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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 -
Objections first: what the scholastic quaestio could teach a modern seminar
This term I've been reading the Summa Theologiae properly for the first time, article by article, and what has struck me is not the conclusions but the shape. Every article begins with “It seems that…” followed by objections against the position Aquinas…
Started by Aoife Kilbride5 replies -
When a prediction changes what it predicts: reflexivity in my day job
Last year my team built a model to predict which small-business customers would fall behind on repayments. It worked well on historical data. Then the business acted on it: flagged customers got tighter terms and more calls. Some of them, squeezed, did…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman4 replies -
Ageing is a disease, and medicine should treat it as one
I'll argue this as an outsider to medicine and expect to be corrected. Ageing is the largest single risk factor for most of what kills people in rich countries: cancers, heart disease, dementia. It involves the progressive failure of almost every bodily…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Langton is right: you can be silenced while still being allowed to speak
Rae Langton's 1993 paper "Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts" changes how some people think about speech every time my reading group takes it up. I want to defend its central idea against the objection that it is a clever stretch. The idea,…
Started by Femke Bosman5 replies -
Playing at a funeral: han, Schopenhauer, and why sad music helps the grieving
Last month I played the sarabande from Bach's fifth cello suite at the funeral of a student's grandmother. I have played it many times, but never for people in the first days of grief. Afterwards the family thanked me in a way…
Started by Moon Ha-eun4 replies -
Deconstruction is not “anything goes”, and its critics should stop saying it is
Every few months someone in a thread like this one says that Derrida licensed readers to make texts mean whatever they like. I want to argue that this is a caricature, and that it mostly comes from one misquoted sentence. The sentence…
Started by Martín Iriarte5 replies -
Is the Sanskrit sahṛdaya the same ideal critic as Hume’s “true judge”?
In my poetics classes the ideal reader is the sahṛdaya, literally "one with heart", or one whose heart is in tune with the poet's. Abhinavagupta, commenting on Ānandavardhana, describes such readers as people whose minds have been made clear, like a polished…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
What is threshold deontology, and isn’t it just consequentialism with extra steps?
In my constitutional law seminar we discussed whether rights can ever be suspended in an emergency. I mentioned the ADM Jabalpur case from 1976, when our Supreme Court accepted that even the right to life could not be enforced during the Emergency,…
Started by Deepa Kartha4 replies -
Reading group: P. F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment” (1962)
I teach a reading class at a men's prison twice a week, and free will comes up in nearly every session, never in the abstract. A man asks whether he deserves his sentence, or whether his father's violence "made him". I want…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma6 replies -
Why did Peirce abandon the word ‘pragmatism’ for something uglier?
I'm a community organizer in Chicago and I've been reading William James for a while, mostly because he writes like someone who has actually talked to people. In an introduction I read that Charles Sanders Peirce, who invented pragmatism, later renamed his…
Started by Dana Whitfield4 replies -
Translating wu wei as “effortless action” does more harm than good; better to leave it untranslated
I spend my working life with words that will not cross borders. Wu wei is a strange case for me, because in Vietnamese it already exists as a Sino-Vietnamese word, vô vi, and it carries baggage that English translators rarely notice. Consider…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo6 replies -
Reading group: Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (1998)
The question I'm asked most by students at the library is some version of "why did the Abbasids translate the Greeks?" The usual answers are curiosity, or the generosity of an enlightened caliph, or the House of Wisdom. Dimitri Gutas's short book…
Started by Mona Fathy5 replies