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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 -
When sovereignty belongs to God, are rulers more limited or less?
Hebrew and Arabic, the two languages I work between, carry traditions that both, at various points, said that sovereignty ultimately belongs to God. I've noticed that the same premise has been used to reach opposite conclusions. In 1 Samuel 8 the people…
Started by Tal Rosen5 replies -
Newton da Costa and why paraconsistency has a Brazilian accent
Newton da Costa died in 2024, and I've wanted to write something about him for the forum since. For anyone outside Brazil: he built the first systematic paraconsistent logics, logics in which a theory can contain a contradiction without every statement becoming…
Started by Ana Clara Ferreira5 replies -
Automated cranes at the port, and Ellul’s idea that efficiency decides for us
Terminals around the world, including mine in Marseille, are moving to cranes operated remotely from an office, and some yards are fully automated. Management's word for it is "inevitable". The union's word is "choice". I want to think about which word is…
Started by Hugo Marchetti5 replies -
What was Hasdai Crescas’s case that an actual infinite is possible?
I translate between Hebrew and Arabic, mostly contracts. A client recently asked me to look at some passages from Crescas's Or Hashem (Light of the Lord) and I have been reading around them ever since, including Harry Wolfson's old study of Crescas's…
Started by Tal Rosen5 replies -
A company can be sued but cannot be tripped over. In what sense does it exist?
Last month I sat through four hearings in my family's case against a company. It had a registered office, a seal, a board, and a lawyer almost as tiresome as ours. What it did not have was a body. You cannot trip…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
My son’s course says ‘don’t judge other cultures’. Is that a rule for studying or a rule for living?
This week my son sent me something on cultural relativism from his anthropology course, and we argued on the phone for an hour. His course says that to understand a people you must not judge their customs by your own standards, and…
Started by Akosua Mensah5 replies -
Why does asking “how do you know?” three times end every argument in our house?
My younger one is seven and has discovered the most powerful question in the world. I say the shop closes at nine. "How do you know?" Because it says so on the door. "How do you know the door is right?" Because…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
My clients can’t tell walnut from stained beech, but they still mean walnut
Half the customers who order furniture from me ask for walnut. Most of them could not pick walnut out of a pile of stained beech if their life depended on it, and some unscrupulous workshops count on that. A friend lent me…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani5 replies -
Contextual integrity explains why my aunt’s clinic group chat felt wrong
My aunt is a nurse at a small clinic outside Kuala Lumpur. Last month she showed me the staff group chat, where a colleague had posted a photo of a patient's rash to ask the doctor whether it looked like shingles. No…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies -
Reading group: Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (1982), read forty years on
In a Different Voice is one of the most cited books in the history of ethics and one of the most misremembered. Gilligan was a psychologist, not a philosopher, and the book began as a response to Lawrence Kohlberg's scale of moral…
Started by Femke Bosman6 replies -
Hayden White was right: the historian chooses the plot before the facts mean anything
Last year I worked on a documentary about a factory closure, and I made two rough cuts from the same footage for the director. In one the closing of the gates is a tragedy: a community undone by forces it could not…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam6 replies -
Sancho’s kinsmen and the key on the leather thong: Hume’s taste essay from a wine judge
Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste" is pinned to my shed wall, mostly for one story he borrows from Don Quixote. Two of Sancho's kinsmen are asked to judge a hogshead of wine. One tastes it and says it would be good…
Started by Bec Doyle4 replies -
When I play a Bach suite from memory, is that the same “memory” philosophers argue about?
I play cello in a chamber ensemble and teach children. This spring I memorised the third Bach suite for a recital, and something happened on stage that I keep thinking about. Halfway through the Bourrée my mind went blank. I could not…
Started by Moon Ha-eun4 replies -
I make cedar doors. Am I an artist, a craftsman, or is that the wrong question?
