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Ubuntu and personhood: Menkiti’s communitarian view
I'm finally reading the African philosophy my physics course never mentioned. The Nguni saying behind ubuntu is usually translated as "a person is a person through other persons". John Mbiti's African Religions and Philosophy (1969) put the idea in the form: I…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha4 replies -
Who is morally responsible when an AI system causes harm?
Andreas Matthias coined the term "responsibility gap" in 2004: when a learning system behaves in ways its designers couldn't predict, it seems nobody is fully responsible. The designers didn't intend the outcome, the operators couldn't foresee it, and the system isn't a…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman3 replies -
The firing squad and my loan defaults: when does surviving need explaining?
In credit scoring we have a problem called reject inference. We only ever see repayment data for people we approved. The people we rejected never got a loan, so we never learn whether they would have repaid. If you're not careful, your…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga5 replies -
I caught myself apologising to the chatbot that took over half my job
I work in a call centre, and since spring the first line of every complaint goes to a chatbot. I only get the callers it gives up on, who arrive already furious. Last week, on a dead night shift, I had a…
Started by Gemma Pritchard6 replies -
‘Existence precedes essence’ is an empirical claim, and the evidence is against it
I want to argue that existentialism's founding premise is not a metaphysical axiom but an empirical claim, and a shaky one. In his 1945 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre puts it plainly: for human beings, existence precedes essence. There is no…
Started by Priya Raghavan6 replies -
What exactly is kasb (acquisition), and is it just compatibilism with God in it?
I have been reading about free will because it is the question that will not leave me alone. In Indonesia the answer I grew up with is that God creates everything, including my actions, but I am still responsible for them. When…
Started by Fajar Nugroho5 replies -
If a system passes every behavioural test, what would still be missing?
Suppose a future system passes every test we can think of. It holds conversations, explains its reasoning, makes jokes that land, learns new tasks quickly, and reacts appropriately to pain-like signals in a robot body. Some people would say there's nothing more…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen4 replies -
I know within ten seconds whether a room will laugh, but I can’t say how. Does that count as knowing?
After a few hundred gigs you develop a sense for a room. I walk on, say two lines, and I know whether tonight is going to work. I'm right far more often than I'm wrong. Promoters have started asking me before they…
Started by Gemma Pritchard5 replies -
Why is saying “I promise” not true or false, like other sentences?
I found an idea I don't fully understand. The book says that when I tell my mother "I promise I'll be home by ten", I am not describing anything. I am not reporting a promise that exists somewhere else. Saying it is…
Started by Fajar Nugroho3 replies -
Do animals have conscious experiences, and how could we ever tell?
In 2012 a group of neuroscientists signed the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, stating that non-human animals, including all mammals and birds and some others such as octopuses, have the neurological substrates of conscious experience. In 2024 the New York Declaration on Animal…
Started by Priya Raghavan4 replies -
What’s the difference between Kant’s “mathematical” and “dynamical” sublime?
Last month I stood at the crater rim at Bromo before sunrise with the volcano smoking below and the sand sea all around, and I felt something I don't have a word for: scared, tiny, and very happy at the same time.…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies -
If Buddhism says there is no self, what exactly gets reborn?
This week's lecture was on Buddhism, and the speaker said two things that seem to contradict each other: there is no permanent self, and there is rebirth. If there's no self, what is reborn? Who carries the karma? If I do something…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
My bus kneels for wheelchairs. What is the difference between an impairment and a disability?
Our newer buses on the 413 can lower themselves at the kerb and put out a ramp, which takes about thirty seconds. Some of the older buses can't. A man I see most mornings uses a wheelchair, and on a new bus…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
Why can’t a shadow explain the height of a flagpole?
I'm reading an introduction to philosophy of science and got stuck on the flagpole example. The idea, as I understand it: Carl Hempel said that to explain something is to derive it from laws of nature plus the starting conditions. From the…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting4 replies -
Kant was wrong: we can know things as they are in themselves
I am posting this thesis partly to test my own reading of the first Critique. Kant holds that we know only appearances. Space and time are forms of our intuition, and the categories are forms of our understanding, so things as they…
Started by Henrike Vogel5 replies -
What is the difference between jus ad bellum and jus in bello, and why keep them apart?
Reading history, I keep meeting two Latin phrases: jus ad bellum and jus in bello. I understand roughly that the first is about whether going to war is just, and the second about how the war is fought. What I don't understand…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies -
Is fana in Sufism the same as nirvana in Buddhism?
My grandmother used to read Sufi poetry about fana, the annihilation of the self in God. Now I've started reading about Buddhism and nirvana, which also seems to involve the end of the self. Are these basically the same experience described in…
Started by Elif Yıldız4 replies -
Founders and Stoicism: real philosophy or corporate self-help?
In the startup world, Stoicism is everywhere. Podcasts, newsletters, Marcus Aurelius quotes on office walls. I got into it during a bad year, and honestly it helped. But I'm starting to wonder if what we're doing is Stoicism at all. The startup…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies -
Is “objectivity” in journalism a coherent ideal?
I was trained to be "objective": report the facts, present both sides, keep my opinions out. In practice, every choice is a judgment: what's a story, whose voice to include, which word to use (killed or died, militant or freedom fighter). Some…
Started by Sana Rizvi3 replies -
Testimony is an independent source of knowledge, not reducible to perception or inference
The Nyāya school counts testimony (śabda) as a distinct means of valid knowledge (pramāṇa), alongside perception, inference and comparison. The Vaiśeṣikas and Buddhist epistemologists like Dignāga disagreed, reducing testimony to a form of inference: I infer the truth of what you say…
Started by Meera Kulkarni6 replies -
Ibn Khaldun on taxation: a fourteenth-century Laffer curve?
In the Muqaddimah (1377) Ibn Khaldun observes that at the beginning of a dynasty, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments, while at the end of a dynasty it yields a small revenue from large assessments. Arthur Laffer himself credited Ibn…
Started by Javier Ferrandis3 replies -
Are the words of the Veda abstract objects? Mīmāṃsā’s eternal language and Frege’s third realm
I teach Sanskrit in Varanasi and read Pūrva Mīmāṃsā. My tradition holds that the Veda is authorless (apauruṣeya), that words (śabda) are eternal, and that the relation between a word and its meaning is not created by anyone. The Mīmāṃsā Sūtra says…
Started by Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya6 replies -
Political meritocracy is better than electoral democracy
I'll argue this to test it, not because I hold it. Daniel Bell's The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy (2015) draws on Confucian ideas to argue that political leaders should be selected and promoted on the basis of…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
Reading group: The Muqaddimah, the introduction on historians’ errors
Before the Muqaddimah proper begins, Ibn Khaldun explains why historians get things wrong. His list includes partisanship for opinions and schools, overconfidence in one's sources, failure to understand what was intended, mistaken belief in the truth of reports, and, above all, ignorance…
Started by Youssef Berrada4 replies -
Reading group: Epictetus, Discourses II.19, where the Master Argument meets a bus driver
Epictetus, as people here know by now, is my favourite. Last month a lecture mentioned that the only clear report we have of the "Master Argument" of Diodorus Cronus is at the start of one chapter of his Discourses (the lectures his…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu5 replies -
Reading group: the Mandukya Upanishad and Gaudapada’s Karika
The Māṇḍūkya is the shortest of the principal Upanishads, only twelve verses. It analyses the syllable AUM in terms of four "quarters" of the self: the waking state (vaiśvānara), the dream state (taijasa), deep sleep (prājña), and the "fourth" (turīya), which is…
Started by Arjun Iyer4 replies -
What exactly is Aristotle’s “function argument” in Nicomachean Ethics I.7?
This argument is easy to fumble when you explain it. My usual summary goes roughly like this: the good of anything that has a function lies in performing that function well human beings have a function it isn't nutrition and growth (plants…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
Spinoza’s God as Nature: an engineer’s reading of Ethics Part I
I came to the Ethics (published 1677, after Spinoza's death) because of the geometrical form: definitions, axioms, propositions, demonstrations. It looks like a specification document. Part I argues that substance is what is in itself and conceived through itself; that there can't…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen5 replies -
I would plug into the experience machine, and most refusals are just status quo bias
Robert Nozick's thought experiment in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974): a machine can give you any experiences you like, indistinguishable from reality. You'd believe you were writing a great novel or climbing a mountain, but you'd be floating in a tank. Would…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting5 replies -
Reading group: Ibn Rushd, The Decisive Treatise
The Faṣl al-Maqāl (c. 1178–80) is short and lucid. It's the best introduction to Ibn Rushd's thought, and it's written in the form of a legal opinion: what is the status, under the religious law, of studying philosophy? His answer: the Law…
Started by Layla Sfeir4 replies