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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 -
Reading group: Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, three essays
Sitting in job centres and taking notes, as I often do, I've realised I'm doing amateur ethnography without having read the ethnographers properly, so I'm proposing three essays from Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). Week 1: ‘Thick Description: Toward an…
Started by Johanna Reinhardt6 replies -
Williams was right: an endless life would eventually become unbearable
Editors think about endings more than is healthy. A film that never ends is not a better film. It is a worse one, and after a while not a film at all. Bernard Williams makes an argument like this about immortality, in…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam6 replies -
Saving a theory with an auxiliary hypothesis is often exactly the right move
In 2011 a neutrino experiment at Gran Sasso reported particles arriving slightly faster than light. If you took naive falsificationism literally, special relativity was refuted that afternoon. Nobody I know believed it. The collaboration itself asked for scrutiny, and the anomaly was…
Started by Lars Eriksen6 replies -
“The best ruler is barely noticed” is compatible with abandonment, and the Legalists exploited exactly that
Chapter 17 of the Daodejing ranks rulers. The best are those whose people barely know they exist. Next come those the people love and praise; then those they fear; then those they despise. And when the work is done, the people all…
Started by Chen Yuting6 replies -
Twenty years of translating have convinced me that meaning is use
Every day at work I meet words that the dictionary claims to define and that my clients use in ways the definition doesn't cover. Heimat is the famous German case, but the ordinary words are worse. “Fair” in English. Geist. The French…
Started by Claire Dubois6 replies -
Was gender always the organising category? Oyěwùmí and the Yoruba argument
I keep returning to a book that divides everyone I discuss it with: Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí's The Invention of Women (1997). Her claim is that in precolonial Yoruba society, the primary principle of social organisation was not gender but seniority, relative age. She…
Started by Titilayo Adeyemi6 replies -
Judges make law in hard cases, and pretending they discover it does more harm than good
Here is my thesis, from someone who has read too many judgments. Hart's famous example is a rule forbidding vehicles in the park. Cars are clearly covered. But a bicycle? A child's electric toy? A decommissioned tank set up as a war…
Started by Deepa Kartha6 replies -
Slippery-slope arguments in medicine are usually predictions, not fallacies
Medicine runs on slippery-slope reasoning, and most of it is sound. A simple case. A patient with a cold asks for antibiotics. If the GP prescribes "just this once", she has taught them that colds get antibiotics, they will ask again, they…
Started by Alistair Gow6 replies -
Confucian ethics is a role ethics, and filing it under virtue ethics hides its best idea
In the national ethics curriculum I teach in Seoul, Confucius sits on the same page as Aristotle under the heading "virtue ethics". I used to accept that. I now think it is a mistake, or at least a costly simplification. Here is…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu6 replies -
Reading group: Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief” and James’s “The Will to Believe” side by side
These two essays are a classic pairing and they are both short, so I'd like to read them together over four weeks. The question they share is the one at the center of debates about rationality: should you believe only what the…
Started by Dana Whitfield6 replies -
Did classical Chinese philosophers have a concept of truth, or only of the “admissible”?
This question sits at the centre of my reading of the Later Mohist canons, and I would welcome other views. In 1985 Chad Hansen published an influential paper arguing, roughly, that classical Chinese philosophy did not use a semantic concept of truth,…
Started by Chen Yuting6 replies -
Reading group: Philip Anderson, “More Is Different” (Science, 1972)
Anderson's essay is about exactly the phenomena that drew me into physics as a student. It is four pages long, written by a physicist who later won the Nobel Prize, and it has probably done more to shape physicists' attitudes to reductionism…
Started by Lars Eriksen6 replies -
Does general anaesthesia switch experience off, or only the memory of it?
Last month, a patient I was interpreting for asked before surgery whether she would "be there" during the operation and simply forget it, or whether she would not be there at all. I passed on the reassuring answer she was given. Afterwards…
Started by Tsion Bekele6 replies -
Rāmānuja’s question ‘whose ignorance?’ is the objection Advaita never answered
I read Mīmāṃsā, which makes me a realist about the world of ritual, persons and things, and therefore no natural friend of either kind of Vedāntin. On one point, though, I side firmly with Rāmānuja against Śaṅkara. Advaita holds that brahman alone…
Started by Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya6 replies -
Was Laozi the first laissez-faire economist? Why wu wei is not the invisible hand
Every few years a younger colleague at work brings me a quotation from the Laozi with great excitement. "The more prohibitions there are, the poorer the people." "Governing a large state is like cooking a small fish": don't keep poking it. And…
Started by Javier Ferrandis6 replies -
The four-principles framework is too individualist for family-centred medicine
I first read Beauchamp and Childress as a student, and I admired it. But my work interpreting at the hospital keeps showing me where it doesn't fit. A typical case: an older man with a serious diagnosis. By the book, the doctor…
Started by Tsion Bekele6 replies -
The Axial Age is defined by its exclusions, and that makes the thesis unfalsifiable
Every survey of world philosophy I've read includes the Axial Age: between about 800 and 200 BCE, in Greece, India, China and Israel, with no documented contact between them, something similar happened. People began defending claims against stated objections, named individuals disagreed…
Started by Mateo Quispe6 replies -
Williams’s integrity objection, not the arithmetic, is the deepest problem for utilitarianism
I have read a fair amount about moral injury, the damage done to people who were made to do, or failed to prevent, things that violated their deepest commitments, often in situations where every option was bad. Bernard Williams's essay in Utilitarianism:…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun6 replies -
Knowing without doing is not knowing: Wang Yangming’s strong internalism is simply correct
Every year I teach my students Wang Yangming's slogan that knowledge and action are one, and every year they treat it as an inspirational poster. I want to defend it as a serious thesis about moral motivation. The usual view, in China…
Started by Lin Pei-shan6 replies -
A role-based ethics gives too little protection to the person the roles are failing
I study constitutional law in Delhi, and Ambedkar is my lodestar. In Annihilation of Caste (1936) he attacked a social order in which a person's duties are fixed by the position they are born into, and argued that such an order leaves…
Started by Deepa Kartha6 replies -
Objectivity belongs to scientific communities, not to individual scientists
I work alongside physicists, and I have never met an objective one. I include myself. We all have pet ideas, we read data in their favour, we are slow to give up an interpretation we have published. And yet I believe physics…
Started by Lars Eriksen6 replies -
Reading group: P. F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment” (1962)
I teach a reading class at a men's prison twice a week, and free will comes up in nearly every session, never in the abstract. A man asks whether he deserves his sentence, or whether his father's violence "made him". I want…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma6 replies -
Take away the rational cosmos and Stoic ethics becomes a coping technique
My students discover Marcus Aurelius on their phones before they discover him in my classroom, usually as short videos about controlling what you can control. I am glad they find him. But I want to defend a thesis that spoils the mood…
Started by Giulia Ferrante6 replies -
Emanation cannot be squared with a God who freely creates, and al-Ghazālī saw exactly why
I spend my working days with systems where outputs follow necessarily from inputs, and perhaps that's why the Neoplatonic picture of the world troubles me. In that picture, everything flows from the One the way light flows from the sun: necessarily, eternally,…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam6 replies -
Rebirth without anyone reborn: the lamp that lights another lamp
In comparative tables of what happens at death, the Buddhist row always reads awkwardly: rebirth, but no self that transmigrates. Continuity, not identity. Many newcomers to the Dhamma, and many philosophers, hear a contradiction. If nobody is reborn, what is the rebirth…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara6 replies -
Confucius refused to talk about death. Is declining a question a kind of answer?
In Book 11 of the Analects, the disciple Zilu asks how to serve ghosts and spirits. Confucius says: you are not yet able to serve people, how could you serve spirits? Zilu asks about death. Confucius replies: you do not yet understand…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu6 replies -
Salazar Bondy asked if there is a philosophy of our America. Over fifty years on, what’s the answer?
In 1968, the Peruvian philosopher Augusto Salazar Bondy published a short book with an uncomfortable title: ¿Existe una filosofía de nuestra América? His answer was, roughly, not yet. Latin American philosophy, he argued, had been imitative: each generation importing the latest European…
Started by Mateo Quispe6 replies -
The building has steps, my legs don’t work: which sentence names my disability?
I spend a lot of my working time measuring door widths and arguing with architects about gradients. When I can't get into a building, two descriptions are true. My legs don't work. The building has no ramp. For most of history the…
Started by Dima Nasser6 replies -
William James was wrong: an emotion is not the perception of a bodily change
Our psychology textbooks still teach the James–Lange theory with a kind of affection. William James's essay "What Is an Emotion?" (1884) proposes that the order we assume is backwards. We don't tremble because we're afraid; the bodily change comes first, and the…
Started by Elif Yıldız6 replies