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Hume’s ‘true judges’ are the best answer we have to whether taste can be wrong
Hume's essay "Of the Standard of Taste" (1757) is pinned to my shed wall, because I get tired of being told that taste is just opinion. The story everyone remembers is from Don Quixote: Sancho's two kinsmen taste wine from a hogshead.…
Started by Bec Doyle5 replies -
Writing an eligibility rule taught me that metaphysics doesn’t settle policy
For some years I served on the committee that wrote eligibility rules for our regional school competitions. I'm not going to argue here about any current controversy, and I'd ask others not to. I want to share something I learned that I…
Started by Gerrit Venter6 replies -
Capoeira is a game, a fight, a dance and a memory: which of Caillois’s boxes does it go in?
In capoeira Angola we don't say we fight. We say we play: jogar capoeira. Two people enter the roda, the circle of players and musicians, and the berimbau sets the pace. Somebody once told me Huizinga thought play was older than culture,…
Started by Jorge Bonfim5 replies -
Every invoice needs some approver: why does the order of quantifiers change the meaning?
One of my clients, a small business, has an internal policy that says: "Every invoice must be approved by some manager." Two of their managers have now spent a month arguing about it. One reads it as: each invoice needs a manager's…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal4 replies -
If many traditions claim revelation and they disagree, can revelation be a reliable way of knowing?
I do tax returns during the week and seva at our gurdwara at weekends, and something from a philosophy reading has been bothering me while I wash dishes after langar. The reading set out an objection to revelation as a source of…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal5 replies -
An outsider can understand a culture, and sometimes better than its own members do
My walking tours go past the Mezquita-Catedral and through the old Jewish quarter of Córdoba, the city where both Ibn Rushd and Maimonides were born. Tourists want a story of three faiths living in harmony, the famous convivencia. I try to tell…
Started by Rafael Lucena Prieto7 replies -
One night at the delivery bed, tested against five traditions’ answers to what makes an act right
Three weeks ago a mother I was sitting with delivered a baby who was clearly unwell. The doctor had been called and was twenty minutes away. The mother, exhausted, held my hand and asked: “Is my baby all right?” I did not…
Started by Farhana Akter5 replies -
What are we claiming when we call a wine, a food or a practice “natural”?
I make small-batch wine in the Adelaide Hills and judge at regional shows. "Natural wine" is the hottest phrase in my trade, and I've come to dislike it, not because the wines are bad (some are great) but because nobody can tell…
Started by Bec Doyle6 replies -
If striving can never be satisfied, can any life be meaningful? A cellist reads Schopenhauer
I came to philosophy through Schopenhauer on music, and stayed out of a kind of dread. His picture is that we are expressions of a blind will that strives without end. Every satisfied desire gives way to a new one, and in…
Started by Moon Ha-eun5 replies -
Nineteen years with one blade: Cook Ding and the discipline that wu wei is usually sold without
A customer from Europe, watching me cut a joint in my workshop, told me it looked effortless and that I must be practising wu wei. She had read a book about it on holiday. I asked her what it meant and she…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani6 replies -
Does philosophy make you better at your actual job, or just more annoying at it?
I'm a carpenter in Tetouan. I've been reading philosophy for a few years, mostly Aristotle, because he talks about carpenters and builders so much, and lately Ibn Bājja, who was from al-Andalus and thought hard about how a person can live well…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani7 replies -
We will never have a test for machine consciousness, and we should say so plainly
This is not a spiritual worry, and I say so as a materialist. It's a methodological one. Three questions get blurred in public talk about AI. Can machines behave intelligently? That is an engineering question and the answer keeps moving. Do they…
Started by Priya Raghavan6 replies -
The buyer at the gate offers more than the cooperative: does a promise bind when breaking it pays?
I sell my cocoa through a farmers' cooperative. At the start of the season every member promises to bring their beans to the cooperative, which in return gives us credit for fertiliser, a fair weight on the scale, and a share of…
Started by Akosua Mensah6 replies -
Natural, necessary and empty desires: running a small winery by Epicurus’s sorting
I make small-batch wine in the Adelaide Hills. The irony of an Epicurean in the wine trade isn't lost on me, but I've found his sorting of desires the most useful bit of ancient philosophy I've ever read. In the Letter to…
Started by Bec Doyle4 replies -
Teaching bad faith to sixteen-year-olds: Sartre’s waiter and the school prefect
The lesson that works best with my class every year is Sartre on bad faith, from Being and Nothingness. Sartre describes a café waiter whose movements are a little too precise, a little too quick, who bends forward a little too eagerly.…
Started by Rowena Abellana6 replies -
Cutting film taught me that clock time and lived time are different things
I cut documentaries in Tehran. A shot of a woman pouring tea can last eight seconds and feel like a minute, or last eight seconds and pass unnoticed, depending on what came before it. Every editor knows this. The clock and the…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam3 replies -
My son says a philosopher proved time is unreal. What are the A-series and B-series?
I farm cocoa near Kumasi. My son is at university and sends me articles from his course, and I send him back proverbs. This week he sent me something by McTaggart, who he says proved that time is not real. I told…
Started by Akosua Mensah4 replies -
A student in my prison class asked why anyone should obey an unjust law. What did Aquinas say?
This came up in my prison reading class. Last week we read part of Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail, where he says, following Augustine, that an unjust law is no law at all, and appeals to Aquinas for how to…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma4 replies -
I banned fallacy names from my debate team for a month. Here’s what happened
My high-school debaters can name about thirty fallacies, mostly in Latin. They use them the way some people use swear words: as a way of ending an exchange rather than continuing it. "That's ad hominem." "That's a slippery slope." Judges nod. Nobody…
Started by Sam Ellery5 replies -
How did Cynicism turn into Stoicism? What did Zeno keep from Crates, and what did he drop?
I'm a startup founder in Mumbai, recently burnt out, and reading my way back via the Stoics. Everywhere I read that Stoicism "grew out of" Cynicism, and that Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, studied with the Cynic Crates. But the two seem…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies -
Wine shows hand out medals. Can someone be wrong about what tastes good?
This question pays my bills. Twice a year I sit at a regional wine show with three other judges and we give medals. Every year someone at the cellar door tells me taste is subjective and my medals are just my opinion…
Started by Bec Doyle6 replies -
A researcher surveyed our village. Why does it matter what we meant by our answers?
Last year a research team came to our village with tablets and asked everyone the same questions. How many hours a day do you work? Do you trust your neighbours? How much land do you own? The questions were polite, but our…
Started by Akosua Mensah3 replies -
A river is not scenery, and environmental aesthetics should stop treating it like a view
In 2017 the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand was recognised in law as a legal person, Te Awa Tupua. The iwi of that river have a saying: Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au, I am the river and…
Started by Aroha Tipene4 replies -
Why does ‘the shape caused the door’ sound so wrong if Aristotle meant it?
When I was an apprentice my father explained Aristotle's four causes to me with a door: the cedar is what it is made of, the design is its form, I am the one who makes it, and it exists to be a…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani4 replies -
Is the ban on riba about bad outcomes, or about the form a transaction may take?
Many of my clients in Surrey are Muslim. Several of them won't take a conventional loan. One explained that it's not because the interest rate is too high; it's that a guaranteed return on money lent is wrong in itself, whatever the…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal4 replies -
What is quasi-realism, and is it a form of realism or a clever way of avoiding it?
One of my debaters ran a case last weekend built on what she called “quasi-realism”, and the judge, a philosophy undergraduate, nodded along as if it were obvious. I did not understand it and I do not like coaching things I do…
Started by Sam Ellery4 replies -
Was Kant an idealist in the same sense as Berkeley?
I mostly read medieval philosophy, so the eighteenth century is a foreign country to me. A friend in my book club said, rather confidently, that Kant is "just Berkeley with extra steps": both say the world is in the mind, Kant just…
Started by Siobhán Keane4 replies -
Restoring a panel painting: is the painting one thing with its wood and pigment, or two?
I restore Renaissance panel paintings in Florence. This month I have a fifteenth-century Madonna on a poplar panel that split badly. The question in the workshop is whether to replace one of the boards, which would mean transferring a strip of the…
Started by Chiara Bellandi5 replies -
Reading group: Kant’s Groundwork, Section I, the good will and the honest shopkeeper
Most readers skip straight to the formulas of the categorical imperative, and for years so did I. I want to read the beginning properly: Section I of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), where Kant starts from what he calls…
Started by Henrike Vogel6 replies -
When I look at a plate, am I seeing the plate or a picture my brain makes of it?
I draw picture books for a living, and the first thing every drawing teacher tells you is "draw what you see, not what you know". The standard exercise is a dinner plate on a table. You know it is round. But if…
Started by Rin Matsuda4 replies