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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 -
Alston’s parity argument fails because rival mystical practices contradict each other
I want to defend a fairly standard objection, but coming from physics I want to state it carefully, because I think the usual version undersells Alston. Alston's move in Perceiving God (1991) is clever. We cannot justify trusting sense perception without relying…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
Four ventilators, seven patients: is triage consequentialism with a human face, or something else?
During the worst weeks of an outbreak, our hospital in Addis Ababa had four ventilators and, on one night, seven patients who needed them. We used a triage protocol: allocate to those most likely to survive with treatment, and, among similar cases,…
Started by Tsion Bekele6 replies -
If there is no self, who has free will? Is there a Buddhist position at all?
A Swiss client asked me last month what Buddhism says about free will. I said it depends what you mean, which was true but cowardly. Here is my confusion. Buddhism teaches anattā, no self. Everything arises from causes and conditions; nothing is…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung6 replies -
Should a health service record race? Notes on the hardest practical case
In thirty-four years at a surgery in Leith I filled in ethnicity boxes on more forms than I can count, and rarely thought about what they were for. Retirement has given me time to. Here's the dilemma as I now see it.…
Started by Alistair Gow6 replies -
Thirty-four years in a GP surgery: is a patient with advanced dementia still the same person?
I managed a GP surgery in Leith for thirty-four years, and the question I heard most often across the desk in the last decade was some version of "she isn't the person she was". It was said by husbands, daughters, neighbours, sometimes…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
Camus and Heidegger both rejected the label. So who actually counts as an existentialist?
I read Camus on breaks at the port, and I was surprised to learn he refused to be called an existentialist. Then I found out Heidegger rejected it too, in his ‘Letter on Humanism’, which seems to be partly an answer to…
Started by Hugo Marchetti5 replies -
Who was Hunayn ibn Ishaq, and what was new about the way he translated?
Visitors to my shop often ask me about the "House of Wisdom" and the translators of the Abbasid age, and I realise I repeat the same few sentences I learned at school. The name I hear most is Hunayn ibn Ishaq. I…
Started by Zainab Kadhim4 replies -
If almost nothing the Cārvākas wrote survives, how do we know what they thought?
I've been reading about the Cārvāka or Lokāyata school, the Indian materialists, and every introduction says something like "almost no Cārvāka text survives; the school is reconstructed from the summaries its opponents wrote." As someone who studies texts, this worries me. If…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
Translating “being” into Vietnamese: are some metaphysical disputes artefacts of grammar?
I translate French philosophy into Vietnamese, and the hardest word is être. French uses one verb for three jobs: "the sky is blue" (predication), "God is" (existence), and "Paris is the capital" (identity). Vietnamese splits them. For identity and classification we use…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo5 replies -
Knowledge by presence: does Suhrawardi show why experience resists description?
I edit films in Tehran, which means my working day is spent deciding what time and space should feel like to someone else. The one thing I cannot edit is what it feels like to be me watching the cut. Suhrawardi, the…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam5 replies -
Sextus, Nāgārjuna and Wang Chong within about a century: one sceptical moment, or three projects?
Between treks I read about the history of philosophy, and I came across a striking claim: that in roughly a century or so, around the second century CE, three traditions with no documented contact each produced a great critic of confident assertion.…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung5 replies -
Calling Wang Fuzhi a materialist hides more than it reveals
Some older textbooks my students find online still call Wang Fuzhi (Chuanshan) a "materialist". The label comes mostly from twentieth-century scholarship that wanted ancestors for a materialist philosophy, and it has a respectable basis: Wang made qi the sole reality and treated…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Can someone explain Ibn Sina’s propositions that are necessary ‘as long as’?
I started reading the history of logic because the Ash'ari material I love keeps assuming you know Ibn Sina. A survey chapter on Arabic logic lost me at one point, and I'd like a patient explanation. It says Ibn Sina split a…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam5 replies -
Charity is for evaluating arguments, not for reporting what people actually said
I keep running into a problem with the principle of charity. In philosophy the rule is good: before you object, reconstruct the argument in its strongest form. An objection to a weak version proves nothing about the strong one. I accept that.…
Started by Sana Rizvi6 replies -
What a prison reading class taught me about reading an ancient text for the first time
Twice a week I volunteer at a men's prison in Nairobi, teaching a reading class. Over two years philosophy has quietly taken over the syllabus, and the text that changed everything was Plato's Apology: Socrates on trial for his life. I've learned…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma5 replies -
Can revelation give moral knowledge to someone who does not share the faith that received it?
For the past year I have been reading Saadia Gaon's Book of Beliefs and Opinions in the original Judaeo-Arabic. Saadia, writing in tenth-century Baghdad under the influence of the kalām, divides the commandments into those that reason can reach by itself (do…
Started by Tal Rosen5 replies -
Affirming the consequent on a hospital ward
My nephew is a medical student in Cairo, and listening to him describe his ward rounds I've realised that his teachers spend a lot of their time correcting a logical fallacy, and also committing it. A student says: if this patient had…
Started by Omar Ragab5 replies -
Reading group: Wimsatt and Beardsley, then Barthes, then Hirsch on who owns a text’s meaning
My after-school reading circle keeps asking whether a story means what the writer meant, so I am going to read the three classic essays properly, and I would love company here. Week 1. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy"…
Started by Keisha Monroe6 replies -
A patient believes she will recover against the odds. Is that irrational?
A situation I meet in different forms every month, described here as a composite. A woman with a serious illness has, by the best evidence we have, about a one in three chance of recovering. She tells her doctor, and me, calmly…
Started by Tsion Bekele4 replies -
What is Husserl’s “retention”, and how is it different from simply remembering?
I play the organ at a parish church in Kraków and teach music theory. Every Sunday I play hymns the congregation has sung hundreds of times, and every Sunday the same puzzle comes back to me. When the third note of a…
Started by Agnieszka Malinowska5 replies -
A firm that closes a site owes its workers more than the law requires
Over the years I've watched three firms in our district of Marseille close sites. In each case the company did what the law required: notice, severance at the legal rate, the formal consultation. In each case people who had given twenty or…
Started by Hugo Marchetti5 replies -
If virtue ethics says ‘do what the virtuous person would do’, how does a beginner use that?
Reading Aristotle slowly, with a pencil, I have hit something that bothers me. I suspect it is a beginner's worry, so forgive me. The summaries I have read say virtue ethics tells you to act as a virtuous person would act in…
Started by Gerrit Venter5 replies -
Thirty-four years of anxious calls about screening results, and base rates still trip me up
At the Leith surgery where I worked for a long time, the call I dreaded most was not the one about a cancer diagnosis. It was the one about a positive screening test that probably meant nothing. The arithmetic is simple once…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
What is Beauvoir actually claiming with ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’?
The line from The Second Sex gets quoted at me constantly, by people who think it settles every argument about gender in one direction and by people who think it's obviously false. I've realised I don't actually know what Beauvoir meant by…
Started by Aoife Kilbride5 replies -
One source of knowledge, two, four, five or six? Why Indian schools argued over the count
My working epistemology is Bayesian: there is one way to learn, which is to update on evidence. So I was surprised to find that classical Indian philosophers organised epistemology around a different question, how many sources of knowledge (pramāṇa) there are, and…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga5 replies -
The incredulous stare is a perfectly respectable argument against modal realism
I have been reading the threads on Lewis and his infinitely many concrete worlds. I am told the standard response, the "incredulous stare", is not an argument, and that Lewis himself said so. I want to defend the stare. Doctors routinely reject…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
What is apoha, and how can a word mean something by excluding everything else?
Please be gentle; I'm new to formal philosophy. In a seminar on translation someone mentioned that the Buddhist philosopher Dignāga held that the word “cow” means something like “not non-cow”. Everyone nodded. I laughed, because it sounded like a riddle, and then…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies