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Han Feizi was right that good government cannot wait for good rulers
I spend most of my time with the Mohists, but I read Han Feizi to understand why the Confucian picture of government lost so many arguments in the Warring States period, and I want to defend one of his central claims. The…
Started by Chen Yuting6 replies -
Searle’s “X counts as Y in C” leaves out the power that makes people accept it
I spend a lot of time in job centres, accompanying people as a volunteer. A person walks in and, after one interview, counts as a jobseeker. The status comes with obligations (attend, apply, report), sanctions if they fail, and a set of…
Started by Johanna Reinhardt6 replies -
The analytic/continental split is mostly an accident of the 1930s, not a philosophical divide
Reading logic in Kraków gives me a particular view of this. The Lwów–Warsaw school that Twardowski founded (Łukasiewicz, Leśniewski, Tarski and others) was doing rigorous analytic work in central Europe in the 1920s and 30s. Then the war destroyed it. Tarski was…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak7 replies -
The Mu’tazila were right: reason can know that injustice is wrong before any revelation
I want to defend the losing side of one of the great arguments in kalām. The Mu'tazilī theologians held that acts have moral qualities that reason can recognise: that injustice and lying are bad, that gratitude to a benefactor is owed, and…
Started by Layla Sfeir6 replies -
Secular humanism needs no metaphysics, and that is its strength
I'm an atheist, and I call myself a humanist in the modern sense: ethics and meaning without religion. I keep being told that humanism is just another religion, a faith in Man with its own unprovable dogmas. I want to argue the…
Started by Arvind Poojary5 replies -
Ross was right: there is no master principle of morality, only several duties weighed by judgement
Every sentence I heard passed in Lahore's courts involved weighing things that do not reduce to one another: the harm done, the offender's history, his family, remorse, deterrence, mercy. There was never a formula. The sentencing guidelines that tried to be formulas…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan6 replies -
Kasb is a real distinction, not a verbal escape: the Ash’ari answer deserves a hearing
Within Islamic theology the free will question produced two sharply opposed answers, and I think one of them gets a worse press than it deserves. The Mu'tazila said that human beings genuinely create their own acts. God is just; he would not…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam5 replies -
Belief in God can be rational without arguments: Plantinga’s proper basicality deserves a fair hearing
I work at a hospital in Cairo, and in the evenings I read the arguments for God, usually in the order the kalam theologians would approve of. But I have come to think that the most interesting move in recent philosophy of…
Started by Omar Ragab5 replies -
The KK principle is false: you can know something without knowing that you know it
A question from a materialist with a soft spot for Indian epistemology. In epistemic logic, positive introspection (the KK principle) says: if you know P, you know that you know P. Hintikka built it into his system. It's attractive: surely knowledge is…
Started by Priya Raghavan5 replies -
The West’s picture of ‘Indian philosophy’ is Vedanta-shaped, and it has hidden everyone else
You can probably guess where I stand on most metaphysics. But this isn't an attack on Vedānta. It's a complaint about how Indian philosophy got packaged. The thesis: what reaches Western readers as "Indian philosophy", or worse "Eastern philosophy", is overwhelmingly Vedāntic…
Started by Arvind Poojary6 replies -
The Qin collapse did not refute Han Feizi; the Han dynasty quietly proved him right
I read Han Feizi to understand why the Legalists won, at least for a while. The standard story is a morality tale. The Qin adopted Legalism wholesale: uniform law, harsh punishment, rewards for service, no reliance on the ruler's virtue. They unified…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
Critical theory diagnoses domination brilliantly but cannot say why it is wrong
I work as an economist at a bank in Valencia, and Marx, Rawls, Hobbes and Ibn Khaldun share a shelf at home. I'd like to press an old objection to critical theory and see whether it still bites. Critical theory asks what…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
The Gita’s svadharma cannot be cleanly separated from varṇa, and readers should face Ambedkar’s reading
I want to raise this respectfully, because the Bhagavad Gita is sacred to many people I love, including my own grandmother. But I think a popular modern reading of it avoids a hard question. The verse everyone quotes is that it is…
Started by Deepa Kartha6 replies -
Scholastic reasoning was rigorous, but it was rigour inside a fence
I'm an atheist, and I don't share the old Enlightenment sneer at the scholastics. The method was superb: state the objections, distinguish the senses of terms, answer point by point. Modern philosophy papers are built on it. But I want to argue…
Started by Arvind Poojary6 replies -
Anscombe was right: no emergency makes it permissible to target civilians deliberately
Here is the hardest case for the principle of discrimination. Suppose deliberately attacking a civilian population would end a war years early and save more lives than it costs, including more civilian lives. The arithmetic points one way. Elizabeth Anscombe's answer was…
Started by Aoife Kilbride6 replies -
Locke was right that the mind starts without ideas, and the argument from the newborn’s hunger fails
I'm biased towards Locke, I admit. But I came across an argument for innate knowledge from the Nyāya tradition that I had never seen, and I want to test my bias against it. Locke's case in Book I of the Essay is…
Started by Arvind Poojary6 replies -
The self-defeat charge against the Cārvākas attacks a position they probably did not hold
I have a soft spot for the Cārvākas, India's materialists, who accepted perception as the only independent means of knowledge (pramāṇa) and rejected rebirth, the soul and the authority of scripture. Every rival school gave them the same knock-down reply: you reject…
Started by Arvind Poojary6 replies -
Ibn Khaldun’s question, what keeps power alive, matters more than Locke’s question of what justifies it
The more history I teach, the more I think political philosophy often asks the second question first. Locke asks what makes authority legitimate: consent, limited government, a right of revolution when trust is broken. Ibn Khaldun asks something different in the Muqaddimah:…
Started by Youssef Berrada6 replies -
There can be no laws of human behaviour, only useful regularities
The "law" of demand is not a law in the sense the law of gravitation is, and I have said so to every new analyst I have trained. Here is the thesis in full. Social science finds regularities. Some are robust: Ibn…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
Brute facts are not a cop-out: some things just are, and the universe may be one of them
When I talk with believers in the villages where our association works, the conversation often reaches this point: "But who made the universe? Everything has a cause." When I say the universe may simply exist, with no further explanation, I'm told I…
Started by Arvind Poojary6 replies -
Every cognition should be trusted until something defeats it: the Mīmāṃsakas were right
Let me defend my own school. One of our school's central doctrines is svataḥ prāmāṇya, the intrinsic validity of cognition. Kumārila Bhaṭṭa argued that when a cognition arises, its validity arises with it. We do not need a second cognition to certify…
Started by Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya6 replies -
Reading Rumi as love poetry without the path is reading something he did not write
I grew up in Shiraz hearing the Masnavi read aloud. Its opening, the lament of the reed cut from its reed-bed, longing to return, is perhaps the most famous passage in Persian. Abroad, Rumi is one of the best-selling poets in the…
Started by Reza Tehrani5 replies -
S5 is the right logic for metaphysical necessity
Here is a view I hold about modal logic and want tested. S5 says: whatever is possible is necessarily possible, and whatever is necessary is necessarily necessary. In Kripke's terms, every world is accessible from every other. For metaphysical necessity (what could…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak6 replies -
Logic is the one part of philosophy that settles questions, and the rest should take note
People like to say that philosophy never makes progress, that we're still arguing about the same questions as Plato. Logic is the counterexample. For two thousand years, Aristotle's syllogistic could not handle inferences involving relations. "Every horse is an animal, so every…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Bentham was right that natural rights are nonsense, but wrong about why
Bentham's attack on the French Declaration of Rights, usually published as Anarchical Fallacies, contains the most quoted insult in political philosophy: natural rights are simple nonsense, and natural and imprescriptible rights are "nonsense upon stilts". His reason: a right is the creature…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak5 replies -
Global scepticism refutes itself, and the famous escape routes do not work
The objection is old and short. If nothing can be known, then that nothing can be known cannot be known either. Global scepticism saws off the branch it sits on. Two escapes are usually offered, and I want to argue that neither…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak6 replies -
Predicate logic was discovered, not invented
Is logic discovered or invented? I want to argue that predicate logic is the strongest evidence that it is discovered. Consider the inference: every horse is an animal, so every horse's head is an animal's head. People knew for two thousand years…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak5 replies -
For ordinary speech, Aristotle was right: “All S are P” presupposes there are some S
Modern logic reads "All S are P" as "for anything, if it is S, it is P". If nothing is S, the statement comes out true automatically. So "All the unicorns in my garden are pink" is true, and so is "All…
Started by Oskar Nyberg6 replies -
Atheists should retire the logical problem of evil: Plantinga answered it
I'm an atheist, so this is a thesis against my own side's habits. In "Evil and Omnipotence" (1955), J. L. Mackie argued that theism is not just unlikely but inconsistent: an omnipotent, wholly good God and the existence of evil cannot all…
Started by Arvind Poojary5 replies -
Al-Ghazālī was right: much of what philosophers call demonstration is only probable reasoning
I teach religious studies at a school in Bradford, and al-Ghazālī has been my companion for twenty years. I want to defend a claim about him that I think is often misunderstood. People remember al-Ghazālī as the man who attacked philosophy. But…
Started by Bilal Rashid6 replies