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If almost nothing the Cārvākas wrote survives, how do we know what they thought?
I've been reading about the Cārvāka or Lokāyata school, the Indian materialists, and every introduction says something like "almost no Cārvāka text survives; the school is reconstructed from the summaries its opponents wrote." As someone who studies texts, this worries me. If…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
Why trekkers weep at the top of the Thorong La, and whether Kant would understand
Eight months a year I take groups over the Thorong La on the Annapurna circuit. At the top, a little over 5,400 metres, something happens to about one person in five. They cry. Strong people, bankers, soldiers. They are exhausted and the…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung4 replies -
Why does my SQL query treat NULL = NULL as neither true nor false?
Beginner question from a data analyst. Last week a report of mine undercounted customers by about four per cent. The bug was a filter like WHERE region 'KL', which I assumed would return everyone outside Kuala Lumpur. It also silently dropped every…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman4 replies -
Were the Renaissance humanists secular? My paintings say otherwise
Visitors to the studio often tell me, kindly, that the Renaissance was when "humanism" replaced religion, when people stopped looking at God and started looking at man. Then they look at what's on my easel, which is almost always a Madonna, a…
Started by Chiara Bellandi4 replies -
Reading group: Vitoria’s lectures On the American Indians and On the Law of War
Francisco de Vitoria gave his relectiones at Salamanca in the 1530s. Two of them, usually known as On the American Indians and On the Law of War, both from 1539, are where a Dominican theologian asked whether his own crown's conquest in…
Started by Valentina Ríos4 replies -
The last person and the kelp forest: does nature matter when no one is left to value it?
Last month, on a long dive in the kelp, I found myself thinking about Richard Routley's "last man" thought experiment from 1973. Imagine you are the last human being. You're dying; nobody will come after you. Before you go, you set out…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo4 replies -
What is a genuine consultation for? Consensus, shura and the contractualist test
Contractualism's core question, "could you justify this to everyone it affects?", is usually treated as a test you run in your head. I've been wondering what it looks like as a practice. Wiredu argued that traditional Akan politics was organised around consensus…
Started by Kwame Asante4 replies -
A patient believes she will recover against the odds. Is that irrational?
A situation I meet in different forms every month, described here as a composite. A woman with a serious illness has, by the best evidence we have, about a one in three chance of recovering. She tells her doctor, and me, calmly…
Started by Tsion Bekele4 replies -
Reading group: Aristotle’s Poetics as a craft manual, with the Nāṭyaśāstra beside it
I've always read the Poetics as "Aristotle's theory of art". Recently I came across the argument that this is a mistranslation of the whole enterprise: the Greek technē covered medicine, carpentry, navigation and poetry alike, and the Poetics is less aesthetics than…
Started by Kavya Menon4 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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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: Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Parts I and III
Having started with Hume, I have moved on to Adam Smith, working through the Scottish Enlightenment in local order. Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments first appeared in 1759 and he kept revising it until the sixth edition of 1790, the year he…
Started by Alistair Gow4 replies -
Smith’s butcher and Smith’s impartial spectator: is there really an ‘Adam Smith problem’?
I am reading the Scottish Enlightenment in order. I've just finished The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and started The Wealth of Nations (1776), and I can see why nineteenth-century German scholars talked about "das Adam Smith Problem". The first book is…
Started by Alistair Gow4 replies -
Find the structure under the argument first: I tried it on three stories I covered
A lecturer's handout I picked up says that most applied-ethics disputes turn on a handful of recurring structures: moral status, where to draw a line on a continuum, doing versus allowing, intended versus foreseen harm, distribution under scarcity, consent and capacity, and…
Started by Sana Rizvi4 replies -
Is negative utilitarianism the most compassionate moral theory, or the most dangerous one?
On the trekking routes I meet a lot of young Westerners who have read a little philosophy and a little Buddhism, and lately some of them talk about negative utilitarianism: the view that morality is about minimising suffering, not maximising happiness. Karl…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung4 replies -
A delusion can be more coherent than my own beliefs. What does that do to coherentism?
A well-organised delusional system, as clinicians describe it, can be strikingly coherent. Every apparent counter-example is absorbed and turned into further confirmation. The neighbour's friendliness proves the plot is subtle; the absence of evidence proves the conspirators are careful. As a structure…
Started by Martín Iriarte4 replies -
Wang Chong against the omen-readers: a naturalist in the Han dynasty
Among the classics my father left me is one I did not expect to enjoy. Recently I have been reading Wang Chong's Lunheng, and I think he deserves to be far better known outside China. In the Han dynasty a powerful theory…
Started by Liu Mingqiao4 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