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Parfit was right: identity is not what matters in survival
I'm the resident sceptic in my effective altruism group, but on this one I'm a believer, so bring your best objections. Parfit's argument in Part III of Reasons and Persons (1984), roughly: Suppose your brain is divided and each half placed in…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies -
What is ijtihad, and why did Iqbal call it the principle of movement in Islam?
From my law studies I know ijtihad in its narrow legal sense: independent reasoning by a qualified jurist to derive a ruling where texts are silent or unclear. But Iqbal, in the sixth lecture of the Reconstruction, "The Principle of Movement in…
Started by Hamza Qureshi3 replies -
Barnes is right: being disabled is not in itself bad for you
I came to philosophy through effective altruism, where it's common to count disability as a reduction in wellbeing and to rank interventions accordingly. Elizabeth Barnes's The Minority Body changed my mind, and I want to defend her thesis. Thesis: disability is a…
Started by Ethan Mercer7 replies -
Free speech should protect offensive religious satire
I write this from a country with strict blasphemy laws, which have led to mob violence and killings. So I'm not neutral on this. The Jyllands-Posten cartoons in 2005, the Charlie Hebdo attack in 2015 and countless cases in Pakistan raise the…
Started by Sana Rizvi8 replies -
The hard problem from a psychology student’s point of view
In 1995 David Chalmers distinguished the "easy problems" of consciousness (explaining discrimination, attention, reportability, the control of behaviour) from the "hard problem": explaining why any of this is accompanied by subjective experience at all. In my psychology courses we study the easy…
Started by Elif Yıldız4 replies -
The argument from divine hiddenness is stronger than the argument from evil
Here's a thesis I want tested. The argument from evil gets all the attention, but theists have well-developed replies: free will, soul-making, goods we cannot see. Whatever you think of them, they at least make sense of suffering as part of a…
Started by Ethan Mercer5 replies -
Consciousness is fundamental, not produced by the brain
Advaita Vedanta holds that consciousness is the one reality, and the material world appears within it. In recent years, several philosophers in the analytic tradition have defended views in the same family: Philip Goff's panpsychism (Galileo's Error, 2019), Bernardo Kastrup's analytic idealism.…
Started by Arjun Iyer9 replies -
My daughter asked where her mind is kept. Is Ryle’s ‘category mistake’ the answer?
My daughter is seven. Last week, while I was plaiting her hair, she asked me where her mind is kept. "Is it in my head, like my brain? Or is it behind my eyes?" I said it was in her brain, and…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
My son says you can’t prove fairies don’t exist. Why is that a weakness, not a strength?
My nine-year-old has discovered the perfect argument. Fairies live in our garden, he says. When I ask how he knows, he says: “You can't prove they don't.” He is very pleased with this and uses it on his sister for everything from…
Started by Thamarai Raman5 replies -
Numbers exist independently of us: mathematical platonism is true
I'll defend platonism in its standard form: there are abstract mathematical objects, they don't depend on minds or language, and mathematical statements are true or false because of them. Main argument: indispensability, from Quine and Putnam. We ought to believe in the…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak5 replies -
What did Gorgias actually say about the power of speech in the Encomium of Helen?
Persuasion is literally my rent. A mate who did classics told me there's an ancient Greek speech where Gorgias argues that words work on people like drugs, and that it's all in a speech defending Helen of Troy, of all people. That…
Started by Gemma Pritchard4 replies -
Why does logic count ‘if the moon is cheese, then 2 + 2 = 5’ as true?
Half my jokes are conditionals. So I was pleased to find a whole branch of logic about "if". Then I hit the truth table and it broke my brain. Apparently in propositional logic "if P then Q" is false only when P…
Started by Gemma Pritchard4 replies -
Reading group: Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), chapter one
The question I keep asking my effective altruism friends is what “ought” means in “you ought to give”. Someone told me to read Mackie before I asked again. So here is a reading group, partly so I do not do it alone.…
Started by Ethan Mercer5 replies -
What is Rawls’s veil of ignorance actually supposed to show?
