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‘Benevolence’ is a better translation of ren than its critics allow
I've been reading the Analects with D. C. Lau's translation, which uses "benevolence" throughout. I keep reading on this site, and in introductions, that this is a false friend: that ren names a condition of full humanity, not a disposition to kindness.…
Started by Henrike Vogel5 replies -
Why insight does not instantly change behaviour: an Abhidhamma account of knowing and not doing
I read the threads here about whether knowing what is right necessarily moves you, and I would like to add the account I have lived with in twelve years of practice. In the Pali discourses, the Buddha says that intention, cetanā, is…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara5 replies -
Soul as the form of a living body: does Aristotle help me teach the Igbo idea of chi, or get in the way?
I teach religious studies at a Catholic secondary school in Enugu and run a philosophy club for the senior students. Every year we read Aristotle's De Anima, where the soul is defined as the first actuality of a natural body that potentially…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies -
Reading group: Gadamer’s Truth and Method, Part Two, on prejudice and the fusion of horizons
I taught German literature for thirty years without ever reading Wahrheit und Methode (1960) from cover to cover, which is a confession. I would like to read the central part of it slowly with anyone willing. I propose the second part, the…
Started by Henrike Vogel5 replies -
Reading group: the Hippocratic Oath and the ethical writings around it, then and now
Everyone cites the Hippocratic Oath; few have read it, and fewer have read the other ethical texts in the Hippocratic collection. I'd like to read them with doctors, nurses and anyone curious, and then compare them with a modern code. Texts. The…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
What exactly is Ibn Rushd’s rule for when scripture should be read non-literally?
I guide visitors around Córdoba, and at the statue of Ibn Rushd near the old walls someone always asks what he believed. For years I have said something like "he thought that when reason and the Qur'an disagree, reason wins". People like…
Started by Rafael Lucena Prieto5 replies -
Could a culture reason by different logical rules, or is that a colonial myth?
Every year a student in my lycée class asks me some version of this: "Is logic universal, or is it just how Europeans think?" The history makes the question sharp. In the early twentieth century, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl described so-called primitive peoples as…
Started by Khady Sène5 replies -
The five rulings, from obligatory to forbidden: why the middle categories are not just extra boxes
Standard deontic logic has three basic statuses: obligatory, forbidden, and permitted. Anything neither obligatory nor forbidden is simply permitted, and that's the end of it. Islamic jurisprudence has five rulings (al-aḥkām al-khamsa). An act is obligatory (wājib), recommended (mandūb), permissible (mubāḥ), disliked…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
Secular humanism needs no metaphysics, and that is its strength
I'm an atheist, and I call myself a humanist in the modern sense: ethics and meaning without religion. I keep being told that humanism is just another religion, a faith in Man with its own unprovable dogmas. I want to argue the…
Started by Arvind Poojary5 replies -
Al-Ma’arri gave up meat, milk and honey, and wrote a poem telling us why
Abu al-'Ala al-Ma'arri (973–1057) lost his sight to smallpox as a child and called himself the prisoner of two prisons, his blindness and his house in Ma'arrat al-Nu'man. I read him first for his fury. I stayed for his ethics. In his…
Started by Dima Nasser5 replies -
Keeping the losing opinion on the page: is disagreement inside a tradition as deep as disagreement between traditions?
In my Tuesday Talmud study group we recently read the story in tractate Eruvin about the houses of Hillel and Shammai, who argued for years until a heavenly voice declared that "these and these are the words of the living God", and…
Started by Eliana Halpern5 replies -
Who is left out when morality is a bargain?
I came to this question with a personal stake. I've used a wheelchair since I was fourteen. The Hobbesian strand of contract theory says morality is what rational, self-interested people would agree to for mutual advantage. David Gauthier's Morals by Agreement (1986)…
Started by Dima Nasser5 replies -
What do I owe a source I don’t believe? Notes from a court reporter
I cover courts and human rights in Karachi. Every week someone tells me something I am not sure I believe: a family about a disappeared relative, an official about a raid, a lawyer about what his client said. I have to decide…
Started by Sana Rizvi5 replies -
If I can conceive it without contradiction, is it possible? Ash’arites, Hume and Kripke
I started reading the Ash'ari theologians to understand occasionalism, and I noticed how much weight they put on one principle: whatever involves no contradiction is possible, at least for God. Al-Ghazali uses it in the Tahāfut when he says the cotton might…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam5 replies -
Reading group: Nāgārjuna on causes and conditions, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 1, 20 and 24
The Nyāya–Madhyamaka debates all lead back to the opening of Nāgārjuna's Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, so I'd like to read three chapters of it together. Translation. Jay Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (1995), which has the verses…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
The indispensability argument is the best case for numbers, and it still does not work
The argument usually called Quine–Putnam goes like this: We should believe in the entities our best scientific theories quantify over. Our best scientific theories quantify over mathematical objects, ineliminably. So we should believe mathematical objects exist. It is the best argument for…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha5 replies -
Seeing before naming: are Dignāga and Merleau-Ponty saying the same thing about perception?
