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Schmitt’s uncomfortable point survives: no constitution can fully govern its own emergencies
Carl Schmitt's Political Theology (1922) opens with a sentence that every journalist covering courts eventually meets: sovereign is he who decides on the exception. The argument goes like this. Constitutions specify normal procedures. Emergencies arise that those procedures did not anticipate. Someone…
Started by Sana Rizvi6 replies -
Splitting causation from explanation was a modern mistake, not an Aristotelian one
Reading Maturana and Varela, the Chilean biologists who described living things as self-producing systems in the early 1970s, I keep running into the same problem. To explain why a kelp forest is the way it is, I need to say what it's…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo6 replies -
Freire’s banking model is unfair to the lecture, and to the teachers who give good ones
Every few years a pedagogy course reminds me that I am a banker. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed Freire describes the "banking" concept of education: the teacher deposits, the students receive, file and store. The teacher talks, the students listen meekly. He…
Started by Giulia Ferrante6 replies -
Skilled manual work demands more thinking than most office work
My cousin works in an office in Casablanca and earns three times what I do, and the family assumes his work is the one that uses the head. Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft argues the reverse, and I want to defend…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani6 replies -
Whoever deploys an automated decision system should answer for its harms, fault or no fault
Take the standard case. A bank uses an automated system to assess loans. A creditworthy applicant is refused. The refusal rests on correlations in the training data that no engineer chose and nobody can fully reconstruct. Who answers for it? The engineers…
Started by Hamza Qureshi7 replies -
Special relativity has refuted presentism, whatever presentists say
I'd like to argue the strong version, then see how much survives. Presentism says only the present exists. Past dinosaurs and future grandchildren are not real; only what is happening now is. That requires a fact about which events are happening now,…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
Moore’s “here is one hand” is not really an argument, and that is exactly why it works
There is a move my best debaters make without ever having heard of G. E. Moore. When the other team builds an elaborate case for a conclusion everyone in the room knows is false, you do not attack the premises one by…
Started by Sam Ellery6 replies -
Yūgen is not a Japanese sublime, and translating it that way loses the point
I have seen yūgen glossed as "the Japanese sublime" in two English books and one museum caption this year. I want to argue that this is a mistake, not just a loose translation. Kant's sublime has a definite shape. Something overwhelms: magnitude…
Started by Aiko Tanabe5 replies -
Hume’s “true judges” are simply people with leisure, and Bourdieu showed it
Look at Hume's list of what makes a good critic: delicacy, practice, comparison, freedom from prejudice, good sense. Now ask who has the time to practise and compare. Not my father, who unloaded ships in Marseille for forty years and listened to…
Started by Hugo Marchetti5 replies -
On the Confucian view there is no self behind your roles, and that is a strength
My students meet Confucius as a list of duties to memorise. I want them to meet the boldest reading of him instead, and I'd like to test it here first. The reading, associated especially with Henry Rosemont and Roger Ames, goes like…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Dreyfus’s critique of AI has aged better than Searle’s Chinese Room
I want to defend an unfashionable ranking. Of the two classic objections to the idea of thinking machines, the one that has earned its keep is Hubert Dreyfus's, not John Searle's. Searle's argument rests on an intuition about what the man in…
Started by Derek Hollis7 replies -
Perdurantism fits modern physics better than endurantism does
I trained in physics in Lagos and now tutor it, and I've been reading Theodore Sider's case for four-dimensionalism. I'm persuaded, and I want to put the argument from physics as strongly as I can. Relativity treats spacetime as a single four-dimensional…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha5 replies -
Alston’s parity argument fails because rival mystical practices contradict each other
I want to defend a fairly standard objection, but coming from physics I want to state it carefully, because I think the usual version undersells Alston. Alston's move in Perceiving God (1991) is clever. We cannot justify trusting sense perception without relying…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
Calling Wang Fuzhi a materialist hides more than it reveals
Some older textbooks my students find online still call Wang Fuzhi (Chuanshan) a "materialist". The label comes mostly from twentieth-century scholarship that wanted ancestors for a materialist philosophy, and it has a respectable basis: Wang made qi the sole reality and treated…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Charity is for evaluating arguments, not for reporting what people actually said
I keep running into a problem with the principle of charity. In philosophy the rule is good: before you object, reconstruct the argument in its strongest form. An objection to a weak version proves nothing about the strong one. I accept that.…
Started by Sana Rizvi6 replies -
A firm that closes a site owes its workers more than the law requires
Over the years I've watched three firms in our district of Marseille close sites. In each case the company did what the law required: notice, severance at the legal rate, the formal consultation. In each case people who had given twenty or…
Started by Hugo Marchetti5 replies -
The incredulous stare is a perfectly respectable argument against modal realism
I have been reading the threads on Lewis and his infinitely many concrete worlds. I am told the standard response, the "incredulous stare", is not an argument, and that Lewis himself said so. I want to defend the stare. Doctors routinely reject…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
Functionalism is officially neutral, but in practice it is materialism with better manners
Functionalism says mental states are defined by their causal roles: pain is whatever state is caused by damage, causes distress and avoidance, and so on, regardless of what realises it. Putnam's argument from multiple realisability in the 1960s made it the default…
Started by Priya Raghavan6 replies -
Testimonial injustice is a failure of knowledge, not only a failure of fairness
I teach eleventh-grade English in Atlanta, and every year we read To Kill a Mockingbird. Every year a student asks why the jury did not believe Tom Robinson when the evidence was on his side. And every year I hand them Miranda…
Started by Keisha Monroe6 replies -
If the Stoic technique works without the Stoic cosmos, the cosmos was never doing the work
Stoicism helped me back from a bad year. I read Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and practised separating what's in my control from what isn't. I don't believe in a rationally ordered cosmos governed by providence. The practice worked anyway. I keep reading…
Started by Rohan Desai7 replies -
Hountondji was right: a people’s worldview is not yet philosophy
Every year a student in my lycée class asks why we study Descartes and not ‘African philosophy’. I owe them a serious answer, and the most serious one I know is Paulin Hountondji's. In African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (originally 1976), Hountondji…
Started by Khady Sène7 replies -
Reliabilism has a machine problem: reliable prediction is not knowledge
Some machine learning systems are very reliable: a fraud model that flags transactions correctly far more often than any human team. Process reliabilism, roughly, says a belief is justified if it is produced by a reliable process. So I want to run…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen6 replies -
Asking a smoker to picture their daughter’s wedding is not manipulation
At the hospital where I interpret, a lot of the work is trying to get people to stop doing things that will kill them. Here's a familiar situation. A doctor I work with gives a patient the figures on smoking: mortality, heart…
Started by Tsion Bekele6 replies -
The al-Ghazali–Hume parallel is shallower than the textbooks suggest
The sentence I most often find myself correcting in discussions is "al-Ghazālī anticipated Hume". I'd like to argue that the parallel, though real, is shallower than it is usually made to look. The shared step is this: we observe one event accompanying…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
Cartwright is right: the fundamental laws of physics are false of real things, and that’s fine
No oil reservoir has ever behaved exactly as my equations say. Every model is an idealisation: uniform permeability, simplified boundary conditions, ignored chemistry. We calibrate, we fudge, we history-match. And yet the models are useful. Nancy Cartwright's How the Laws of Physics…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam5 replies -
Dai Zhen was right: moral principle used to crush desire is itself a cruelty
My students memorise Zhu Xi for their exams, and one slogan of the Cheng–Zhu school always sticks: preserve heavenly principle, eliminate human desires. They write it down without blinking. Dai Zhen (1724–1777) blinked. A Qing scholar trained in the philological methods of…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Ageing is a disease, and medicine should treat it as one
I'll argue this as an outsider to medicine and expect to be corrected. Ageing is the largest single risk factor for most of what kills people in rich countries: cancers, heart disease, dementia. It involves the progressive failure of almost every bodily…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Langton is right: you can be silenced while still being allowed to speak
Rae Langton's 1993 paper "Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts" changes how some people think about speech every time my reading group takes it up. I want to defend its central idea against the objection that it is a clever stretch. The idea,…
Started by Femke Bosman5 replies -
Deconstruction is not “anything goes”, and its critics should stop saying it is
Every few months someone in a thread like this one says that Derrida licensed readers to make texts mean whatever they like. I want to argue that this is a caricature, and that it mostly comes from one misquoted sentence. The sentence…
Started by Martín Iriarte5 replies -
Translating wu wei as “effortless action” does more harm than good; better to leave it untranslated
I spend my working life with words that will not cross borders. Wu wei is a strange case for me, because in Vietnamese it already exists as a Sino-Vietnamese word, vô vi, and it carries baggage that English translators rarely notice. Consider…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo6 replies