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Diotima’s ladder: does loving the Form of Beauty make particular people disposable?
In the Symposium (210a–212a), Socrates reports Diotima's account of the ascent of love. The lover moves from one beautiful body to all beautiful bodies, then to beautiful souls, to practices and laws, to kinds of knowledge, and finally to Beauty itself. Gregory…
Started by Giulia Ferrante3 replies -
Eliminative materialism: how can anyone claim that beliefs don’t exist?
Another beginner question from me, sorry. I read a short summary of Paul Churchland's eliminative materialism and I can't get past the first step. As I understand it, he says that our everyday way of explaining people ("she went to the shop…
Started by Fajar Nugroho3 replies -
What is the actual difference between Pyrrhonian and Academic sceptics?
I have been reading about doubt, mostly because of al-Ghazālī. Every book I pick up mentions two kinds of ancient sceptics, Pyrrhonians and Academics, and then moves on as if the difference were obvious. It is not obvious to me. From what…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies -
Should judges interpret constitutions by their original meaning?
Originalism, defended in the US by Antonin Scalia (for example, in A Matter of Interpretation, 1997), says the meaning of a constitutional text is fixed at the time it was adopted. Judges should apply that meaning, and changes should come through amendment,…
Started by Deepa Kartha2 replies -
What is the “no miracles” argument for believing electrons are real?
I've been reading al-Ghazālī's Deliverance from Error, where he doubts the senses and then doubts reason. After that I started wondering about things nobody can see at all. Nobody has ever seen an electron. My physics teacher says they are as real…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies -
How does one contradiction let you prove absolutely anything?
A friend studying computer science told me that in logic "a contradiction implies everything". If you accept one contradiction, you can prove the moon is green, that I'm a king, anything. This sounds like a trick. Contradictions are bad, sure, but why…
Started by Fajar Nugroho3 replies -
What do the strange names Barbara, Celarent and Darii actually mean?
I'm working through an old logic textbook my uncle left at our house. There is a page with a Latin verse that starts "Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferioque..." and then a lot of other names like Cesare and Baroco. The book just says…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies -
Introspection is too unreliable to ground a science of consciousness
Early experimental psychology relied on trained introspection, in the laboratories of Wundt and Titchener. It collapsed partly because labs couldn't agree: the "imageless thought" controversy couldn't be settled, because one lab's trained observers reported imageless thought and another's didn't. More recently, Nisbett…
Started by Elif Yıldız5 replies -
Turing never said passing his test means a machine thinks? Then what was the test for?
This month my reading is about computers and minds. My cousin studies informatics in Bandung and he told me the Turing test is simple: if a machine can fool you in a conversation, it thinks. Done. Then I read an introduction that…
Started by Fajar Nugroho5 replies -
Zhuangzi’s happy fish: can we know what others feel?
In chapter 17 of the Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi and his friend the logician Huizi are strolling on a bridge over the river Hao. Zhuangzi remarks that the minnows darting about are happy. Huizi objects: you're not a fish, so how do you know…
Started by Claire Dubois3 replies -
What are the pramāṇas, and how do the schools disagree about them?
I grew up hearing words like "pramāṇa" in family discussions without really knowing what they meant. I've started reading Indian philosophy properly and keep running into lists of pramāṇas that differ between schools. What are they, and why does the number matter?
Started by Rohan Desai3 replies -
What Arendt actually meant by “the banality of evil”
The phrase comes from the subtitle of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). It is often misread as meaning that evil is ordinary, or unimportant, or that anyone would have done the same. As I read her,…
Started by Henrike Vogel4 replies -
Is it irrational to want to be remembered after you die?
Founders talk a lot about "legacy". I've caught myself thinking about it too: building something that lasts after me. But I won't be around to enjoy being remembered. Epicurus argued that death is nothing to us, because when we exist death isn't…
Started by Rohan Desai3 replies -
Emptiness is not nothingness: common misreadings of śūnyatā
I keep seeing "emptiness" in Buddhist philosophy explained as "nothing exists" or "everything is an illusion". That's exactly the view Nāgārjuna rejects as nihilism. For Madhyamaka, things are empty of intrinsic nature (svabhāva). They exist, but only dependently: on causes and conditions,…
Started by Meera Kulkarni3 replies -
Is the fine-tuning of physical constants evidence for design?
Physicists say that if some constants of nature, like the strength of gravity or the cosmological constant, were even slightly different, no stars, chemistry or life could exist. Some philosophers and theologians say this is strong evidence of a designer. Others respond…
Started by Omar Ragab4 replies -
Holding firm on religion and ethics while deferring on arithmetic is a failure of nerve
Most people are conciliationists about arithmetic. If an equally competent friend gets a different answer to a sum, you check, and until you do, you are less confident. Almost nobody is a conciliationist about religion, ethics or politics. We know perfectly well…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies -
What is functionalism, and why do people think it supports machine consciousness?
People in AI discussions often say that "on a functionalist view" a machine could be conscious. I have a vague sense of what that means but I'd like to understand it properly. What exactly does functionalism claim? Why do people think it…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen3 replies -
Gandhi’s satyagraha as philosophy, not just a tactic
Gandhi coined the word satyāgraha, "holding firmly to truth", in South Africa around 1906–08. He distinguished it from "passive resistance", which he saw as the weapon of the weak. Satyāgraha requires the resister to accept suffering without retaliating, aiming to convert the…
Started by Anand Kurup3 replies -
Did al-Ghazali’s Incoherence kill philosophy in the Islamic world?
A story you'll still find in textbooks: al-Ghazali attacked philosophy around 1095, Ibn Rushd's defence was ignored in the East, and after that Islamic philosophy died while Europe picked up the torch. The story is false, and I want to collect the…
Started by Layla Sfeir4 replies -
Reading group: al-Ghazālī’s Deliverance from Error, the chapters on doubt
Al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl, usually translated Deliverance from Error, is short enough to read in an evening and deep enough to read for a lifetime. I would like to read the first part, the account of his doubt, slowly over three weeks with…
Started by Bilal Rashid7 replies -
Eighteen and on a gap year: should I read the philosophers themselves or an introduction first?
My parents still call my gap year wasting time. Last month I read al-Ghazālī's Deliverance from Error, his account of his crisis of doubt, and I haven't stopped thinking about it. It was the first time a book felt like it was…
Started by Fajar Nugroho6 replies -
What is Benacerraf’s dilemma, in words a school leaver can follow?
I finished senior high school this year and I'm taking a gap year, which my parents call wasting time. I've been reading about whether numbers are discovered or invented, because my maths teacher always said "we discover mathematics, we don't make it…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies -
Is love a choice, or something that happens to us?
In poetry, love is almost always something that happens to you: you "fall", you're struck, you're helpless. But in many families and religious traditions, love is described as a commitment you choose and keep choosing. Harry Frankfurt, in The Reasons of Love…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
A random string and a sonnet can carry the same information? Then what is Shannon measuring?
Yesterday's lecture was about information, and the lecturer said something that has been bothering me through two full shifts: in Claude Shannon's theory, a random string of letters and a sonnet of the same length can carry the same amount of information.…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
If morality depends on God, what is my atheist friend doing when she keeps her promises?
My uncle says that without God there's no reason to be good, and that people without religion only pretend to be moral. My closest friend from school is an atheist, and she's the most honest person I know. She returned money a…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies -
Did the Stoics really think all emotions are bad?
I keep hearing that the Stoics wanted us to feel nothing, to be like robots. But when I read Seneca's letters, he clearly feels grief, friendship and even joy. He writes very warmly to Lucilius. So what did they actually think about…
Started by Elin Hedqvist4 replies -
Dream arguments East and West: Descartes, Zhuangzi and the Yoga Vasistha
Three treatments of the same worry. Descartes, Meditations I (1641): there are no sure signs to distinguish waking from dreaming, so the senses can't give certain knowledge. He uses it as a method, a step towards certainty. Zhuangzi, chapter 2: Zhuangzi dreams…
Started by Arjun Iyer3 replies -
Mystical experience can count as evidence for what it reveals
William Alston, in Perceiving God (1991), argued that mystical experience is a form of perception, and that beliefs formed through it are prima facie justified in the same way perceptual beliefs are. Richard Swinburne's "principle of credulity" says that if it seems…
Started by Reza Tehrani7 replies -
Is the liar paradox a problem about language or about truth itself?
Take the sentence: this sentence is false. If true, it's false; if false, it's true. Tarski's response (1933) was that a language can't consistently contain its own truth predicate, so we need a hierarchy: an object language, a metalanguage that talks about…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak3 replies -
Truth as ‘what inquiry converges on’ breaks down exactly where we most need it: ethics
Peirce wrote, in 1878, that the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth. I find that a beautiful idea for physics. Scientists disagree, run experiments, and over time opinions…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies