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Who speaks for someone who cannot? Advance directives, surrogates and the family at three in the morning
Many of the people I care for at night can't speak for themselves when it matters most: confused, very ill, at the end. Decisions get made about them anyway, and I've watched how. The usual guidance gives two standards. Substituted judgement: decide…
Started by Elin Hedqvist5 replies -
Watsuji’s betweenness, ubuntu and relational autonomy: one discovery made three times, or three ideas?
I've been reading Watsuji Tetsurō's Ethics (Rinrigaku) slowly, with a friend from the temple who reads more Japanese philosophy than I do. Watsuji's starting point is that the Japanese word for a human being, ningen, is written with characters meaning "person" and…
Started by Aiko Tanabe5 replies -
Reading group: McTaggart’s ‘The Unreality of Time’ and Prior’s ‘Thank Goodness That’s Over’
I spend most of my free time on modal and many-valued logics, and I owe a great deal to Arthur Prior, who founded tense logic partly because he thought the A-series was real and needed a logic of its own. So I…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak5 replies -
Dharma, li, sharia, natural law: four words English keeps flattening into “duty” or “law”
Last week an engineering student in the evening class on Indian philosophy that I help with asked a good question: “If dharma is not duty, what is it like? Is there anything in other cultures that works the same way?” I tried…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Rebirth without anyone reborn: the lamp that lights another lamp
In comparative tables of what happens at death, the Buddhist row always reads awkwardly: rebirth, but no self that transmigrates. Continuity, not identity. Many newcomers to the Dhamma, and many philosophers, hear a contradiction. If nobody is reborn, what is the rebirth…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara6 replies -
“I could have caught it sooner”: what is a carer’s regret actually claiming?
Something from work that I keep returning to. One of our residents got worse overnight. Looking back, there was a sign at 2 a.m. that, in hindsight, meant he was seriously ill. I noticed it, it didn't seem much, I did not…
Started by Elin Hedqvist5 replies -
Nāgārjuna and the Vienna Circle both attacked metaphysics. Were they doing the same thing?
Recently a trekking client who studied philosophy in Vienna told me Nāgārjuna sounded like a logical positivist: someone who shows that metaphysical claims collapse under analysis. I can see the resemblance. Nāgārjuna takes every position, that things exist intrinsically, that they don't,…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung5 replies -
Why the translators skipped Greek tragedy, and what Ibn Rushd made of Aristotle’s Poetics
At the statue of Ibn Rushd near Córdoba's old walls I often tell visitors about Borges's story "Averroes' Search". Borges imagines the great commentator puzzling over two words in Aristotle's Poetics, "tragedy" and "comedy", for which his world has no examples, while…
Started by Rafael Lucena Prieto4 replies -
Many-worlds is the most conservative reading of quantum mechanics, not the wildest
Many-worlds has a reputation as the science-fiction interpretation. I want to argue it is the opposite: the reading that adds least to the physics. Look at what the others add. Copenhagen-style views add a collapse whenever a "measurement" happens, without saying what…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen5 replies -
Doing harm and allowing harm differ morally, even when the outcome is the same
At the hospital where I work, the distinction between doing and allowing comes up every week. Withdrawing a ventilator from a patient with no prospect of recovery is treated very differently from giving a lethal injection, by law, by most religious authorities,…
Started by Omar Ragab5 replies -
Hume’s Dialogues had answered the watchmaker before Paley set it ticking
Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion were published in 1779, three years after his death, which is a fair measure of how risky he thought they were. William Paley's Natural Theology, with its famous watch found on a heath, appeared in 1802. My…
Started by Alistair Gow6 replies -
What does Moore’s open question argument actually prove, and what is the standard reply to it?
Moore's open question argument from Principia Ethica (1903) keeps coming up as I work through ethics on my own, and I cannot tell whether it is a deep insight or a trick. Here is my understanding. Take any proposed definition of good…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha4 replies -
Mackie’s argument from queerness proves too much: by its standards arithmetic is queer too
Mackie's argument from queerness says that if there were objective moral facts, they would be, in his words, of “a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe”, and we would need an equally strange faculty to know them.…
Started by Ana Clara Ferreira5 replies -
Does Sunzi have an ethics of war, or only an economics of it?
We read The Art of War in the army as a manual, which is how most soldiers meet it. Rereading it in retirement, I am struck by how much of it counsels restraint. It opens by calling war a matter of life…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun4 replies -
Mencius was unfair to Mozi: impartial care does not mean having no father
I've grown tired of how Mohism is introduced: through Mencius's insult. Mencius says that Yang Zhu's "each for himself" means having no ruler, and Mozi's impartial care means having no father, and that people without father or ruler are beasts. Most students…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
Most abortion arguments are really disputes about what grounds moral status, and we should say so
When abortion comes up in a class, the room divides quickly, each side convinced the other doesn't care about something important. I want to propose something modest. Almost everyone in my classes agrees that killing an innocent person is seriously wrong. The…
Started by Miriam Adler5 replies -
When someone says “that’s my truth”, what exactly are they claiming?
