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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 -
Why trekkers weep at the top of the Thorong La, and whether Kant would understand
Eight months a year I take groups over the Thorong La on the Annapurna circuit. At the top, a little over 5,400 metres, something happens to about one person in five. They cry. Strong people, bankers, soldiers. They are exhausted and the…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung4 replies -
The last person and the kelp forest: does nature matter when no one is left to value it?
Last month, on a long dive in the kelp, I found myself thinking about Richard Routley's "last man" thought experiment from 1973. Imagine you are the last human being. You're dying; nobody will come after you. Before you go, you set out…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo4 replies -
What is a genuine consultation for? Consensus, shura and the contractualist test
Contractualism's core question, "could you justify this to everyone it affects?", is usually treated as a test you run in your head. I've been wondering what it looks like as a practice. Wiredu argued that traditional Akan politics was organised around consensus…
Started by Kwame Asante4 replies -
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 -
Rousseau said the English were free only at election time. Was he right about the rest of us?
In Book III of The Social Contract, Rousseau has a line that hit me hard: the English people think they are free, but they are badly mistaken; they are free only during the election of members of Parliament, and once those are…
Started by Dana WhitfieldReply first (no replies yet) -
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