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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 -
Vitaṇḍā is not always illegitimate: a critic with no thesis can still be doing philosophy
There is one problem in Nāgārjuna I have been chewing on for a long time. The Nyāya tradition calls vitaṇḍā illegitimate: one party only attacks and never defends a position, so they risk nothing and cannot be wrong. That seems fair as…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung7 replies -
The deepest split in metaphysics is substance versus process, not matter versus mind
I want to defend a claim I came across in a comparative table of answers to "what is real?" across traditions. Most introductions organise metaphysics around matter versus mind: materialism, idealism, dualism. That division is real, but it's largely a European early-modern…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
Reading group: the Nyāya-sūtra on debate, from the sixteen categories to the points of defeat
Several threads here have touched on the Nyāya distinction between vāda, jalpa and vitaṇḍā. I'd like to read the primary text together, since most of us (me included, honestly) know it through summaries. Text. The Nyāya-sūtra attributed to Gautama (Akṣapāda), with Vātsyāyana's…
Started by Meera Kulkarni6 replies -
Reading group: Sima Qian’s postface and his letter to Ren An
My students meet Sima Qian as a name in a list of Han dynasty achievements. I would like to read him properly, as someone who thought hard about what a historian is for. The plan, three weeks: Week 1. The postface to…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
What is music for? Xunzi, Plato and my parish choir
I play the organ at a parish church in Kraków and teach music theory at a secondary school. Every Sunday I see music do something to a congregation that a sermon can't, and I want to know what philosophers have thought that…
Started by Agnieszka Malinowska5 replies -
Did Adam Smith change his mind between The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations?
Adam Smith is buried in the Canongate Kirkyard, and since retiring I've been reading him properly for the first time. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) opens by saying that however selfish we may suppose a man to be, there are principles…
Started by Alistair Gow4 replies -
Williams was right: an endless life would eventually become unbearable
Editors think about endings more than is healthy. A film that never ends is not a better film. It is a worse one, and after a while not a film at all. Bernard Williams makes an argument like this about immortality, in…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam6 replies -
“The best ruler is barely noticed” is compatible with abandonment, and the Legalists exploited exactly that
Chapter 17 of the Daodejing ranks rulers. The best are those whose people barely know they exist. Next come those the people love and praise; then those they fear; then those they despise. And when the work is done, the people all…
Started by Chen Yuting6 replies -
Saving a theory with an auxiliary hypothesis is often exactly the right move
In 2011 a neutrino experiment at Gran Sasso reported particles arriving slightly faster than light. If you took naive falsificationism literally, special relativity was refuted that afternoon. Nobody I know believed it. The collaboration itself asked for scrutiny, and the anomaly was…
Started by Lars Eriksen6 replies -
Can technomoral virtues be cultivated the way Confucian ones are, or is the borrowing too loose?
My students spend most of their waking lives on their phones, so Shannon Vallor's Technology and the Virtues (2016) caught my attention. She argues that rules and impact assessments cannot keep up with technologies that change every year, and that what we…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Is there a fact about how many people were in Fes one morning in 1200, if nobody recorded it?
My students love questions like this one. On a particular morning in the year 1200, there was some exact number of people inside the walls of our city. Nobody counted. No register survives, and no amount of future research will ever find…
Started by Youssef Berrada5 replies -
If nobody deserves punishment, could a court actually run on Pereboom’s quarantine model?
I studied law in Lahore and have never quite stopped reading it. Lately I have been reading Derk Pereboom, who argues that free will in the sense needed for basic desert does not exist, whether determinism is true or not. He does…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
Mencius’s child at the well, seen from a delivery room in Sylhet
I have worked on a maternity ward for nineteen years. Last month a friend lent me a translation of Mencius, and I stopped at the passage about the child at the well and read it three times. Mencius says that anyone who…
Started by Farhana Akter5 replies -
Does “wrong” mean the same thing in every language, or does each language build in a moral theory?
In the last year I have spent more time translating the word “wrong” than any other. In ordinary Vietnamese, the word we would use most often for “wrong”, sai, also means simply “incorrect”: a wrong answer on a test, a wrong turn.…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo5 replies -
Frege said logic is not psychology. A materialist would like a word
In the introduction to The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884), Frege lays down as his first principle that the psychological must be sharply separated from the logical, the subjective from the objective. Husserl later made the anti-psychologism case at length in the Prolegomena…
Started by Priya Raghavan4 replies -
Care ethics has no convincing account of what we owe to strangers far away
Working alongside GPs persuaded me that care is morally basic in the consulting room. What I'm not persuaded of is that it can be a whole ethics. The thesis: if moral obligation is grounded in particular relationships and the responsiveness they call…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
Bullough’s fog at sea, seen from an edit suite in Tehran
Edward Bullough's 1912 essay on "psychical distance" begins with a fog at sea. For the passengers it is mostly misery and anxiety: delays, danger, the foghorn. But if you can set the practical side aside, the fog becomes strange and beautiful: the…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam4 replies -
Is Zhu Xi’s li a universal? What does ‘principle is one, manifestations many’ mean?
I teach ethics at a secondary school in Seoul. Toegye is on the 1,000-won note and my students can tell you he was a Neo-Confucian, but not what that means. This term I am trying to explain li (理, "principle" or "pattern")…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu5 replies -
Reading group: Eva Kittay’s Love’s Labor and the dependency critique of Rawls
Eva Kittay's Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (1999) is one of the books that turned care ethics from a set of intuitions into a challenge to political philosophy. I have dipped into parts of it for years, but I've…
Started by Femke Bosman5 replies -
Reading group: Émilie du Châtelet’s Foundations of Physics, the opening chapters
Reading women in early modern philosophy, I keep meeting Émilie du Châtelet (1706–1749) in footnotes as Voltaire's companion and as the translator of Newton's Principia into French. Both true, and both shrink her. Her own book, the Institutions de physique (1740), is…
Started by Valentina Ríos4 replies -
Reading group: Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief” and James’s “The Will to Believe” side by side
These two essays are a classic pairing and they are both short, so I'd like to read them together over four weeks. The question they share is the one at the center of debates about rationality: should you believe only what the…
Started by Dana Whitfield6 replies -
Twenty years of translating have convinced me that meaning is use
Every day at work I meet words that the dictionary claims to define and that my clients use in ways the definition doesn't cover. Heimat is the famous German case, but the ordinary words are worse. “Fair” in English. Geist. The French…
Started by Claire Dubois6 replies -
Anton Wilhelm Amo’s impassive mind: a better dualism than Descartes’s?
When the philosophy club I run at school reaches mind and body, I always start with Anton Wilhelm Amo, the philosopher born near Axim on the Gold Coast around 1703, taken to Germany as a child, educated at Halle and Wittenberg, and…
Started by Kwame Asante5 replies -
Why does arguing about a song feel different from arguing about coriander?
I'm new to aesthetics, so bear with me. Last weekend a friend called a song I love "objectively bad", and I was genuinely hurt, more than I would be if she said she hated my cooking. When people disagree about coriander, nobody…
Started by Elif Yıldız5 replies -
Norms are neither true nor false, so there is no logic of obligation, only a logic about obligations
This puzzle has bothered me since I read Kelsen as a law student in Lahore. Logic, as usually understood, is about relations between things that can be true or false: if the premises are true, the conclusion must be. But norms ("you…
Started by Hamza Qureshi4 replies -
Crackle lines in batik: a flaw my mother taught me to keep
In hand-drawn batik, after the wax is applied and the cloth goes into the dye, the wax sometimes cracks. Dye seeps into the cracks and leaves fine veined lines across the pattern. Some makers try to avoid it. My mother taught me…
Started by Ratna Wulandari4 replies -
“Seventy faces” and “no verse leaves its plain sense”: the rabbis held both at once
This tripped up my Tuesday study group last month and I have not stopped thinking about it. On one side, there is the midrashic saying that the Torah has seventy faces. A verse can bear many readings, and the tradition records them…
Started by Eliana Halpern4 replies -
Reading group: Gould and Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco” (1979)
Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin's paper, published in 1979 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, is one of the few biology papers whose title became a philosophical term. Its target is what they called the adaptationist programme: the habit of…
Started by Priya Raghavan4 replies -
Why did Maimonides say he could have read Genesis figuratively, if eternity had been proved?
I guide visitors around the old Jewish quarter in Córdoba, where there is a statue of Maimonides in a small square. Visitors photograph it and ask me what he believed. Usually I say something about reason and faith and move on. A…
Started by Rafael Lucena Prieto5 replies