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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 -
Read the Republic with ‘citizen community’ in place of ‘state’ and the argument changes
Every year one of my students asks why we bother with Plato's Republic, since it's obviously a blueprint for a totalitarian state. I've started giving them an exercise that I'd like to share here. Take any English translation that renders polis as…
Started by Nikos TheodoridisReply first (no replies yet) -
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 -
Ross was right: there is no master principle of morality, only several duties weighed by judgement
Every sentence I heard passed in Lahore's courts involved weighing things that do not reduce to one another: the harm done, the offender's history, his family, remorse, deterrence, mercy. There was never a formula. The sentencing guidelines that tried to be formulas…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan6 replies -
Even if the proof works, whose God has it reached? The gap from “first cause” to God
I teach adults in Jerusalem who often arrive believing that philosophy and religion are enemies. One thing I show them early is that even a successful argument for a first cause or a necessary being leaves a large question open: why call…
Started by Miriam Adler5 replies -
Kasb is a real distinction, not a verbal escape: the Ash’ari answer deserves a hearing
Within Islamic theology the free will question produced two sharply opposed answers, and I think one of them gets a worse press than it deserves. The Mu'tazila said that human beings genuinely create their own acts. God is just; he would not…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam5 replies -
Belief in God can be rational without arguments: Plantinga’s proper basicality deserves a fair hearing
I work at a hospital in Cairo, and in the evenings I read the arguments for God, usually in the order the kalam theologians would approve of. But I have come to think that the most interesting move in recent philosophy of…
Started by Omar Ragab5 replies -
The KK principle is false: you can know something without knowing that you know it
A question from a materialist with a soft spot for Indian epistemology. In epistemic logic, positive introspection (the KK principle) says: if you know P, you know that you know P. Hintikka built it into his system. It's attractive: surely knowledge is…
Started by Priya Raghavan5 replies -
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