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Teaching bad faith to sixteen-year-olds: Sartre’s waiter and the school prefect
The lesson that works best with my class every year is Sartre on bad faith, from Being and Nothingness. Sartre describes a café waiter whose movements are a little too precise, a little too quick, who bends forward a little too eagerly.…
Started by Rowena Abellana6 replies -
Wine shows hand out medals. Can someone be wrong about what tastes good?
This question pays my bills. Twice a year I sit at a regional wine show with three other judges and we give medals. Every year someone at the cellar door tells me taste is subjective and my medals are just my opinion…
Started by Bec Doyle6 replies -
We will never have a test for machine consciousness, and we should say so plainly
This is not a spiritual worry, and I say so as a materialist. It's a methodological one. Three questions get blurred in public talk about AI. Can machines behave intelligently? That is an engineering question and the answer keeps moving. Do they…
Started by Priya Raghavan6 replies -
Nineteen years with one blade: Cook Ding and the discipline that wu wei is usually sold without
A customer from Europe, watching me cut a joint in my workshop, told me it looked effortless and that I must be practising wu wei. She had read a book about it on holiday. I asked her what it meant and she…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani6 replies -
The buyer at the gate offers more than the cooperative: does a promise bind when breaking it pays?
I sell my cocoa through a farmers' cooperative. At the start of the season every member promises to bring their beans to the cooperative, which in return gives us credit for fertiliser, a fair weight on the scale, and a share of…
Started by Akosua Mensah6 replies -
What are we claiming when we call a wine, a food or a practice “natural”?
I make small-batch wine in the Adelaide Hills and judge at regional shows. "Natural wine" is the hottest phrase in my trade, and I've come to dislike it, not because the wines are bad (some are great) but because nobody can tell…
Started by Bec Doyle6 replies -
Hayden White was right: the historian chooses the plot before the facts mean anything
Last year I worked on a documentary about a factory closure, and I made two rough cuts from the same footage for the director. In one the closing of the gates is a tragedy: a community undone by forces it could not…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam6 replies -
Frankfurt is right that we don’t love our children for their qualities, and all love works that way
Raising two children has given me a lot of time with the evidence. Harry Frankfurt argues in The Reasons of Love that love is not a response to the beloved's value. It is a form of caring, and caring is what makes…
Started by Thamarai Raman6 replies -
Genes carry information only in Shannon’s sense; the rest is metaphor
In biology, people talk about information constantly. Genes "encode" proteins, DNA is a "blueprint" or a "program", development "reads out" the genome. My thesis is that only one of those uses is literal, and it is the least interesting one. In Shannon's…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo6 replies -
Reading group: Kant’s Groundwork, Section I, the good will and the honest shopkeeper
Most readers skip straight to the formulas of the categorical imperative, and for years so did I. I want to read the beginning properly: Section I of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), where Kant starts from what he calls…
Started by Henrike Vogel6 replies -
What is hermeneutical injustice, and how is it different from simply not being believed?
I work as an attendant on the maternity ward of a district hospital. In my work I see women not being believed all the time. A mother says the pain is not normal, and she is told every mother says that. Later…
Started by Farhana Akter6 replies -
Teaching non-European philosophy as live positions, not museum pieces
I teach the terminale philosophy class at a lycée in Dakar, where Descartes and Senghor sit on the same exam paper. One of the clearest changes in philosophy since 1990 is that traditions outside Europe have begun entering curricula and journals as…
Started by Khady Sène6 replies -
Anscombe was right: we see causing all the time
I make cedar doors and ceilings in Tetouan. When I push a chisel through cedar I do not see a chisel, then a cut, and infer a connection. I see the chisel cutting. When my apprentice drops a plank and it cracks,…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani6 replies -
Reading group: the first book of the Nyāya Sūtra with Vātsyāyana’s commentary
The Nyāya Sūtra, traditionally attributed to Gautama Akṣapāda and dated around the second century CE in its current form, is the root text of the school that made Indian logic and debate into a system. About three centuries later Vātsyāyana wrote the…
Started by Vikram Sethi6 replies -
If the One cannot be described, how did Plotinus manage to write so much about it?
