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Trustee or plain citizen? Nasr’s khalifa and Leopold’s land community
A Persian garden is a strange object: entirely human-made, geometric, irrigated by channels that took enormous labour, and yet everyone who walks in feels that it is a picture of something given, not imposed. I've been reading two environmental thinkers who seem…
Started by Reza Tehrani5 replies -
The Abhidharma was the most thorough reductionism ever attempted. Was it right?
I taught chemistry for years, and when I first studied the Abhidhamma I recognised something familiar: a periodic table of experience. The Abhidharma traditions analyse everything a person is into ultimate constituents, dhammas: momentary events of consciousness, mental factors, material qualities. In…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara4 replies -
Is Yājñavalkya’s unseen seer an answer to the problem of personal identity?
I study Sanskrit and Indian philosophy in Pune, and something about how Indian theories of self get slotted into Western debates bothers me. In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, Yājñavalkya says you cannot see the seer of seeing or think the thinker of thinking,…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies -
What is Carnap’s distinction between internal and external questions, in plain terms?
I build machine-learning systems, and I've been reading about debates over whether numbers or properties "really exist". Several people pointed me to Carnap's paper "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology" (1950) as the place where someone argued these debates are confused. I read it…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen4 replies -
Chisholm’s contrary-to-duty paradox: why exactly do four sensible sentences become inconsistent?
I work for a tenants' organisation in Johannesburg, so most of my working life is spent on what is owed when someone has already failed to do what they should: the landlord who evicted unlawfully, the municipality that didn't provide alternative accommodation.…
Started by Thandeka Mokoena3 replies -
When philosophers ask what exists, what would even count as an answer?
I come to this from literature, so forgive me if the question is naive. In a seminar last week someone said ontology is "the study of what there is". I nodded along, and then on the bus home I realised I had…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies -
Ibn Khaldun’s question, what keeps power alive, matters more than Locke’s question of what justifies it
The more history I teach, the more I think political philosophy often asks the second question first. Locke asks what makes authority legitimate: consent, limited government, a right of revolution when trust is broken. Ibn Khaldun asks something different in the Muqaddimah:…
Started by Youssef Berrada6 replies -
Prophet and philosopher in al-Fārābī: one truth in two languages, or a ranking of believers?
I teach history in Fes, and al-Fārābī is the author I give my older students when they tell me philosophy and religion must be enemies. But I've started to wonder whether his reconciliation is as friendly as it looks. As I understand…
Started by Youssef Berrada6 replies -
Al-Shaybani’s siyar and the scholastics reached civilian immunity separately
In retirement I have been reading Majid Khadduri's 1966 translation of al-Shaybani's siyar, published as The Islamic Law of Nations. Al-Shaybani (749–805) was a student of Abu Hanifa, and his work on the siyar is one of the earliest systematic treatments of…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
Analogy, negation, or “without asking how”: how can finite words say anything true of God?
Every year one of my students asks the question that underlies everything else: when we say "God is good" or "God knows", what do the words mean? If they mean what they mean of us, God becomes a large human being. If…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu4 replies -
A scripture with no author: what Mīmāṃsā does to the intention debate
The Western argument about artistic intention assumes there is an author whose mind we either consult or ignore. My tradition has a case where, on its own account, there is no author at all. Pūrva Mīmāṃsā holds that the Veda is apauruṣeya:…
Started by Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya4 replies -
There can be no laws of human behaviour, only useful regularities
The "law" of demand is not a law in the sense the law of gravitation is, and I have said so to every new analyst I have trained. Here is the thesis in full. Social science finds regularities. Some are robust: Ibn…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
Reading group: Benacerraf’s “What Numbers Could Not Be” and “Mathematical Truth”
Paul Benacerraf wrote two short papers that between them set the agenda for half a century of philosophy of mathematics. Both are in the Benacerraf and Putnam anthology Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings, and both are easy to find. Plan, three weeks:…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Reading group: how grief becomes rasa, from Lollaṭa to Abhinavagupta
The rasa debate is one of the great sustained arguments in Indian philosophy, and it is usually presented in a single paragraph that flattens it. I propose we read it slowly, commentator by commentator. The main difficulty is that the commentaries of…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Reading group: Russell’s ‘On Denoting’ (1905), and the puzzle of the hare’s horn
Bertrand Russell's "On Denoting", published in Mind in 1905, has been called a paradigm of philosophy, and it is also short. It is the best example I know of predicate logic being turned on ordinary language, so I'd like to read it…
Started by Oskar Nyberg5 replies -
Reading group: Kripke, Naming and Necessity, Lectures I and II
Naming and Necessity began as three lectures given at Princeton in January 1970, transcribed with very light editing. It reads like a man talking, digressions and all, which makes it more fun than most philosophy and occasionally harder to pin down. Plan…
Started by Oskar Nyberg5 replies -
Integrity, proportion, radiance: does Aquinas have a theory of beauty or just three words?
