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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 -
How much of just war theory is really in Augustine?
Every introduction I read says that Augustine founded the Christian theory of just war. So I went looking for the treatise. I have read a fair amount of The City of God for other reasons and could not find one. What I…
Started by Siobhán Keane4 replies -
What are the ‘four principles’ of medical ethics, and what do you do when they conflict?
A drug rep who also teaches a short course mentioned "the four principles" as if everyone knew them, and I nodded and then looked them up: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice. I understand each one on its own. My problem is a…
Started by Hetal Shah3 replies -
Reading group: Anselm’s Proslogion 2–4, with Gaunilo’s reply and Anselm’s answer
I am a philosophy and theology student and I have heard the ontological argument "refuted" in three different modules without ever reading it properly. Proposal: we read it slowly, together with the objection that came immediately and Anselm's own answer to it.…
Started by Aoife Kilbride6 replies -
Tagore would not define art, and asked why we make it at all
My father sang Baul songs, and Tagore loved the Bauls: he collected their songs and admired Lalon. So I came to Tagore's lecture "What Is Art?" in his book Personality (1917) with my father's voice in my head. What I like is…
Started by Farhana Akter5 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 -
Reading group: G. A. Cohen’s Why Not Socialism?, a short book for a long argument
The port doesn't leave me time for long books during the season, so I was glad to find this one: G. A. Cohen's Why Not Socialism? (2009), well under a hundred pages. Cohen asks us to imagine a camping trip. A group…
Started by Hugo Marchetti5 replies -
Is Wiredu’s consensus democracy what Habermas’s discourse principle looks like in a council?
This term I have been reading Wiredu's essays on consensus alongside Habermas with a few older students, and they keep asking a question I want to put to a wider group. Wiredu argued that traditional Ashanti politics, at least at the level…
Started by Kwame Asante5 replies -
Does a Carmelite’s prayer of union and a Zen kenshō report the same experience?
Between sittings this winter, out of curiosity, I read Teresa of Ávila's Interior Castle, which she wrote in 1577. I expected it to be completely foreign. Parts of it were. Other parts, especially her descriptions of the faculties going quiet, felt uncomfortably…
Started by Aiko Tanabe6 replies -
Reading group: Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, one dialogue at a time
George Berkeley was born in County Kilkenny, studied at Trinity College Dublin, and spent the last part of his life as Bishop of Cloyne, about half an hour from where I'm writing. I've always felt we in Cork should know him better…
Started by Siobhán Keane5 replies -
My model was right for the wrong reason. Which answer to Gettier explains why that matters?
Last quarter one of our credit models flagged a small trader as high risk. She did default. But when we looked at the case, the default came from a long hospital stay, and the features the model had leaned on, irregular airtime…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga5 replies -
When someone dies, whose loss is grief about: theirs or ours?
My father died in February. In Addis Ababa people come to the house for days, the lekso, and sit with you, and much of what is said is about him: how young he was, what he would have seen. Thomas Nagel's account…
Started by Tsion Bekele5 replies -
Teleosemantics is the best naturalistic theory of content we have
I dive in kelp forests on the Chilean coast, and I came to philosophy through biology, so I will defend the view that feels most like home. The puzzle: a frog's tongue fires at small dark moving dots. Usually they are flies,…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo6 replies -
Reading group: Christine de Pizan and Mary Astell, two arguments from reason three centuries apart
Women who claimed the right to think in earlier centuries kept reaching for the same tool against their opponents: argument from the opponents' own premises. I'd like to read two of them side by side. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the…
Started by Valentina Ríos5 replies -
My father knew which cedar beam would split. He could never say how. Did he know?
When I was a boy my father would walk past a stack of beams and tap one with his knuckle and say: not that one, it will split when we carve it. He was almost always right. If you asked him how…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani6 replies -
If a life has a place rather than a meaning, what happens when the place is unjust?
I've been reading discussions of how different traditions answer "does life have meaning?", and one idea keeps coming up: most traditions say a life has a place rather than a meaning. Your meaning comes from your role in a family, a lineage,…
Started by Keisha Monroe6 replies -
Before the Axial Age: the Nāsadīya hymn, Egyptian instructions and the gradualist objection
One of the first hymns my grandfather made me memorise was the Nāsadīya Sūkta of the Ṛgveda, the hymn of creation. It begins before being and non-being and ends with doubt: who truly knows how this arose? Perhaps the one who watches…
Started by Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya5 replies -
Pacifism is the most consistent ethics of war, not a refusal to have one
I grew up among Jain neighbours in Hyderabad and came to Gandhi through them. Gandhi credited Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894) with a large influence on him, so the pacifist line I have absorbed runs from Mahavira through…
Started by Anand Kurup6 replies -
When I restore a panel painting, at what point is it no longer the original?
I restore Renaissance panel paintings in Florence. Every working day I decide how much of the past to bring back and how much to leave alone, and every decision touches a question I first met in philosophy as the ship of Theseus,…
Started by Chiara Bellandi4 replies -
Zhaozhou’s dog, Dōgen, and a robotics engineer: does a robot have buddha-nature?
A small puzzle from my temple that connects to the threads here about machines. The first case of the Gateless Gate collection is the famous one: a monk asks Zhaozhou whether a dog has buddha-nature, and Zhaozhou answers "Mu" (in Chinese, wu).…
Started by Aiko Tanabe5 replies -
Can an institution be at fault when nobody inside it did anything wrong?
Years ago, in a unit I served with, a soldier died in a training accident. The inquiry took months. Every officer had followed the regulations. The equipment had passed inspection. The schedule had been approved at the proper level. The report concluded…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun5 replies -
Taylor’s happy Sisyphus shows meaning is purely subjective
I make my debaters argue the side they don't believe, so here's me arguing a side I'm only half sure of. Richard Taylor's version of Sisyphus goes like this. The gods, in pity, implant in Sisyphus an overwhelming desire to roll boulders.…
Started by Sam Ellery6 replies -
After reading Hamblin, should I still teach my prison class the list of fallacies?
In my prison reading class, the men's favourite unit is the fallacies. They love catching each other: "That's ad hominem!" "Straw man!" Then I read about C. L. Hamblin's book Fallacies (1970). As I understand it, he looked at the standard catalogue…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma5 replies -
Possibility lives in the powers of real things, not in other worlds
When I look at a plank of cedar I see what it can become: a panel, a frame, a box. That "can" is not in some other world. It is in the cedar: its grain, its weight, the way it takes a…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani5 replies -
Why debates about first principles never end: notes from the high-school tournament circuit
I coach debate at a public high school in Portland, and after years of judging I've noticed a pattern. Rounds about facts resolve. Someone has better evidence, or the other side drops a point, and the judge can decide. Rounds about fundamentals…
Started by Sam Ellery5 replies -
Is the circularity objection to identity-based accounts of gender fatal, or a misunderstanding?
Logic is what I think about most, so circularity is the kind of objection I find myself taking seriously by reflex. I'd like help understanding whether it lands here. An identity-based account says: what makes someone a member of a gender category…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak6 replies -
Why did the Latin scholastics call Ibn Rushd simply “the Commentator”?
Reading Aquinas for the first time, after years with Eriugena and Boethius, I keep meeting references to "the Philosopher", who is Aristotle, and "the Commentator", who turns out to be Ibn Rushd, Averroes. I'd like to understand how that happened. How did…
Started by Siobhán Keane4 replies -
Friedman’s billiard player: is predictive success really all a model owes us?
My models predict, quite well, who will repay a small loan, using patterns in phone and payment records. They do not describe why anyone repays. Some of the strongest predictors are things that have no plausible causal story at all. A colleague…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga4 replies -
Relativism about truth refutes itself, but relativism about morality does not, at least not so easily
There is a passage in Plato's Theaetetus where Socrates turns Protagoras's own doctrine against him. Protagoras says man is the measure of all things: what seems true to each person is true for that person. Socrates points out that most people believe…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
How do you choose a translation when you can’t read the original?
Speaking Irish as well as English, I know how much changes between languages. I've been reading Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy on the train, and I recently noticed that the two translations I own feel like different books. One is stately and archaic,…
Started by Siobhán Keane6 replies