All topics
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Deafness: disease, disability, or difference? And who gets to decide?
Last month a family in Amman asked me to help them think about a cochlear implant for their deaf toddler. The surgeon spoke of "correcting hearing loss". A Deaf friend of mine, who signs and has a rich social life in the…
Started by Dima Nasser4 replies -
What exactly is Odera Oruka’s sage philosophy, and how is it different from ethnophilosophy?
I live in Nairobi, and Henry Odera Oruka taught at the University of Nairobi, so I feel I should understand his work better than I do. I build credit models for a living and came to philosophy through statistics, so I know…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga4 replies -
What did al-Ghazālī mean by beauty as a thing’s proper perfection?
I make hand-drawn batik in Yogyakarta, in a workshop my mother started. At a study circle last month, the teacher said that for al-Ghazālī everything has its own beauty, which lies in the perfection proper to it: a horse is beautiful as…
Started by Ratna Wulandari4 replies -
My grandmother’s Jōdo Shinshū, and why “grace” is not quite the word for other-power
My grandmother was a devout Jōdo Shinshū Buddhist. When I was a teenager and got interested in meditation, she told me, kindly but firmly, that trying to become enlightened by my own effort was a subtle kind of pride. For her the…
Started by Rin Matsuda4 replies -
Reading group: Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes), twelve chapters in six weeks
Every autumn Kohelet is read in synagogue on the Sabbath of Sukkot, and every year someone asks afterward how such a book got into the Bible. It's a fair question. The rabbis asked it too. The Mishnah records a dispute over whether…
Started by Eliana Halpern5 replies -
Our safety manual tells us what to do after we’ve broken a safety rule. Is that a paradox?
Working the cranes, I read our safety manual more carefully than most. Rule 1: never enter the exclusion zone under a suspended load. Rule 2: if you find yourself in the exclusion zone, do not move; radio the operator and wait for…
Started by Hugo Marchetti4 replies -
What are the seven “in some respect” predications of syādvāda, and is it really a many-valued logic?
Reading about many-valued and modal logics, I keep meeting the Jain doctrine of syādvāda in footnotes that call it "an ancient three-valued logic" or "a seven-valued logic". I am suspicious of both descriptions, but I don't know enough to say why. From…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak4 replies -
Wang Yangming stared at bamboo for seven days and fell ill. Was he refuting empiricism?
I teach ethics at a secondary school in Seoul, and the story my students remember best from the whole Neo-Confucian unit is the bamboo. As a young man, Wang Yangming tried to put Zhu Xi's teaching into practice. Zhu Xi said that…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu5 replies -
Splitting causation from explanation was a modern mistake, not an Aristotelian one
Reading Maturana and Varela, the Chilean biologists who described living things as self-producing systems in the early 1970s, I keep running into the same problem. To explain why a kelp forest is the way it is, I need to say what it's…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo6 replies -
Reading group: Bacon’s idols of the mind in the Novum Organum, Book One
I spend my working life classifying knowledge, so Bacon has always interested me as much for his ambition to reorganise the sciences as for his method. The New Organon (1620) is written in numbered aphorisms, which makes it ideal for slow reading…
Started by Mona Fathy5 replies -
Freire’s banking model is unfair to the lecture, and to the teachers who give good ones
Every few years a pedagogy course reminds me that I am a banker. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed Freire describes the "banking" concept of education: the teacher deposits, the students receive, file and store. The teacher talks, the students listen meekly. He…
Started by Giulia Ferrante6 replies -
Is Iris Marion Young right that most injustice is not about who gets what?
Whenever my reading group discusses Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990), the same split appears. Young argued that political philosophy had been captured by the "distributive paradigm": it treats justice as the fair division of a stock of goods, income,…
Started by Femke Bosman6 replies -
Knowledge as a building or a raft? Neurath’s boat, seen from a community organiser’s chair
I'm a community organiser in Chicago and used to teach in public schools. I've always loved pragmatism because it treats knowledge as something you do with other people. Lately I've been reading about the structure of justification and want to test the…
Started by Dana Whitfield5 replies -
Skilled manual work demands more thinking than most office work
My cousin works in an office in Casablanca and earns three times what I do, and the family assumes his work is the one that uses the head. Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft argues the reverse, and I want to defend…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani6 replies -
Is Wheeler’s “it from bit” a physics proposal or a piece of metaphysics?
