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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 -
What did McLuhan mean by ‘the medium is the message’? It sounds like a slogan
Colleagues at work quote ‘the medium is the message’ at least once a week, usually when they want to sound deep about social media. I finally looked it up: it's the title of the first chapter of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media (1964).…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies -
What do Sufis mean by “tasting” (dhawq) as a way of knowing?
I love the Sufi poetry that has been sung in Yogyakarta for centuries. My teacher, an old woman who learned from her father, often says that certain things cannot be known from books, only "tasted". I always took this as a beautiful…
Started by Ratna Wulandari4 replies -
Do capabilities measure a good life better than happiness surveys do?
The donors I work with on accessible buildings want outcomes, and increasingly the outcome they ask for is "satisfaction": did people report being happier after the ramp was built? I find this maddening, and Amartya Sen's work explains why. Two of his…
Started by Dima Nasser5 replies -
Why did Philippa Foot invent the trolley case, and what did Judith Jarvis Thomson change?
The trolley problem comes up at every debate tournament, usually as a gotcha: "so you'd push the fat man?" My students treat it as a puzzle with a trick answer. I'd like to teach it properly, which means knowing where it came…
Started by Sam Ellery4 replies -
Species are drawn, not discovered: biology has already chosen nominalism
I dive in the kelp forests along the Chilean coast. In the years I have been diving there, the species boundaries in some kelp groups have been argued over and redrawn on the basis of genetic data, and biologists still disagree about…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo5 replies -
Why “I’m sorry you feel that way” is not an apology
This term our prison reading class ran a short course on restorative justice. Part of it was writing a letter to the person you harmed. The letters were not meant to be sent unless the other person agreed, but the drafting was…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma4 replies -
If many-sidedness is true only from a standpoint, then Jain anekāntavāda undermines itself
Here is the classic challenge, which I want to press as hard as I can before I hear the answer. Anekāntavāda says reality is many-sided, and every claim holds only from some standpoint. Now take that claim itself. Either it holds absolutely,…
Started by Oskar Nyberg5 replies -
‘With us or against us’ sounds like logic. Is it?
One sentence I've heard in Colombia from armed men of every stripe, and sometimes from people on the other side of the table, is "if you're not with us, you're against us". In villages that wanted nothing to do with any armed…
Started by Andrés Zuluaga4 replies -
Hume’s bundle and the Buddha’s no-self sound identical to me. What is the real difference?
I've just read two things in the same week and they seemed to say the same thing. Hume, in the Treatise, looks inward for his self and reports that he never catches himself without a perception, and never observes anything but the…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
When the woman in labour is your cousin: professional fairness and the ethics of care
Last month my cousin came in to our district hospital to deliver her second child. It was a busy night: four other women in labour, one of them in difficulty, and only two of us on the ward. Everyone expected things of…
Started by Farhana Akter4 replies -
Not every coherent prior is rational: subjective Bayesianism is far too permissive
The subjective Bayesian line, roughly de Finetti's, is that any coherent prior is permissible and evidence does the rest. Start where you like, conditionalise honestly, and the data will eventually bring reasonable people together. I think this is too generous, for three…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
At my office “Confucian values” means obey the boss. Where did the reciprocity go?
I translate for a publishing house in Hanoi. When managers here want staff to stay late without complaint, they speak of Confucian values: respect for seniors, loyalty, harmony. We have a common saying about honouring teachers and respecting the Way. I grew…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo4 replies -
The statue-and-clay puzzle is a verbal dispute, and metaphysicians should admit it
I coach high school debate. Half my job is stopping kids from winning arguments by quietly changing what a word means. So I'm primed to spot verbal disputes, and I think I've spotted a big one. The puzzle: a sculptor shapes a…
Started by Sam Ellery5 replies -
What were Mozi’s three tests for judging whether a doctrine is right?
I've been reading about early Chinese philosophy for fun. Several books mention that Mozi proposed "three tests" or "three standards" for judging a doctrine, and one claims this was the first explicit methodology in Chinese thought. I'd like to know what the…
Started by Vikram Sethi3 replies -
Epicurus’s argument about death still works if you throw away the atoms
As a volunteer in Montreal, I spend a lot of my evenings with people who are dying. Epicurus helped me think about death without flinching, so I want to defend him against a claim I keep reading: that his consolations about death…
Started by Nadia Haddad6 replies -
Treating beauty as a matter of personal taste is the odd one out among the world’s traditions
I make hand-drawn batik in Yogyakarta, in a workshop my mother started. Our motifs carry Javanese ideas about harmony and Sufi ideas about longing. When foreign buyers ask me "which pattern do you like best?", I find the question strange. A motif…
Started by Ratna Wulandari5 replies -
Did Plato’s Republic X really attack “art”, or is that a translation problem?
Every year in my class we reach the moment where a student says, "Wait, Plato wanted to ban poets?" I usually say yes, and we have a lively argument about censorship. But I've just read an argument that this framing misleads. Plato…
Started by Keisha Monroe5 replies -
Reading group: Toulmin’s The Uses of Argument, starting from the middle
The Toulmin layout (claim, grounds, warrant, backing, qualifier, rebuttal) is on every debate camp handout in the country. Almost nobody has read the book it comes from. Let's fix that. Text. Stephen Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (1958; the Cambridge updated edition…
Started by Sam Ellery6 replies -
Reading group: Aristotle’s Poetics as a craft manual, with the Nāṭyaśāstra beside it
I've always read the Poetics as "Aristotle's theory of art". Recently I came across the argument that this is a mistranslation of the whole enterprise: the Greek technē covered medicine, carpentry, navigation and poetry alike, and the Poetics is less aesthetics than…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
Thirty years of coaching while colour-blind: whose experience of red is the accurate one?
I was diagnosed red-green colour-blind at fourteen, when I failed the dotted-number test at the school nurse's office. I then spent thirty years coaching under-16 rugby while unable to tell our maroon bibs from the opposition's green ones, which my boys found…
Started by Gerrit Venter4 replies -
Our neighborhood grant asked us to prove a mural was ‘art’, not ‘signage’
This spring our block association on the South Side applied for a small public-art grant to paint a mural on the side of a corner store. The design came from kids at the rec center and includes the store's name and the…
Started by Dana WhitfieldReply first (no replies yet)