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Knowledge by presence: does Suhrawardi show why experience resists description?
I edit films in Tehran, which means my working day is spent deciding what time and space should feel like to someone else. The one thing I cannot edit is what it feels like to be me watching the cut. Suhrawardi, the…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam5 replies -
Thirty-four years in a GP surgery: is a patient with advanced dementia still the same person?
I managed a GP surgery in Leith for thirty-four years, and the question I heard most often across the desk in the last decade was some version of "she isn't the person she was". It was said by husbands, daughters, neighbours, sometimes…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
Sextus, Nāgārjuna and Wang Chong within about a century: one sceptical moment, or three projects?
Between treks I read about the history of philosophy, and I came across a striking claim: that in roughly a century or so, around the second century CE, three traditions with no documented contact each produced a great critic of confident assertion.…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung5 replies -
Calling Wang Fuzhi a materialist hides more than it reveals
Some older textbooks my students find online still call Wang Fuzhi (Chuanshan) a "materialist". The label comes mostly from twentieth-century scholarship that wanted ancestors for a materialist philosophy, and it has a respectable basis: Wang made qi the sole reality and treated…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
What is Husserl’s “retention”, and how is it different from simply remembering?
I play the organ at a parish church in Kraków and teach music theory. Every Sunday I play hymns the congregation has sung hundreds of times, and every Sunday the same puzzle comes back to me. When the third note of a…
Started by Agnieszka Malinowska5 replies -
Reading group: Bazin’s What Is Cinema?, starting with ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’
A friend sent me André Bazin's essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (1945), and it begins with my trade: Egyptian mummies, portraits, the old human wish to preserve a being against time. Bazin calls it a ‘mummy complex’ at the origin…
Started by Chiara Bellandi5 replies -
Ageing is a disease, and medicine should treat it as one
I'll argue this as an outsider to medicine and expect to be corrected. Ageing is the largest single risk factor for most of what kills people in rich countries: cancers, heart disease, dementia. It involves the progressive failure of almost every bodily…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Langton is right: you can be silenced while still being allowed to speak
Rae Langton's 1993 paper "Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts" changes how some people think about speech every time my reading group takes it up. I want to defend its central idea against the objection that it is a clever stretch. The idea,…
Started by Femke Bosman5 replies -
How should a journalist judge a study in a field she knows nothing about?
Last month, in a case I was covering, an expert witness gave evidence on a forensic technique I had never heard of, with total confidence and a long list of qualifications. The defence's expert said the technique was unreliable, with equal confidence…
Started by Sana Rizvi5 replies -
Objections first: what the scholastic quaestio could teach a modern seminar
This term I've been reading the Summa Theologiae properly for the first time, article by article, and what has struck me is not the conclusions but the shape. Every article begins with “It seems that…” followed by objections against the position Aquinas…
Started by Aoife Kilbride5 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 -
Do exams measure anything worth measuring? A view from the bac philo
Exam season is coming round again in Dakar. In June my students sit four hours to write a dissertation on a subject of the kind "Is it reasonable to fear death?", "Can one be free without laws?", and so on. The exam…
Started by Khady Sène5 replies -
Deconstruction is not “anything goes”, and its critics should stop saying it is
Every few months someone in a thread like this one says that Derrida licensed readers to make texts mean whatever they like. I want to argue that this is a caricature, and that it mostly comes from one misquoted sentence. The sentence…
Started by Martín Iriarte5 replies -
If ātman already is brahman, what is left for liberation to do?
Recently I started on Advaita Vedānta, and one idea has stopped me cold. As I understand it, the claim is that the self (ātman) already is ultimate reality (brahman). "Tat tvam asi", you are that, as Uddālaka tells his son in the…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies -
One sustained note on the organ, and the case against beauty as proportion
This month I finally read Plotinus's treatise "On Beauty", the sixth of the first Ennead, and one argument has been sitting with me through every Mass. The old view, which my own tradition loved (Augustine's De Musica is full of it), says…
Started by Agnieszka Malinowska5 replies -
The al-Ghazali–Hume parallel is shallower than the textbooks suggest
The sentence I most often find myself correcting in discussions is "al-Ghazālī anticipated Hume". I'd like to argue that the parallel, though real, is shallower than it is usually made to look. The shared step is this: we observe one event accompanying…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
Dai Zhen was right: moral principle used to crush desire is itself a cruelty
My students memorise Zhu Xi for their exams, and one slogan of the Cheng–Zhu school always sticks: preserve heavenly principle, eliminate human desires. They write it down without blinking. Dai Zhen (1724–1777) blinked. A Qing scholar trained in the philological methods of…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Genealogy and the genetic fallacy: can the history of a value ever count against it?
