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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 -
Reading group: Ibn Hazm’s The Ring of the Dove, four weeks through al-Andalus
Córdoba is the city where Ibn Hazm was born in 994 and which he watched being torn apart in the civil wars of his youth. Visitors know Ibn Rushd and Maimonides; almost nobody knows that the same city produced one of the…
Started by Rafael Lucena Prieto5 replies -
Taking the meditation without the metaphysics is fine: most people never wanted the path
Meditation helped me through a bad year more than anything else. I did it with an app, then a weekly class. Nobody mentioned rebirth, and nobody asked me to accept that there is no self. I keep reading that this is a…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies -
Śrīharṣa against the Naiyāyikas: can every definition be refuted, and how did Nyāya answer him?
Definitions are my bread and butter. A good definition in geometry settles what you are talking about, and then the proofs can begin. I recently came across Śrīharṣa, the twelfth-century Advaitin, whose great work has a title usually translated as something like…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies -
The Cartesian circle: can clear and distinct perception vouch for itself?
Every year I read Descartes' Meditations with students who arrive expecting an enemy of faith and leave rather fond of him. And every year, around the Third Meditation, a sharp student raises the objection that Antoine Arnauld put to Descartes in 1641.…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies -
Reading group: Augustine’s Confessions Book X, the books of memory, in Chadwick’s translation
There are already threads here on Book XI (time) and Book IV (the death of a friend), so I'd like to propose Book X, which sits between them and which I think is the most philosophical book of the Confessions. Having told…
Started by Aoife Kilbride5 replies -
When we refuse to imagine that cruelty is admirable, the failure is the work’s, not ours
Hume noticed something odd near the end of his essay on taste. We forgive old poets for their speculative errors: the wrong science, the gods we no longer believe in. We read past them easily. But when a poet asks us to…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
When a family says ‘it was always going to happen’, what are they claiming?
"It was always going to happen." I hear the sentence most weeks at work. Sometimes from a daughter, sometimes from a doctor, sometimes from me. I've started to think it means very different things in different mouths: Medical inevitability. Given the disease…
Started by Elin Hedqvist5 replies -
Dignāga cut the Nyāya inference from five members to three. What did the example member become?
I have been translating some passages on Buddhist logic for a seminar in Pune and keep getting stuck on one question. The Nyāya inference for others has five members: thesis, reason, example, application, conclusion ("this hill has fire, because it has smoke,…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Carneades at three in the morning: how much certainty does a decision need?
I have been reading what Sextus Empiricus reports of Carneades, the Academic sceptic, and I think he described night work better than any training course I've been sent on. Carneades, as far as we can reconstruct him, said we never have certainty,…
Started by Elin Hedqvist5 replies -
Sellars was right that raw experience can cause a belief but never justify one
The more I read about visual perception, the more I think Wilfrid Sellars got something exactly right in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (1956). The foundationalist wants a floor: beliefs justified without leaning on other beliefs. The obvious candidate is experience…
Started by Priya Raghavan5 replies -
Reading group: the chariot in the Milindapañha, read beside Hume’s “Of personal identity”
My working rule is that comparisons should be made text against text, not summary against summary. Here is a small experiment: read the most famous Buddhist passage on the self and the most famous Western one side by side, slowly, and see…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
Kim was right: non-reductive physicalism cannot give the mind any causal work
Here is a thesis many materialists find uncomfortable, and I want to defend it. Non-reductive physicalism says two things: everything is physical, and mental properties (believing, wanting, feeling pain) are not identical to physical properties. It's the most popular view among cognitive…
Started by Priya Raghavan5 replies -
Reading group: McTaggart’s ‘The Unreality of Time’ and Prior’s ‘Thank Goodness That’s Over’
I spend most of my free time on modal and many-valued logics, and I owe a great deal to Arthur Prior, who founded tense logic partly because he thought the A-series was real and needed a logic of its own. So I…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak5 replies -
A verdict that was right by accident: did the court know he was guilty?
Many years ago, early in my time as a court correspondent, I watched a magistrate convict a young man of a burglary largely on the identification of one witness. The identification was confident, the defence was weak, and I was as satisfied…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
Dharmottara’s mirage is not really a Gettier case, and calling it one flattens both traditions
Every year someone on a comparative course says "the Buddhists found the Gettier problem a thousand years early", and every year I nod and feel uneasy. Let me try to say why, and you can tell me where it breaks. The case:…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Lakatos found the right middle path between Popper and Kuhn
My physics students in Lagos always ask the same thing when we reach the history of astronomy: if a single failed prediction refutes a theory, why did astronomers keep Newton when Uranus misbehaved? Popper's falsificationism seems to say they shouldn't have. Kuhn's…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha5 replies -
Zhuangzi and Hui Shi on the bridge: an ancient argument about knowing what someone else knows
What does this part of the system know about what that part knows? I spent forty years on that question as a railway signalling engineer. I found the same question in the most famous conversation in Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi and Hui Shi are…
Started by Liu Mingqiao5 replies -
Epsilon-delta is two nested quantifiers, and that is why my students struggle
Every year I teach limits to senior secondary students in Delhi, and every year the same thing happens. They can compute limits perfectly well. Then I write the definition: For every ε > 0 there exists a δ > 0 such that…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies -
Should the law impose a general duty to rescue a stranger?
Common law systems, including Pakistan's, traditionally impose no general duty to rescue. If I watch a stranger drown in shallow water and do nothing, I may be a moral monster, but unless I had some special relationship or created the danger, I've…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
Could a psychopath genuinely know that cruelty is wrong? The amoralist and the clinical literature
Meta-ethicists argue about the amoralist: someone who sincerely judges that cheating or cruelty is wrong and feels no motivation whatever to avoid it. Internalists say such a person is impossible, that someone wholly unmoved has not really made the judgement, only learned…
Started by Martín Iriarte5 replies -
If the past no longer exists, what exactly is my regret about?
I served twenty-two years in the army, the last part on the DMZ. There are a few decisions I regret, none of them dramatic, all of them still with me. Reading about the philosophy of time has given me a strange new…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun5 replies -
Memory preserves knowledge but never produces it: the Indian schools were right to exclude it
For forty years of reading Śaṅkara I have accepted, almost without noticing, a rule that most of the classical Indian schools share: memory is not a pramāṇa, not a means of valid knowledge in its own right. The Nyāya divide cognition into…
Started by Arjun Iyer5 replies -
Reading group: Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), five chapters over five weeks
The Souls of Black Folk is the book I keep pushing onto the philosophy syllabus, because it was doing philosophy all along. Du Bois wrote much of it in my city, at Atlanta University. The ‘Forethought’ announces that the problem of the…
Started by Keisha Monroe5 replies -
Ibn Sina begins the Canon by defining medicine. What does that definition assume about health?
I recently reread the opening of Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine for a reading group at the hospital, and I was struck by how much philosophy is packed into the first sentence. Paraphrasing: medicine is the knowledge of the states of the…
Started by Omar Ragab5 replies -
If objectivity belongs to communities, what happens when the community all looks the same?
Helen Longino argues that objectivity is not a property of individual scientists, who all have commitments and blind spots, but of communities. And not any community. Only one with public venues for criticism, shared standards, genuine uptake of criticism, and what she…
Started by Femke Bosman5 replies -
Usul al-fiqh and Dworkin’s integrity: two ways of saying law is more than its rules
I read Iqbal and Hart side by side, more or less as a hobby, and lately I have been adding Dworkin and al-Shafi'i to the pile. I want to test a comparison that I find tempting and suspect is partly false. Dworkin…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
Reading group: Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful, chapter by chapter
Eduard Hanslick's Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854) is short, polemical and still the book every philosopher of music has to answer. I teach music theory and play the organ, and I have argued with it for twenty years without reading it straight through with…
Started by Agnieszka Malinowska5 replies -
Thirty-one years of watching courts decide what is ‘reasonable’, and no degrees of truth in sight
Here is something I watched every week in the courts of Punjab. A large part of the work was applying words that have no sharp edges: "reasonable doubt", "sudden provocation", "sufficient cause", "unsound mind". Now I read that fuzzy logic was invented…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
The fall of Qin refutes Legalism itself, not merely its excesses
I read Han Feizi mostly to understand why the most effective political theory of early China produced the shortest-lived dynasty. The Legalist tradition, from Shang Yang's reforms in the state of Qin in the fourth century BCE to Han Feizi's synthesis in…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies