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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 -
Reading Nāgārjuna as a dialetheist imports a problem he did not have
I keep running into Graham Priest's reading of Nāgārjuna, partly in his own books and partly in the paper he wrote with Jay Garfield on Nāgārjuna and the limits of thought. On that reading, some of Nāgārjuna's claims are true contradictions: the…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Being a realist about electrons commits me to nothing about moral or mathematical facts
I'm a scientific realist in the ordinary way: I think electrons, quantum fields and the like really exist, and that our best theories are approximately true of them. People sometimes assume this makes me a realist about everything else too. It doesn't,…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
Double effect is a genuine moral distinction, not a lawyer’s trick for doing harm with clean hands
Every year at least one of my students arrives having read online that the doctrine of double effect is Catholic casuistry: a way to do what you want and say you did not intend it. I want to defend it as a…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu6 replies -
Where a claim came from is often the best evidence you have about it
Yoruba speech draws a careful line between what you have seen for yourself and what you have only heard. My grandmother's first question on hearing any news was "who told you?", and then "who told them?" I used to find it tiresome.…
Started by Titilayo Adeyemi6 replies -
Many-worlds is the most conservative reading of quantum mechanics, not the wildest
Many-worlds has a reputation as the science-fiction interpretation. I want to argue it is the opposite: the reading that adds least to the physics. Look at what the others add. Copenhagen-style views add a collapse whenever a "measurement" happens, without saying what…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen5 replies -
Doing harm and allowing harm differ morally, even when the outcome is the same
At the hospital where I work, the distinction between doing and allowing comes up every week. Withdrawing a ventilator from a patient with no prospect of recovery is treated very differently from giving a lethal injection, by law, by most religious authorities,…
Started by Omar Ragab5 replies -
Hume’s Dialogues had answered the watchmaker before Paley set it ticking
Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion were published in 1779, three years after his death, which is a fair measure of how risky he thought they were. William Paley's Natural Theology, with its famous watch found on a heath, appeared in 1802. My…
Started by Alistair Gow6 replies -
Mackie’s argument from queerness proves too much: by its standards arithmetic is queer too
Mackie's argument from queerness says that if there were objective moral facts, they would be, in his words, of “a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe”, and we would need an equally strange faculty to know them.…
Started by Ana Clara Ferreira5 replies -
Mencius was unfair to Mozi: impartial care does not mean having no father
I've grown tired of how Mohism is introduced: through Mencius's insult. Mencius says that Yang Zhu's "each for himself" means having no ruler, and Mozi's impartial care means having no father, and that people without father or ruler are beasts. Most students…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
Most abortion arguments are really disputes about what grounds moral status, and we should say so
When abortion comes up in a class, the room divides quickly, each side convinced the other doesn't care about something important. I want to propose something modest. Almost everyone in my classes agrees that killing an innocent person is seriously wrong. The…
Started by Miriam Adler5 replies -
Gödel’s “perception” of sets explains nothing about how we actually know mathematics
Rationalists from Plato onward have said that reason can simply see certain truths: that a surface cannot be red and green all over, that the axioms of geometry hold. The most famous modern version is Gödel's. In his essay on Cantor's continuum…
Started by Ana Clara Ferreira5 replies -
Taking the meditation without the metaphysics is fine: most people never wanted the path
Meditation helped me through a bad year more than anything else. I did it with an app, then a weekly class. Nobody mentioned rebirth, and nobody asked me to accept that there is no self. I keep reading that this is a…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies -
Hume was right: reason can choose the means, never the ends
Hume lived down the road from where I worked for thirty-four years, so I am biased. But I think his account of practical reason has never been bettered. In the Treatise, Book 2, Hume says that reason is, and ought only to…
Started by Alistair Gow6 replies -
Sellars was right that raw experience can cause a belief but never justify one
The more I read about visual perception, the more I think Wilfrid Sellars got something exactly right in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (1956). The foundationalist wants a floor: beliefs justified without leaning on other beliefs. The obvious candidate is experience…
Started by Priya Raghavan5 replies -
The contingency argument fails because a collection of contingent things needs no explanation of its own
The argument from contingency is one of the most elegant in philosophy, and because it comes apart cleanly into steps, I think I can show exactly where it breaks. Roughly: everything is either necessary or contingent; contingent things depend on something else;…