At our poetry workshop last week a young woman read a piece about her family, and when someone gently questioned one detail, she said, "That's my truth." The room went quiet. Nobody knew what to say next. I felt two things at…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies -
Winch on the Azande: who gets to call a practice irrational?
Every year the older students in my school's philosophy club read Peter Winch's essay "Understanding a Primitive Society" (1964). It is a reply to E. E. Evans-Pritchard's classic 1937 study of witchcraft and oracles among the Azande of central Africa. Evans-Pritchard took…
Started by Kwame Asante4 replies -
Mu’tazilis, al-Māturīdī and Aquinas: three ways of saying reason can see part of the moral law
I started reading kalām to understand my own faith better. The question that keeps pulling me back is whether moral knowledge needs revelation. The classical positions, as I understand them: Muʿtazila: good and bad (ḥusn and qubḥ) are knowable by reason. That…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam4 replies -
Kalam atomism did not anticipate quantum theory, however tempting the comparison
I read kalam for pleasure. Twice this year I have sat through talks claiming that the Ash'ari theologians "anticipated quantum mechanics": the world made of discrete atoms, accidents re-created at each instant, no necessary connection between cause and effect, and al-Ghazali's cotton…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam4 replies -
If everything is empty, is emptiness itself empty too? Or does that make the idea collapse?
I have been reading about Buddhist theories of mind. A friend who meditates explained that, according to Madhyamaka, everything is "empty". I understood (I think) that this does not mean things don't exist, only that they don't exist independently, on their own.…
Started by Elif Yıldız4 replies -
The Four-Seven Debate: what a sixteenth-century exchange of letters teaches about disagreeing well
My students know Toegye's face, not his argument. This year I tried teaching the Four-Seven Debate not as doctrine but as a model of how to disagree. The basics: from 1559 Yi Hwang (Toegye), already the most respected scholar in Korea, exchanged…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu4 replies -
How is apoha supposed to work? ‘Cow’ means ‘not non-cow’ sounds circular to me
I teach mathematics, and when I read that Dignāga's theory of meaning says a word like "cow" works by exclusion, meaning roughly "not non-cow", my first reaction was the one I would have to a student's proof: this is circular. To exclude…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies -
What is Wakefield’s “harmful dysfunction” account, and why do psychiatrists still argue about it?
In our clinical module we spent a week on whether intense grief should ever be diagnosed as depression. When the diagnostic manual changed in 2013 and dropped the old exclusion for recent bereavement, there was a big argument, and one name kept…
Started by Elif Yıldız3 replies -
Reading group: the Elisabeth–Descartes letters of 1643, slowly
I have spent years reading Sor Juana, and one of the things she keeps teaching me is how much philosophy by women survives only in letters, prefaces and replies. So I would like to read the most famous case in early modern…
Started by Valentina Ríos6 replies -
Gödel’s “perception” of sets explains nothing about how we actually know mathematics
Rationalists from Plato onward have said that reason can simply see certain truths: that a surface cannot be red and green all over, that the axioms of geometry hold. The most famous modern version is Gödel's. In his essay on Cantor's continuum…
Started by Ana Clara Ferreira5 replies -
Reading group: the Hippocratic Oath and the ethical writings around it, then and now
Everyone cites the Hippocratic Oath; few have read it, and fewer have read the other ethical texts in the Hippocratic collection. I'd like to read them with doctors, nurses and anyone curious, and then compare them with a modern code. Texts. The…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
Reading group: A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (1936), chapters 1, 2, 4 and 6
Every year a student asks me whether mathematics "says anything about the world". Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic gives the boldest answer I know (no, it is all tautology) and the boldest dismissal of metaphysics. He was in his mid-twenties when he…
Started by Vikram Sethi6 replies -
Reading group: Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful, chapter by chapter
Eduard Hanslick's Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854) is short, polemical and still the book every philosopher of music has to answer. I teach music theory and play the organ, and I have argued with it for twenty years without reading it straight through with…
Started by Agnieszka Malinowska5 replies -
Does it matter at the bedside whether the self is a soul, ātman or a process?
I've been reading comparative accounts of the self: a created soul accountable to God in Islam, the self identical with brahman in Vedānta, no permanent self in Buddhism, a rational soul in the Greeks, a contested thing in modern European thought. The…
Started by Omar Ragab6 replies