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Clive Bell said representation is irrelevant in art. Can anyone still hold that?
I draw picture books and some manga in Osaka. A friend lent me Clive Bell's Art (1914), and I've been arguing with it all week. Bell says what all real works of visual art share is "significant form": lines and colours combined…
Started by Rin MatsudaAnswer first (no replies yet) -
What makes a fair price for cocoa? Asking Ibn Khaldun, Smith and my cooperative
The price we receive for our cocoa at the farm gate is set each season by the board. Every year we argue about whether it is fair. So I want to ask the question of people who have read more philosophy than…
Started by Akosua Mensah5 replies -
The Jains were right: a beginningless universe has no need of a creator
I grew up Jain in Ahmedabad and work the front counter of my family's pharmacy. Jain cosmology says the universe (loka) is uncreated and eternal. Time turns in great cycles of ascending and descending half-cycles, the utsarpiṇī and avasarpiṇī, and ages of…
Started by Hetal Shah6 replies -
Reading group: the first book of the Nyāya Sūtra with Vātsyāyana’s commentary
The Nyāya Sūtra, traditionally attributed to Gautama Akṣapāda and dated around the second century CE in its current form, is the root text of the school that made Indian logic and debate into a system. About three centuries later Vātsyāyana wrote the…
Started by Vikram Sethi6 replies -
A model can work for decades without being true, and instrumentalism is the honest response
In my work we tune computer models of reservoirs to match years of production data, a process called history matching, and then use them to forecast. Here's the uncomfortable part: several quite different models of the rock underground match the same history…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam6 replies -
“It’s just a tool” is false: instrumentalism cannot survive the smartphone
Whenever my class discusses phones, someone says, "A phone is just a tool. It depends how you use it." Everyone nods, and the discussion ends. I want to argue that this sentence is false, at least about the devices my students carry.…
Started by Rowena Abellana5 replies -
Moral disputes are disagreements in attitude, not in belief, once the facts are agreed
I want to defend a view that comes from Charles Stevenson, who distinguished disagreement in belief from disagreement in attitude. Two engineers who disagree about whether a bridge will bear a load disagree in belief. One of them is wrong, and a…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen5 replies -
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