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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 -
Is Yogācāra “consciousness-only” idealism? Three readings and a false friend
Every year someone in my reading group says "Yogācāra is Buddhist idealism, like Berkeley". It's one of the more interesting mistakes, because it's partly right. The Yogācāra school, systematised by Asaṅga and Vasubandhu in the fourth and fifth centuries and carried to…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 replies -
Reading group: aboutness from Brentano to Husserl, with Xuanzang alongside
Yogācāra and Husserl are two traditions that share more vocabulary than either admits and differ more than enthusiasts claim. I propose a three-week reading on intentionality, the property of mental states of being about something, with one Buddhist text set beside the…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 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 -
Reading group: al-Ghazālī and Ibn Rushd on whether the world had a beginning
The longest chapter of al-Ghazālī's Incoherence of the Philosophers is the first, on the philosophers' doctrine that the world is eternal. Nearly a century later Ibn Rushd answered it, line by line, in The Incoherence of the Incoherence. I have read summaries…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam6 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 -
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 -
“I know what I saw”: what is a witness actually claiming?
I cover courts and human rights in Karachi. The sentence I hear most often in witness boxes is "I know what I saw." It's said with total conviction, often by people who are mistaken. Psychologists have shown how fragile this is. Elizabeth…
Started by Sana Rizvi6 replies -
A source that is not one of the things it produces: Anaximander’s apeiron and Plotinus’s One
In my library we keep a small display on the Alexandrian Neoplatonists, and I have been rereading Plotinus between cataloguing jobs. What strikes me is a move that appears, in different forms, at both ends of Greek philosophy. Anaximander, very early, said…
Started by Mona Fathy6 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 -
Reading group: Prior Analytics I.1–7, slowly, with a Nyāya inference on the table
Everyone says Aristotle invented formal logic, and I realise I have never read the Prior Analytics closely in company. So here is a proposal: the first seven chapters of Book I, over five weeks, which is where the whole assertoric system is…
Started by Giulia Ferrante6 replies -
Prophet and philosopher in al-Fārābī: one truth in two languages, or a ranking of believers?
I teach history in Fes, and al-Fārābī is the author I give my older students when they tell me philosophy and religion must be enemies. But I've started to wonder whether his reconciliation is as friendly as it looks. As I understand…
Started by Youssef Berrada6 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 -
‘Illa, kāraṇa, gù: what each tradition’s word for ’cause’ lets it ask
I've been thinking about how the translators of the ninth and tenth centuries handled Aristotle's aitia. They used 'illa and sabab, and here is the interesting part: 'illa already had, or soon acquired, a second life in law. In Islamic jurisprudence, the…
Started by Layla Sfeir6 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 -
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 -
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 group: Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic (1884), five weeks with Austin’s translation
Frege's Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884) is short, sharp and still the best place to see why someone would think numbers are objects. J. L. Austin's translation (1950) has German and English on facing pages, which helps if anyone reads German. I…
Started by Ana Clara Ferreira6 replies -
Outside a courtroom, who should carry the burden of proof?
In court the burden of proof is fixed by rules. In a criminal case the prosecution must prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt; in a civil case the claimant must win on the balance of probabilities. Islamic law has a well-known maxim to…
Started by Hamza Qureshi6 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 -
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 -
Reading group: Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses, and whether ‘mind-only’ means idealism
Vasubandhu's Twenty Verses (Viṃśatikā), with his own short commentary, is the most compact argument for the Yogācāra claim that there is "only consciousness" (vijñaptimātra). It is also the text that most invites the question of whether Yogācāra is a form of idealism,…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 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 -
Reading group: Miskawayh’s Refinement of Character, and Tusi’s Persian reworking of it
I'd like to read Miskawayh's Tahdhib al-Akhlaq together over the next couple of months. It is one of the most systematic works of philosophical ethics in Arabic, and it is a good place to watch Greek ethics being made at home in…
Started by Layla Sfeir6 replies -
Deflationism is right: “true” is a useful device, not the name of a property
Here is the view I want to defend, as plainly as I can. Take the schema: "snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white. Every reasonable theory of truth accepts instances of this. Deflationists say these instances are…
Started by Oskar Nyberg6 replies -
Unrestricted composition is the only principled answer to when parts make a whole
Thesis: any things whatever compose something. Here is why I think universalism is the only principled position. Restriction generates vagueness. If only some collections compose, there will be a sequence of cases, removing one particle at a time, in which composition goes…
Started by Derek Hollis6 replies -
Can reason tell right from wrong on its own, or does it need revelation?
In the courts I covered in Lahore, judges applied statutes, precedent and, where the law allowed, the principles of Islamic law. Many times a case was decided correctly by every rule and I went home feeling it had been decided wrongly. I…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan6 replies -
If syllogistic logic couldn’t handle relations, why did it last two thousand years?
Working inside predicate logic every day, I'm often reminded how much it can do that the syllogism can't. The textbook example (usually credited to De Morgan) is: all horses are animals, therefore every head of a horse is the head of an…
Started by Derek Hollis6 replies