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Karma as moral causation: does the theory hold together?
The doctrine of karma says that actions have consequences for the agent that go beyond their visible effects, ripening in this life or future lives. It is shared, in different forms, by Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions. As an engineer I want…
Started by Arjun Iyer1 reply -
Would games really be the only thing left worth doing in utopia?
Bernard Suits ends The Grasshopper with a strange and wonderful claim. Imagine a utopia where every instrumental need is met: machines do all the work, nobody needs to earn, build, heal or cook. What would people do? Suits's Grasshopper argues that they…
Started by Sasha KovalenkoAnswer first (no replies yet) -
Automated cranes at my port: freedom from drudgery, or the end of what gave the day shape?
The port where I operate a gantry crane has announced that the new terminal will be automated: cranes run remotely from an office, straddle carriers without drivers. Some of us will retrain to sit at screens. Most won't be needed. As a…
Started by Hugo MarchettiReply first (no replies yet) -
Boole, not Frege, deserves to be called the father of modern logic
I'll declare my bias at the start: George Boole was professor of mathematics at Queen's College here in Cork from 1849 until his death in 1864. There's a plaque. I walk past it. Philosophers tend to say that modern logic begins with…
Started by Siobhán KeaneReply first (no replies yet) -
Mozi was wrong about music, but his question about it still stings
I play cello in a chamber ensemble in Seoul and teach children. I recently read the Mohist chapter "Against Music" and I can't stop arguing with it in my head. Mozi's argument, as I understand it: ordinary people have three great worries,…
Started by Moon Ha-eunReply first (no replies yet) -
Legal realism is not a claim about what exists, and lawyers should stop treating it as one
A small irritation from evenings spent arguing with lawyer friends in Lahore. They say "I'm a legal realist" to mean one of three things: that judges decide on their prejudices and then find reasons; that law is ultimately power; or that there…
Started by Hamza QureshiReply first (no replies yet) -
Is an economy more than the people in it?
Economics lives with a tension it never resolves, and I meet it at work every year. On one side, methodological individualism: social phenomena should be explained, ultimately, by individuals' choices and interactions. Prices, unemployment and recessions are patterns of individual behaviour. Most…
Started by Javier FerrandisAnswer first (no replies yet) -
Bundle theory or bare particulars: which embarrassment would you rather live with?
I tutor logic and keep running into this in tutoring sessions, so I'd like to hear people argue it properly. Bundle theory: an object is nothing but a bundle of properties. There is no underlying thing that "has" the redness and the…
Started by Ana Clara FerreiraAnswer first (no replies yet) -
Wu wei for burnt-out founders: what did Laozi actually mean?
After Stoicism, I've been reading the Daodejing. One idea that hits hard is wu wei, usually translated "non-action" or "effortless action". Chapter 48 says that in pursuing learning you add something every day, but in pursuing the Dao you let something go…
Started by Rohan Desai1 reply -
Sanskrit grammar as philosophy: Bhartṛhari on word and meaning
Bhartṛhari (around the fifth century) wrote the Vākyapadīya, "On Sentences and Words", a work of grammar that became a full philosophy of language. Some key ideas: Sphoṭa: meaning isn't built up from individual sounds; there's an indivisible linguistic unit, manifested by the…
Started by Meera Kulkarni1 reply -
What did Ibn Sina mean by the “internal senses”?
In my history of psychology course, Ibn Sina was mentioned for his theory of "internal senses", and the lecturer said it was an early version of cognitive psychology. I'd love a clear explanation of what the internal senses were and how they…
Started by Elif Yıldız2 replies -
What does “intersectionality” mean philosophically, beyond the slogan?
In journalism the word "intersectionality" is everywhere, and it's often used just to list identities. I know Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the term in 1989, but I'd like to understand the original argument and what philosophical claim, if any, it makes.
Started by Sana Rizvi2 replies -
Translating śūnyatā into Vietnamese: why “không” keeps sliding into “nothing”
I translate philosophy into Vietnamese, and I have run into a problem that the English-language warnings about emptiness don't quite cover. The Sino-Vietnamese word for emptiness is không (空). In the Heart Sutra, which many Vietnamese Buddhists chant, form is emptiness and…
Started by Vũ Quốc BảoReply first (no replies yet) -
Plantinga’s proper function: does warrant need a designer, or will evolution do?
This term a student asked me a question I could not answer cleanly, so I bring it here. Alvin Plantinga's account of warrant, in Warrant and Proper Function (1993), says roughly that a belief has warrant if it is produced by cognitive…
Started by Ikechukwu AnyanwuAnswer first (no replies yet) -
Can you be religious and a philosophical skeptic at the same time?
This semester I took a module on scepticism, Pyrrhonism, Descartes' demon and so on, and I found some of the arguments hard to answer. Now I'm wondering whether serious scepticism is compatible with religious faith, or whether every believer is just a…
Started by Aoife Kilbride2 replies -
Reading group: Suhrawardi’s Philosophy of Illumination, introduction and Part One
Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi (1154–1191) was executed in Aleppo, still young, after falling foul of the authorities. His Philosophy of Illumination (Hikmat al-Ishraq), completed in 1186, founded a school that shaped Persian philosophy for centuries, Mulla Sadra included. The first part is a…
Started by Reza Tehrani2 replies -
What is longtermism, and what’s the main objection to it?
Everyone in tech talks about longtermism. I know it's connected to effective altruism and William MacAskill's What We Owe the Future (2022). But I've never seen a clear explanation of the core argument and the best objections. Can someone help?
Started by Rohan Desai2 replies -
Capabilities or the social model: which better tells a city what it owes disabled residents?
In a moot this term we had to argue about what a municipal corporation owes disabled residents under India's disability-rights legislation. I found myself reaching for two frameworks that don't fit together as neatly as our professors suggest. The social model tells…
Started by Deepa KarthaAnswer first (no replies yet) -
Advaita says the Self is not the doer. Is that an answer to the free will problem, or a way of leaving it?
I want to put my own tradition's answer on the free will question to the test, because I suspect it is either very deep or a polite evasion, and I can't decide which. The karmic traditions in India share a puzzle. Acts…
Started by Arjun IyerReply first (no replies yet) -
Naturalisms before the word: the Cārvākas, Wang Chong and Xunzi’s Heaven
I want to test the distinction this site keeps drawing between kinds of naturalism (ontological, methodological, ethical, epistemological) against three older figures who are often lumped together as "early naturalists". The Cārvākas (Lokāyata). Almost all of their own texts are lost; we…
Started by Arvind PoojaryReply first (no replies yet) -
How does Ibn Sina’s proof of the Necessary Existent avoid the infinite regress problem?
I understand the basic structure: things that exist are either necessary in themselves or possible (contingent) in themselves. Contingent things need a cause. So there must be a necessary being. But why can't there be an infinite chain of contingent beings, each…
Started by Omar Ragab2 replies -
Reading group: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, propositions 1–3
A short, dense text, so let's go slowly. Use the Ogden translation (1922) or the Pears–McGuinness (1961). I'll quote proposition numbers, not pages. Plan: Week 1: 1–2.063. The world as the totality of facts, not things; objects; states of affairs. Week 2:…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak3 replies -
Fes, al-Qarawiyyin, and how medieval students learned to argue
Al-Qarawiyyin is a short walk from my school. Founded in 859 by Fatima al-Fihri, it's often described as one of the oldest continuously operating institutions of learning in the world. What interests me is how teaching worked. Students learned not only texts…
Started by Youssef Berrada2 replies -
Can a translation of a poem be as beautiful as the original?
I translate my own Malayalam poems into English and they always lose something. Sometimes they gain something, which is stranger. Edward FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859) is a famous case: a very free version that many consider a great English poem…
Started by Kavya Menon3 replies -
Is there a coherent left-wing case for private property?
On the left, private property is usually treated as the problem. But there are traditions that defend it on egalitarian grounds: the small farmer's land, the artisan's workshop, the home that can't be taken from you. Rawls even argued for a "property-owning…
Started by Javier Ferrandis2 replies -
Teaching the Euthyphro to sixteen-year-olds: what works and what doesn’t?
The central question (10a) is whether the pious is loved by the gods because it is pious, or pious because it is loved by the gods. My students grasp the dilemma in about four minutes. What they struggle with is the Greek…
Started by Giulia Ferrante4 replies -
Dōgen’s “being-time”: is time something things have, or something they are?
Dōgen (1200–1253), founder of the Sōtō Zen school in Japan, wrote a short and very strange essay in 1240 called "Uji", usually translated "Being-Time", which became part of his Shōbōgenzō. Its central claim is that time is not a container things exist…
Started by Reza Tehrani2 replies -
Does anger ever help? Seneca’s On Anger versus Aristotle
Aristotle, in Nicomachean Ethics IV.5, praises the person who gets angry at the right things, with the right people, to the right degree, at the right time. Not to be angry when you should be is a kind of slavishness. Seneca's On…
Started by Elif Yıldız3 replies -
The sorites paradox and my pile of exam scripts
It's marking season. A script with 33 marks out of 100 passes; one with 32 fails. My students ask: "Sir, what's the real difference between 32 and 33?" And I can't really answer. That's the sorites paradox, which goes back to Eubulides.…
Started by Vikram Sethi2 replies -
The translation movement: what was gained and lost between Greek, Syriac and Arabic?
Between the eighth and tenth centuries, a huge body of Greek philosophy, medicine and science was translated into Arabic, mostly in Baghdad. Many of the translators were Syriac-speaking Christians, and texts often passed through Syriac on the way. Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809–873)…
Started by Layla Sfeir3 replies