Tourists photograph my work and call it art. Gallery people, when they come, call it craft, and they say it a little differently. I read recently that this division is young. Before the eighteenth century in Europe, making was one category judged…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani5 replies -
Anscombe was right: we see causing all the time
I make cedar doors and ceilings in Tetouan. When I push a chisel through cedar I do not see a chisel, then a cut, and infer a connection. I see the chisel cutting. When my apprentice drops a plank and it cracks,…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani6 replies -
Syādvāda is not a seven-valued logic, and treating it as one loses the point
I grew up Jain, so I've been hearing about anekāntavāda since before I could read. Lately I keep seeing syādvāda described online as "the ancient Indian seven-valued logic", usually in the same breath as fuzzy logic. I'd like to explain why that…
Started by Hetal Shah5 replies -
Teaching non-European philosophy as live positions, not museum pieces
I teach the terminale philosophy class at a lycée in Dakar, where Descartes and Senghor sit on the same exam paper. One of the clearest changes in philosophy since 1990 is that traditions outside Europe have begun entering curricula and journals as…
Started by Khady Sène6 replies -
Frankfurt is right that we don’t love our children for their qualities, and all love works that way
Raising two children has given me a lot of time with the evidence. Harry Frankfurt argues in The Reasons of Love that love is not a response to the beloved's value. It is a form of caring, and caring is what makes…
Started by Thamarai Raman6 replies -
Genes carry information only in Shannon’s sense; the rest is metaphor
In biology, people talk about information constantly. Genes "encode" proteins, DNA is a "blueprint" or a "program", development "reads out" the genome. My thesis is that only one of those uses is literal, and it is the least interesting one. In Shannon's…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo6 replies -
Can you get a proverb wrong, or only use it in a new way?
My son sent me an essay that quotes a proverb I have known all my life: Obi nkyerɛ abɔfra Nyame, "No one shows a child God". His essay reads it as saying children should be left alone to find religion for themselves.…
Started by Akosua Mensah4 replies -
I’m a scientific realist and, after twenty-two years in the army, a political realist. Is that inconsistent?
I retired from the army after twenty-two years, the last stretch on the DMZ. On a leadership course we read the classic realist authors on international politics: states pursue power and security, and moral principles do not govern what they do to…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun5 replies -
Kūkai and Bhartṛhari: when a word is part of what is real rather than a label for it
Last spring I visited Kōyasan, the mountain monastery Kūkai founded, and sat in on the morning chanting. I don't understand Sanskrit and barely understand the Sino-Japanese readings, but it was obvious the monks didn't treat the syllables as labels for something else.…
Started by Rin Matsuda5 replies -
Wiredu’s consensus politics and the epistemology of disagreement: is agreement evidence?
Kwasi Wiredu argued that traditional Akan political decision-making aimed at consensus rather than majority rule. Councils of elders would talk, sometimes for a long time, until they reached a decision everyone could accept. He proposed that modern African states might learn from…
Started by Kwame Asante5 replies -
What is hermeneutical injustice, and how is it different from simply not being believed?
I work as an attendant on the maternity ward of a district hospital. In my work I see women not being believed all the time. A mother says the pain is not normal, and she is told every mother says that. Later…
Started by Farhana Akter6 replies -
A door-maker reads Hume’s Dialogues: the design argument from the workshop
This one comes from the workshop. I have been reading Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in a French translation, because people kept telling me the design argument is about things like what I make. The argument says: the world is like a…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani5 replies -
Why did Hobbes think sovereignty could not be divided?
I have no formal background in politics, so this is train reading. I've been going through a history of the English Civil War and then dipped into Leviathan, and I'm puzzled. Everything I learned at school says separation of powers is obviously…
Started by Siobhán Keane4 replies -
Neither filling nor drawing out: what the Analects and Xunzi think a learner is
My students in Taipei memorise the Analects for exams, which means they experience Confucian learning as the most extreme form of filling-up imaginable. I keep trying to show them that the texts themselves say something else. The Analects opens with learning and…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Wang Yangming’s unity of knowing and acting, read alongside Anscombe
My students memorise Wang Yangming's slogan, the unity of knowing and acting (zhi xing he yi), without believing a word of it. Obviously, they say, you can know something and not do it. They know they should study. Wang's reply, in Instructions…
Started by Lin Pei-shan4 replies -
Why do scholars keep saying “duty” is a bad translation of dharma?
I am translating some Malayalam devotional poems into English, and I've hit a word I can't carry across. The word dharma comes up constantly, and every English version I look at uses “duty” or “righteousness”. Then a lecturer in a comparative philosophy…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies