All topics
-
Traditions that disagree about the self agree about how to live, so ethics can do without metaphysics
There is one comparison that always woke my students up. Put the great traditions side by side on what a person is, and they disagree completely: an immortal soul, an eternal self identical with the absolute, no abiding self at all, a…
Started by Henrike Vogel6 replies -
Reading group: Tarski’s “The Semantic Conception of Truth” (1944) in three sittings
Tarski's technical work on truth is hard going, but in 1944 he wrote a non-technical paper for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research that explains the ideas for philosophers. It is clear, polemical in places, and only thirty-odd pages. I propose we read it…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak6 replies -
Reading group: Pascal’s wager fragment and the pages around it, in French and English
I translate for a living, and Pascal is one of the writers whose sentences I envy most. The wager is usually taught as a three-line argument in a table. In the Pensées it is a long, broken, urgent fragment, and the context…
Started by Claire Dubois6 replies -
Reading group: David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (1986), chapters 1–4
Most people meet modal realism as a punchline: the man who believed every possible world is as real as ours. I want to read the book properly, because the argument is far better than its reputation, and because I think most of…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak6 replies -
Reading group: Quine’s ‘On What There Is’, slowly, in three sittings
"On What There Is" first appeared in the Review of Metaphysics in 1948 and opens From a Logical Point of View (1953). It is short, funny in places, and much quoted by people who have not read it. I propose we read…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak6 replies -
My mother forwards health rumours to the family group. Is correcting her a duty or a disrespect?
My mother is seventy-one and sharp. She is also the main source of health rumours in our family WhatsApp group: lemon water that cures this, a vaccine that causes that, a "doctor in Singapore" who says something terrifying. Each forward comes with…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies -
The lazy argument fails against tawakkul just as it failed against the Stoics
Every so often someone at work tells me not to bother with a contingency plan because "what is written is written". I want to argue that this is a philosophical mistake, and an old one. Cicero's On Fate reports what the ancients…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam5 replies -
Outcomes rightly change how much we blame someone, even when luck decided them
Two drivers leave the same wedding equally drunk and drive equally badly. One gets home. The other hits a child who ran into the road. In every court I have covered, the second driver faces something far heavier than the first, and…
Started by Sana Rizvi5 replies -
Markets are morally neutral tools
I'll argue a thesis I'm not sure I believe. Markets are mechanisms for coordinating exchange. They have no values of their own. When they produce injustice, the problem lies in the background conditions (unequal property, missing information, bad laws), not in buying…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
I have forgotten most of my childhood. On Locke’s view, am I still that child?
I am on a gap year and reading whatever I can find. This week it was a summary of Locke on personal identity. As I understood it, Locke says you are the same person as far back as your consciousness reaches to…
Started by Fajar Nugroho5 replies -
Epictetus was a slave and I drive the 413. What counts as ‘up to us’ at work?
I drive the 413 across Ankara. Eight hours, two breaks, roughly three hundred passengers a day. I listen to philosophy lectures between stops, and Epictetus is the one I keep coming back to. The Handbook opens by dividing things into what is…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu5 replies -
The “double truth” doctrine was never Ibn Rushd’s view
In thirteenth-century Paris, some arts masters were accused of holding that something could be true in philosophy and false in faith, or the reverse: the so-called doctrine of double truth. These "Latin Averroists", including Siger of Brabant, were associated with Ibn Rushd,…
Started by Youssef Berrada5 replies -
Turing never said passing his test means a machine thinks? Then what was the test for?
This month my reading is about computers and minds. My cousin studies informatics in Bandung and he told me the Turing test is simple: if a machine can fool you in a conversation, it thinks. Done. Then I read an introduction that…
Started by Fajar Nugroho5 replies -
Al-Ghazali says some knowledge has to be tasted. Is that an argument, or a way out of one?
Last month I read al-Ghazali's Deliverance from Error in an English translation I found online, and one part keeps bothering me. He goes through the theologians, the philosophers and the Batinites, finds each of them lacking, and then turns to the Sufis.…
Started by Fajar Nugroho5 replies -
Introspection is too unreliable to ground a science of consciousness
Early experimental psychology relied on trained introspection, in the laboratories of Wundt and Titchener. It collapsed partly because labs couldn't agree: the "imageless thought" controversy couldn't be settled, because one lab's trained observers reported imageless thought and another's didn't. More recently, Nisbett…
Started by Elif Yıldız5 replies -
The hedonic treadmill shows money can’t buy lasting happiness
Psychologists Brickman and Campbell coined the phrase "hedonic treadmill" in 1971: we adapt to improvements in our circumstances and return to a baseline level of happiness. A famous 1978 study by Brickman, Coates and Janoff-Bulman suggested lottery winners weren't much happier than…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies -
Does translating philosophy change the philosophy?
Philosophical texts are the ones that keep translators up at night. Heidegger's Dasein is left untranslated in English. Sartre's pour-soi becomes "for-itself", which sounds nothing like ordinary English. Hegel's Aufhebung becomes "sublation", a word English speakers learn only from Hegel. Each choice…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
Aristotle’s account of friendship is still the best one we have
Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics distinguish three kinds of friendship: for utility, for pleasure, and for character. Only the third is complete. In it you wish your friend well for their own sake, and the friend becomes something like…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 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 -
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 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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
“Because that’s how it works”: when is that an explanation and when is it a refusal?
New cooks ask why a lot. Why rest the meat? Why salt the pasta water and not the sauce at the start? Why does this sauce split if you rush it? When I was an apprentice in Goa my chef answered almost…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies -
Norman the clairvoyant is reliably right, yet most people say he doesn’t know. Why?
We did the Norman case in my epistemology tutorial this week and I came out more confused than I went in. The setup, as I understood it: Norman has a clairvoyant faculty that is completely reliable. He has no idea he has…
Started by Ethan Mercer5 replies -
The actual infinite is a useful fiction, not something real
Aristotle, in Physics III, allowed only the potential infinite: you can always count one more, but there's never a completed infinite totality. For two thousand years, most mathematicians agreed. Then Cantor, in the late nineteenth century, treated infinite sets as completed objects…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies -
If consent of the governed is the newcomer, what did legitimacy rest on before it?
My students are learning about government this term. I showed them a comparative table of answers to the question "how should we be governed?" across many traditions: Greek, Chinese, Indian, Islamic, European. The thing that surprised them most was that only the…
Started by Aroha Tipene5 replies