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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 -
Is the logician’s ‘if’ what a contract means by ‘if’?
In contract translation, conditionals are where most of my difficulties live. Arabic has several words that English renders as "if". Classical grammar distinguishes in, for an open possibility; idhā, for something expected to happen; and law, for the counterfactual, what would have…
Started by Tal Rosen6 replies -
Murdoch’s mother-in-law: is moral change mostly a matter of learning to see someone differently?
I've been rereading Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of Good (1970) and I keep coming back to the example in its first essay. A mother-in-law, M, finds her son's wife, D, tiresome: a bit common, too familiar, juvenile. M behaves perfectly correctly throughout.…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
Ibn Khaldun’s impossible-army test, applied to the stories that go viral
There is a passage in the Muqaddimah where Ibn Khaldun complains about earlier chroniclers. They recorded enormous army numbers because a source had recorded them, without asking whether such an army could be fed, watered, marched and supplied. His point is that…
Started by Youssef Berrada4 replies -
Does a cut make an argument? Notes from an edit suite in Tehran
My working day is spent deciding which shot follows which, and I've started to wonder what exactly I'm doing to the audience when I do it. The classic story is the Kuleshov experiment in early Soviet cinema. As it's usually told, an…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam6 replies -
Where is Hart’s rule of recognition actually written down?
One of my debaters ran a case on constitutional law last month and I realized I couldn't answer a basic question her opponent asked, so here I am. I've been reading Hart's The Concept of Law (1961). I follow the outline: primary…
Started by Sam Ellery5 replies -
Margaret Cavendish’s thinking matter: a forgotten alternative to laws imposed from outside
Reading about Sor Juana and women claiming the right to think in the seventeenth century, I keep meeting her English contemporary Margaret Cavendish. I want to make a case that Cavendish's natural philosophy deserves attention not just as a curiosity but as…
Started by Valentina Ríos4 replies -
Yūgen is not a Japanese sublime, and translating it that way loses the point
I have seen yūgen glossed as "the Japanese sublime" in two English books and one museum caption this year. I want to argue that this is a mistake, not just a loose translation. Kant's sublime has a definite shape. Something overwhelms: magnitude…
Started by Aiko Tanabe5 replies -
When the ventilators run out: lottery, first come first served, or most life-years saved?
During the pandemic a doctor friend in Nairobi described a night when her hospital had two ventilators and five patients who needed them. Since then I've been reading about allocation rules, and I'm surprised how much they disagree. The main options, as…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga5 replies -
Preferred indifferents: a real distinction, or having your health and despising it too?
I volunteer on a palliative-care unit and my own sympathies are Epicurean, so I come to this a little sceptical. The Stoics say virtue is the only good. Health, wealth, reputation, even life itself, are "indifferent": neither good nor bad. But then,…
Started by Nadia Haddad4 replies -
Kripke’s Gödel and Schmidt case: why would my word still pick out Gödel?
Every year when we reach the incompleteness theorems one student asks the same thing: what if somebody else actually did it? This year I went looking and found that Kripke used exactly that scenario. The setup, as I understand it: suppose the…
Started by Vikram Sethi4 replies -
Twelve-pointed stars in cedar: what is Islamic geometric pattern actually for?
My father taught me to lay out a star pattern for a ceiling with nothing but a compass, a straightedge and a cord. You start with a circle, divide it, draw lines that pass through the divisions, and the twelve-pointed star appears…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani5 replies -
Hume’s “true judges” are simply people with leisure, and Bourdieu showed it
Look at Hume's list of what makes a good critic: delicacy, practice, comparison, freedom from prejudice, good sense. Now ask who has the time to practise and compare. Not my father, who unloaded ships in Marseille for forty years and listened to…
Started by Hugo Marchetti5 replies -
Did the Latin scholastics really receive Aristotle through Arabic?
Almost every group I walk around Córdoba wants the same simple story: the Arabs preserved Greek learning during Europe's dark ages and then handed it back, and that is how Europe got Aristotle. I tell it with less and less confidence. I…
Started by Rafael Lucena Prieto4 replies -
Does doing science commit you to atheism? Methodological versus ontological naturalism
A student of mine who's a devout Christian asked me last week whether studying physics would make her an atheist, because, she'd been told, science assumes there's nothing but nature. I gave a muddled answer about how lots of scientists believe in…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha4 replies -
QBism says the wavefunction is my degrees of belief. What exactly is it claiming?
A colleague who knows I work with Bayesian statistics sent me an article about QBism ("quantum Bayesianism", though I gather some proponents now prefer just the acronym) with the note: "your people have taken over physics." As far as I can tell,…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga3 replies -
How can I tell an argument is valid when I don’t know what its words mean?
Forgive me if this is basic; I'm very new to formal philosophy. I met this pair of arguments in a logic primer: All whales are mammals. All mammals are warm-blooded. So all whales are warm-blooded. All zorps are blickets. All blickets are…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
What did Tolstoy mean when he called art an ‘infection’?
Last week one of the men in my prison class read out a verse he'd written in his cell and asked: "Is this art, or only feelings?" Someone suggested I look at Tolstoy, who apparently said that art is "infection" with the…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma5 replies -
Reading group: Bazin’s What Is Cinema?, starting with ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’
A friend sent me André Bazin's essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (1945), and it begins with my trade: Egyptian mummies, portraits, the old human wish to preserve a being against time. Bazin calls it a ‘mummy complex’ at the origin…
Started by Chiara Bellandi5 replies -
On the Confucian view there is no self behind your roles, and that is a strength
My students meet Confucius as a list of duties to memorise. I want them to meet the boldest reading of him instead, and I'd like to test it here first. The reading, associated especially with Henry Rosemont and Roger Ames, goes like…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
How did Buddhist ideas first get into Chinese, and why did Daoist words matter so much?
I'm a poet and translator in Kochi, mostly between Malayalam and English. I've been reading about how Buddhist texts were first translated into Chinese, and I keep seeing the claim that Buddhist concepts "entered through Daoist vocabulary". Apparently in the early centuries…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies -
Reading group: Vitoria’s lectures On the American Indians and On the Law of War
Francisco de Vitoria gave his relectiones at Salamanca in the 1530s. Two of them, usually known as On the American Indians and On the Law of War, both from 1539, are where a Dominican theologian asked whether his own crown's conquest in…
Started by Valentina Ríos4 replies -
Frankfurt’s unwilling addict and the men in my prison reading class
Last month my prison reading class read a summary of Harry Frankfurt's essay "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person", and it landed harder than anything we've read. Frankfurt distinguishes first-order desires (I want a drink) from second-order desires…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma5 replies -
Dreyfus’s critique of AI has aged better than Searle’s Chinese Room
I want to defend an unfashionable ranking. Of the two classic objections to the idea of thinking machines, the one that has earned its keep is Hubert Dreyfus's, not John Searle's. Searle's argument rests on an intuition about what the man in…
Started by Derek Hollis7 replies -
Gundissalinus didn’t read Arabic: philosophy translated through spoken Castilian
The mechanics of translation are my daily bread, so I can't stop thinking about a detail I've just learned about the twelfth-century Toledo translations. Dominicus Gundissalinus, the archdeacon who put Ibn Sina's work on the soul and parts of his Healing into…
Started by Tal Rosen5 replies -
In the five Confucian relationships, friendship is the odd one out. Why is it there?
My students memorise Mencius's list of the five relationships for exams: affection between father and son, rightness between ruler and minister, distinction between husband and wife, proper order between elder and younger, and trust (xin) between friends. They memorise it and never…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Rasa and ordinary emotion: why can grief in a play be a kind of delight?
Rasa theory seems to answer a question the emotion threads here haven't asked: why do we enjoy sad things? In Bharata's Nāṭyaśāstra, rasa is produced when the causes of an emotion (the situation and characters), its outward expressions and its passing accompanying…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies -
Perdurantism fits modern physics better than endurantism does
I trained in physics in Lagos and now tutor it, and I've been reading Theodore Sider's case for four-dimensionalism. I'm persuaded, and I want to put the argument from physics as strongly as I can. Relativity treats spacetime as a single four-dimensional…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha5 replies -
Nāgārjuna asked what proves the means of knowledge. Is that Agrippa’s trilemma in Sanskrit?
I have been translating parts of Nāgārjuna's Vigrahavyāvartanī (often rendered "The Dispeller of Disputes"), and one argument keeps reminding me of the Agrippan problem people discuss under foundationalism and coherentism. The opponent is a realist of the Nyāya type who says objects…
Started by Meera Kulkarni6 replies -
Watsuji’s betweenness, Akan personhood and Confucian roles: is the relation more basic than the person?
When I retired after forty years designing bridges, I was surprised by how much of “me” went with the job. I did not lose a role; I seemed to lose a person. A friend at the temple handed me Watsuji's Ethics and…
Started by Aiko Tanabe5 replies