replies -
Marx’s alienation and the gig economy
In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx describes four aspects of alienated labour: the worker is alienated from the product, from the activity of working, from their "species-being" (our nature as freely creative producers), and from other people. Delivery riders…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
Predictive processing and the Buddhist idea of constructed perception
In cognitive science, the predictive processing framework (Andy Clark's Surfing Uncertainty, 2016; Jakob Hohwy's The Predictive Mind, 2013) says the brain is constantly generating predictions about incoming sensory signals, and what we perceive is largely the brain's best guess, corrected by prediction…
Started by Priya Raghavan4 replies -
Jayarāśi and the Cārvāka skeptics: India’s most radical doubters
The Cārvāka or Lokāyata school is usually summarised as Indian materialism: only perception is a valid means of knowledge, there's no afterlife, enjoy life while it lasts. Most of what we know comes from their opponents' summaries. But one genuine Lokāyata text…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies -
Can I keep Stoic advice and leave Stoic determinism behind?
The first line of Epictetus's Handbook changed how I work: some things are up to us and some are not, and suffering comes from confusing the two. But I've just learned that Stoic ethics isn't separable from Stoic physics in the way…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies -
Shankara’s rope and snake: what kind of “unreality” is maya?
The most famous image in Advaita Vedanta: at dusk a man sees a rope and takes it for a snake. He is frightened, he may even run. When a lamp is brought, the snake vanishes, and he sees that there was only…
Started by Arjun Iyer5 replies -
The recommendation letter that says nothing bad: Grice and the art of faint praise
Every autumn I write about forty college recommendation letters. This year a colleague showed me a letter she'd received for a student teacher. It said, in full, that the candidate was always punctual, that her handwriting on the board was very clear,…
Started by Keisha Monroe5 replies -
Guo Xiang said things are ‘self-so’. Does that mean uncaused, or caused by everything?
After my question about non-being, a friend at the park told me to read Guo Xiang, who wrote the commentary on the Zhuangzi that shaped every later edition. (There is an old story that he took much of it from an earlier…
Started by Liu Mingqiao5 replies -
Reading group: Iqbal’s Reconstruction, Lecture I (“Knowledge and Religious Experience”)
The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam began as lectures Iqbal delivered in Madras, Hyderabad and Aligarh in 1928–29. They were published in Lahore in 1930, and the 1934 Oxford edition added a seventh lecture, "Is Religion Possible?" Lecture I sets the…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
Teaching ethics to fifteen-year-olds: do I water sprouts or straighten warped wood?
Our school is arguing about a new behaviour policy, and I realised the argument is the old one between Mencius and Xunzi. Mencius says anyone who sees a child about to fall into a well feels alarm and compassion, before any calculation.…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu5 replies -
Can someone explain Danto’s Brillo boxes to a capoeira teacher?
At our community centre in Salvador, an exhibition opened last month. On one wall was a berimbau, hung up with a small label: the same instrument I play every week in the roda. People stood in front of it quietly, the way…
Started by Jorge Bonfim4 replies -
Hacking’s test for reality: if you can spray it, it’s real. Does that work for genes?
Ian Hacking, in Representing and Intervening (1983), argued that we should stop expecting theories to settle what exists. Look at the laboratory instead. Experimenters spray electrons at a target to change its charge. They use electrons as tools, reliably, to investigate something…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo4 replies -
Plato called my trade a knack. Why did philosophy decide taste and smell don’t count?
I've started reading the philosophers on food because I'm tired of being told it's ‘just subjective’ by people who have never had to fix a split sauce on a Friday night. What I found surprised me. In the Gorgias, Socrates sorts cookery…
Started by Joel D'Souza6 replies -
My grandmother knew when rain was coming but couldn’t say how. Did she know? What is reliabilism?
I farm cocoa near Kumasi. My son is at university and sends me articles from his philosophy course. The latest one said that to know something you need a true belief plus a good reason, a "justification". Then it said some philosophers…
Started by Akosua Mensah5 replies -
Data is not knowledge: what Dretske’s account says about my credit-scoring models
At work we decide who gets a small loan from patterns in phone use: how regularly someone tops up airtime, how many contacts they call, how their balance moves through the month. Our marketing calls this "knowing the customer". I've been reading…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga5 replies -
Giving a river legal personhood is the right idea, not a legal gimmick
I teach at a Māori-language school in Rotorua. Since the Whanganui River was recognised in law as a person, Te Awa Tupua, in 2017, my students have found the idea completely obvious, and I've been surprised by how many adults outside our…
Started by Aroha Tipene5 replies -
If I try to understand a practice from the inside first, have I signed up to relativism?
I teach at a Māori-language school. When visitors come, I always ask them to understand our practices on their own terms before judging them: why we greet the way we do, why the river is treated as an ancestor, why some places…
Started by Aroha Tipene5 replies -
Should knowing that Caravaggio killed a man change how we see his paintings?
Every year someone on a guided tour asks me the same question in front of a Caravaggio. In 1606 he killed Ranuccio Tomassoni in a fight in Rome and fled, and spent his last years on the run under a death sentence.…
Started by Chiara Bellandi4 replies -
Nine countries in one kitchen and no agreement on salt: can food be judged like art?
Every one of my cooks arrived knowing exactly how much salt, sour and heat a dish needs, and every one of them knew something different. My Keralite cooks find the Lebanese lentil soup timid. The Filipino cooks find my Goan vindaloo too…
Started by Joel D'Souza4 replies -
Can a baby or an animal have a right if it cannot claim it? Interest theory versus will theory
I think about the ethics of drug trials on animals more than most of our customers would like. Someone at a talk recently said there are two main theories of what a right is: the "will" theory and the "interest" theory, and…
Started by Hetal Shah3 replies -
Reading group: Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste, aphorisms and first meditations
I grew up an hour from Belley, where Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin was born, so this book has followed me around. Physiologie du goût appeared in 1825, a couple of months before he died. He was a lawyer and magistrate, briefly an exile…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies