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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) -
What did Tolstoy mean when he called art an ‘infection’?
Last week one of the men in my prison class read out a verse he'd written in his cell and asked: "Is this art, or only feelings?" Someone suggested I look at Tolstoy, who apparently said that art is "infection" with the…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma5 replies -
Reading group: Bazin’s What Is Cinema?, starting with ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’
A friend sent me André Bazin's essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (1945), and it begins with my trade: Egyptian mummies, portraits, the old human wish to preserve a being against time. Bazin calls it a ‘mummy complex’ at the origin…
Started by Chiara Bellandi5 replies -
On the Confucian view there is no self behind your roles, and that is a strength
My students meet Confucius as a list of duties to memorise. I want them to meet the boldest reading of him instead, and I'd like to test it here first. The reading, associated especially with Henry Rosemont and Roger Ames, goes like…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
How did Buddhist ideas first get into Chinese, and why did Daoist words matter so much?
I'm a poet and translator in Kochi, mostly between Malayalam and English. I've been reading about how Buddhist texts were first translated into Chinese, and I keep seeing the claim that Buddhist concepts "entered through Daoist vocabulary". Apparently in the early centuries…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies -
Reading group: Vitoria’s lectures On the American Indians and On the Law of War
Francisco de Vitoria gave his relectiones at Salamanca in the 1530s. Two of them, usually known as On the American Indians and On the Law of War, both from 1539, are where a Dominican theologian asked whether his own crown's conquest in…
Started by Valentina Ríos4 replies -
Where do Zhu Xi’s li and qi fall in the substance-versus-process divide?
I recently saw a comparative table that sorted traditions by their answer to "what is real?". It placed Neo-Confucianism under "pattern and material force, inseparable in every thing" and left it outside the neat line it drew between substance traditions (Aristotle, Vedānta,…
Started by Lin Pei-shanAnswer first (no replies yet) -
Frankfurt’s unwilling addict and the men in my prison reading class
Last month my prison reading class read a summary of Harry Frankfurt's essay "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person", and it landed harder than anything we've read. Frankfurt distinguishes first-order desires (I want a drink) from second-order desires…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma5 replies -
Dreyfus’s critique of AI has aged better than Searle’s Chinese Room
I want to defend an unfashionable ranking. Of the two classic objections to the idea of thinking machines, the one that has earned its keep is Hubert Dreyfus's, not John Searle's. Searle's argument rests on an intuition about what the man in…
Started by Derek Hollis7 replies -
Gundissalinus didn’t read Arabic: philosophy translated through spoken Castilian
The mechanics of translation are my daily bread, so I can't stop thinking about a detail I've just learned about the twelfth-century Toledo translations. Dominicus Gundissalinus, the archdeacon who put Ibn Sina's work on the soul and parts of his Healing into…
Started by Tal Rosen5 replies -
In the five Confucian relationships, friendship is the odd one out. Why is it there?
My students memorise Mencius's list of the five relationships for exams: affection between father and son, rightness between ruler and minister, distinction between husband and wife, proper order between elder and younger, and trust (xin) between friends. They memorise it and never…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Rasa and ordinary emotion: why can grief in a play be a kind of delight?
Rasa theory seems to answer a question the emotion threads here haven't asked: why do we enjoy sad things? In Bharata's Nāṭyaśāstra, rasa is produced when the causes of an emotion (the situation and characters), its outward expressions and its passing accompanying…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies -
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