When I talk about Rawls with the younger economists at work, they treat the original position as a risk-aversion exercise. Behind the veil you don't know whether you'll be rich or poor, so you pick the society where the worst-off do best:…
Started by Javier Ferrandis4 replies -
Large language models understand nothing: the Chinese Room still applies
This isn't idle for anyone who builds software on these models. I'll argue the thesis and see if it survives. John Searle's 1980 paper "Minds, Brains, and Programs" imagines a man in a room who receives Chinese characters, follows an English rulebook…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen9 replies -
Reading group: Nagarjuna, Mulamadhyamakakarika chapter 1 (on conditions)
The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā opens with an examination of causal conditions (pratyaya). The first verse says that nothing arises from itself, from something else, from both, or without a cause. The chapter then examines the four types of condition recognised by the Abhidharma schools:…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies -
Al-Ghazali was right: causal necessity cannot be demonstrated
In the Seventeenth Discussion of The Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali argues that the connection between what is customarily believed to be a cause and its effect is not necessary. When cotton touches fire and burns, observation shows only that the burning…
Started by Layla Sfeir8 replies -
Reading group: the Analects, Books 1–4
After a year with Kant I want to read an ethics built on something other than rules. The Analects (Lunyu) were compiled by Confucius's disciples and their students after his death, and they read more like a notebook of conversations than a…
Started by Henrike Vogel4 replies -
Brain death is not death
I've seen the hospital handle brain death several times, and I'm told the clinical criteria are reliable. My question is philosophical: is a person who meets them actually dead? The 1968 Harvard ad hoc committee defined "irreversible coma" as a criterion of…
Started by Omar Ragab6 replies -
Is the Allegory of the Cave a theory of education first and a metaphysics second?
The cave in Republic VII is usually read as a story about two worlds: shadows down here, Forms up there. That's not wrong, but I've come to think it isn't the emphasis Plato gives it. Socrates introduces the image as a picture…
Started by Giulia Ferrante4 replies -
The institutional theory of art is circular, and it’s the vicious kind
A mate who did an art degree keeps telling me that whether my stand-up set is art depends on the "artworld". So I read up. George Dickie's later version of the institutional theory, from The Art Circle (1984), says roughly: a work…
Started by Gemma Pritchard5 replies -
Affirmative action is required by justice, not merely permitted
In 2023, the US Supreme Court effectively ended race-conscious admissions in SFFA v. Harvard. India has the opposite constitutional structure: Articles 15(4) and 16(4) allow special provisions and reservations for disadvantaged groups, and Indra Sawhney (1992) upheld reservations for Other Backward Classes,…
Started by Deepa Kartha6 replies -
Epictetus says some things are up to us. What did that depend on for him?
Epictetus is still my favourite. The Handbook begins by saying some things are up to us and some are not: our opinions, desires and aversions are up to us; our body, property, reputation and office are not. In traffic this is very…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu5 replies -
Compatibilism answers a question nobody was asking
I have now heard about four lectures defending compatibilism, and every time I feel the same thing: it changes the subject. Hume says liberty is just a power of acting or not acting according to the determinations of the will. Fine. When…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu6 replies -
I know the spider is harmless and I’m still terrified. Is my fear wrong, or just irrational?
I am very afraid of spiders. Last week one sat on my monitor for an hour. I knew it was a harmless house spider. I could have recited the facts about its venom. I still couldn't touch the keyboard. A friend who…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting5 replies -
I never agreed to obey the state. Why do I owe it anything?
This week's lecture was on the social contract, and since then one thought keeps coming back while I sit in traffic. I never signed anything. I was born here, like my parents. Nobody asked me if I agreed to the laws, the…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
What is the doctrine of double effect, and did Aquinas really come up with it?
Yesterday's lecture mentioned the "doctrine of double effect" and said it goes back to Thomas Aquinas. The lecturer moved on quickly and I didn't fully follow. Here's what I understood. If I swerve to avoid a child who runs into the road…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
What is the anthropic principle, and is it an explanation or a polite way of not explaining?
I drive a bus in Ankara and listen to lectures between stops. One lecture said that the physical constants of the universe seem "finely tuned" for life, and then mentioned "the anthropic principle", saying something like: of course we observe a universe…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
Why a joke dies in Leeds and kills in Salford: notes from a stand-up
I've started reading philosophy of humour because I want to know why the exact same bit, same words, same timing, can get silence in one room and a roar in another twenty miles away. The theory that has helped me most is…
Started by Gemma Pritchard6 replies -
My son says our choices can’t harm people who don’t exist yet. What is the non-identity problem?
There is a famous puzzle, my son tells me, the "non-identity problem", which shows that we cannot make future people worse off by damaging the environment, because different choices would mean different people being born. This makes no sense to me. My…
Started by Akosua Mensah3 replies