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‘Killing robbers is not killing people’: the Later Mohists on inferences that fail
One passage in the Later Mohist texts seems to me to belong in any discussion of what predicate logic was invented to handle. In the chapter of the Mozi usually called the "Lesser Selection" (Xiaoqu), the Mohists discuss a kind of inference…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
Reading group: Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, the first two chapters
Jonas published Das Prinzip Verantwortung in 1979 and the English version, which he prepared with David Herr, came out in 1984 as The Imperative of Responsibility. I taught ethics for years without reading it properly, and now that I have time I…
Started by Henrike Vogel5 replies -
Xunzi says the sages invented ritual and rightness. Does that make him a moral anti-realist?
I came to Xunzi through the debate with Mencius about human nature. That debate is usually told as optimism against pessimism: Mencius thinks we are born with the sprouts of goodness, Xunzi thinks our nature is crooked and goodness comes from deliberate…
Started by Elif Yıldız5 replies -
Does a diagnosis name a real condition, or a useful bundle of symptoms?
I work as an interpreter at a hospital in Addis Ababa. Some diagnoses I translate every day feel like discoveries: a particular infection, caused by a particular organism, with a test that finds it. Others feel more like agreements. "Metabolic syndrome" is…
Started by Tsion Bekele5 replies -
Sincere and mistaken: what the memory research means for how we listen to victims
I have spent eight years covering the peace process in Colombia, which has meant listening to hundreds of people describe the worst days of their lives. Something has troubled me for a long time, and I'd like to think it through with…
Started by Andrés Zuluaga5 replies -
Classical phenomenology described one kind of body and called it the structure of experience
This term my reading circle read the fifth chapter of Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, the one translated as "The Fact of Blackness" in the older English edition and "The Lived Experience of the Black Man" in the newer. My students understood…
Started by Keisha Monroe5 replies -
Is Susan Wolf’s account of meaning just “do what you love” with extra steps?
Every founder book I read on the way down said the same thing: find your passion and meaning will follow. I believed it. I was passionate. It didn't. Someone here recommended Susan Wolf, and the phrase I keep seeing is that meaning…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies -
Many-worlds is the most conservative reading of quantum mechanics, not the wildest
Many-worlds has a reputation as the science-fiction interpretation. I want to argue it is the opposite: the reading that adds least to the physics. Look at what the others add. Copenhagen-style views add a collapse whenever a "measurement" happens, without saying what…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen5 replies -
Reading group: van Fraassen’s The Scientific Image, on realism and explanation
The Scientific Image (1980) is the book that made anti-realism respectable again after a period when scientific realism seemed to have won. It's short, dense and often witty. I'd like to read the parts that matter most for the realism debate. Plan,…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak5 replies -
Reading group: Mencius Book 1, the conversations with the kings
Every year I tell my students that Mencius was a political philosopher before he was a theorist of human nature. They don't believe me, because the textbook only gives them the child at the well. So I'd like to read the opening…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu5 replies -
Reading Nāgārjuna as a dialetheist imports a problem he did not have
I keep running into Graham Priest's reading of Nāgārjuna, partly in his own books and partly in the paper he wrote with Jay Garfield on Nāgārjuna and the limits of thought. On that reading, some of Nāgārjuna's claims are true contradictions: the…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Fire and cotton in the Seventeenth Discussion, read beside Hume’s Enquiry
Causation is a practical problem for me most mornings. I've been reading the seventeenth discussion of al-Ghazālī's Incoherence of the Philosophers (in Michael Marmura's translation) next to Section VII of Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), and I want to set out…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam5 replies -
Doing harm and allowing harm differ morally, even when the outcome is the same
At the hospital where I work, the distinction between doing and allowing comes up every week. Withdrawing a ventilator from a patient with no prospect of recovery is treated very differently from giving a lethal injection, by law, by most religious authorities,…
Started by Omar Ragab5 replies -
Mencius was unfair to Mozi: impartial care does not mean having no father
I've grown tired of how Mohism is introduced: through Mencius's insult. Mencius says that Yang Zhu's "each for himself" means having no ruler, and Mozi's impartial care means having no father, and that people without father or ruler are beasts. Most students…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
Most abortion arguments are really disputes about what grounds moral status, and we should say so
When abortion comes up in a class, the room divides quickly, each side convinced the other doesn't care about something important. I want to propose something modest. Almost everyone in my classes agrees that killing an innocent person is seriously wrong. The…
Started by Miriam Adler5 replies -
Who speaks for someone who cannot? Advance directives, surrogates and the family at three in the morning
Many of the people I care for at night can't speak for themselves when it matters most: confused, very ill, at the end. Decisions get made about them anyway, and I've watched how. The usual guidance gives two standards. Substituted judgement: decide…
Started by Elin Hedqvist5 replies -
Watsuji’s betweenness, ubuntu and relational autonomy: one discovery made three times, or three ideas?
