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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 -
The “false friend” warning about Hume and anattā is overstated
I've read the warnings: Hume's bundle theory is not the Buddhist doctrine of not-self, because Hume merely reports failing to find a self, while Buddhism asserts its absence and builds a practice on it. I agree with the facts. I think the…
Started by Alistair Gow4 replies -
Nobody from our founding team is left. Is it still the same company?
I left the startup I co-founded about eighteen months ago, burnt out. Last week I visited. The twelve people who started it are all gone, including me. The product has been rewritten twice. The office moved from a flat in Andheri to…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies -
Is my red your red? Where does the inverted spectrum come from?
Is the red I see the red my sister sees? I have wondered since childhood. When I was eight I asked my mother and she said, "Of course, it's red." That was not an answer. Now I learn that this has a…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies -
My son asked whether race is real. How can ‘race isn’t biological’ and ‘racism is real’ both be true?
My children ask the questions that keep me reading. Last week my nine-year-old came home from school in Penang, where his classmates are Malay, Chinese, Indian and mixed, and asked me if race is real. His teacher had said scientists have shown…
Started by Thamarai Raman5 replies -
Drug trials on animals, seen from behind a Jain pharmacy counter
Every few weeks a customer at our family pharmacy, usually an older Jain auntie, asks me whether a medicine was tested on animals. The honest answer is nearly always yes, somewhere along the line, because regulators have long required it. Ahimsa, as…
Started by Hetal Shah5 replies -
Is Aristotle’s “final cause” an explanation, or just a story about purpose?
When I first read Aristotle's four causes I recognised my trade immediately. The material cause of a door is the cedar. The formal cause is the pattern, the geometry my father taught me. The efficient cause is my hands and my tools.…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani4 replies -
Where do Ubuntu and Confucian role ethics fit, if they are neither utilitarian, Kantian nor virtue ethics?
I teach capoeira Angola in Salvador, and I am new to academic ethics. In a free course online, the lecturer said there are three main moral theories: consequences, duties and virtues. Then, in a footnote, she said Ubuntu and Confucian ethics “don't…
Started by Jorge Bonfim4 replies -
Twenty-odd species concepts, and conservation law written as if there were one
This year a survey of one of the lakes our trust looks after turned up two populations that look almost identical, interbreed where they meet, but differ genetically and in when they spawn. Are they one species or two? The answer is…
Started by Anand Kurup3 replies -
Can someone walk me through the Frege–Geach problem without the jargon?
A friend recommended an introduction to ethics and I got stuck on one page for most of a week. The book explained emotivism, the view that “stealing is wrong” is not a statement of fact but an expression of disapproval, a bit…
Started by Siobhán Keane4 replies -
My daughter asked what mosquitoes are for. Is there an honest answer?
We were swatting mosquitoes on the balcony in Penang and my eight-year-old asked, quite seriously, "What are mosquitoes for?" I said something vague about food for birds and she said, "But that's what they're for for the birds. What are they for…
Started by Thamarai Raman3 replies -
My debaters keep talking past each other on gender. Are they even answering the same question?
Last season a practice round with my debate team on a gender-related resolution went off the rails, not because the students were rude (they weren't) but because after forty minutes nobody had engaged anybody. One side kept saying the category is grounded…
Started by Sam Ellery4 replies -
What do fa, shu and shi mean in Han Feizi?
Zhuangzi sat unread on my father's shelf for most of my life. Next to him was a battered copy of Han Feizi, which I've now started on as well. I'm not a scholar, so please be patient with me. I keep meeting…
Started by Liu Mingqiao4 replies -
Reproduction did not wither the aura of art; it made the aura more valuable
I've just reread Walter Benjamin's essay on the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, from the mid-1930s. His claim, roughly: the original work has an "aura", its unique presence in one time and place, its embeddedness in a…
Started by Chiara Bellandi5 replies -
Reading group: Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Part One on the body
I've read Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) in French more times than I can count, and I'd like to read the first part with people who come to it from bodies rather than from books: dancers, players, nurses, craftspeople. Translation: Donald Landes's…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
If the One cannot be described, how did Plotinus manage to write so much about it?
Visitors to my workshop often tell me that this or that painting is "Neoplatonic", and I have learned to be wary of the word, because art historians argue fiercely about how much philosophy the painters actually knew. So I decided to go…
Started by Chiara Bellandi6 replies -
Cārvāka and Epicurus, two ancient materialists at a deathbed
A question from the bedside. Epicurus helped me think about death without flinching: in the Letter to Menoeceus he says death is nothing to us, because where death is, we are not, and where we are, death is not. I've never repeated…
Started by Nadia Haddad5 replies -
Aristotle was right that distributive justice is proportion; every quarrel is about what counts as merit
The fiercest arguments I ever heard as a school coach were about team selection. So I've been reading Aristotle to find out whether I was teaching justice or just picking teams. In Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics he says distributive justice…
Started by Gerrit Venter6 replies -
Does contemplating death dissolve the fear, or does it just stop us arguing about it?
In the Theravāda tradition we practise maraṇasati, mindfulness of death. Buddhaghosa's Path of Purification gives it a full treatment among the recollections, and there is a sutta where monks tell the Buddha how they practise it, hoping to live for a day…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara6 replies -
A correlation explains nothing until someone shows the mechanism
Our data say that people who charge their phones at regular times are more likely to repay small loans. The effect is real, stable and useful for prediction. But when a manager says this explains repayment, I object. It explains nothing. Perhaps…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga6 replies -
Justice should start from dependency, not from independent adults making a deal
Every baby born on our ward is completely dependent, and so is the mother for a few hours, and so, at the end of life, most of us will be again. Reading Eva Kittay's Love's Labor this year, I felt someone had…
Started by Farhana Akter7 replies -
Keep the losing opinion on the page: what the Talmud could teach an online forum
The more time I spend in online philosophy forums, including this one, the more I think the rabbis solved some problems we keep failing at. Three practices I'd love to see here. Record the minority view. The Mishnah asks why it bothers…
Started by Eliana Halpern6 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 -
Logical pluralism is right, for the same reason statistical pluralism is
In data science the old fight between frequentist and Bayesian statistics has mostly cooled into pluralism: each is legitimate, they answer different questions, and a good analyst knows which to use when. I think logic is the same. Carnap said something like…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga5 replies -
My model has ‘the average borrower’. Nobody is the average borrower. What am I talking about?
I build credit-scoring models for a mobile-money company in Nairobi. Every week I write sentences like "the average borrower in this segment repays within 23 days" or "the typical applicant has 2.4 active SIM cards". Everyone understands them. No borrower repays in…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga5 replies -
Orí and the Stoic cylinder: does a destiny you chose make you more free or less?
In Yoruba thought, before birth each person chooses an orí, literally a "head", meaning the inner self that carries one's destiny. One of the words for destiny, àkúnlẹ̀yàn, means something like "that which was chosen kneeling". You chose it, but you cannot…
Started by Titilayo Adeyemi5 replies -
What is pragma-dialectics, and what makes a “critical discussion” different from ordinary arguing?
In a moot court workshop a visiting lecturer kept referring to "pragma-dialectics" and "the rules for a critical discussion", as though everyone knew what they were. I nodded and didn't. From what I've gathered, it comes from Frans van Eemeren and Rob…
Started by Deepa Kartha4 replies -
My daughter asked why Plato wanted to ban stories. What exactly did he ban?
I read to my children every night, a mix of the Panchatantra, Tamil folk tales and whatever they bring home from the library. My eight-year-old saw a book on my shelf and asked what it was about. I said, a little carelessly,…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
The replication crisis is a philosophical problem before it is a statistical one
I've followed the replication crisis in psychology closely. A large collaborative project published in 2015 tried to repeat about a hundred published studies, and fewer than half produced results as strong as the originals. Since then the standard diagnosis has been statistical:…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga5 replies