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‘Existence precedes essence’ is an empirical claim, and the evidence is against it
I want to argue that existentialism's founding premise is not a metaphysical axiom but an empirical claim, and a shaky one. In his 1945 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre puts it plainly: for human beings, existence precedes essence. There is no…
Started by Priya Raghavan6 replies -
I caught myself apologising to the chatbot that took over half my job
I work in a call centre, and since spring the first line of every complaint goes to a chatbot. I only get the callers it gives up on, who arrive already furious. Last week, on a dead night shift, I had a…
Started by Gemma Pritchard6 replies -
Quine was right that even logic could be revised in the light of experience
Be gentle but not too gentle. We read the end of Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951) in a seminar last week, and I think its most radical claim is correct: no statement is immune to revision, logic included. The picture: our…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies -
Testimony is an independent source of knowledge, not reducible to perception or inference
The Nyāya school counts testimony (śabda) as a distinct means of valid knowledge (pramāṇa), alongside perception, inference and comparison. The Vaiśeṣikas and Buddhist epistemologists like Dignāga disagreed, reducing testimony to a form of inference: I infer the truth of what you say…
Started by Meera Kulkarni6 replies -
Are the words of the Veda abstract objects? Mīmāṃsā’s eternal language and Frege’s third realm
I teach Sanskrit in Varanasi and read Pūrva Mīmāṃsā. My tradition holds that the Veda is authorless (apauruṣeya), that words (śabda) are eternal, and that the relation between a word and its meaning is not created by anyone. The Mīmāṃsā Sūtra says…
Started by Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya6 replies -
Existentialism can ground an ethics, and Beauvoir showed how
The standard charge is simple: if there are no given values, then anything goes. Sartre promised an ethics at the end of Being and Nothingness and never published one; the Notebooks for an Ethics came out only after his death. Beauvoir did…
Started by Claire Dubois6 replies -
Hobbes’s ‘sudden glory’ explains far more laughter than its critics admit
Every textbook dismisses the superiority theory in a paragraph. Hobbes says in Leviathan chapter 6 that ‘sudden glory’ is the passion that makes the grimaces called laughter, caused either by some act of our own that pleases us or by seeing some…
Started by Javier Ferrandis6 replies -
If a machine might have interests, what do we owe it before we know?
Of course the thing that has eaten my semester is the one I was most sceptical about: whether anything is owed to AI systems that might have interests. Here's my difficulty. On the question of whether there is something it is like…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies -
The argument from marginal cases has never been properly answered
It pains me to agree with my effective altruism group on anything. But on this I do. The argument runs like this. Name the property that gives humans moral status. If it's rationality, language or moral agency, some humans lack it (newborns,…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies -
Beauty is objective
I want to defend a thesis that's unfashionable in literature departments: beauty is not merely in the eye of the beholder. Hume, in "Of the Standard of Taste" (1757), argued that though beauty depends on sentiment, some judges are better than others:…
Started by Kavya Menon6 replies -
Reading group for complete beginners: Plato’s Apology, slowly, in three sittings
Several newcomers have asked where to start, and my answer is always the same: Plato's Apology. It's short (an evening's reading), it's a real trial (Athens, 399 BCE), and it's the founding scene of philosophy as a way of life. Socrates, accused…
Started by Giulia Ferrante6 replies -
Parfit was right: identity is not what matters in survival
I'm the resident sceptic in my effective altruism group, but on this one I'm a believer, so bring your best objections. Parfit's argument in Part III of Reasons and Persons (1984), roughly: Suppose your brain is divided and each half placed in…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies -
Brain death is not death
I've seen the hospital handle brain death several times, and I'm told the clinical criteria are reliable. My question is philosophical: is a person who meets them actually dead? The 1968 Harvard ad hoc committee defined "irreversible coma" as a criterion of…
Started by Omar Ragab6 replies -
Why a joke dies in Leeds and kills in Salford: notes from a stand-up
I've started reading philosophy of humour because I want to know why the exact same bit, same words, same timing, can get silence in one room and a roar in another twenty miles away. The theory that has helped me most is…
Started by Gemma Pritchard6 replies -
Compatibilism answers a question nobody was asking
I have now heard about four lectures defending compatibilism, and every time I feel the same thing: it changes the subject. Hume says liberty is just a power of acting or not acting according to the determinations of the will. Fine. When…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu6 replies -
Affirmative action is required by justice, not merely permitted
In 2023, the US Supreme Court effectively ended race-conscious admissions in SFFA v. Harvard. India has the opposite constitutional structure: Articles 15(4) and 16(4) allow special provisions and reservations for disadvantaged groups, and Indra Sawhney (1992) upheld reservations for Other Backward Classes,…
Started by Deepa Kartha6 replies -
Falsifiability is not a good criterion for what counts as science
Karl Popper, in Logik der Forschung (1934; English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1959), proposed that a theory is scientific if and only if it's falsifiable: it makes predictions that could turn out false. As a physics teacher I used to…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha6 replies -
An unjust law is not really law: legal positivism is mistaken
H. L. A. Hart's The Concept of Law (1961) defends the separation of law and morality: what the law is is one question, what it ought to be is another. Lon Fuller argued against this in their famous 1958 exchange in the…
Started by Hamza Qureshi6 replies -
A deliberate foul that accepts its penalty is still a move within the game
Here is a thesis from someone who builds rule systems for a living: a tactical foul, committed openly and paid for with the stated penalty, is part of playing the game, not a break from it. The strict formalist reading of Suits…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting6 replies -
Algorithmic hiring tools are inherently unjust
I don't say this lightly. Algorithms trained on past hiring decisions learn past discrimination. The best-known case: Amazon built an experimental recruiting tool that, as Reuters reported in 2018, learned to penalise CVs containing the word "women's" (as in "women's chess club…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman6 replies -
What does Kant mean when he says laughter is an expectation turning into nothing?
I am reading the Critique of the Power of Judgment slowly, with a pencil, and I have reached the remark after section 54, where Kant suddenly starts telling jokes. I did not expect this from him. His formula, in one standard English…
Started by Henrike Vogel6 replies -
Once you know how a food was produced, you cannot honestly taste it the same way
I grew up Jain, which means I have strong views on honey, onions and root vegetables, and I think every week about animal testing. So this is not a neutral thesis for me, but I want to argue it on terms anyone…
Started by Hetal Shah6 replies -
Langar, the Shabbat table and Confucius’s sauce: what does eating together do?
The langar, where I help out at our gurdwara in Surrey, goes back to Guru Nanak and was made central by the gurus who followed: a free kitchen where everyone, whatever their caste, faith or status, sits on the floor in the…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal6 replies -
Animals have moral rights, not just interests to be weighed
Peter Singer's Animal Liberation (1975) is often called the founding text of the animal rights movement, but Singer is a utilitarian: he argues animals' interests should be given equal consideration, which allows trading them off against others' interests. Tom Regan's The Case…
Started by Anand Kurup6 replies -
If a cheat wins the match, has he even played the game? Help me with Suits
I am working through a book my grandson gave me: Bernard Suits's The Grasshopper. I like it, but I keep losing the thread on one point. Suits says a game is an attempt to reach some goal using only the means the…
Started by Gerrit Venter6 replies -
Is the “flow state” players reach in a good game the same thing as wu wei, or a false friend?
I design puzzle games for a small studio in Tainan. Our whole craft is building challenges that match a player's skill closely enough that they lose track of time. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this "flow": deep absorption, loss of self-consciousness, action…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting6 replies -
Plato called my trade a knack. Why did philosophy decide taste and smell don’t count?
I've started reading the philosophers on food because I'm tired of being told it's ‘just subjective’ by people who have never had to fix a split sauce on a Friday night. What I found surprised me. In the Gorgias, Socrates sorts cookery…
Started by Joel D'Souza6 replies -
Writing an eligibility rule taught me that metaphysics doesn’t settle policy
For some years I served on the committee that wrote eligibility rules for our regional school competitions. I'm not going to argue here about any current controversy, and I'd ask others not to. I want to share something I learned that I…
Started by Gerrit Venter6 replies -
A model can work for decades without being true, and instrumentalism is the honest response
In my work we tune computer models of reservoirs to match years of production data, a process called history matching, and then use them to forecast. Here's the uncomfortable part: several quite different models of the rock underground match the same history…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam6 replies -
The Jains were right: a beginningless universe has no need of a creator
I grew up Jain in Ahmedabad and work the front counter of my family's pharmacy. Jain cosmology says the universe (loka) is uncreated and eternal. Time turns in great cycles of ascending and descending half-cycles, the utsarpiṇī and avasarpiṇī, and ages of…
Started by Hetal Shah6 replies