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Seeing before naming: are Dignāga and Merleau-Ponty saying the same thing about perception?
Two accounts of perception seem to me to speak to the moment just before a word arrives, which is where a translator spends her days. Dignāga, the Buddhist epistemologist of the late fifth and early sixth centuries, defines perception as cognition free…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
Could a culture reason by different logical rules, or is that a colonial myth?
Every year a student in my lycée class asks me some version of this: "Is logic universal, or is it just how Europeans think?" The history makes the question sharp. In the early twentieth century, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl described so-called primitive peoples as…
Started by Khady Sène5 replies -
The five rulings, from obligatory to forbidden: why the middle categories are not just extra boxes
Standard deontic logic has three basic statuses: obligatory, forbidden, and permitted. Anything neither obligatory nor forbidden is simply permitted, and that's the end of it. Islamic jurisprudence has five rulings (al-aḥkām al-khamsa). An act is obligatory (wājib), recommended (mandūb), permissible (mubāḥ), disliked…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
Al-Ma’arri gave up meat, milk and honey, and wrote a poem telling us why
Abu al-'Ala al-Ma'arri (973–1057) lost his sight to smallpox as a child and called himself the prisoner of two prisons, his blindness and his house in Ma'arrat al-Nu'man. I read him first for his fury. I stayed for his ethics. In his…
Started by Dima Nasser5 replies -
Keeping the losing opinion on the page: is disagreement inside a tradition as deep as disagreement between traditions?
In my Tuesday Talmud study group we recently read the story in tractate Eruvin about the houses of Hillel and Shammai, who argued for years until a heavenly voice declared that "these and these are the words of the living God", and…
Started by Eliana Halpern5 replies -
Who is left out when morality is a bargain?
I came to this question with a personal stake. I've used a wheelchair since I was fourteen. The Hobbesian strand of contract theory says morality is what rational, self-interested people would agree to for mutual advantage. David Gauthier's Morals by Agreement (1986)…
Started by Dima Nasser5 replies -
The Mu’tazila were right: reason can know that injustice is wrong before any revelation
I want to defend the losing side of one of the great arguments in kalām. The Mu'tazilī theologians held that acts have moral qualities that reason can recognise: that injustice and lying are bad, that gratitude to a benefactor is owed, and…
Started by Layla Sfeir6 replies -
Yorùbá separates what you have seen from what you were told. What does that do to testimony?
Let me offer something from Yorùbá for comparison and see what others make of it. In a well-known study from the 1980s, the philosophers Barry Hallen and J. Olubi Sodipo worked with Yorùbá healers and argued that the verb mọ̀, usually translated…
Started by Titilayo Adeyemi4 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 -
Secular humanism needs no metaphysics, and that is its strength
I'm an atheist, and I call myself a humanist in the modern sense: ethics and meaning without religion. I keep being told that humanism is just another religion, a faith in Man with its own unprovable dogmas. I want to argue the…
Started by Arvind Poojary5 replies -
If I can conceive it without contradiction, is it possible? Ash’arites, Hume and Kripke
I started reading the Ash'ari theologians to understand occasionalism, and I noticed how much weight they put on one principle: whatever involves no contradiction is possible, at least for God. Al-Ghazali uses it in the Tahāfut when he says the cotton might…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam5 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 -
What exactly is Ibn Rushd’s rule for when scripture should be read non-literally?
I guide visitors around Córdoba, and at the statue of Ibn Rushd near the old walls someone always asks what he believed. For years I have said something like "he thought that when reason and the Qur'an disagree, reason wins". People like…
Started by Rafael Lucena Prieto5 replies -
What did Milton Friedman actually argue in his 1970 essay on business and profit?
In every business-ethics discussion I've been in, someone quotes Friedman's line that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, and everyone either nods or sneers. Usually it's summarised as "greed is good". I've now found the essay (in the…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies -
What did Xenophanes actually say about horses, oxen and the gods, and what was he arguing for?
My students love to quote "if horses could draw, they would draw gods like horses" as a knock-down argument against religion. As a theology teacher I find that interesting, because the man who said it was not an atheist, as far as…
Started by Nikos Theodoridis4 replies -
What did Weber actually mean by “value-free” social science?
In arguments about whether journalism or research can be neutral, Max Weber gets quoted by both sides. One side says Weber proved social science must be value-free. The other says Weber admitted that values decide what we study, so neutrality is a…
Started by Sana Rizvi3 replies -
Reading group: Plotinus, “On Beauty” (Ennead I.6), the treatise he is said to have written first
I work in a library in Alexandria, and Plotinus studied philosophy here with Ammonius Saccas before he moved to Rome. That is reason enough for me to propose reading him together. "On Beauty" is the obvious place to start. It is short,…
Started by Mona Fathy5 replies -
Reading group: Aristotle’s Metaphysics Gamma on the firmest principle
Several recent threads keep coming back to Aristotle's defence of the principle of non-contradiction, usually second-hand. Let's read it. It's short and much stranger than its reputation. Text: Metaphysics Book Gamma (IV), chapters 3 to 7. Ross's translation is freely available; Christopher…
Started by Nikos Theodoridis5 replies -
Can students learn something from a teacher who doesn’t believe it herself?
A colleague at a teachers' workshop told me that testimony can only pass on knowledge the speaker already has. It is a tidy principle, and it is how most of us picture teaching: I know something, I tell my students, now they…
Started by Rowena Abellana6 replies -
Reading group: Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, about a hundred remarks a week
On Certainty consists of notes Wittgenstein wrote in the last year and a half of his life, largely provoked by G. E. Moore's papers defending common sense against scepticism. It was published in 1969, edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G.…
Started by Oskar Nyberg5 replies -
Wujūd, brahman, dao: are these even answers to the same question?
I keep returning to Mullā Ṣadrā. I've been looking at a comparative table of traditions' answers to "what is real?", and the Islamic row says: created being, contingent, distinct from a necessary existent. The key term is wujūd. That's fair for much…
Started by Reza Tehrani4 replies -
Reading group: Longinus, On the Sublime, in four sittings
Before Burke and Kant there was a short Greek treatise, probably from the first century CE, by an author we do not really know. The manuscript names "Dionysius or Longinus", and scholars have argued about who wrote it and when ever since.…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
Reading group: Miskawayh, The Refinement of Character, on happiness
I keep a secondhand bookshop off Mutanabbi Street, and the book I most often press on young customers who say they want philosophy is Miskawayh's Tahdhīb al-akhlāq, The Refinement of Character. Miskawayh (c. 932–1030) worked as a librarian and treasurer in the…
Started by Zainab Kadhim5 replies -
Does ubuntu ground human rights, or quietly replace them with duties?
I support families facing eviction in Johannesburg, and I think ubuntu is a serious legal idea, and also a slogan that is easily abused. This question sits right on that line. In S v Makwanyane (1995), the case that abolished the death…
Started by Thandeka Mokoena5 replies -
Is Yogācāra “consciousness-only” idealism? Three readings and a false friend
Every year someone in my reading group says "Yogācāra is Buddhist idealism, like Berkeley". It's one of the more interesting mistakes, because it's partly right. The Yogācāra school, systematised by Asaṅga and Vasubandhu in the fourth and fifth centuries and carried to…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 replies -
Reading group: al-Ghazālī on the remembrance of death, the last book of the Revival
The book I return to most often when I visit the sick is the fortieth and final book of al-Ghazālī's Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, the Revival of the Religious Sciences: Kitāb dhikr al-mawt wa-mā baʿdahu, the book of the remembrance of death and…
Started by Bilal Rashid5 replies -
Why did argument appear in Greece, India, China and Israel in the same few centuries?
When someone shows me a pattern I want a mechanism. Granting for the moment that something similar happened in several regions between roughly 800 and 200 BCE, with no documented transmission between them, the explanations I've seen are: Material surplus. Iron-age agriculture…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
Heraclitus, Vasubandhu, Zhuangzi, Mulla Sadra: four routes to process, or four destinations?
It is often said that four thinkers, with no documented transmission between them, all arrived at a process view of reality: Heraclitus in Greece, Vasubandhu in India, Zhuangzi in China, and much later Mulla Sadra in Safavid Iran. The convergence is real.…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
If the comparison table had a Yoruba row: mọ̀, gbàgbọ́ and the gap between seeing and hearing
Comparative tables of how traditions answer "how do we know anything?" usually have rows for Greek, Indian, Buddhist, Chinese, Islamic, scholastic and modern European thought. My doctorate is on Yoruba epistemic vocabulary, so I want to sketch the row that is usually…
Started by Titilayo Adeyemi5 replies -
Nāgārjuna says he has no thesis. Is “I have no thesis” itself a thesis?
There is a question I keep returning to, the oldest one in the long argument between Advaitins and Mādhyamikas. In the Vigrahavyāvartanī, answering a critic who says his claim that all things are empty refutes itself, Nāgārjuna says (I paraphrase): if I…
Started by Arjun Iyer5 replies