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What does ziran, “self-so”, actually mean, and why do people call it the centre of Daoism?
Maturana and Varela described living things as autopoietic, self-making: a cell produces the very components that produce it. A friend in Santiago told me that Daoism had a word for something similar, ziran, which she translated as “self-so” or “of itself so”.…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo5 replies -
We were taught “control what you can control” in the army. Was that Stoicism?
In my last years in the army, "resilience training" was introduced, and the instructors sometimes quoted Epictetus. Control what you can control. Let the rest go. Some officers had read about James Stockdale, the American pilot who was a prisoner of war…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun5 replies -
Is it irrational to have no precise credence at all about something like life on Europa?
A friend asked me last month, after a news piece about the Europa missions, what probability I would put on there being life in its ocean. I said I had no idea. She pushed: “Just a number, roughly.” I said somewhere between…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
Is Nyāya tarka a kind of counterfactual reasoning, and does it need possible worlds?
Reading Nyāya, I am always delighted by how close their techniques are to the proofs I teach. One that puzzles me is tarka, which I have seen translated as "hypothetical reasoning", "suppositional reasoning" or "reductio". The classic example seems to go like…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies -
Special relativity has refuted presentism, whatever presentists say
I'd like to argue the strong version, then see how much survives. Presentism says only the present exists. Past dinosaurs and future grandchildren are not real; only what is happening now is. That requires a fact about which events are happening now,…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
On the Confucian view there is no self behind your roles, and that is a strength
My students meet Confucius as a list of duties to memorise. I want them to meet the boldest reading of him instead, and I'd like to test it here first. The reading, associated especially with Henry Rosemont and Roger Ames, goes like…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
How did Buddhist ideas first get into Chinese, and why did Daoist words matter so much?
I'm a poet and translator in Kochi, mostly between Malayalam and English. I've been reading about how Buddhist texts were first translated into Chinese, and I keep seeing the claim that Buddhist concepts "entered through Daoist vocabulary". Apparently in the early centuries…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies -
Wang Yangming stared at bamboo for seven days and fell ill. Was he refuting empiricism?
I teach ethics at a secondary school in Seoul, and the story my students remember best from the whole Neo-Confucian unit is the bamboo. As a young man, Wang Yangming tried to put Zhu Xi's teaching into practice. Zhu Xi said that…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu5 replies -
What a prison reading class taught me about reading an ancient text for the first time
Twice a week I volunteer at a men's prison in Nairobi, teaching a reading class. Over two years philosophy has quietly taken over the syllabus, and the text that changed everything was Plato's Apology: Socrates on trial for his life. I've learned…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma5 replies -
Camus and Heidegger both rejected the label. So who actually counts as an existentialist?
I read Camus on breaks at the port, and I was surprised to learn he refused to be called an existentialist. Then I found out Heidegger rejected it too, in his ‘Letter on Humanism’, which seems to be partly an answer to…
Started by Hugo Marchetti5 replies -
What is Beauvoir actually claiming with ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’?
The line from The Second Sex gets quoted at me constantly, by people who think it settles every argument about gender in one direction and by people who think it's obviously false. I've realised I don't actually know what Beauvoir meant by…
Started by Aoife Kilbride5 replies -
Frankfurt’s unwilling addict and the men in my prison reading class
Last month my prison reading class read a summary of Harry Frankfurt's essay "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person", and it landed harder than anything we've read. Frankfurt distinguishes first-order desires (I want a drink) from second-order desires…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma5 replies -
Gundissalinus didn’t read Arabic: philosophy translated through spoken Castilian
The mechanics of translation are my daily bread, so I can't stop thinking about a detail I've just learned about the twelfth-century Toledo translations. Dominicus Gundissalinus, the archdeacon who put Ibn Sina's work on the soul and parts of his Healing into…
Started by Tal Rosen5 replies -
Rasa and ordinary emotion: why can grief in a play be a kind of delight?
Rasa theory seems to answer a question the emotion threads here haven't asked: why do we enjoy sad things? In Bharata's Nāṭyaśāstra, rasa is produced when the causes of an emotion (the situation and characters), its outward expressions and its passing accompanying…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies -
In the five Confucian relationships, friendship is the odd one out. Why is it there?
My students memorise Mencius's list of the five relationships for exams: affection between father and son, rightness between ruler and minister, distinction between husband and wife, proper order between elder and younger, and trust (xin) between friends. They memorise it and never…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Reading group: Bacon’s idols of the mind in the Novum Organum, Book One
I spend my working life classifying knowledge, so Bacon has always interested me as much for his ambition to reorganise the sciences as for his method. The New Organon (1620) is written in numbered aphorisms, which makes it ideal for slow reading…
Started by Mona Fathy5 replies -
Watsuji’s betweenness, Akan personhood and Confucian roles: is the relation more basic than the person?
When I retired after forty years designing bridges, I was surprised by how much of “me” went with the job. I did not lose a role; I seemed to lose a person. A friend at the temple handed me Watsuji's Ethics and…
Started by Aiko Tanabe5 replies -
One source of knowledge, two, four, five or six? Why Indian schools argued over the count
My working epistemology is Bayesian: there is one way to learn, which is to update on evidence. So I was surprised to find that classical Indian philosophers organised epistemology around a different question, how many sources of knowledge (pramāṇa) there are, and…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga5 replies -
Alston’s parity argument fails because rival mystical practices contradict each other
I want to defend a fairly standard objection, but coming from physics I want to state it carefully, because I think the usual version undersells Alston. Alston's move in Perceiving God (1991) is clever. We cannot justify trusting sense perception without relying…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
What did Tolstoy mean when he called art an ‘infection’?
Last week one of the men in my prison class read out a verse he'd written in his cell and asked: "Is this art, or only feelings?" Someone suggested I look at Tolstoy, who apparently said that art is "infection" with the…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma5 replies -
Can someone explain Ibn Sina’s propositions that are necessary ‘as long as’?
I started reading the history of logic because the Ash'ari material I love keeps assuming you know Ibn Sina. A survey chapter on Arabic logic lost me at one point, and I'd like a patient explanation. It says Ibn Sina split a…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam5 replies -
Affirming the consequent on a hospital ward
My nephew is a medical student in Cairo, and listening to him describe his ward rounds I've realised that his teachers spend a lot of their time correcting a logical fallacy, and also committing it. A student says: if this patient had…
Started by Omar Ragab5 replies -
Why do some translators refuse to render ren as ‘benevolence’?
This question came to me through my work. A French colleague asked me why English translations of the Analects disagree so much about the word 仁, ren: Legge often has "perfect virtue", D. C. Lau "benevolence", Waley and Slingerland "Goodness", others "humaneness",…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo5 replies -
A firm that closes a site owes its workers more than the law requires
Over the years I've watched three firms in our district of Marseille close sites. In each case the company did what the law required: notice, severance at the legal rate, the formal consultation. In each case people who had given twenty or…
Started by Hugo Marchetti5 replies -
If virtue ethics says ‘do what the virtuous person would do’, how does a beginner use that?
Reading Aristotle slowly, with a pencil, I have hit something that bothers me. I suspect it is a beginner's worry, so forgive me. The summaries I have read say virtue ethics tells you to act as a virtuous person would act in…
Started by Gerrit Venter5 replies -
Can revelation give moral knowledge to someone who does not share the faith that received it?
For the past year I have been reading Saadia Gaon's Book of Beliefs and Opinions in the original Judaeo-Arabic. Saadia, writing in tenth-century Baghdad under the influence of the kalām, divides the commandments into those that reason can reach by itself (do…
Started by Tal Rosen5 replies -
Thirty-four years of anxious calls about screening results, and base rates still trip me up
At the Leith surgery where I worked for a long time, the call I dreaded most was not the one about a cancer diagnosis. It was the one about a positive screening test that probably meant nothing. The arithmetic is simple once…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
The incredulous stare is a perfectly respectable argument against modal realism
I have been reading the threads on Lewis and his infinitely many concrete worlds. I am told the standard response, the "incredulous stare", is not an argument, and that Lewis himself said so. I want to defend the stare. Doctors routinely reject…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
Translating “being” into Vietnamese: are some metaphysical disputes artefacts of grammar?
I translate French philosophy into Vietnamese, and the hardest word is être. French uses one verb for three jobs: "the sky is blue" (predication), "God is" (existence), and "Paris is the capital" (identity). Vietnamese splits them. For identity and classification we use…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo5 replies -
Perdurantism fits modern physics better than endurantism does
I trained in physics in Lagos and now tutor it, and I've been reading Theodore Sider's case for four-dimensionalism. I'm persuaded, and I want to put the argument from physics as strongly as I can. Relativity treats spacetime as a single four-dimensional…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha5 replies