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Reading group: Prior Analytics I.1–7, slowly, with a Nyāya inference on the table
Everyone says Aristotle invented formal logic, and I realise I have never read the Prior Analytics closely in company. So here is a proposal: the first seven chapters of Book I, over five weeks, which is where the whole assertoric system is…
Started by Giulia Ferrante6 replies -
What are the Nyāya hetvābhāsas, and do they line up with the Western list of fallacies?
I've been reading about Nyāya logic on weekends. I keep meeting the word hetvābhāsa, usually translated "fallacy" or "pseudo-reason", and a list of five kinds. My questions, as a non-specialist: What are the five, in plain terms, with an example of each…
Started by Vikram Sethi4 replies -
Reading group: Gettier’s three pages, with Russell’s clock and Dharmottara’s mirage alongside
The thing I love most about Gettier's paper is that it works like a failing test case. One counterexample, cleanly stated, and a definition that looked settled stops compiling. It is also the shortest famous paper I know, so it is an…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Reading group: Dummett’s ‘The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic Logic’
I keep noticing that people defend intuitionistic logic for two very different reasons. Brouwer's reason was a picture of mathematics as mental construction. Dummett's reason, in his 1973 paper "The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic Logic", was a theory of meaning. I'd like…
Started by Ana Clara Ferreira5 replies -
Nāgasena’s condition for talking with a king: argue as scholars do, not as kings do
Early in the Milindapañha, the Questions of King Milinda, the king asks the monk Nāgasena to discuss with him. Nāgasena answers with a condition. He will talk if the king will talk as scholars do, not as kings do. What's the difference?…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara5 replies -
The West’s picture of ‘Indian philosophy’ is Vedanta-shaped, and it has hidden everyone else
You can probably guess where I stand on most metaphysics. But this isn't an attack on Vedānta. It's a complaint about how Indian philosophy got packaged. The thesis: what reaches Western readers as "Indian philosophy", or worse "Eastern philosophy", is overwhelmingly Vedāntic…
Started by Arvind Poojary6 replies -
Does every culture have a word for ‘art’? Technē, kalā and the Japanese ‘ways’
I spend a lot of time warning people about false friends in comparison. One of the biggest sits under the whole debate about defining art. Greek technē is usually translated "art", but it means skilled making of any kind: medicine, shoemaking, navigation,…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
The Qin collapse did not refute Han Feizi; the Han dynasty quietly proved him right
I read Han Feizi to understand why the Legalists won, at least for a while. The standard story is a morality tale. The Qin adopted Legalism wholesale: uniform law, harsh punishment, rewards for service, no reliance on the ruler's virtue. They unified…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
Reading group: Feyerabend’s Against Method, with the Galileo chapters at the centre
Anyone who reads psychoanalysis learns early that Popper used Freud as his model of a theory that explains everything and therefore says nothing. So I've always had a soft spot for Feyerabend, who argued that no methodological rule survives contact with the…
Started by Martín Iriarte5 replies -
Critical theory diagnoses domination brilliantly but cannot say why it is wrong
I work as an economist at a bank in Valencia, and Marx, Rawls, Hobbes and Ibn Khaldun share a shelf at home. I'd like to press an old objection to critical theory and see whether it still bites. Critical theory asks what…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
Does Spinoza solve the mind–body problem or just rename it?
I came to this site for philosophy of mind and stayed for Spinoza, so I owe the question. Spinoza's move, as I understand it: there is one substance, with infinitely many attributes, of which we know two, thought and extension. A mind…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen4 replies -
A source that is not one of the things it produces: Anaximander’s apeiron and Plotinus’s One
In my library we keep a small display on the Alexandrian Neoplatonists, and I have been rereading Plotinus between cataloguing jobs. What strikes me is a move that appears, in different forms, at both ends of Greek philosophy. Anaximander, very early, said…
Started by Mona Fathy6 replies -
Al-Fārābī’s virtuous city looks different on a bad day in a bookshop
On quiet afternoons in the shop I read al-Farabi, who lived and taught in this city a thousand years before me. In The Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City he compares the excellent city to a healthy body, in which…
Started by Zainab Kadhim5 replies -
Mulla Sadra’s substantial motion: what if things change in their very substance?
I am an architect in Shiraz, and Mulla Sadra, who was born here, keeps pulling me back to questions about being. This one has been on my mind since I started reading about persistence. In Aristotle's framework, which Ibn Sina refined, a…
Started by Reza Tehrani4 replies -
The Gita’s svadharma cannot be cleanly separated from varṇa, and readers should face Ambedkar’s reading
I want to raise this respectfully, because the Bhagavad Gita is sacred to many people I love, including my own grandmother. But I think a popular modern reading of it avoids a hard question. The verse everyone quotes is that it is…
Started by Deepa Kartha6 replies -
“I know what I saw”: what is a witness actually claiming?
I cover courts and human rights in Karachi. The sentence I hear most often in witness boxes is "I know what I saw." It's said with total conviction, often by people who are mistaken. Psychologists have shown how fragile this is. Elizabeth…
Started by Sana Rizvi6 replies -
Scholastic reasoning was rigorous, but it was rigour inside a fence
I'm an atheist, and I don't share the old Enlightenment sneer at the scholastics. The method was superb: state the objections, distinguish the senses of terms, answer point by point. Modern philosophy papers are built on it. But I want to argue…
Started by Arvind Poojary6 replies -
Kumārila said a cognition is valid until shown otherwise. Is that internalism or externalism?
The Mīmāṃsā school I follow holds a doctrine called svataḥ prāmāṇya, intrinsic validity. I have been reading the internalism and externalism debate in English, and I would like to know whether this doctrine belongs on one side, or whether the map does…
Started by Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya5 replies -
Anscombe was right: no emergency makes it permissible to target civilians deliberately
Here is the hardest case for the principle of discrimination. Suppose deliberately attacking a civilian population would end a war years early and save more lives than it costs, including more civilian lives. The arithmetic points one way. Elizabeth Anscombe's answer was…
Started by Aoife Kilbride6 replies -
Hui Shi’s Ten Theses: paradoxes for their own sake, or a theory of space?
I spend most of my reading time on the Later Mohist canons, and I keep being drawn sideways to Hui Shi, Zhuangzi's friend and sparring partner. Almost nothing of his own survives. What we have is a list of ten theses preserved…
Started by Chen Yuting4 replies -
How does Islamic legal reasoning decide on a financial product that no text mentions?
Our product team at the bank is looking at a "buy now, pay later" service. Inevitably someone asked whether it's halal. Someone else said, a bit dismissively, that the Qur'an and hadith obviously don't mention smartphone instalment apps, so either the scholars…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies -
What are Udayana’s arguments for God, and whom was he arguing against?
I am an atheist, and I am tired of Western debates about God being treated as the only debates. India had a long, sophisticated argument about a creator, and I know far less about the theist side of it than I should.…
Started by Arvind Poojary5 replies -
Is “depression” one condition or several? A reader’s doubts
One question has followed me through years of my own analysis and of reading psychiatry: when two people receive the same diagnosis of major depression, do they have the same thing? Consider how the diagnosis works. A person needs five of nine…
Started by Martín Iriarte4 replies -
Is a brilliantly made propaganda film a great film, or only a skilful one?
At a workshop for journalists on propaganda, we watched long stretches of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935), her film of the 1934 Nazi party rally at Nuremberg. Afterwards the room split badly. Some said: it is a great film made…
Started by Sana Rizvi5 replies -
Frege and Husserl started on the same side. What was the psychologism dispute about?
I've been reading about the split between analytic and continental philosophy because my colleagues treat it as two tribes. What surprised me is that both traditions are said to trace back, around 1900, to two men who agreed about something: Frege and…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen5 replies -
Reading group: Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses, and whether ‘mind-only’ means idealism
Vasubandhu's Twenty Verses (Viṃśatikā), with his own short commentary, is the most compact argument for the Yogācāra claim that there is "only consciousness" (vijñaptimātra). It is also the text that most invites the question of whether Yogācāra is a form of idealism,…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 replies -
Reading group: Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic (1884), five weeks with Austin’s translation
Frege's Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884) is short, sharp and still the best place to see why someone would think numbers are objects. J. L. Austin's translation (1950) has German and English on facing pages, which helps if anyone reads German. I…
Started by Ana Clara Ferreira6 replies -
Reading group: Kit Fine, ‘Vagueness, Truth and Logic’ (1975)
Vagueness is my obsession, and I've realised that many people know supervaluationism only from summaries. The original is better than the summaries. So: a slow read of Kit Fine's "Vagueness, Truth and Logic", first published in Synthese in 1975 and reprinted in…
Started by Oskar Nyberg4 replies -
Locke was right that the mind starts without ideas, and the argument from the newborn’s hunger fails
I'm biased towards Locke, I admit. But I came across an argument for innate knowledge from the Nyāya tradition that I had never seen, and I want to test my bias against it. Locke's case in Book I of the Essay is…
Started by Arvind Poojary6 replies -
The self-defeat charge against the Cārvākas attacks a position they probably did not hold
I have a soft spot for the Cārvākas, India's materialists, who accepted perception as the only independent means of knowledge (pramāṇa) and rejected rebirth, the soul and the authority of scripture. Every rival school gave them the same knock-down reply: you reject…
Started by Arvind Poojary6 replies