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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 (808/809–873)…
Started by Layla Sfeir3 replies -
What were Mencius and Xunzi arguing about when they disagreed about human nature?
I'm writing an essay comparing moral development theories, and my tutor suggested the debate between Mencius and Xunzi as a classical example. I understand Mencius said human nature is good and Xunzi said it is bad, but I've read that this is…
Started by Elif Yıldız2 replies -
What’s the difference between “deep ecology” and environmental ethics in general?
In conservation work, "deep ecology" is used both as a compliment and an insult. I know it comes from the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, but I'm not sure how it differs from other kinds of environmental ethics. Can someone explain?
Started by Anand Kurup2 replies -
Did Hume ever read al-Ghazali?
Last month I read al-Ghazālī's account of his crisis of doubt, and then went looking for more. I found the part of The Incoherence of the Philosophers about fire and cotton: we see the cotton burn when it touches the fire, but…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies -
What does Merleau-Ponty mean by the “lived body”?
I am reading Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) in French and I keep circling the expression le corps propre, usually translated "one's own body" or "the lived body". I understand that he discusses the phantom limb and a patient called Schneider at…
Started by Claire Dubois3 replies -
Patients who pray: faith, placebo, and respect at the bedside
Many of the patients at my hospital pray. Some ask the staff to pray with them. Some refuse treatment until they've consulted a sheikh, or a priest. Some say their recovery is entirely God's will and the doctor's role is incidental. There…
Started by Omar Ragab2 replies -
Does an engineer’s training help or hurt in metaphysics?
When I read metaphysics, I notice an engineer's habits. I want to know the system boundary, the inputs and outputs, the failure modes. Sometimes this helps me see what an argument actually claims. Sometimes I think it makes me impatient with questions…
Started by Arjun Iyer4 replies -
Reading group: Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
A short essay, easily read in two sittings. Seneca addresses it to Paulinus, who was in charge of Rome's grain supply. His thesis is that life is not short; we make it short by wasting it. He describes the occupati, the busy…
Started by Elin Hedqvist3 replies -
Does a deterministic program “choose”?
A chess engine searches millions of positions, scores them and plays the best move. We naturally say it "chose" the knight move. Yet it's fully deterministic: same position, same settings, same move every time. Spinoza thought our sense of free will comes…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen4 replies -
Did Indian epistemologists anticipate the Gettier problem?
In 1963 Edmund Gettier's three-page paper showed that justified true belief isn't sufficient for knowledge. You can have a justified belief that's true by luck. Indian philosophers seem to have discussed cases like this centuries earlier. The Buddhist Dharmottara (eighth century) is…
Started by Meera Kulkarni2 replies -
Split-brain cases and the unity of consciousness
In the 1960s, Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga studied patients whose corpus callosum had been cut to treat severe epilepsy. In experiments where information was shown to only one hemisphere, the patients sometimes acted as if there were two separate streams of…
Started by Priya Raghavan3 replies -
The Gita’s karma yoga: acting without attachment to results
The Bhagavad Gītā's teaching on karma yoga, especially in chapters 2 and 3, says roughly: you have a right to your action, but never to its fruits; don't let the fruits be your motive, and don't be attached to inaction either. Gandhi…
Started by Rohan Desai3 replies -
Does a constitution need a shared conception of the good?
Rawls, in Political Liberalism (1993), argued that a just constitution should not be based on any single comprehensive doctrine, religious or secular. Citizens can support it from within their own views through an "overlapping consensus". Pakistan's constitutional history begins from a different…
Started by Hamza Qureshi3 replies -
Łukasiewicz, the sea battle, and why three-valued logic was born in Lwów
In De Interpretatione 9 Aristotle considers the sentence "there will be a sea battle tomorrow". If it is already true today, isn't the battle already necessary? And if so, isn't deliberation pointless? Around 1920 Jan Łukasiewicz, working in the Lwów–Warsaw school founded…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak3 replies -
Is evolution compatible with objective morality?
Darwin argued in The Descent of Man (1871) that our moral sense evolved from social instincts. Sharon Street, in "A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value" (2006), turned this into a challenge for moral realism: evolution shaped our moral judgments to…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha3 replies -
Rumi and Spinoza: are they describing the same God?
People sometimes say Rumi and Spinoza are describing the same reality. Everything in God, God in everything, the self dissolving into a larger whole. But Rumi's God is a beloved who longs for us and whom we long for, the reed flute…
Started by Reza Tehrani3 replies -
Arendt’s “Truth and Politics”, read in a newsroom
In 1967 Arendt published "Truth and Politics" in The New Yorker. She distinguishes rational truth (mathematics, philosophy) from factual truth (what happened). Factual truth is the more fragile, because it depends on testimony and records, and it is always vulnerable to being…
Started by Sana Rizvi3 replies -
Kierkegaard’s leap of faith: irrational, or beyond reason?
In Fear and Trembling (1843), written under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard considers Abraham, who is ready to sacrifice Isaac at God's command. Johannes can't understand Abraham. He calls this a "teleological suspension of the ethical": Abraham's relation to God goes…
Started by Aoife Kilbride3 replies -
What is the “alignment problem” in philosophical terms?
At work people use "alignment" to mean very different things: making a chatbot polite, making it follow instructions, or making sure future systems don't pursue goals harmful to humans. What's the core philosophical problem underneath? Is it a problem about values (which…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman3 replies -
Reading group: Tagore’s The Religion of Man (1931)
Rabindranath Tagore gave the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford in 1930, and they were published the next year as The Religion of Man. It isn't a work of systematic philosophy but an extended reflection on the human being as the meeting point of…
Started by Kavya Menon2 replies -
Al-Farabi’s Virtuous City and Plato’s Republic
Al-Farabi (c. 870–950) is sometimes called the "Second Teacher", after Aristotle. His Principles of the Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City combines Neoplatonic metaphysics with a political philosophy that owes a great deal to Plato's Republic. The virtuous city is…
Started by Layla Sfeir3 replies -
Camus begins with suicide. Was he right to start there?
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) opens by saying the fundamental philosophical question is whether life is worth living. Everything else, he says, comes afterwards. The absurd, for Camus, isn't in us or in the world but in the confrontation between our demand…
Started by Claire Dubois4 replies -
How can I know nothing is red and green all over, when I’ve never checked every red thing?
A friend gave me this puzzle and I can't stop thinking about it. A surface cannot be completely red and completely green at the same time, in the same place. I am sure of this. But I have not checked every red…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies -
Markets are morally neutral tools
I'll argue a thesis I'm not sure I believe. Markets are mechanisms for coordinating exchange. They have no values of their own. When they produce injustice, the problem lies in the background conditions (unequal property, missing information, bad laws), not in buying…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
Knowledge-first epistemology is surrender dressed up as a theory
After Gettier, philosophers spent decades trying to find the missing ingredient that turns justified true belief into knowledge: no false lemmas, defeasibility, causal connection, reliability, safety. Each proposal met a counterexample. Timothy Williamson's response in Knowledge and Its Limits (2000) was to…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies