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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 -
Why does mathematics invented for its own sake keep turning up in physics?
Every year a student asks me what the point of complex numbers is. I tell them that for a long time mathematicians themselves treated them as a formal convenience, a trick for solving cubic equations, and that today quantum mechanics cannot be…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies -
We were taught “control what you can control” in the army. Was that Stoicism?
In my last years in the army, "resilience training" was introduced, and the instructors sometimes quoted Epictetus. Control what you can control. Let the rest go. Some officers had read about James Stockdale, the American pilot who was a prisoner of war…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun5 replies -
Adab, and the humanism that rarely gets the name
Much of my working time goes to books from a culture that, in the ninth to twelfth centuries, was organised around an ideal called adab. The word is hard to translate. It can mean manners and etiquette, and it can mean literature.…
Started by Mona Fathy5 replies -
What does ziran, “self-so”, actually mean, and why do people call it the centre of Daoism?
Maturana and Varela described living things as autopoietic, self-making: a cell produces the very components that produce it. A friend in Santiago told me that Daoism had a word for something similar, ziran, which she translated as “self-so” or “of itself so”.…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo5 replies -
Is it irrational to have no precise credence at all about something like life on Europa?
A friend asked me last month, after a news piece about the Europa missions, what probability I would put on there being life in its ocean. I said I had no idea. She pushed: “Just a number, roughly.” I said somewhere between…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
Moore’s “here is one hand” is not really an argument, and that is exactly why it works
There is a move my best debaters make without ever having heard of G. E. Moore. When the other team builds an elaborate case for a conclusion everyone in the room knows is false, you do not attack the premises one by…
Started by Sam Ellery6 replies -
Nishitani on nihilism: you have to go through it, not around it
This year I have been reading the Kyoto School slowly. The book that has helped me most this year is Nishitani Keiji's Religion and Nothingness, read slowly in Japanese with the English translation beside it. Nishitani, who studied with Heidegger in Freiburg…
Started by Aiko Tanabe4 replies -
Is Nyāya tarka a kind of counterfactual reasoning, and does it need possible worlds?
Reading Nyāya, I am always delighted by how close their techniques are to the proofs I teach. One that puzzles me is tarka, which I have seen translated as "hypothetical reasoning", "suppositional reasoning" or "reductio". The classic example seems to go like…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies -
What did Horkheimer mean by ‘traditional’ versus ‘critical’ theory?
I operate a gantry crane at the container port in Marseille and I'm a union delegate. Someone at a union education weekend said the Frankfurt School started with an essay by Max Horkheimer called "Traditional and Critical Theory", from 1937, and that…
Started by Hugo Marchetti4 replies -
Is Vasubandhu’s doctrine of momentariness the same as modern stage theory?
I guide trekkers in the Annapurna region and have read about Buddhist philosophy for years, mostly in tea houses. Recently a friend showed me a chart of Western theories of persistence and pointed to one called exdurantism or stage theory: nothing strictly…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung4 replies -
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 -
Adab, li and hexis: is character trained the same way in three traditions?
When a girl comes to learn batik in my mother's workshop, she doesn't begin by drawing. She begins by preparing cloth, heating wax, watching. She learns how to sit, how to hold the canting, how to speak to the older women. After…
Started by Ratna WulandariAnswer first (no replies yet)