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Could a psychopath genuinely know that cruelty is wrong? The amoralist and the clinical literature
Meta-ethicists argue about the amoralist: someone who sincerely judges that cheating or cruelty is wrong and feels no motivation whatever to avoid it. Internalists say such a person is impossible, that someone wholly unmoved has not really made the judgement, only learned…
Started by Martín Iriarte5 replies -
Should the law impose a general duty to rescue a stranger?
Common law systems, including Pakistan's, traditionally impose no general duty to rescue. If I watch a stranger drown in shallow water and do nothing, I may be a moral monster, but unless I had some special relationship or created the danger, I've…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
Reading group: Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological
Georges Canguilhem's essay began as his medical thesis in 1943, written while he was also active in the Resistance, and was reissued in 1966 with a second part, "New Reflections". It is one of the founding texts of the philosophy of medicine,…
Started by Claire Dubois4 replies -
Memory preserves knowledge but never produces it: the Indian schools were right to exclude it
For forty years of reading Śaṅkara I have accepted, almost without noticing, a rule that most of the classical Indian schools share: memory is not a pramāṇa, not a means of valid knowledge in its own right. The Nyāya divide cognition into…
Started by Arjun Iyer5 replies -
Reading group: Nāgārjuna on causes and conditions, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 1, 20 and 24
The Nyāya–Madhyamaka debates all lead back to the opening of Nāgārjuna's Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, so I'd like to read three chapters of it together. Translation. Jay Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (1995), which has the verses…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Is “what is the meaning of life?” a modern European question?
Every year I teach Camus to my terminale class in Dakar, and every year the same thing happens. The students read The Myth of Sisyphus, which begins by saying that the only truly serious philosophical problem is suicide, whether life is worth…
Started by Khady Sène6 replies -
Usul al-fiqh and Dworkin’s integrity: two ways of saying law is more than its rules
I read Iqbal and Hart side by side, more or less as a hobby, and lately I have been adding Dworkin and al-Shafi'i to the pile. I want to test a comparison that I find tempting and suspect is partly false. Dworkin…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
Thirty-one years of watching courts decide what is ‘reasonable’, and no degrees of truth in sight
Here is something I watched every week in the courts of Punjab. A large part of the work was applying words that have no sharp edges: "reasonable doubt", "sudden provocation", "sufficient cause", "unsound mind". Now I read that fuzzy logic was invented…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
Reading group: Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan as a book about learning without teachers
I have spent years with Hayy ibn Yaqzan, and I would love company for a slow reading with one question in mind: what does this book think a teacher is for? Ibn Tufayl, writing in twelfth-century al-Andalus, imagines a child raised on…
Started by Hessa Al Mazrouei6 replies -
Illusionism is the only view of consciousness that takes neuroscience seriously
I'm a materialist who builds machine-perception software, and I'll defend the position most people here find hardest to swallow. Illusionism, associated with Dennett and developed by Keith Frankish, says the hard problem is generated by a misleading introspective model. When we introspect,…
Started by Priya Raghavan6 replies -
Reading group: Nāgasena’s chariot and flame in the Questions of King Milinda
The Milindapañha, the Questions of King Milinda, is a dialogue between a king usually identified with the Indo-Greek ruler Menander and a monk called Nāgasena. It is a composite text that grew over centuries, so I read Nāgasena as a literary interlocutor…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara6 replies -
If objectivity belongs to communities, what happens when the community all looks the same?
Helen Longino argues that objectivity is not a property of individual scientists, who all have commitments and blind spots, but of communities. And not any community. Only one with public venues for criticism, shared standards, genuine uptake of criticism, and what she…
Started by Femke Bosman5 replies -
Strong moral intuitions count as evidence, in the same way that perceptions count as evidence
In my ethics seminar we were told that appealing to intuitions is unscientific: they are just gut feelings shaped by upbringing. I want to argue the opposite. W. D. Ross, in The Right and the Good (1930), compared the considered moral convictions…
Started by Aoife Kilbride6 replies -
Why insight does not instantly change behaviour: an Abhidhamma account of knowing and not doing
I read the threads here about whether knowing what is right necessarily moves you, and I would like to add the account I have lived with in twelve years of practice. In the Pali discourses, the Buddha says that intention, cetanā, is…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara5 replies -
Soul as the form of a living body: does Aristotle help me teach the Igbo idea of chi, or get in the way?
I teach religious studies at a Catholic secondary school in Enugu and run a philosophy club for the senior students. Every year we read Aristotle's De Anima, where the soul is defined as the first actuality of a natural body that potentially…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies -
Ibn Sina begins the Canon by defining medicine. What does that definition assume about health?
I recently reread the opening of Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine for a reading group at the hospital, and I was struck by how much philosophy is packed into the first sentence. Paraphrasing: medicine is the knowledge of the states of the…
Started by Omar Ragab5 replies -
The fall of Qin refutes Legalism itself, not merely its excesses
I read Han Feizi mostly to understand why the most effective political theory of early China produced the shortest-lived dynasty. The Legalist tradition, from Shang Yang's reforms in the state of Qin in the fourth century BCE to Han Feizi's synthesis in…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
Arjuna sees the universal form and begs it to stop. Is that the sublime, or something else?
I reread the Bhagavad Gita when I burned out last year, and the chapter I keep returning to is the eleventh. Arjuna asks Krishna to show his universal form. Krishna gives him a divine eye, and what Arjuna sees is unbearable: countless…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies -
Xunzi on “obsession” and modern cognitive bias: the same diagnosis of irrationality?
I study psychology, and this term we covered heuristics and biases: anchoring, availability, confirmation bias, all the ways judgement goes systematically wrong. In the same month I read the chapter of the Xunzi usually translated "Dispelling Obsession" or "Undoing Fixation", and I…
Started by Elif Yıldız4 replies -
Al-Ghazali and Hume make the same argument about fire. Why do they end up so far apart?
I teach history in Fes, and my students love the story that al-Ghazali "anticipated Hume" by six centuries. I tell it too. But the more I read, the less I think "anticipated" is the right word, and I would like help explaining…
Started by Youssef Berrada4 replies -
‘Benevolence’ is a better translation of ren than its critics allow
I've been reading the Analects with D. C. Lau's translation, which uses "benevolence" throughout. I keep reading on this site, and in introductions, that this is a false friend: that ren names a condition of full humanity, not a disposition to kindness.…
Started by Henrike Vogel5 replies -
The indispensability argument is the best case for numbers, and it still does not work
The argument usually called Quine–Putnam goes like this: We should believe in the entities our best scientific theories quantify over. Our best scientific theories quantify over mathematical objects, ineliminably. So we should believe mathematical objects exist. It is the best argument for…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha5 replies -
Reading group: al-Ghazālī and Ibn Rushd on whether the world had a beginning
The longest chapter of al-Ghazālī's Incoherence of the Philosophers is the first, on the philosophers' doctrine that the world is eternal. Nearly a century later Ibn Rushd answered it, line by line, in The Incoherence of the Incoherence. I have read summaries…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam6 replies -
Ji Kang argued that music holds neither sorrow nor joy, sixteen centuries before Hanslick
My taiji group practises to recordings of the guqin, and one morning someone asked whether the music was sad. I said what my father would have said: sound has no sorrow or joy. It turns out that is not just my father's…
Started by Liu Mingqiao4 replies -
Reading group: Nāgārjuna’s Middle Verses, chapter 24, where emptiness is accused of nihilism
If you want to know what Nāgārjuna means by emptiness, the best place to look is the chapter where he is accused of destroying everything. Chapter 24 of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā opens with an opponent's objection: if all things are empty, nothing arises…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
Reading group: aboutness from Brentano to Husserl, with Xuanzang alongside
Yogācāra and Husserl are two traditions that share more vocabulary than either admits and differ more than enthusiasts claim. I propose a three-week reading on intentionality, the property of mental states of being about something, with one Buddhist text set beside the…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 replies -
Han Feizi was right that good government cannot wait for good rulers
I spend most of my time with the Mohists, but I read Han Feizi to understand why the Confucian picture of government lost so many arguments in the Warring States period, and I want to defend one of his central claims. The…
Started by Chen Yuting6 replies -
Searle’s “X counts as Y in C” leaves out the power that makes people accept it
I spend a lot of time in job centres, accompanying people as a volunteer. A person walks in and, after one interview, counts as a jobseeker. The status comes with obligations (attend, apply, report), sanctions if they fail, and a set of…
Started by Johanna Reinhardt6 replies -
Do the world’s ethical traditions really agree about how to live, or does it only look that way from far off?
There is a claim one often meets in comparative philosophy courses: traditions that disagree completely about metaphysics agree substantially about how to live. Aristotelian virtue, Confucian self-cultivation, Buddhist training and Islamic adab all say character is shaped by repeated action, habit makes…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 replies -
What do I owe a source I don’t believe? Notes from a court reporter
I cover courts and human rights in Karachi. Every week someone tells me something I am not sure I believe: a family about a disappeared relative, an official about a raid, a lawyer about what his client said. I have to decide…
Started by Sana Rizvi5 replies