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Why is a banknote money when a perfect copy of it is not?
When Ghana changed its currency in 2007 and took four zeros off the cedi, my mother kept a tin of the old notes. For a while you could exchange them. After that they were just paper. Same paper, same printing, same faces.…
Started by Akosua Mensah4 replies -
How can a piece of music be sad when it has no feelings to have?
We have just finished the soundtrack for our new game. In the final level the player has to leave a companion character behind, and our composer wrote a slow piece for it. Playtesters keep telling us the music is "so sad". Some…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting4 replies -
What is “defeasible” reasoning, and why do people say most good arguments aren’t valid?
I read philosophy on the bus home. Last week I read that "most good real-world reasoning is not valid at all", and the word that kept coming up was defeasible. Here is my problem. In the kitchen I reason all day. The…
Started by Joel D'Souza4 replies -
What did Bernard Williams mean by ‘one thought too many’?
A book on care ethics I borrowed keeps quoting Bernard Williams's phrase "one thought too many", and I think I understand it but I want to be sure. As I understand the case: a man can save only one of two drowning…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
I know I shouldn’t shout at drivers who cut me off, and I still do. How is that possible?
When someone cuts in front of my bus at a stop, I shout. I know it does nothing. I know it is bad for my heart, bad for the passengers, and that the other driver cannot hear me. I have decided, many…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
I do tax returns. When a colleague gets a different total, should I move halfway?
I prepare tax returns for small businesses. Last week a colleague and I each worked through the same client's figures. I got one total; she got a total about two hundred dollars higher. We are equally experienced, equally careful, neither of us…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal4 replies -
Diogenes and the naked Jain monk are not doing the same thing
When I read about Diogenes, people kept saying he was like our Digambara monks: no possessions, no shame about the body, indifferent to comfort. There's even a historical thread: a writer called Onesicritus, said to have been a pupil of Diogenes, went…
Started by Hetal Shah4 replies -
Why do philosophers say “in some possible world” instead of just “possibly”?
I design puzzle games, so I spend my days building small worlds with rules. When I started reading about modality I kept seeing sentences like "there is a possible world in which you became a dentist." Why not just say "you could…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting4 replies -
My daughter says the thermostat wants the room warmer. Is she wrong?
I spend my days answering my children's questions, and this one stumped me. We were cold, the heating clicked on, and my seven-year-old said, "The thermostat wants it warmer." Her brother said machines can't want anything. They looked at me. I said…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
Are emotions judgments, feelings, or both?
In my emotion psychology course we covered three families of theories: feeling theories, like the James–Lange theory (1880s): an emotion is our perception of bodily changes, so we're afraid because we tremble, not the other way round cognitive or judgment theories, like…
Started by Elif Yıldız4 replies -
My new cooks believe everything I tell them about safe temperatures. Do they actually know it?
Every few months a new commis arrives in my kitchen, often very young, and the first week is mostly me telling them things. Chicken has to reach a certain core temperature. Rice left out too long is dangerous. This knife is for…
Started by Joel D'Souza4 replies -
How does rasa theory compare with Aristotle’s catharsis?
I studied rasa theory in my literature classes and Aristotle's Poetics in a single comparative class. My professor said they're answering the same question: why do we enjoy art that shows painful emotions? But I'm not sure. Can someone explain what rasa…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
Iqbal’s khudi and Nietzsche’s Übermensch: influence or polemic?
Iqbal's Persian poem Asrar-i-Khudi (1915), translated by R. A. Nicholson as The Secrets of the Self (1920), makes the self, khudi, the centre of his philosophy. The self must be strengthened, disciplined and creatively asserted, not dissolved in mystical annihilation. Western readers…
Started by Hamza Qureshi4 replies -
The kalam cosmological argument: what the mutakallimun actually argued
The argument that William Lane Craig revived in The Kalam Cosmological Argument (1979) has three steps: whatever begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore the universe has a cause. The name comes from kalam, Islamic theology. Al-Kindi…
Started by Omar Ragab4 replies -
Does quantum indeterminacy help free will at all?
People sometimes argue that because quantum mechanics is indeterministic, there's room for free will. Having studied physics, I'm sceptical. First, randomness isn't freedom. If my decision depends on a random quantum event, it isn't more mine than if it were determined. Second,…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha4 replies -
Mulla Sadra’s substantial motion: is everything changing at the level of substance?
For Aristotle, motion happens in a few categories only: quantity (growth), quality (a leaf turning red), and place. Substance doesn't move; it's the stable subject of change. When one substance becomes another, that's generation and corruption, not motion. Mulla Sadra disagreed. His…
Started by Reza Tehrani4 replies -
Ibn Khaldun’s asabiyya and the rise and fall of states
The central concept of the Muqaddimah is asabiyya, usually translated "group feeling" or "solidarity". Ibn Khaldun argues that groups living hard lives on the margins of civilisation, often nomadic or tribal, develop strong solidarity. That solidarity lets them conquer settled states. Once…
Started by Youssef Berrada4 replies -
Night shifts and Epictetus: the dichotomy of control in a care home
The Enchiridion opens by dividing things into those up to us (our judgments, impulses, desires and aversions) and those not up to us (our bodies, property, reputation, office). Epictetus says that suffering comes from treating the second kind as though it were…
Started by Elin Hedqvist4 replies -
The Nyaya five-membered syllogism versus Aristotle’s three
I've recently started comparing two traditions of logic. The Nyāya inference for others (parārthānumāna) has five members: Thesis (pratijñā): the hill has fire. Reason (hetu): because it has smoke. Example (udāharaṇa): wherever there is smoke, there is fire, as in a kitchen.…
Started by Vikram Sethi4 replies -
What is the epoché, and why would bracketing whether the world exists help anyone?
A friend who did philosophy says what I do at the wine-show judging table is "basically phenomenology", which flattered me until I tried to read about it. The bit I'm stuck on is the epoché, or "bracketing". As far as I can…
Started by Bec Doyle4 replies -
Our CEO keeps announcing “paradigm shifts”. Is that what Kuhn meant?
I have sat through a lot of pitch meetings where someone announced a paradigm shift. A new app for ordering groceries: paradigm shift. Moving the team to four-day weeks: paradigm shift. My last investor used it three times in one call. I…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies -
What did R. S. Peters mean by calling education an initiation?
I have started reading philosophy of education because I want to understand what I am doing when I teach them at home in the evenings. An introductory book I borrowed says R. S. Peters, in the 1960s, described education as "initiation into…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
Can a tidy ledger be beautiful? What is “everyday aesthetics” about?
There is a moment near the end of every tax return I prepare, when the columns reconcile and the ledger is clean and everything is where it should be, that gives me a feeling I can only call aesthetic. My husband laughs…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal4 replies -
My rice cooker says ‘fuzzy logic’. Is that just probability with a nicer name?
We bought a Japanese rice cooker with "Fuzzy Logic" printed on the front, and it has become a running joke in the kitchen. The Filipino line cook says the rice is "fuzzy done". The pastry chef says everything in the kitchen is…
Started by Joel D'Souza4 replies -
“Not necessarily” versus “necessarily not”: can someone explain the difference with an everyday example?
My older child, who is nine, has started catching me out on words. Yesterday I said "it won't necessarily rain at the picnic". She said, "So it necessarily won't rain?" I said no, that's different. She said, "How?" and I realised I…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
Why does Cora Diamond say we don’t eat our dead, and what does that have to do with animals?
My son, who is eight, asked me last week whether the cat knows it is a cat, and then whether it is wrong to eat chicken if the chicken does not know it is a chicken. I did not have a good…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
Half my class says they are nihilists. What exactly are they claiming?
I teach Introduction to the Philosophy of the Human Person to sixteen-year-olds in Davao. This term, about half the class announced they were nihilists. When I asked what that meant, I got: "nothing matters", "there's no right or wrong", "we can't really…
Started by Rowena Abellana4 replies -
Rasa and catharsis: is tasting an emotion the same as purging it?
I grew up with rasa theory the way some people grow up with grammar. Recently I read Aristotle's Poetics for a class and was told that catharsis is "the Greek version of rasa". I don't think it is, and I want to…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste as political philosophy
In 1936 B. R. Ambedkar was invited to give the presidential address at the annual conference of the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal, an anti-caste Hindu reform group in Lahore. When the organisers saw the text, they asked him to remove parts, he refused, and…
Started by Deepa Kartha4 replies -
Predictive processing and the Buddhist idea of constructed perception
In cognitive science, the predictive processing framework (Andy Clark's Surfing Uncertainty, 2016; Jakob Hohwy's The Predictive Mind, 2013) says the brain is constantly generating predictions about incoming sensory signals, and what we perceive is largely the brain's best guess, corrected by prediction…
Started by Priya Raghavan4 replies