I've been reading Watsuji Tetsurō's Ethics (Rinrigaku) slowly, with a friend from the temple who reads more Japanese philosophy than I do. Watsuji's starting point is that the Japanese word for a human being, ningen, is written with characters meaning "person" and…
Started by Aiko Tanabe5 replies -
Dharma, li, sharia, natural law: four words English keeps flattening into “duty” or “law”
Last week an engineering student in the evening class on Indian philosophy that I help with asked a good question: “If dharma is not duty, what is it like? Is there anything in other cultures that works the same way?” I tried…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Reading group: Hume’s Treatise on reason, passion and the source of moral distinctions
I have finally started reading Hume properly in retirement, and I would like company for the passages that underlie most modern arguments about moral motivation. Three short sections of A Treatise of Human Nature, one a week: Week 1. Book 2, Part…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
Mackie’s argument from queerness proves too much: by its standards arithmetic is queer too
Mackie's argument from queerness says that if there were objective moral facts, they would be, in his words, of “a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe”, and we would need an equally strange faculty to know them.…
Started by Ana Clara Ferreira5 replies -
When someone says “that’s my truth”, what exactly are they claiming?
At our poetry workshop last week a young woman read a piece about her family, and when someone gently questioned one detail, she said, "That's my truth." The room went quiet. Nobody knew what to say next. I felt two things at…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies -
Being a realist about electrons commits me to nothing about moral or mathematical facts
I'm a scientific realist in the ordinary way: I think electrons, quantum fields and the like really exist, and that our best theories are approximately true of them. People sometimes assume this makes me a realist about everything else too. It doesn't,…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
“I could have caught it sooner”: what is a carer’s regret actually claiming?
Something from work that I keep returning to. One of our residents got worse overnight. Looking back, there was a sign at 2 a.m. that, in hindsight, meant he was seriously ill. I noticed it, it didn't seem much, I did not…
Started by Elin Hedqvist5 replies -
Nāgārjuna and the Vienna Circle both attacked metaphysics. Were they doing the same thing?
Recently a trekking client who studied philosophy in Vienna told me Nāgārjuna sounded like a logical positivist: someone who shows that metaphysical claims collapse under analysis. I can see the resemblance. Nāgārjuna takes every position, that things exist intrinsically, that they don't,…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung5 replies -
Epistemic injustice, nearly two decades on: what has the idea actually changed?
I teach Yoruba at a secondary school in Ibadan and read a lot about Yoruba epistemic vocabulary, and one of the developments in philosophy since 1990 that matters most to me is the turn to testimony and the social side of knowledge.…
Started by Titilayo Adeyemi5 replies -
Leibniz had the better of the argument with Clarke
I've been reading the Leibniz–Clarke correspondence of 1715–16, in which Samuel Clarke defended Newton's absolute space and Leibniz argued that space is only the order of coexisting things. My thesis: Leibniz won. His central argument: suppose God had created the whole universe…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam5 replies -
Does a language model mean anything by what it writes?
At work in Kuala Lumpur I evaluate text-generating systems for fairness. Last month a colleague said, half joking, that one of our models "meant" something offensive. Everyone laughed and then nobody could say whether that was false. The usual philosophical framing seems…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies -
At three in the morning, does a first cause comfort anyone?
I work nights at a care home for older people in Uppsala. A few weeks ago, while his father was dying, a man asked me whether I thought there was a reason for everything. He didn't want an argument, I think. He…
Started by Elin Hedqvist5 replies -
How is apoha supposed to work? ‘Cow’ means ‘not non-cow’ sounds circular to me
I teach mathematics, and when I read that Dignāga's theory of meaning says a word like "cow" works by exclusion, meaning roughly "not non-cow", my first reaction was the one I would have to a student's proof: this is circular. To exclude…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies -
Gödel’s “perception” of sets explains nothing about how we actually know mathematics
Rationalists from Plato onward have said that reason can simply see certain truths: that a surface cannot be red and green all over, that the axioms of geometry hold. The most famous modern version is Gödel's. In his essay on Cantor's continuum…
Started by Ana Clara Ferreira5 replies