Started by Derek Hollis6 replies -
‘What happens when we die?’ is a question most traditions would not have asked in that form
Here's a thesis about a table everyone likes. Comparative tables of ‘what happens when we die?’ line up the traditions in neat rows: Platonic immortal soul, Epicurean dissolution, Vedantic rebirth, Buddhist rebirth without self, Confucian deferral, Islamic resurrection. It looks like many…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho7 replies -
Haslanger’s ameliorative method changes the subject rather than answering the question
I come to this from the method rather than the politics. In her well-known paper asking what gender and race are and what we want them to be, Sally Haslanger distinguishes three projects. A conceptual project asks what our concept is. A…
Started by Oskar Nyberg7 replies -
Kim was right: non-reductive physicalism cannot give the mind any causal work
Here is a thesis many materialists find uncomfortable, and I want to defend it. Non-reductive physicalism says two things: everything is physical, and mental properties (believing, wanting, feeling pain) are not identical to physical properties. It's the most popular view among cognitive…
Started by Priya Raghavan5 replies -
If Nāgasena’s chariot argument removes the self, it removes the chariot too
The chariot argument in the Milindapañha is one of the most famous arguments about parts and wholes. King Milinda arrives by chariot. Nāgasena asks him: is the pole the chariot? The axle? The wheels? The frame? All of them together? Something apart…
Started by Arjun Iyer6 replies -
When we refuse to imagine that cruelty is admirable, the failure is the work’s, not ours
Hume noticed something odd near the end of his essay on taste. We forgive old poets for their speculative errors: the wrong science, the gods we no longer believe in. We read past them easily. But when a poet asks us to…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
The deviant causal chain shows the causal theory of action cannot be repaired
I care about analyses that can be stated precisely, and this one, I'll argue, can't be. Davidson's causal theory: a movement is an action when it's caused in the right way by the agent's reasons, a belief–desire pair. Davidson's own counterexample, the…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak6 replies -
Dharmottara’s mirage is not really a Gettier case, and calling it one flattens both traditions
Every year someone on a comparative course says "the Buddhists found the Gettier problem a thousand years early", and every year I nod and feel uneasy. Let me try to say why, and you can tell me where it breaks. The case:…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Lakatos found the right middle path between Popper and Kuhn
My physics students in Lagos always ask the same thing when we reach the history of astronomy: if a single failed prediction refutes a theory, why did astronomers keep Newton when Uranus misbehaved? Popper's falsificationism seems to say they shouldn't have. Kuhn's…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha5 replies -
Memory preserves knowledge but never produces it: the Indian schools were right to exclude it
For forty years of reading Śaṅkara I have accepted, almost without noticing, a rule that most of the classical Indian schools share: memory is not a pramāṇa, not a means of valid knowledge in its own right. The Nyāya divide cognition into…
Started by Arjun Iyer5 replies -
Illusionism is the only view of consciousness that takes neuroscience seriously
I'm a materialist who builds machine-perception software, and I'll defend the position most people here find hardest to swallow. Illusionism, associated with Dennett and developed by Keith Frankish, says the hard problem is generated by a misleading introspective model. When we introspect,…
Started by Priya Raghavan6 replies -
Strong moral intuitions count as evidence, in the same way that perceptions count as evidence
In my ethics seminar we were told that appealing to intuitions is unscientific: they are just gut feelings shaped by upbringing. I want to argue the opposite. W. D. Ross, in The Right and the Good (1930), compared the considered moral convictions…
Started by Aoife Kilbride6 replies -
The fall of Qin refutes Legalism itself, not merely its excesses
I read Han Feizi mostly to understand why the most effective political theory of early China produced the shortest-lived dynasty. The Legalist tradition, from Shang Yang's reforms in the state of Qin in the fourth century BCE to Han Feizi's synthesis in…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
‘Benevolence’ is a better translation of ren than its critics allow
I've been reading the Analects with D. C. Lau's translation, which uses "benevolence" throughout. I keep reading on this site, and in introductions, that this is a false friend: that ren names a condition of full humanity, not a disposition to kindness.…
Started by Henrike Vogel5 replies -
The indispensability argument is the best case for numbers, and it still does not work
The argument usually called Quine–Putnam goes like this: We should believe in the entities our best scientific theories quantify over. Our best scientific theories quantify over mathematical objects, ineliminably. So we should believe mathematical objects exist. It is the best argument for…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha5 replies