John Wheeler's slogan "it from bit" says that every physical thing derives its existence from answers to yes-or-no questions: that reality is informational at the bottom. Anyone who spends time around physicists hears versions of it constantly, usually late in the evening.…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
If you had to give up one classical principle, which would you choose?
I've been working through a list of non-classical logics, and each one gives up something different: bivalence (every statement true or false), excluded middle (P or not-P), explosion (from a contradiction, anything), or the assumption that every name refers to something. Thought…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha6 replies -
Whoever deploys an automated decision system should answer for its harms, fault or no fault
Take the standard case. A bank uses an automated system to assess loans. A creditworthy applicant is refused. The refusal rests on correlations in the training data that no engineer chose and nobody can fully reconstruct. Who answers for it? The engineers…
Started by Hamza Qureshi7 replies -
The crane logs were falsified and reporting them might shut the terminal: what each theory told me
Last spring, as union delegate, I found out that maintenance records for one of the older gantry cranes at our terminal had been filled in for inspections that never happened. The crane was probably fine. The risk was small but real: a…
Started by Hugo Marchetti6 replies -
Special relativity has refuted presentism, whatever presentists say
I'd like to argue the strong version, then see how much survives. Presentism says only the present exists. Past dinosaurs and future grandchildren are not real; only what is happening now is. That requires a fact about which events are happening now,…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
Why does mathematics invented for its own sake keep turning up in physics?
Every year a student asks me what the point of complex numbers is. I tell them that for a long time mathematicians themselves treated them as a formal convenience, a trick for solving cubic equations, and that today quantum mechanics cannot be…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies -
We were taught “control what you can control” in the army. Was that Stoicism?
In my last years in the army, "resilience training" was introduced, and the instructors sometimes quoted Epictetus. Control what you can control. Let the rest go. Some officers had read about James Stockdale, the American pilot who was a prisoner of war…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun5 replies -
Adab, and the humanism that rarely gets the name
Much of my working time goes to books from a culture that, in the ninth to twelfth centuries, was organised around an ideal called adab. The word is hard to translate. It can mean manners and etiquette, and it can mean literature.…
Started by Mona Fathy5 replies -
What does ziran, “self-so”, actually mean, and why do people call it the centre of Daoism?
Maturana and Varela described living things as autopoietic, self-making: a cell produces the very components that produce it. A friend in Santiago told me that Daoism had a word for something similar, ziran, which she translated as “self-so” or “of itself so”.…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo5 replies -
Is it irrational to have no precise credence at all about something like life on Europa?
A friend asked me last month, after a news piece about the Europa missions, what probability I would put on there being life in its ocean. I said I had no idea. She pushed: “Just a number, roughly.” I said somewhere between…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
Moore’s “here is one hand” is not really an argument, and that is exactly why it works
There is a move my best debaters make without ever having heard of G. E. Moore. When the other team builds an elaborate case for a conclusion everyone in the room knows is false, you do not attack the premises one by…
Started by Sam Ellery6 replies -
Nishitani on nihilism: you have to go through it, not around it
This year I have been reading the Kyoto School slowly. The book that has helped me most this year is Nishitani Keiji's Religion and Nothingness, read slowly in Japanese with the English translation beside it. Nishitani, who studied with Heidegger in Freiburg…
Started by Aiko Tanabe4 replies -
Is Nyāya tarka a kind of counterfactual reasoning, and does it need possible worlds?
Reading Nyāya, I am always delighted by how close their techniques are to the proofs I teach. One that puzzles me is tarka, which I have seen translated as "hypothetical reasoning", "suppositional reasoning" or "reductio". The classic example seems to go like…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies -
What did Horkheimer mean by ‘traditional’ versus ‘critical’ theory?
I operate a gantry crane at the container port in Marseille and I'm a union delegate. Someone at a union education weekend said the Frankfurt School started with an essay by Max Horkheimer called "Traditional and Critical Theory", from 1937, and that…
Started by Hugo Marchetti4 replies -
Is Vasubandhu’s doctrine of momentariness the same as modern stage theory?
I guide trekkers in the Annapurna region and have read about Buddhist philosophy for years, mostly in tea houses. Recently a friend showed me a chart of Western theories of persistence and pointed to one called exdurantism or stage theory: nothing strictly…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung4 replies -
Davos, 1929: was the split already visible in the room?
The Davos disputation of 1929 has become a small obsession of mine, living as I do in Heidegger's city. In the spring of that year, at a university course in the Swiss resort, Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger debated how to read…
Started by Henrike Vogel6 replies