All topics
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Hacking’s test for reality: if you can spray it, it’s real. Does that work for genes?
Ian Hacking, in Representing and Intervening (1983), argued that we should stop expecting theories to settle what exists. Look at the laboratory instead. Experimenters spray electrons at a target to change its charge. They use electrons as tools, reliably, to investigate something…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo4 replies -
Can someone explain Danto’s Brillo boxes to a capoeira teacher?
At our community centre in Salvador, an exhibition opened last month. On one wall was a berimbau, hung up with a small label: the same instrument I play every week in the roda. People stood in front of it quietly, the way…
Started by Jorge Bonfim4 replies -
Should knowing that Caravaggio killed a man change how we see his paintings?
Every year someone on a guided tour asks me the same question in front of a Caravaggio. In 1606 he killed Ranuccio Tomassoni in a fight in Rome and fled, and spent his last years on the run under a death sentence.…
Started by Chiara Bellandi4 replies -
Nine countries in one kitchen and no agreement on salt: can food be judged like art?
Every one of my cooks arrived knowing exactly how much salt, sour and heat a dish needs, and every one of them knew something different. My Keralite cooks find the Lebanese lentil soup timid. The Filipino cooks find my Goan vindaloo too…
Started by Joel D'Souza4 replies -
Every invoice needs some approver: why does the order of quantifiers change the meaning?
One of my clients, a small business, has an internal policy that says: "Every invoice must be approved by some manager." Two of their managers have now spent a month arguing about it. One reads it as: each invoice needs a manager's…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal4 replies -
A student in my prison class asked why anyone should obey an unjust law. What did Aquinas say?
This came up in my prison reading class. Last week we read part of Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail, where he says, following Augustine, that an unjust law is no law at all, and appeals to Aquinas for how to…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma4 replies -
A river is not scenery, and environmental aesthetics should stop treating it like a view
In 2017 the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand was recognised in law as a legal person, Te Awa Tupua. The iwi of that river have a saying: Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au, I am the river and…
Started by Aroha Tipene4 replies -
Why does ‘the shape caused the door’ sound so wrong if Aristotle meant it?
When I was an apprentice my father explained Aristotle's four causes to me with a door: the cedar is what it is made of, the design is its form, I am the one who makes it, and it exists to be a…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani4 replies -
Is the ban on riba about bad outcomes, or about the form a transaction may take?
Many of my clients in Surrey are Muslim. Several of them won't take a conventional loan. One explained that it's not because the interest rate is too high; it's that a guaranteed return on money lent is wrong in itself, whatever the…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal4 replies -
What is quasi-realism, and is it a form of realism or a clever way of avoiding it?
One of my debaters ran a case last weekend built on what she called “quasi-realism”, and the judge, a philosophy undergraduate, nodded along as if it were obvious. I did not understand it and I do not like coaching things I do…
Started by Sam Ellery4 replies -
Was Kant an idealist in the same sense as Berkeley?
I mostly read medieval philosophy, so the eighteenth century is a foreign country to me. A friend in my book club said, rather confidently, that Kant is "just Berkeley with extra steps": both say the world is in the mind, Kant just…
Started by Siobhán Keane4 replies -
How did Cynicism turn into Stoicism? What did Zeno keep from Crates, and what did he drop?
I'm a startup founder in Mumbai, recently burnt out, and reading my way back via the Stoics. Everywhere I read that Stoicism "grew out of" Cynicism, and that Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, studied with the Cynic Crates. But the two seem…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies -
Natural, necessary and empty desires: running a small winery by Epicurus’s sorting
I make small-batch wine in the Adelaide Hills. The irony of an Epicurean in the wine trade isn't lost on me, but I've found his sorting of desires the most useful bit of ancient philosophy I've ever read. In the Letter to…
Started by Bec Doyle4 replies -
My son says a philosopher proved time is unreal. What are the A-series and B-series?
I farm cocoa near Kumasi. My son is at university and sends me articles from his course, and I send him back proverbs. This week he sent me something by McTaggart, who he says proved that time is not real. I told…
Started by Akosua Mensah4 replies -
When I look at a plate, am I seeing the plate or a picture my brain makes of it?
I draw picture books for a living, and the first thing every drawing teacher tells you is "draw what you see, not what you know". The standard exercise is a dinner plate on a table. You know it is round. But if…
Started by Rin Matsuda4 replies -
Sancho’s kinsmen and the key on the leather thong: Hume’s taste essay from a wine judge
Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste" is pinned to my shed wall, mostly for one story he borrows from Don Quixote. Two of Sancho's kinsmen are asked to judge a hogshead of wine. One tastes it and says it would be good…
Started by Bec Doyle4 replies -
Why does asking “how do you know?” three times end every argument in our house?
My younger one is seven and has discovered the most powerful question in the world. I say the shop closes at nine. "How do you know?" Because it says so on the door. "How do you know the door is right?" Because…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
When I play a Bach suite from memory, is that the same “memory” philosophers argue about?
I play cello in a chamber ensemble and teach children. This spring I memorised the third Bach suite for a recital, and something happened on stage that I keep thinking about. Halfway through the Bourrée my mind went blank. I could not…
Started by Moon Ha-eun4 replies -
My debaters keep talking past each other on gender. Are they even answering the same question?
Last season a practice round with my debate team on a gender-related resolution went off the rails, not because the students were rude (they weren't) but because after forty minutes nobody had engaged anybody. One side kept saying the category is grounded…
Started by Sam Ellery4 replies -
Wang Yangming’s unity of knowing and acting, read alongside Anscombe
My students memorise Wang Yangming's slogan, the unity of knowing and acting (zhi xing he yi), without believing a word of it. Obviously, they say, you can know something and not do it. They know they should study. Wang's reply, in Instructions…
Started by Lin Pei-shan4 replies -
Is Aristotle’s “final cause” an explanation, or just a story about purpose?
When I first read Aristotle's four causes I recognised my trade immediately. The material cause of a door is the cedar. The formal cause is the pattern, the geometry my father taught me. The efficient cause is my hands and my tools.…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani4 replies -
Why did Hobbes think sovereignty could not be divided?
I have no formal background in politics, so this is train reading. I've been going through a history of the English Civil War and then dipped into Leviathan, and I'm puzzled. Everything I learned at school says separation of powers is obviously…
Started by Siobhán Keane4 replies -
Can you get a proverb wrong, or only use it in a new way?
My son sent me an essay that quotes a proverb I have known all my life: Obi nkyerɛ abɔfra Nyame, "No one shows a child God". His essay reads it as saying children should be left alone to find religion for themselves.…
Started by Akosua Mensah4 replies -
What do fa, shu and shi mean in Han Feizi?
Zhuangzi sat unread on my father's shelf for most of my life. Next to him was a battered copy of Han Feizi, which I've now started on as well. I'm not a scholar, so please be patient with me. I keep meeting…
Started by Liu Mingqiao4 replies -
Where do Ubuntu and Confucian role ethics fit, if they are neither utilitarian, Kantian nor virtue ethics?
I teach capoeira Angola in Salvador, and I am new to academic ethics. In a free course online, the lecturer said there are three main moral theories: consequences, duties and virtues. Then, in a footnote, she said Ubuntu and Confucian ethics “don't…
Started by Jorge Bonfim4 replies -
Can someone walk me through the Frege–Geach problem without the jargon?
A friend recommended an introduction to ethics and I got stuck on one page for most of a week. The book explained emotivism, the view that “stealing is wrong” is not a statement of fact but an expression of disapproval, a bit…
Started by Siobhán Keane4 replies -
The “false friend” warning about Hume and anattā is overstated
I've read the warnings: Hume's bundle theory is not the Buddhist doctrine of not-self, because Hume merely reports failing to find a self, while Buddhism asserts its absence and builds a practice on it. I agree with the facts. I think the…
Started by Alistair Gow4 replies -
My daughter asked why Plato wanted to ban stories. What exactly did he ban?
I read to my children every night, a mix of the Panchatantra, Tamil folk tales and whatever they bring home from the library. My eight-year-old saw a book on my shelf and asked what it was about. I said, a little carelessly,…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
What is pragma-dialectics, and what makes a “critical discussion” different from ordinary arguing?
In a moot court workshop a visiting lecturer kept referring to "pragma-dialectics" and "the rules for a critical discussion", as though everyone knew what they were. I nodded and didn't. From what I've gathered, it comes from Frans van Eemeren and Rob…
Started by Deepa Kartha4 replies -
How much of just war theory is really in Augustine?
Every introduction I read says that Augustine founded the Christian theory of just war. So I went looking for the treatise. I have read a fair amount of The City of God for other reasons and could not find one. What I…
Started by Siobhán Keane4 replies