All topics
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Does every culture have a word for ‘art’? Technē, kalā and the Japanese ‘ways’
I spend a lot of time warning people about false friends in comparison. One of the biggest sits under the whole debate about defining art. Greek technē is usually translated "art", but it means skilled making of any kind: medicine, shoemaking, navigation,…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
Reading group: Gettier’s three pages, with Russell’s clock and Dharmottara’s mirage alongside
The thing I love most about Gettier's paper is that it works like a failing test case. One counterexample, cleanly stated, and a definition that looked settled stops compiling. It is also the shortest famous paper I know, so it is an…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Frege and Husserl started on the same side. What was the psychologism dispute about?
I've been reading about the split between analytic and continental philosophy because my colleagues treat it as two tribes. What surprised me is that both traditions are said to trace back, around 1900, to two men who agreed about something: Frege and…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen5 replies -
The Qin collapse did not refute Han Feizi; the Han dynasty quietly proved him right
I read Han Feizi to understand why the Legalists won, at least for a while. The standard story is a morality tale. The Qin adopted Legalism wholesale: uniform law, harsh punishment, rewards for service, no reliance on the ruler's virtue. They unified…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
Al-Fārābī’s virtuous city looks different on a bad day in a bookshop
On quiet afternoons in the shop I read al-Farabi, who lived and taught in this city a thousand years before me. In The Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City he compares the excellent city to a healthy body, in which…
Started by Zainab Kadhim5 replies -
Is a brilliantly made propaganda film a great film, or only a skilful one?
At a workshop for journalists on propaganda, we watched long stretches of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935), her film of the 1934 Nazi party rally at Nuremberg. Afterwards the room split badly. Some said: it is a great film made…
Started by Sana Rizvi5 replies -
Reading group: Dummett’s ‘The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic Logic’
I keep noticing that people defend intuitionistic logic for two very different reasons. Brouwer's reason was a picture of mathematics as mental construction. Dummett's reason, in his 1973 paper "The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic Logic", was a theory of meaning. I'd like…
Started by Ana Clara Ferreira5 replies -
Nāgasena’s condition for talking with a king: argue as scholars do, not as kings do
Early in the Milindapañha, the Questions of King Milinda, the king asks the monk Nāgasena to discuss with him. Nāgasena answers with a condition. He will talk if the king will talk as scholars do, not as kings do. What's the difference?…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara5 replies -
How does Islamic legal reasoning decide on a financial product that no text mentions?
Our product team at the bank is looking at a "buy now, pay later" service. Inevitably someone asked whether it's halal. Someone else said, a bit dismissively, that the Qur'an and hadith obviously don't mention smartphone instalment apps, so either the scholars…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies -
Kumārila said a cognition is valid until shown otherwise. Is that internalism or externalism?
The Mīmāṃsā school I follow holds a doctrine called svataḥ prāmāṇya, intrinsic validity. I have been reading the internalism and externalism debate in English, and I would like to know whether this doctrine belongs on one side, or whether the map does…
Started by Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya5 replies -
What are Udayana’s arguments for God, and whom was he arguing against?
I am an atheist, and I am tired of Western debates about God being treated as the only debates. India had a long, sophisticated argument about a creator, and I know far less about the theist side of it than I should.…
Started by Arvind Poojary5 replies -
Critical theory diagnoses domination brilliantly but cannot say why it is wrong
I work as an economist at a bank in Valencia, and Marx, Rawls, Hobbes and Ibn Khaldun share a shelf at home. I'd like to press an old objection to critical theory and see whether it still bites. Critical theory asks what…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
Reading group: Longinus, On the Sublime, in four sittings
Before Burke and Kant there was a short Greek treatise, probably from the first century CE, by an author we do not really know. The manuscript names "Dionysius or Longinus", and scholars have argued about who wrote it and when ever since.…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
Reading group: Plotinus, “On Beauty” (Ennead I.6), the treatise he is said to have written first
I work in a library in Alexandria, and Plotinus studied philosophy here with Ammonius Saccas before he moved to Rome. That is reason enough for me to propose reading him together. "On Beauty" is the obvious place to start. It is short,…
Started by Mona Fathy5 replies -
“A hundred scriptures cannot make fire cold”: Śaṅkara’s rule for when scripture and perception collide
Discussions here of reason and revelation usually draw on Ibn Rushd and Maimonides. They deserve it. But the Advaita tradition worked out its own conflict rule, and I think it belongs in the same conversation. For Śaṅkara, scripture (śruti) is a means…
Started by Arjun Iyer5 replies -
Reading group: al-Ghazālī on the remembrance of death, the last book of the Revival
The book I return to most often when I visit the sick is the fortieth and final book of al-Ghazālī's Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, the Revival of the Religious Sciences: Kitāb dhikr al-mawt wa-mā baʿdahu, the book of the remembrance of death and…
Started by Bilal Rashid5 replies -
Reading group: Feyerabend’s Against Method, with the Galileo chapters at the centre
Anyone who reads psychoanalysis learns early that Popper used Freud as his model of a theory that explains everything and therefore says nothing. So I've always had a soft spot for Feyerabend, who argued that no methodological rule survives contact with the…
Started by Martín Iriarte5 replies -
What Ibn al-Haytham actually did, and why “father of the scientific method” overstates it
Every few weeks someone sends me a graphic declaring that Ibn al-Haytham invented the scientific method centuries before Bacon. I understand the impulse. The standard Western story did put the origins of experimental practice far too late. But the slogan replaces one…
Started by Layla Sfeir5 replies -
Does ubuntu ground human rights, or quietly replace them with duties?
I support families facing eviction in Johannesburg, and I think ubuntu is a serious legal idea, and also a slogan that is easily abused. This question sits right on that line. In S v Makwanyane (1995), the case that abolished the death…
Started by Thandeka Mokoena5 replies -
My brother’s conversion: can an experience be real and its interpretation wrong?
My younger brother is an engineer, a careful and slightly dry man, raised like me without religion. Last spring he spent a week at a Benedictine abbey, mostly because a colleague recommended the silence. He came back saying that during the night…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
Navya-Nyāya’s language of limitors, and what it was built to do
Every few months someone tells me that Navya-Nyāya was "Indian predicate logic". I'd like to test that claim with people who know Frege better than I do. The school is usually dated from Gaṅgeśa's Tattvacintāmaṇi in the fourteenth century. What Gaṅgeśa and…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Trustee or plain citizen? Nasr’s khalifa and Leopold’s land community
A Persian garden is a strange object: entirely human-made, geometric, irrigated by channels that took enormous labour, and yet everyone who walks in feels that it is a picture of something given, not imposed. I've been reading two environmental thinkers who seem…
Started by Reza Tehrani5 replies -
When philosophers ask what exists, what would even count as an answer?
I come to this from literature, so forgive me if the question is naive. In a seminar last week someone said ontology is "the study of what there is". I nodded along, and then on the bus home I realised I had…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies -
Al-Shaybani’s siyar and the scholastics reached civilian immunity separately
In retirement I have been reading Majid Khadduri's 1966 translation of al-Shaybani's siyar, published as The Islamic Law of Nations. Al-Shaybani (749–805) was a student of Abu Hanifa, and his work on the siyar is one of the earliest systematic treatments of…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
Devadatta is fat but never eats by day: is Mīmāṃsā “postulation” just inference to the best explanation?
When I read about sources of knowledge comparatively, I like to point out that the European and Indian debates ask different questions. The European one asks which source does the real work, senses or reason. The Indian one asks how many irreducible…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
There can be no laws of human behaviour, only useful regularities
The "law" of demand is not a law in the sense the law of gravitation is, and I have said so to every new analyst I have trained. Here is the thesis in full. Social science finds regularities. Some are robust: Ibn…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
When rhetoric and poetry were counted as logic: the Arabic Organon and al-Jāḥiẓ on eloquence
I keep a secondhand bookshop off Mutanabbi Street. People come in for poetry far more often than for logic, and they are surprised when I tell them that for centuries the two were shelved together. In the Arabic tradition, following late-antique practice,…
Started by Zainab Kadhim5 replies -
Reading group: Russell’s ‘On Denoting’ (1905), and the puzzle of the hare’s horn
Bertrand Russell's "On Denoting", published in Mind in 1905, has been called a paradigm of philosophy, and it is also short. It is the best example I know of predicate logic being turned on ordinary language, so I'd like to read it…
Started by Oskar Nyberg5 replies -
Reading Rumi as love poetry without the path is reading something he did not write
I grew up in Shiraz hearing the Masnavi read aloud. Its opening, the lament of the reed cut from its reed-bed, longing to return, is perhaps the most famous passage in Persian. Abroad, Rumi is one of the best-selling poets in the…
Started by Reza Tehrani5 replies -
Reading group: Kripke, Naming and Necessity, Lectures I and II
Naming and Necessity began as three lectures given at Princeton in January 1970, transcribed with very light editing. It reads like a man talking, digressions and all, which makes it more fun than most philosophy and occasionally harder to pin down. Plan…
Started by Oskar Nyberg5 replies