Two accounts of perception seem to me to speak to the moment just before a word arrives, which is where a translator spends her days. Dignāga, the Buddhist epistemologist of the late fifth and early sixth centuries, defines perception as cognition free…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
Reading group: Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought, Part One, over four weeks
Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001) is long, so I suggest we read only Part One, which sets out the theory that the rest of the book applies to compassion and love. The book opens with Nussbaum's own…
Started by Femke Bosman5 replies -
Kasb is a real distinction, not a verbal escape: the Ash’ari answer deserves a hearing
Within Islamic theology the free will question produced two sharply opposed answers, and I think one of them gets a worse press than it deserves. The Mu'tazila said that human beings genuinely create their own acts. God is just; he would not…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam5 replies -
Why did argument appear in Greece, India, China and Israel in the same few centuries?
When someone shows me a pattern I want a mechanism. Granting for the moment that something similar happened in several regions between roughly 800 and 200 BCE, with no documented transmission between them, the explanations I've seen are: Material surplus. Iron-age agriculture…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
If the comparison table had a Yoruba row: mọ̀, gbàgbọ́ and the gap between seeing and hearing
Comparative tables of how traditions answer "how do we know anything?" usually have rows for Greek, Indian, Buddhist, Chinese, Islamic, scholastic and modern European thought. My doctorate is on Yoruba epistemic vocabulary, so I want to sketch the row that is usually…
Started by Titilayo Adeyemi5 replies -
Reading group: Nāgārjuna’s Middle Verses, chapter 24, where emptiness is accused of nihilism
If you want to know what Nāgārjuna means by emptiness, the best place to look is the chapter where he is accused of destroying everything. Chapter 24 of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā opens with an opponent's objection: if all things are empty, nothing arises…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
Reading group: Aristotle’s Metaphysics Gamma on the firmest principle
Several recent threads keep coming back to Aristotle's defence of the principle of non-contradiction, usually second-hand. Let's read it. It's short and much stranger than its reputation. Text: Metaphysics Book Gamma (IV), chapters 3 to 7. Ross's translation is freely available; Christopher…
Started by Nikos Theodoridis5 replies -
The KK principle is false: you can know something without knowing that you know it
A question from a materialist with a soft spot for Indian epistemology. In epistemic logic, positive introspection (the KK principle) says: if you know P, you know that you know P. Hintikka built it into his system. It's attractive: surely knowledge is…
Started by Priya Raghavan5 replies -
Reading group: Miskawayh, The Refinement of Character, on happiness
I keep a secondhand bookshop off Mutanabbi Street, and the book I most often press on young customers who say they want philosophy is Miskawayh's Tahdhīb al-akhlāq, The Refinement of Character. Miskawayh (c. 932–1030) worked as a librarian and treasurer in the…
Started by Zainab Kadhim5 replies -
Reading group: Ibn Khaldun on making a living, crafts and taxes in the Muqaddimah
Ibn Khaldun spent formative years at the Marinid court here in Fes. His Muqaddimah (1377) is famous for its theory of the rise and fall of dynasties, but the chapters on economic life are often skipped, and I think they're among the…
Started by Youssef Berrada5 replies -
Reading group: Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, about a hundred remarks a week
On Certainty consists of notes Wittgenstein wrote in the last year and a half of his life, largely provoked by G. E. Moore's papers defending common sense against scepticism. It was published in 1969, edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G.…
Started by Oskar Nyberg5 replies -
Even if the proof works, whose God has it reached? The gap from “first cause” to God
I teach adults in Jerusalem who often arrive believing that philosophy and religion are enemies. One thing I show them early is that even a successful argument for a first cause or a necessary being leaves a large question open: why call…
Started by Miriam Adler5 replies -
Heraclitus, Vasubandhu, Zhuangzi, Mulla Sadra: four routes to process, or four destinations?
It is often said that four thinkers, with no documented transmission between them, all arrived at a process view of reality: Heraclitus in Greece, Vasubandhu in India, Zhuangzi in China, and much later Mulla Sadra in Safavid Iran. The convergence is real.…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
Belief in God can be rational without arguments: Plantinga’s proper basicality deserves a fair hearing
I work at a hospital in Cairo, and in the evenings I read the arguments for God, usually in the order the kalam theologians would approve of. But I have come to think that the most interesting move in recent philosophy of…
Started by Omar Ragab5 replies