All topics
-
If only the transformed can know, how could a mystic ever be shown to be wrong?
Since I campaign against superstition, let me say first that I'm not asking this to sneer. I read Sufi poetry with real pleasure, and I've learned from discussions here that the Sufi claim is subtler than "feelings beat reason". The claim, as…
Started by Arvind PoojaryAnswer first (no replies yet) -
“Chinese philosophy had no epistemology” is wrong, and the Mohists are the proof
Every comparative table I see gives the Chinese row the same apologetic note: less interest in formal proof, more in precedent and the classics, no real epistemology, but that's not a deficiency. The intention is kind, but the claim underneath is wrong.…
Started by Lin Pei-shanReply first (no replies yet) -
Reading group: Nagel and Newman, Gödel’s Proof
I've noticed that half the physicists and engineers I work with cite Gödel and the other half wince when they do. I would like to understand the theorem properly, and I suspect I'm not alone. Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman's Gödel's…
Started by Lars EriksenReply first (no replies yet) -
Reading group: the ren passages of the Analects in five English translations
Following the recent arguments here about whether ren means "benevolence", I'd like to propose something slower: reading the key ren passages of the Analects side by side in five translations, with the Chinese for those who read it, and noticing exactly where…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-hoReply first (no replies yet) -
Reading group: Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (2001), from plants and wolves to people
I coached rugby for thirty years, and every season there was one boy who never tackled. He was fast, he scored, and the team was worse for having him. I never had the words for what was wrong with him beyond “he's…
Started by Gerrit VenterReply first (no replies yet) -
My agent called me an idealist. Which of the three idealisms was that?
Last week my agent told me I was "too much of an idealist" for turning down a corporate gig. Naturally I went home and looked the word up instead of reconsidering my finances. It turns out "idealist" has at least three meanings…
Started by Gemma PritchardReply first (no replies yet) -
Reading group: Saadia Gaon’s Book of Beliefs and Opinions, starting with the roots of knowledge
I teach Jewish thought to adults in Jerusalem, and many of my students arrive convinced that philosophy and religion are enemies. My favourite answer is a tenth-century one. Saadia Gaon (882–942) was born in Egypt and became head of the academy at…
Started by Miriam AdlerReply first (no replies yet) -
Did non-Euclidean geometry sink Kant’s view of space?
I am a retired teacher in Freiburg, finally reading the Critique of Pure Reason properly, and I am stuck on the Transcendental Aesthetic. Kant says space is not a thing in itself and not a set of relations among things in themselves.…
Started by Henrike VogelAnswer first (no replies yet) -
Could the constants have been different? Spinoza says no; the Ashʿarites say God could change them tomorrow
I model oil reservoirs. Every model has parameters, and every morning I change some of them to see what would have happened. So the question "could the physical constants have been different?" feels very concrete to me, and I've found two answers…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-BassamAnswer first (no replies yet) -
Would games really be the only thing left worth doing in utopia?
Bernard Suits ends The Grasshopper with a strange and wonderful claim. Imagine a utopia where every instrumental need is met: machines do all the work, nobody needs to earn, build, heal or cook. What would people do? Suits's Grasshopper argues that they…
Started by Sasha KovalenkoAnswer first (no replies yet) -
Automated cranes at my port: freedom from drudgery, or the end of what gave the day shape?
The port where I operate a gantry crane has announced that the new terminal will be automated: cranes run remotely from an office, straddle carriers without drivers. Some of us will retrain to sit at screens. Most won't be needed. As a…
Started by Hugo MarchettiReply first (no replies yet) -
Boole, not Frege, deserves to be called the father of modern logic
I'll declare my bias at the start: George Boole was professor of mathematics at Queen's College here in Cork from 1849 until his death in 1864. There's a plaque. I walk past it. Philosophers tend to say that modern logic begins with…
Started by Siobhán KeaneReply first (no replies yet) -
Mozi was wrong about music, but his question about it still stings
I play cello in a chamber ensemble in Seoul and teach children. I recently read the Mohist chapter "Against Music" and I can't stop arguing with it in my head. Mozi's argument, as I understand it: ordinary people have three great worries,…
Started by Moon Ha-eunReply first (no replies yet) -
Legal realism is not a claim about what exists, and lawyers should stop treating it as one
A small irritation from evenings spent arguing with lawyer friends in Lahore. They say "I'm a legal realist" to mean one of three things: that judges decide on their prejudices and then find reasons; that law is ultimately power; or that there…
Started by Hamza QureshiReply first (no replies yet) -
Is an economy more than the people in it?
Economics lives with a tension it never resolves, and I meet it at work every year. On one side, methodological individualism: social phenomena should be explained, ultimately, by individuals' choices and interactions. Prices, unemployment and recessions are patterns of individual behaviour. Most…
Started by Javier FerrandisAnswer first (no replies yet) -
Bundle theory or bare particulars: which embarrassment would you rather live with?
I tutor logic and keep running into this in tutoring sessions, so I'd like to hear people argue it properly. Bundle theory: an object is nothing but a bundle of properties. There is no underlying thing that "has" the redness and the…
Started by Ana Clara FerreiraAnswer first (no replies yet) -
Translating śūnyatā into Vietnamese: why “không” keeps sliding into “nothing”
I translate philosophy into Vietnamese, and I have run into a problem that the English-language warnings about emptiness don't quite cover. The Sino-Vietnamese word for emptiness is không (空). In the Heart Sutra, which many Vietnamese Buddhists chant, form is emptiness and…
Started by Vũ Quốc BảoReply first (no replies yet) -
Plantinga’s proper function: does warrant need a designer, or will evolution do?
This term a student asked me a question I could not answer cleanly, so I bring it here. Alvin Plantinga's account of warrant, in Warrant and Proper Function (1993), says roughly that a belief has warrant if it is produced by cognitive…
Started by Ikechukwu AnyanwuAnswer first (no replies yet) -
Capabilities or the social model: which better tells a city what it owes disabled residents?
In a moot this term we had to argue about what a municipal corporation owes disabled residents under India's disability-rights legislation. I found myself reaching for two frameworks that don't fit together as neatly as our professors suggest. The social model tells…
Started by Deepa KarthaAnswer first (no replies yet) -
Advaita says the Self is not the doer. Is that an answer to the free will problem, or a way of leaving it?
I want to put my own tradition's answer on the free will question to the test, because I suspect it is either very deep or a polite evasion, and I can't decide which. The karmic traditions in India share a puzzle. Acts…
Started by Arjun IyerReply first (no replies yet) -
Naturalisms before the word: the Cārvākas, Wang Chong and Xunzi’s Heaven
I want to test the distinction this site keeps drawing between kinds of naturalism (ontological, methodological, ethical, epistemological) against three older figures who are often lumped together as "early naturalists". The Cārvākas (Lokāyata). Almost all of their own texts are lost; we…
Started by Arvind PoojaryReply first (no replies yet) -
Nozick gave up closure to beat the sceptic. Isn’t that too high a price?
I've been reading al-Ghazālī's Deliverance from Error lately, especially the part where he doubts the senses and then even reason, because in dreams everything seems real until you wake. It got me into modern scepticism, and now I'm stuck on Nozick. As…
Started by Fajar NugrohoAnswer first (no replies yet) -
Clive Bell said representation is irrelevant in art. Can anyone still hold that?
I draw picture books and some manga in Osaka. A friend lent me Clive Bell's Art (1914), and I've been arguing with it all week. Bell says what all real works of visual art share is "significant form": lines and colours combined…
Started by Rin MatsudaAnswer first (no replies yet) -
Our neighborhood grant asked us to prove a mural was ‘art’, not ‘signage’
This spring our block association on the South Side applied for a small public-art grant to paint a mural on the side of a corner store. The design came from kids at the rec center and includes the store's name and the…
Started by Dana WhitfieldReply first (no replies yet) -
Adab, li and hexis: is character trained the same way in three traditions?
When a girl comes to learn batik in my mother's workshop, she doesn't begin by drawing. She begins by preparing cloth, heating wax, watching. She learns how to sit, how to hold the canting, how to speak to the older women. After…
Started by Ratna WulandariAnswer first (no replies yet) -
Where do Zhu Xi’s li and qi fall in the substance-versus-process divide?
I recently saw a comparative table that sorted traditions by their answer to "what is real?". It placed Neo-Confucianism under "pattern and material force, inseparable in every thing" and left it outside the neat line it drew between substance traditions (Aristotle, Vedānta,…
Started by Lin Pei-shanAnswer first (no replies yet) -
Rousseau said the English were free only at election time. Was he right about the rest of us?
In Book III of The Social Contract, Rousseau has a line that hit me hard: the English people think they are free, but they are badly mistaken; they are free only during the election of members of Parliament, and once those are…
Started by Dana WhitfieldReply first (no replies yet) -
I use modal logic at work every day, and the engineers around me have no idea it was philosophy
Every day, the engineers I work with write properties like "on every path, whenever a request is issued, a grant eventually follows". In our notation that's something like AG(request → AF grant): A for "on all paths", G for "always", F for…
Started by Derek HollisReply first (no replies yet) -
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) -
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)