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Were the Renaissance humanists secular? My paintings say otherwise
Visitors to the studio often tell me, kindly, that the Renaissance was when "humanism" replaced religion, when people stopped looking at God and started looking at man. Then they look at what's on my easel, which is almost always a Madonna, a…
Started by Chiara Bellandi4 replies -
Why do some translators refuse to render ren as ‘benevolence’?
This question came to me through my work. A French colleague asked me why English translations of the Analects disagree so much about the word 仁, ren: Legge often has "perfect virtue", D. C. Lau "benevolence", Waley and Slingerland "Goodness", others "humaneness",…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo5 replies -
Why does my SQL query treat NULL = NULL as neither true nor false?
Beginner question from a data analyst. Last week a report of mine undercounted customers by about four per cent. The bug was a filter like WHERE region 'KL', which I assumed would return everyone outside Kuala Lumpur. It also silently dropped every…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman4 replies -
Reading group: Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, three essays
Sitting in job centres and taking notes, as I often do, I've realised I'm doing amateur ethnography without having read the ethnographers properly, so I'm proposing three essays from Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). Week 1: ‘Thick Description: Toward an…
Started by Johanna Reinhardt6 replies -
Functionalism is officially neutral, but in practice it is materialism with better manners
Functionalism says mental states are defined by their causal roles: pain is whatever state is caused by damage, causes distress and avoidance, and so on, regardless of what realises it. Putnam's argument from multiple realisability in the 1960s made it the default…
Started by Priya Raghavan6 replies -
Reading group: William James, The Principles of Psychology, three chapters
William James published The Principles of Psychology in 1890, after twelve years of work. It is two huge volumes, and nobody should read it straight through. But three chapters are among the best things written about the mind, and they read like…
Started by Dana Whitfield5 replies -
Do exams measure anything worth measuring? A view from the bac philo
Exam season is coming round again in Dakar. In June my students sit four hours to write a dissertation on a subject of the kind "Is it reasonable to fear death?", "Can one be free without laws?", and so on. The exam…
Started by Khady Sène5 replies -
Testimonial injustice is a failure of knowledge, not only a failure of fairness
I teach eleventh-grade English in Atlanta, and every year we read To Kill a Mockingbird. Every year a student asks why the jury did not believe Tom Robinson when the evidence was on his side. And every year I hand them Miranda…
Started by Keisha Monroe6 replies -
If the Stoic technique works without the Stoic cosmos, the cosmos was never doing the work
Stoicism helped me back from a bad year. I read Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and practised separating what's in my control from what isn't. I don't believe in a rationally ordered cosmos governed by providence. The practice worked anyway. I keep reading…
Started by Rohan Desai7 replies -
Reading group: Ibn Khaldun on making a living, crafts and taxes in the Muqaddimah
Ibn Khaldun spent formative years at the Marinid court here in Fes. His Muqaddimah (1377) is famous for its theory of the rise and fall of dynasties, but the chapters on economic life are often skipped, and I think they're among the…
Started by Youssef Berrada5 replies -
Is it fair to call Nāgārjuna or Śrīharṣa a sceptic at all?
In English books on Indian philosophy two names are regularly filed under "scepticism": Nāgārjuna, the Buddhist founder of Madhyamaka, and Śrīharṣa, the twelfth-century Advaitin whose Khaṇḍanakhaṇḍakhādya (roughly "The Sweets of Refutation") takes apart the Nyāya definitions of valid cognition one after another.…
Started by Arjun Iyer6 replies -
Can you be a good person in a role that sometimes requires you to do bad things?
I am thinking of my years in the army, and I am not talking about atrocities. I mean ordinary things the role required: enforcing a punishment I thought was disproportionate because the regulation was clear, sending a capable young private on a…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun6 replies -
Frank Jackson gave up on Mary. Should the rest of us?
I came to philosophy from physics, and something about the knowledge argument has always interested me less than its history. Jackson's Mary knows every physical fact about colour vision, having lived her life in a black-and-white room. She leaves and sees a…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
Hountondji was right: a people’s worldview is not yet philosophy
Every year a student in my lycée class asks why we study Descartes and not ‘African philosophy’. I owe them a serious answer, and the most serious one I know is Paulin Hountondji's. In African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (originally 1976), Hountondji…
Started by Khady Sène7 replies -
How should a journalist judge a study in a field she knows nothing about?
Last month, in a case I was covering, an expert witness gave evidence on a forensic technique I had never heard of, with total confidence and a long list of qualifications. The defence's expert said the technique was unreliable, with equal confidence…
Started by Sana Rizvi5 replies -
One sustained note on the organ, and the case against beauty as proportion
This month I finally read Plotinus's treatise "On Beauty", the sixth of the first Ennead, and one argument has been sitting with me through every Mass. The old view, which my own tradition loved (Augustine's De Musica is full of it), says…
Started by Agnieszka Malinowska5 replies -
Reliabilism has a machine problem: reliable prediction is not knowledge
Some machine learning systems are very reliable: a fraud model that flags transactions correctly far more often than any human team. Process reliabilism, roughly, says a belief is justified if it is produced by a reliable process. So I want to run…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen6 replies -
Can a believer say “none of the proofs work” and lose nothing? Judah Halevi’s answer
I translate between Hebrew and Arabic, and Judah Halevi's Kuzari is a book I keep going back to, partly because he wrote it in Arabic about Judaism. The frame is a king who has a dream telling him his intentions please God…
Started by Tal Rosen6 replies -
Reading group: Philip Anderson, “More Is Different” (Science, 1972)
Anderson's essay is about exactly the phenomena that drew me into physics as a student. It is four pages long, written by a physicist who later won the Nobel Prize, and it has probably done more to shape physicists' attitudes to reductionism…
Started by Lars Eriksen6 replies -
Al-Fārābī’s virtuous city and Plato’s philosopher-king: the same answer for different reasons?
Baghdad is the city where al-Fārābī did much of his work a thousand years ago, and on bad days I find it hopeful that someone here once believed a city could be organised around wisdom. Al-Fārābī's Principles of the Opinions of the…
Started by Zainab Kadhim4 replies -
Asking a smoker to picture their daughter’s wedding is not manipulation
At the hospital where I interpret, a lot of the work is trying to get people to stop doing things that will kill them. Here's a familiar situation. A doctor I work with gives a patient the figures on smoking: mortality, heart…
Started by Tsion Bekele6 replies -
The al-Ghazali–Hume parallel is shallower than the textbooks suggest
The sentence I most often find myself correcting in discussions is "al-Ghazālī anticipated Hume". I'd like to argue that the parallel, though real, is shallower than it is usually made to look. The shared step is this: we observe one event accompanying…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
Cartwright is right: the fundamental laws of physics are false of real things, and that’s fine
No oil reservoir has ever behaved exactly as my equations say. Every model is an idealisation: uniform permeability, simplified boundary conditions, ignored chemistry. We calibrate, we fudge, we history-match. And yet the models are useful. Nancy Cartwright's How the Laws of Physics…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam5 replies -
The tumour cases: why does a cause we can see on a scan excuse, when one we can’t see doesn’t?
At the hospital I have met patients whose personalities changed with a lesion: a meningioma, a frontal stroke. Families say "it's not him, it's the illness", and they are usually right to. There is a famous case reported in a neurology journal…
Started by Tsion Bekele6 replies -
If ātman already is brahman, what is left for liberation to do?
Recently I started on Advaita Vedānta, and one idea has stopped me cold. As I understand it, the claim is that the self (ātman) already is ultimate reality (brahman). "Tat tvam asi", you are that, as Uddālaka tells his son in the…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies -
Dai Zhen was right: moral principle used to crush desire is itself a cruelty
My students memorise Zhu Xi for their exams, and one slogan of the Cheng–Zhu school always sticks: preserve heavenly principle, eliminate human desires. They write it down without blinking. Dai Zhen (1724–1777) blinked. A Qing scholar trained in the philological methods of…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Do I see that an old woman is being humiliated, or do I infer it? Moral perception on a night shift
Last month, when I went with one of our residents to the hospital, a senior doctor spoke to her as if she were not there, discussing her bowels with a junior doctor across her bed. I did not reason my way to…
Started by Elin Hedqvist5 replies -
What does Fazang mean when he says the rafter simply is the building?
I was a structural engineer for forty years, so I came to Fazang's writings expecting to find something about parts and wholes I could recognise. Instead I found the dialogue about the rafter and the building, in which the claim is made…
Started by Aiko Tanabe5 replies -
Genealogy and the genetic fallacy: can the history of a value ever count against it?
Every introductory logic course warns against the genetic fallacy: where a belief came from does not settle whether it is true. Your racist uncle may believe the earth is round, and it is. And yet a whole style of moral philosophy works…
Started by Johanna Reinhardt5 replies -
My student doubts the moon landing but trusts the bus timetable. Is that scepticism?
One of my brightest students has decided that the Apollo moon landings were staged. I have tried evidence: the retroreflectors left on the surface that observatories still bounce lasers off, the rock samples, the sheer number of people who would have had…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha4 replies