Visitors to my workshop often tell me that this or that painting is "Neoplatonic", and I have learned to be wary of the word, because art historians argue fiercely about how much philosophy the painters actually knew. So I decided to go…
Started by Chiara Bellandi6 replies -
Keep the losing opinion on the page: what the Talmud could teach an online forum
The more time I spend in online philosophy forums, including this one, the more I think the rabbis solved some problems we keep failing at. Three practices I'd love to see here. Record the minority view. The Mishnah asks why it bothers…
Started by Eliana Halpern6 replies -
Does contemplating death dissolve the fear, or does it just stop us arguing about it?
In the Theravāda tradition we practise maraṇasati, mindfulness of death. Buddhaghosa's Path of Purification gives it a full treatment among the recollections, and there is a sutta where monks tell the Buddha how they practise it, hoping to live for a day…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara6 replies -
A correlation explains nothing until someone shows the mechanism
Our data say that people who charge their phones at regular times are more likely to repay small loans. The effect is real, stable and useful for prediction. But when a manager says this explains repayment, I object. It explains nothing. Perhaps…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga6 replies -
Aristotle was right that distributive justice is proportion; every quarrel is about what counts as merit
The fiercest arguments I ever heard as a school coach were about team selection. So I've been reading Aristotle to find out whether I was teaching justice or just picking teams. In Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics he says distributive justice…
Started by Gerrit Venter6 replies -
Reading group: Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (1982), read forty years on
In a Different Voice is one of the most cited books in the history of ethics and one of the most misremembered. Gilligan was a psychologist, not a philosopher, and the book began as a response to Lawrence Kohlberg's scale of moral…
Started by Femke Bosman6 replies -
How do you choose a translation when you can’t read the original?
Speaking Irish as well as English, I know how much changes between languages. I've been reading Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy on the train, and I recently noticed that the two translations I own feel like different books. One is stately and archaic,…
Started by Siobhán Keane6 replies -
Is the circularity objection to identity-based accounts of gender fatal, or a misunderstanding?
Logic is what I think about most, so circularity is the kind of objection I find myself taking seriously by reflex. I'd like help understanding whether it lands here. An identity-based account says: what makes someone a member of a gender category…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak6 replies -
Taylor’s happy Sisyphus shows meaning is purely subjective
I make my debaters argue the side they don't believe, so here's me arguing a side I'm only half sure of. Richard Taylor's version of Sisyphus goes like this. The gods, in pity, implant in Sisyphus an overwhelming desire to roll boulders.…
Started by Sam Ellery6 replies -
Does a Carmelite’s prayer of union and a Zen kenshō report the same experience?
Between sittings this winter, out of curiosity, I read Teresa of Ávila's Interior Castle, which she wrote in 1577. I expected it to be completely foreign. Parts of it were. Other parts, especially her descriptions of the faculties going quiet, felt uncomfortably…
Started by Aiko Tanabe6 replies -
Pacifism is the most consistent ethics of war, not a refusal to have one
I grew up among Jain neighbours in Hyderabad and came to Gandhi through them. Gandhi credited Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894) with a large influence on him, so the pacifist line I have absorbed runs from Mahavira through…
Started by Anand Kurup6 replies -
My father knew which cedar beam would split. He could never say how. Did he know?
When I was a boy my father would walk past a stack of beams and tap one with his knuckle and say: not that one, it will split when we carve it. He was almost always right. If you asked him how…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani6 replies -
Teleosemantics is the best naturalistic theory of content we have
I dive in kelp forests on the Chilean coast, and I came to philosophy through biology, so I will defend the view that feels most like home. The puzzle: a frog's tongue fires at small dark moving dots. Usually they are flies,…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo6 replies -
If a life has a place rather than a meaning, what happens when the place is unjust?
I've been reading discussions of how different traditions answer "does life have meaning?", and one idea keeps coming up: most traditions say a life has a place rather than a meaning. Your meaning comes from your role in a family, a lineage,…
Started by Keisha Monroe6 replies -
Epicurus’s argument about death still works if you throw away the atoms
As a volunteer in Montreal, I spend a lot of my evenings with people who are dying. Epicurus helped me think about death without flinching, so I want to defend him against a claim I keep reading: that his consolations about death…
Started by Nadia Haddad6 replies -
Is there a film theory that starts from ma, rasa or the imaginal world rather than from Paris?
Almost every film theory I've read starts from France, Russia or America: Eisenstein, Bazin, Cavell, Carroll. They're wonderful, but when I watch Ozu, I feel the most important things happen in what those theories treat as gaps. In Japanese aesthetics there's ma,…
Started by Rin Matsuda6 replies