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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) -
Reading group: Porphyry’s Isagoge and the three questions he refused to answer
Porphyry wrote the Isagoge, a short "Introduction" to Aristotle's Categories, in the late third century. In the opening lines he raises three questions about genera and species, and then declines to answer them because they need a deeper inquiry: Do they subsist,…
Started by Siobhán Keane6 replies -
Schmitt’s uncomfortable point survives: no constitution can fully govern its own emergencies
Carl Schmitt's Political Theology (1922) opens with a sentence that every journalist covering courts eventually meets: sovereign is he who decides on the exception. The argument goes like this. Constitutions specify normal procedures. Emergencies arise that those procedures did not anticipate. Someone…
Started by Sana Rizvi6 replies -
Epicureans and Cārvākas: two ancient materialisms, two ideas of pleasure?
I have spent years arguing that the Cārvāka or Lokāyata materialists deserved a fairer hearing than their opponents gave them. Reading Epicurus, I keep seeing the comparison, and I want to test it. Both schools hold that there is no soul that…
Started by Arvind Poojary4 replies -
Udayana, Ibn Sina and Leibniz: three arguments for a first cause that do not need a beginning
People often assume that arguments for a first cause depend on the universe having a beginning. I want to compare three that don't, from three traditions. Udayana (Nyāya, eleventh century). In the Nyāyakusumāñjali he gives a series of inferences for Īśvara, starting…
Started by Meera Kulkarni6 replies -
Correlation is not causation, I tell my team. But what exactly is the missing ingredient?
Our credit-scoring models find patterns: people who top up airtime at regular times repay loans more often. Everyone on my team can recite "correlation is not causation". Nobody can say what causation adds. It matters practically. If regular top-ups merely correlate with…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga4 replies -
Is Nāgārjuna’s conventional truth a kind of instrumentalism about science?
In the tea houses on the Annapurna circuit I have been reading Nāgārjuna's Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way with a commentary a monk in Manang gave me. Last season a client of mine, a physicist, explained over dal bhat that some…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung5 replies -
Is there a film theory that starts from ma, rasa or the imaginal world rather than from Paris?
Almost every film theory I've read starts from France, Russia or America: Eisenstein, Bazin, Cavell, Carroll. They're wonderful, but when I watch Ozu, I feel the most important things happen in what those theories treat as gaps. In Japanese aesthetics there's ma,…
Started by Rin Matsuda6 replies -
Can Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica be read against its own hierarchy?
I read Vasconcelos ‘with admiration and a long list of objections’, as my profile says, and this year the list got longer. La raza cósmica (1925) is often taught in Mexico as an anti-racist text, and in one sense it is. Against…
Started by Valentina Ríos6 replies -
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