In a seminar on Aquinas we hit the passage everyone quotes on beauty: Summa theologiae I, question 39, article 8, where he says beauty requires three things: integrity or perfection (things that are lacking are ugly for that reason), due proportion or…
Started by Aoife KilbrideReply first (no replies yet) -
Devadatta is fat but never eats by day: is Mīmāṃsā “postulation” just inference to the best explanation?
When I read about sources of knowledge comparatively, I like to point out that the European and Indian debates ask different questions. The European one asks which source does the real work, senses or reason. The Indian one asks how many irreducible…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
‘Illa, kāraṇa, gù: what each tradition’s word for ’cause’ lets it ask
I've been thinking about how the translators of the ninth and tenth centuries handled Aristotle's aitia. They used 'illa and sabab, and here is the interesting part: 'illa already had, or soon acquired, a second life in law. In Islamic jurisprudence, the…
Started by Layla Sfeir6 replies -
Thirty-one years in the courts: legal causation is not physical causation, and should not be
For thirty-one years I reported on the courts of Lahore for a newspaper, the last ten mostly from the sessions courts. In retirement I am reading the jurisprudence I only skimmed in those years, and causation is where philosophy and the courtroom…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan4 replies -
Brute facts are not a cop-out: some things just are, and the universe may be one of them
When I talk with believers in the villages where our association works, the conversation often reaches this point: "But who made the universe? Everything has a cause." When I say the universe may simply exist, with no further explanation, I'm told I…
Started by Arvind Poojary6 replies -
When rhetoric and poetry were counted as logic: the Arabic Organon and al-Jāḥiẓ on eloquence
I keep a secondhand bookshop off Mutanabbi Street. People come in for poetry far more often than for logic, and they are surprised when I tell them that for centuries the two were shelved together. In the Arabic tradition, following late-antique practice,…
Started by Zainab Kadhim5 replies -
Reading group: Frank Ramsey, “Truth and Probability” (written 1926)
Ramsey wrote “Truth and Probability” in 1926, when he was twenty-three, and it was published only after his death, in the 1931 collection of his papers edited by R. B. Braithwaite. It is the founding text of the idea that degrees of…
Started by Oskar Nyberg5 replies -
Reading group: Mozi’s “Against Music” and Xunzi’s reply, with the Analects as prelude
The oldest sustained argument I know about whether art is morally good for us took place in warring-states China, and it deserves to be read in full rather than in a footnote. I propose three weeks. Week 1. The Analects on music.…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
Every cognition should be trusted until something defeats it: the Mīmāṃsakas were right
Let me defend my own school. One of our school's central doctrines is svataḥ prāmāṇya, the intrinsic validity of cognition. Kumārila Bhaṭṭa argued that when a cognition arises, its validity arises with it. We do not need a second cognition to certify…
Started by Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya6 replies -
Reading group: Plato’s Theaetetus, the three definitions of knowledge
Every year I teach the Theaetetus to my liceo students in fragments, and every year I promise myself I'll read it whole again with adults. This is that promise. It is the founding text of epistemology and also one of Plato's most…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
Reading Rumi as love poetry without the path is reading something he did not write
I grew up in Shiraz hearing the Masnavi read aloud. Its opening, the lament of the reed cut from its reed-bed, longing to return, is perhaps the most famous passage in Persian. Abroad, Rumi is one of the best-selling poets in the…
Started by Reza Tehrani5 replies -
S5 is the right logic for metaphysical necessity
Here is a view I hold about modal logic and want tested. S5 says: whatever is possible is necessarily possible, and whatever is necessary is necessarily necessary. In Kripke's terms, every world is accessible from every other. For metaphysical necessity (what could…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak6 replies -
Logic is the one part of philosophy that settles questions, and the rest should take note
People like to say that philosophy never makes progress, that we're still arguing about the same questions as Plato. Logic is the counterexample. For two thousand years, Aristotle's syllogistic could not handle inferences involving relations. "Every horse is an animal, so every…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Who was al-Ruhawi, and what does his Adab al-Tabib actually say about the physician?
At a hospital conference in Cairo, a speaker mentioned al-Ruhawi's Adab al-Tabib as one of the earliest systematic works on medical ethics, written in the ninth century, and then moved straight on to modern guidelines. I've been unable to find much more…
Started by Omar Ragab4 replies