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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: Gould and Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco” (1979)
Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin's paper, published in 1979 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, is one of the few biology papers whose title became a philosophical term. Its target is what they called the adaptationist programme: the habit of…
Started by Priya Raghavan4 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 -
Did Ibn Khaldun really say that labour is the source of value?
Every year at least one of my students comes back from the internet with the claim that Ibn Khaldun "invented the labour theory of value four centuries before Adam Smith and Marx". It's said with pride, and I share the pride, but…
Started by Youssef Berrada4 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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
Rights by consistency: Sor Juana, Astell and Wollstonecraft on the same argument
I keep noticing the same argument shape in three women who never read one another. The shape is a consistency argument. If reason is what entitles men to education, liberty or rights, and women have reason, then you must either extend those…
Started by Valentina Ríos4 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 -
Reading group: Weitz, Danto and Dickie on whether art can be defined
My students keep asking "but who decides what counts as art?", and I'd like to read the classic papers properly before I try to answer. Join me. Plan (three weeks): Week 1: Morris Weitz, "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics" (1956), with…
Started by Keisha Monroe4 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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
Do the laws of physics make things happen, or only describe what happens?
Last week a student asked me why the ball "obeys" Newton's second law. I started to answer and realised I did not know what I meant by "obeys". We talk as if laws are rules and objects follow them. But a ball…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha4 replies -
When should someone who isn’t an expert simply defer? What did al-Ghazālī say?
As a data analyst I defer to experts all day: to doctors about my health, to engineers about the bridges I drive over, to the people who built the statistical libraries I use. I can't check them. I'd like to understand when…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman4 replies -
Dignāga’s apoha and Frege’s sense are answers to different questions
In a seminar this term somebody summarised apoha as "basically Frege's sense", and someone else said "no, it's Saussure: meaning by difference". I want to resist both, or at least slow them down. Dignāga's claim (c. 480–540) is that a word like…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies -
Why a sad film consoles where good advice doesn’t
At work, after a night when we lose someone we were close to, some of us have a ritual. We go to someone's flat, open a bottle of something, and watch a particular old film that makes everyone cry. I have done…
Started by Elin Hedqvist4 replies -
My lecturer says the poet’s own explanation doesn’t count. Where does that idea come from?
In a seminar last week we were reading a Malayalam poem by a living poet, and I brought in an interview where she explains what one of the images means. My lecturer listened politely and then said that what the poet says…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
What are the three kinds of theory of well-being that Parfit distinguished?
For six years of running a company I thought I was optimising for happiness, mine and the team's. Now I'm not sure what I was optimising for. A friend pointed me to an appendix in Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984) called…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies -
Fuller’s King Rex, read by someone who spent thirty-one years in the courts
Lon Fuller's The Morality of Law (1964) opens with a fable about an unhappy king called Rex who fails to make law in eight different ways. He decides cases without general rules. He makes rules but keeps them secret. He legislates retroactively.…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan4 replies -
Reading group: the Nāṭyaśāstra’s chapters on rasa and bhāva
Everyone in my literature classes mentions rasa, almost nobody has read the chapters where the theory is actually set out. I'd like to read them with company, and with people who know more Sanskrit than I do. Translation: Manomohan Ghosh's English translation…
Started by Kavya Menon4 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 -
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 -
Heidegger’s standing-reserve and Zhuangzi’s machine heart are two different worries
People often put two passages side by side as if they said the same thing, and I think the comparison hides more than it shows. In chapter 12, Confucius's disciple Zigong meets an old man watering his garden by carrying jars from…
Started by Liu Mingqiao4 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 -
What does Derrida’s différance actually claim about meaning?
Every year one or two bright students in my terminale class discover Derrida online and come to class announcing that “there is nothing outside the text”, which they take to mean that nothing is real except words. The others are either impressed…
Started by Khady Sène4 replies