All topics
-
Reading group: Benacerraf’s “What Numbers Could Not Be” and “Mathematical Truth”
Paul Benacerraf wrote two short papers that between them set the agenda for half a century of philosophy of mathematics. Both are in the Benacerraf and Putnam anthology Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings, and both are easy to find. Plan, three weeks:…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Reading group: how grief becomes rasa, from Lollaṭa to Abhinavagupta
The rasa debate is one of the great sustained arguments in Indian philosophy, and it is usually presented in a single paragraph that flattens it. I propose we read it slowly, commentator by commentator. The main difficulty is that the commentaries of…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Nāgārjuna says he has no thesis. Is “I have no thesis” itself a thesis?
There is a question I keep returning to, the oldest one in the long argument between Advaitins and Mādhyamikas. In the Vigrahavyāvartanī, answering a critic who says his claim that all things are empty refutes itself, Nāgārjuna says (I paraphrase): if I…
Started by Arjun Iyer5 replies -
Logic is the one part of philosophy that settles questions, and the rest should take note
People like to say that philosophy never makes progress, that we're still arguing about the same questions as Plato. Logic is the counterexample. For two thousand years, Aristotle's syllogistic could not handle inferences involving relations. "Every horse is an animal, so every…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Reading group: Frank Ramsey, “Truth and Probability” (written 1926)
Ramsey wrote “Truth and Probability” in 1926, when he was twenty-three, and it was published only after his death, in the 1931 collection of his papers edited by R. B. Braithwaite. It is the founding text of the idea that degrees of…
Started by Oskar Nyberg5 replies -
Atheists should retire the logical problem of evil: Plantinga answered it
I'm an atheist, so this is a thesis against my own side's habits. In "Evil and Omnipotence" (1955), J. L. Mackie argued that theism is not just unlikely but inconsistent: an omnipotent, wholly good God and the existence of evil cannot all…
Started by Arvind Poojary5 replies -
Reading group: Mozi’s “Against Music” and Xunzi’s reply, with the Analects as prelude
The oldest sustained argument I know about whether art is morally good for us took place in warring-states China, and it deserves to be read in full rather than in a footnote. I propose three weeks. Week 1. The Analects on music.…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
Predicate logic was discovered, not invented
Is logic discovered or invented? I want to argue that predicate logic is the strongest evidence that it is discovered. Consider the inference: every horse is an animal, so every horse's head is an animal's head. People knew for two thousand years…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak5 replies -
The Buddhist answer to ‘what makes a life go well’ refuses the shape of the question
Most theories of well-being name a good to pursue: pleasure, the satisfaction of desire, a list of objective goods, the development of human excellence, a life of virtuous activity. Even asceticism names one, freedom from appetite. The teaching I have followed for…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara5 replies -
Reading group: al-Bīrūnī’s India, the preface and the chapter on why understanding is hard
Around 1030 the scholar al-Bīrūnī completed a book usually known in English as India (or Alberuni's India). He had learned Sanskrit, read Indian works with pandits, and set out to describe Indian religion, philosophy and science as their adherents understood them. It…
Started by Layla Sfeir5 replies -
What does Ibn Sina mean by a thing that is “possible in itself, necessary through another”?
I am an architect, not a trained philosopher, so forgive me if this is basic. In reading about Ibn Sina I keep meeting a three-way division: the Necessary Existent in itself, things possible in themselves, and things that are possible in themselves…
Started by Reza Tehrani5 replies -
Are talk therapy and antidepressants treating the same thing?
I have been in psychoanalysis for years in Buenos Aires, and like many people here I have also seen a psychiatrist and taken medication. At some point I started asking whether the two were working on the same problem from two sides…
Started by Martín Iriarte5 replies -
Aquinas’s metaphysics is unintelligible without Ibn Sina
My students arrive believing that Aquinas is a Catholic synthesis of Aristotle and the Bible. That leaves out the man in the middle. My thesis is strong: Aquinas's metaphysics cannot be understood without Ibn Sina. The centre of Thomist metaphysics is the…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies -
How can death be bad for someone who no longer exists to be harmed?
We did Epicurus in my ancient philosophy module and I can't get past the argument, even though I don't believe the conclusion. As I understand it: harm requires a subject. While I'm alive, death isn't here. When death is here, I'm not.…
Started by Aoife Kilbride5 replies -
Novels give us moral knowledge that no argument can deliver
Every year in my classroom I watch the same thing happen. Students who have heard every argument about slavery, its cruelty, its injustice, its economics, read Toni Morrison's Beloved and come out changed in a way the arguments never managed. They don't…
Started by Keisha Monroe5 replies -
We enjoy tragic art because the grief belongs to no one in particular
Thesis: the best single explanation of why people seek out sad and terrible works is generalisation, the idea associated with Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka, that the work strips the emotion of its particular owner. The paradox: grief hurts, yet we pay for tragedies and…
Started by Arjun Iyer5 replies -
Reading group: Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, over four weeks
"Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" is the essay where the phrase "the myth of the given" comes from. It is famous, hard and shorter than its reputation. I would like to read it slowly with whoever is willing. Text. The Harvard…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Reading group: Plato’s Theaetetus, the three definitions of knowledge
Every year I teach the Theaetetus to my liceo students in fragments, and every year I promise myself I'll read it whole again with adults. This is that promise. It is the founding text of epistemology and also one of Plato's most…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
“But for the defendant’s act”: thirty-one years of counterfactuals from the courtroom
For three decades I reported on judgments that turned on sentences of the form "had the accused not done X, the deceased would not have died". I never asked what such a sentence is. It cannot be checked: the accused did do…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
Wittgenstein said philosophy “leaves everything as it is”. Is quietism a position, or a refusal to have one?
I translate for a living, and this year I have been rereading a book about the Philosophical Investigations. I keep returning to §124: philosophy may not interfere with the actual use of language; it can only describe it; it "leaves everything as…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
Reading group: Plato’s Gorgias in five weeks, one interlocutor at a time
I teach theology at a secondary school in Thessaloniki, and every year a student asks whether politicians are "just good at talking". I always want to hand them the Gorgias, and I have never read it closely with adults. Let's do that.…
Started by Nikos Theodoridis5 replies -
Reading group: al-Mawardi’s Ordinances of Government, on the conditions of legitimate rule
Al-Mawardi (972–1058) was a Shafi'i jurist and judge in Baghdad at a strange moment: the Abbasid caliph was the recognised head of the community, while real military power in the city belonged for most of his life to the Buyid emirs. His…
Started by Layla Sfeir5 replies -
Robert Adams’s modified divine command theory answers the ‘God could command cruelty’ objection
The standing objection to divine command theory is that if obligation depends on God's will as such, the content of morality could in principle have been anything. Had God commanded gratuitous cruelty, cruelty would have been obligatory. William of Ockham is often…
Started by Aoife Kilbride5 replies -
Reading group: Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, one section a week for six weeks
"Two Dogmas of Empiricism" first appeared in The Philosophical Review in 1951 and was reprinted, revised, in From a Logical Point of View (1953). It is perhaps the most cited paper in twentieth-century analytic philosophy, and many people who cite it have…
Started by Oskar Nyberg5 replies -
Reading group: Sen’s ‘Rational Fools’ and the problem of commitment
Amartya Sen's essay "Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioural Foundations of Economic Theory" appeared in Philosophy & Public Affairs in 1977 and is reprinted in his Choice, Welfare and Measurement. It's about thirty pages and it has been rattling around my…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Qiyās, kal va-chomer and legal analogy: defeasible reasoning with centuries of rules
The reasoning I heard most often from the bench, in all my years in court, was neither deduction nor statistics. It was analogy: this case resembles that one in the respect that matters, so it should be decided the same way. Islamic…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
Metaphysics is about what grounds what, not about what exists
For most of the last century analytic metaphysics followed Quine: the job of ontology is to say what exists, and existence is settled by what our best theories quantify over. Recently a neo-Aristotelian movement has pushed back. Jonathan Schaffer put it bluntly…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies -
An infinite chain of reasons is not a defect: the case for infinitism deserves more than a smirk
When students first meet the regress problem they are told there are three options and one of them is obviously absurd. Foundations, coherence, or an infinite regress; and who could believe in an infinite regress? I want to argue that infinitism, defended…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak5 replies -
Bentham was right that natural rights are nonsense, but wrong about why
Bentham's attack on the French Declaration of Rights, usually published as Anarchical Fallacies, contains the most quoted insult in political philosophy: natural rights are simple nonsense, and natural and imprescriptible rights are "nonsense upon stilts". His reason: a right is the creature…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak5 replies -
Reading group: Stoic logic in Diogenes Laertius, Lives Book VII
Chrysippus is said to have written hundreds of books, a large share of them on logic, and almost all are lost. What we have of Stoic logic comes mostly through later writers: Diogenes Laertius, who gives a summary of Stoic dialectic in…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies