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Everyone already knew: what truth commissions teach about common knowledge
I spent eight years reporting on Colombia's peace process and the truth commission. One phrase I heard constantly, from victims, officials and former combatants alike: "Everyone already knew." And in a sense they did. People in the regions knew who had disappeared,…
Started by Andrés Zuluaga5 replies -
The four-principles framework is too individualist for family-centred medicine
I first read Beauchamp and Childress as a student, and I admired it. But my work interpreting at the hospital keeps showing me where it doesn't fit. A typical case: an older man with a serious diagnosis. By the book, the doctor…
Started by Tsion Bekele6 replies -
“You are your relationships”: is that Confucius, or a modern reading of him?
I'm a retired teacher reading the Analects slowly with a commentary, and I keep meeting a claim in the secondary literature that I can't quite find in the text. The claim, associated with Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont and their "role ethics",…
Started by Henrike Vogel5 replies -
Reading group: Ibn Hazm’s The Ring of the Dove, four weeks through al-Andalus
Córdoba is the city where Ibn Hazm was born in 994 and which he watched being torn apart in the civil wars of his youth. Visitors know Ibn Rushd and Maimonides; almost nobody knows that the same city produced one of the…
Started by Rafael Lucena Prieto5 replies -
Does knowing what a kelp forest is make it more beautiful, or just different?
When I take visitors down into the kelp, most of them see brown weed swaying in murky water and come up politely bored. When I take students who have studied the system, who know that the kelp can grow astonishingly fast, that…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo4 replies -
Reading group: Hume’s Treatise on reason, passion and the source of moral distinctions
I have finally started reading Hume properly in retirement, and I would like company for the passages that underlie most modern arguments about moral motivation. Three short sections of A Treatise of Human Nature, one a week: Week 1. Book 2, Part…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
If I know myself “by presence”, why am I so bad at knowing my own motives? Suhrawardi meets psychology
In my psychology courses, self-knowledge is treated as a model the brain builds of itself, and a fairly unreliable one. People misreport their own motives all the time. So I was surprised to find, in a book about Persian philosophy, the claim…
Started by Elif Yıldız5 replies -
Reading group: van Fraassen’s The Scientific Image, on realism and explanation
The Scientific Image (1980) is the book that made anti-realism respectable again after a period when scientific realism seemed to have won. It's short, dense and often witty. I'd like to read the parts that matter most for the realism debate. Plan,…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak5 replies -
Reading group: William James’s Varieties, from ‘Religion and Neurology’ to the mysticism lectures
James gave the Gifford Lectures here in Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902, and they became The Varieties of Religious Experience. I have walked past the building for decades without reading the book, which seems a poor show for someone who spent his…
Started by Alistair Gow6 replies -
Reading group: Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, the first two chapters
Jonas published Das Prinzip Verantwortung in 1979 and the English version, which he prepared with David Herr, came out in 1984 as The Imperative of Responsibility. I taught ethics for years without reading it properly, and now that I have time I…
Started by Henrike Vogel5 replies -
Reading group: Rousseau’s Social Contract in four weeks, in French and English
Every year my terminale students in Dakar meet Rousseau on the syllabus, and every year I find something new in Du contrat social (1762). I'd like to read it slowly with people who will argue. Texts. I'll read the French. For English…
Started by Khady Sène6 replies -
Austin answered the argument from illusion, but the argument from hallucination survives him
Lately I have been rereading J. L. Austin's Sense and Sensibilia (1962), the lectures reconstructed after his death in which he takes apart A. J. Ayer's sense-datum theory. Austin's treatment of the stick in water is brilliant. The argument from illusion says:…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen5 replies -
“Why did this happen to me?” What do we owe someone who asks?
Last month my cousin, a woman in her forties who has never smoked, was diagnosed with lung cancer. When I sat with her afterwards she asked: “Why did this happen to me?” I gave her a good answer, I thought, from what…
Started by Omar Ragab5 replies -
Reading group: Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method, chapters 1 to 3
In my reading class at the prison, one of the men asked whether crime is “just normal” in every society. I said I would find out who had argued that. It turns out Durkheim did, in The Rules of Sociological Method (1895),…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma4 replies -
A role-based ethics gives too little protection to the person the roles are failing
I study constitutional law in Delhi, and Ambedkar is my lodestar. In Annihilation of Caste (1936) he attacked a social order in which a person's duties are fixed by the position they are born into, and argued that such an order leaves…
Started by Deepa Kartha6 replies -
Objectivity belongs to scientific communities, not to individual scientists
I work alongside physicists, and I have never met an objective one. I include myself. We all have pet ideas, we read data in their favour, we are slow to give up an interpretation we have published. And yet I believe physics…
Started by Lars Eriksen6 replies -
Take away the rational cosmos and Stoic ethics becomes a coping technique
My students discover Marcus Aurelius on their phones before they discover him in my classroom, usually as short videos about controlling what you can control. I am glad they find him. But I want to defend a thesis that spoils the mood…
Started by Giulia Ferrante6 replies -
Williams’s integrity objection, not the arithmetic, is the deepest problem for utilitarianism
I have read a fair amount about moral injury, the damage done to people who were made to do, or failed to prevent, things that violated their deepest commitments, often in situations where every option was bad. Bernard Williams's essay in Utilitarianism:…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun6 replies -
Knowing without doing is not knowing: Wang Yangming’s strong internalism is simply correct
Every year I teach my students Wang Yangming's slogan that knowledge and action are one, and every year they treat it as an inspirational poster. I want to defend it as a serious thesis about moral motivation. The usual view, in China…
Started by Lin Pei-shan6 replies -
Why did Confucian thinkers rarely ask whether the will is free?
A colleague who teaches European philosophy asked me what the Confucians said about free will versus determinism. I realised I had nothing to give him. The tradition talks constantly about effort and cultivation. Xunzi says goodness is the product of deliberate effort.…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu5 replies -
The Axial Age is defined by its exclusions, and that makes the thesis unfalsifiable
Every survey of world philosophy I've read includes the Axial Age: between about 800 and 200 BCE, in Greece, India, China and Israel, with no documented contact between them, something similar happened. People began defending claims against stated objections, named individuals disagreed…
Started by Mateo Quispe6 replies -
Every legal code I know contradicts itself somewhere, and courts still function
Every legal system I know contains provisions that conflict: a later statute that cuts across an earlier one, a general rule and a specific exception that both seem to apply, a constitutional provision in tension with an ordinary law. If classical logic…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
‘Killing robbers is not killing people’: the Later Mohists on inferences that fail
One passage in the Later Mohist texts seems to me to belong in any discussion of what predicate logic was invented to handle. In the chapter of the Mozi usually called the "Lesser Selection" (Xiaoqu), the Mohists discuss a kind of inference…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
Xunzi says the sages invented ritual and rightness. Does that make him a moral anti-realist?
I came to Xunzi through the debate with Mencius about human nature. That debate is usually told as optimism against pessimism: Mencius thinks we are born with the sprouts of goodness, Xunzi thinks our nature is crooked and goodness comes from deliberate…
Started by Elif Yıldız5 replies -
How did Frederick Douglass argue against the race science of the 1850s on its own terms?
I know Douglass from the Narrative and the Fourth of July speech, but someone here mentioned that he also gave a commencement address in 1854, ‘The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered’, taking on the scientists of his day. I've started reading…
Started by Dana Whitfield5 replies -
Calling al-Jahiz a forerunner of Darwin does him no favours
Every few months someone sends me a graphic headed "Evolution, 1,000 years before Darwin", with a portrait of al-Jahiz (c. 776–869) that nobody painted from life. I work on classical Arabic texts, and I want to argue that the "forerunner" label shrinks…
Started by Layla Sfeir5 replies -
Does a diagnosis name a real condition, or a useful bundle of symptoms?
I work as an interpreter at a hospital in Addis Ababa. Some diagnoses I translate every day feel like discoveries: a particular infection, caused by a particular organism, with a test that finds it. Others feel more like agreements. "Metabolic syndrome" is…
Started by Tsion Bekele5 replies -
When Sor Juana protests her own ignorance, is that rhetoric or argument, and does it matter?
One question about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz keeps returning to me. In 1691 she wrote the Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, her reply to the Bishop of Puebla, who had published her critique of a famous sermon with…
Started by Valentina Ríos4 replies -
Why does any list of qualities feel like the wrong answer to “why do you love me?”
I write love poems, and I'm new to reading philosophy about love, so forgive me if this is obvious. My partner asked me last month, half joking, "why do you love me?" I started to answer: you are kind, you are funny,…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
Reading group: Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), five chapters over five weeks
The Souls of Black Folk is the book I keep pushing onto the philosophy syllabus, because it was doing philosophy all along. Du Bois wrote much of it in my city, at Atlanta University. The ‘Forethought’ announces that the problem of the…
Started by Keisha Monroe5 replies