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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 -
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