Every introductory logic course warns against the genetic fallacy: where a belief came from does not settle whether it is true. Your racist uncle may believe the earth is round, and it is. And yet a whole style of moral philosophy works…
Started by Johanna Reinhardt5 replies -
Do I see that an old woman is being humiliated, or do I infer it? Moral perception on a night shift
Last month, when I went with one of our residents to the hospital, a senior doctor spoke to her as if she were not there, discussing her bowels with a junior doctor across her bed. I did not reason my way to…
Started by Elin Hedqvist5 replies -
Cartwright is right: the fundamental laws of physics are false of real things, and that’s fine
No oil reservoir has ever behaved exactly as my equations say. Every model is an idealisation: uniform permeability, simplified boundary conditions, ignored chemistry. We calibrate, we fudge, we history-match. And yet the models are useful. Nancy Cartwright's How the Laws of Physics…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam5 replies -
Frank Jackson gave up on Mary. Should the rest of us?
I came to philosophy from physics, and something about the knowledge argument has always interested me less than its history. Jackson's Mary knows every physical fact about colour vision, having lived her life in a black-and-white room. She leaves and sees a…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
What does Fazang mean when he says the rafter simply is the building?
I was a structural engineer for forty years, so I came to Fazang's writings expecting to find something about parts and wholes I could recognise. Instead I found the dialogue about the rafter and the building, in which the claim is made…
Started by Aiko Tanabe5 replies -
The deepest split in metaphysics is substance versus process, not matter versus mind
I want to defend a claim I came across in a comparative table of answers to "what is real?" across traditions. Most introductions organise metaphysics around matter versus mind: materialism, idealism, dualism. That division is real, but it's largely a European early-modern…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
Reading group: Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes), twelve chapters in six weeks
Every autumn Kohelet is read in synagogue on the Sabbath of Sukkot, and every year someone asks afterward how such a book got into the Bible. It's a fair question. The rabbis asked it too. The Mishnah records a dispute over whether…
Started by Eliana Halpern5 replies -
Reading group: William James, The Principles of Psychology, three chapters
William James published The Principles of Psychology in 1890, after twelve years of work. It is two huge volumes, and nobody should read it straight through. But three chapters are among the best things written about the mind, and they read like…
Started by Dana Whitfield5 replies -
Zakat is a claim on wealth, not a gift. What does that do to the charity versus justice debate?
Many debates about distributive justice I read, especially in English, assume a sharp line: justice is what can be demanded and enforced; charity is good but optional, a gift. Taxes for the first, donations for the second. Zakat doesn't sit comfortably on…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies -
Can technomoral virtues be cultivated the way Confucian ones are, or is the borrowing too loose?
My students spend most of their waking lives on their phones, so Shannon Vallor's Technology and the Virtues (2016) caught my attention. She argues that rules and impact assessments cannot keep up with technologies that change every year, and that what we…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Reading group: Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, from the shack to the land ethic
Leopold's A Sand County Almanac was published in 1949, the year after he died helping fight a neighbour's grass fire. It's short, it's beautiful, and its last essay, "The Land Ethic", is one of the founding texts of environmental ethics. I work…
Started by Anand Kurup5 replies -
Care ethics has no convincing account of what we owe to strangers far away
Working alongside GPs persuaded me that care is morally basic in the consulting room. What I'm not persuaded of is that it can be a whole ethics. The thesis: if moral obligation is grounded in particular relationships and the responsiveness they call…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
Mencius’s child at the well, seen from a delivery room in Sylhet
I have worked on a maternity ward for nineteen years. Last month a friend lent me a translation of Mencius, and I stopped at the passage about the child at the well and read it three times. Mencius says that anyone who…
Started by Farhana Akter5 replies