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The Cartesian circle: can clear and distinct perception vouch for itself?
Every year I read Descartes' Meditations with students who arrive expecting an enemy of faith and leave rather fond of him. And every year, around the Third Meditation, a sharp student raises the objection that Antoine Arnauld put to Descartes in 1641.…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies -
Zhuangzi and Hui Shi on the bridge: an ancient argument about knowing what someone else knows
What does this part of the system know about what that part knows? I spent forty years on that question as a railway signalling engineer. I found the same question in the most famous conversation in Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi and Hui Shi are…
Started by Liu Mingqiao5 replies -
Teaching Descartes in Dakar with Peirce in my pocket: should doubt need a reason?
Every year my terminale students meet Descartes's methodical doubt. He resolves to treat as false anything he can find the slightest reason to doubt: the senses deceive, I might be dreaming, an evil genius might be fooling me. Then he finds the…
Started by Khady Sène6 replies -
Carneades at three in the morning: how much certainty does a decision need?
I have been reading what Sextus Empiricus reports of Carneades, the Academic sceptic, and I think he described night work better than any training course I've been sent on. Carneades, as far as we can reconstruct him, said we never have certainty,…
Started by Elin Hedqvist5 replies -
Dignāga cut the Nyāya inference from five members to three. What did the example member become?
I have been translating some passages on Buddhist logic for a seminar in Pune and keep getting stuck on one question. The Nyāya inference for others has five members: thesis, reason, example, application, conclusion ("this hill has fire, because it has smoke,…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Dignāga’s apoha and Frege’s sense are answers to different questions
In a seminar this term somebody summarised apoha as "basically Frege's sense", and someone else said "no, it's Saussure: meaning by difference". I want to resist both, or at least slow them down. Dignāga's claim (c. 480–540) is that a word like…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies -
Why a sad film consoles where good advice doesn’t
At work, after a night when we lose someone we were close to, some of us have a ritual. We go to someone's flat, open a bottle of something, and watch a particular old film that makes everyone cry. I have done…
Started by Elin Hedqvist4 replies -
A verdict that was right by accident: did the court know he was guilty?
Many years ago, early in my time as a court correspondent, I watched a magistrate convict a young man of a burglary largely on the identification of one witness. The identification was confident, the defence was weak, and I was as satisfied…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
If the past no longer exists, what exactly is my regret about?
I served twenty-two years in the army, the last part on the DMZ. There are a few decisions I regret, none of them dramatic, all of them still with me. Reading about the philosophy of time has given me a strange new…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun5 replies -
Fuller’s King Rex, read by someone who spent thirty-one years in the courts
Lon Fuller's The Morality of Law (1964) opens with a fable about an unhappy king called Rex who fails to make law in eight different ways. He decides cases without general rules. He makes rules but keeps them secret. He legislates retroactively.…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan4 replies -
Epsilon-delta is two nested quantifiers, and that is why my students struggle
Every year I teach limits to senior secondary students in Delhi, and every year the same thing happens. They can compute limits perfectly well. Then I write the definition: For every ε > 0 there exists a δ > 0 such that…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies -
Is “what is the meaning of life?” a modern European question?
Every year I teach Camus to my terminale class in Dakar, and every year the same thing happens. The students read The Myth of Sisyphus, which begins by saying that the only truly serious philosophical problem is suicide, whether life is worth…
Started by Khady Sène6 replies -
Usul al-fiqh and Dworkin’s integrity: two ways of saying law is more than its rules
I read Iqbal and Hart side by side, more or less as a hobby, and lately I have been adding Dworkin and al-Shafi'i to the pile. I want to test a comparison that I find tempting and suspect is partly false. Dworkin…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
Thirty-one years of watching courts decide what is ‘reasonable’, and no degrees of truth in sight
Here is something I watched every week in the courts of Punjab. A large part of the work was applying words that have no sharp edges: "reasonable doubt", "sudden provocation", "sufficient cause", "unsound mind". Now I read that fuzzy logic was invented…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
Why insight does not instantly change behaviour: an Abhidhamma account of knowing and not doing
I read the threads here about whether knowing what is right necessarily moves you, and I would like to add the account I have lived with in twelve years of practice. In the Pali discourses, the Buddha says that intention, cetanā, is…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara5 replies -
Soul as the form of a living body: does Aristotle help me teach the Igbo idea of chi, or get in the way?
I teach religious studies at a Catholic secondary school in Enugu and run a philosophy club for the senior students. Every year we read Aristotle's De Anima, where the soul is defined as the first actuality of a natural body that potentially…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies -
Ibn Sina begins the Canon by defining medicine. What does that definition assume about health?
I recently reread the opening of Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine for a reading group at the hospital, and I was struck by how much philosophy is packed into the first sentence. Paraphrasing: medicine is the knowledge of the states of the…
Started by Omar Ragab5 replies -
I use modal logic at work every day, and the engineers around me have no idea it was philosophy
Every day, the engineers I work with write properties like "on every path, whenever a request is issued, a grant eventually follows". In our notation that's something like AG(request → AF grant): A for "on all paths", G for "always", F for…
Started by Derek HollisReply first (no replies yet) -
Ji Kang argued that music holds neither sorrow nor joy, sixteen centuries before Hanslick
My taiji group practises to recordings of the guqin, and one morning someone asked whether the music was sad. I said what my father would have said: sound has no sorrow or joy. It turns out that is not just my father's…
Started by Liu Mingqiao4 replies -
Do the world’s ethical traditions really agree about how to live, or does it only look that way from far off?
There is a claim one often meets in comparative philosophy courses: traditions that disagree completely about metaphysics agree substantially about how to live. Aristotelian virtue, Confucian self-cultivation, Buddhist training and Islamic adab all say character is shaped by repeated action, habit makes…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 replies -
What do I owe a source I don’t believe? Notes from a court reporter
I cover courts and human rights in Karachi. Every week someone tells me something I am not sure I believe: a family about a disappeared relative, an official about a raid, a lawyer about what his client said. I have to decide…
Started by Sana Rizvi5 replies -
Seeing before naming: are Dignāga and Merleau-Ponty saying the same thing about perception?
Two accounts of perception seem to me to speak to the moment just before a word arrives, which is where a translator spends her days. Dignāga, the Buddhist epistemologist of the late fifth and early sixth centuries, defines perception as cognition free…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
The five rulings, from obligatory to forbidden: why the middle categories are not just extra boxes
Standard deontic logic has three basic statuses: obligatory, forbidden, and permitted. Anything neither obligatory nor forbidden is simply permitted, and that's the end of it. Islamic jurisprudence has five rulings (al-aḥkām al-khamsa). An act is obligatory (wājib), recommended (mandūb), permissible (mubāḥ), disliked…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
Al-Ma’arri gave up meat, milk and honey, and wrote a poem telling us why
Abu al-'Ala al-Ma'arri (973–1057) lost his sight to smallpox as a child and called himself the prisoner of two prisons, his blindness and his house in Ma'arrat al-Nu'man. I read him first for his fury. I stayed for his ethics. In his…
Started by Dima Nasser5 replies -
Keeping the losing opinion on the page: is disagreement inside a tradition as deep as disagreement between traditions?
In my Tuesday Talmud study group we recently read the story in tractate Eruvin about the houses of Hillel and Shammai, who argued for years until a heavenly voice declared that "these and these are the words of the living God", and…
Started by Eliana Halpern5 replies -
Yorùbá separates what you have seen from what you were told. What does that do to testimony?
Let me offer something from Yorùbá for comparison and see what others make of it. In a well-known study from the 1980s, the philosophers Barry Hallen and J. Olubi Sodipo worked with Yorùbá healers and argued that the verb mọ̀, usually translated…
Started by Titilayo Adeyemi4 replies -
Heidegger’s standing-reserve and Zhuangzi’s machine heart are two different worries
People often put two passages side by side as if they said the same thing, and I think the comparison hides more than it shows. In chapter 12, Confucius's disciple Zigong meets an old man watering his garden by carrying jars from…
Started by Liu Mingqiao4 replies -
Read the Republic with ‘citizen community’ in place of ‘state’ and the argument changes
Every year one of my students asks why we bother with Plato's Republic, since it's obviously a blueprint for a totalitarian state. I've started giving them an exercise that I'd like to share here. Take any English translation that renders polis as…
Started by Nikos TheodoridisReply first (no replies yet) -
Can students learn something from a teacher who doesn’t believe it herself?
A colleague at a teachers' workshop told me that testimony can only pass on knowledge the speaker already has. It is a tidy principle, and it is how most of us picture teaching: I know something, I tell my students, now they…
Started by Rowena Abellana6 replies -
Wujūd, brahman, dao: are these even answers to the same question?
I keep returning to Mullā Ṣadrā. I've been looking at a comparative table of traditions' answers to "what is real?", and the Islamic row says: created being, contingent, distinct from a necessary existent. The key term is wujūd. That's fair for much…
Started by Reza Tehrani4 replies