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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 -
My cooks are free to leave, in theory. What republican liberty sees in a kitchen
I came from Goa to cook in Dubai fifteen years ago, and I'm proud of how we treat people in my kitchen now. Nobody is shouted at. Overtime is paid. When someone's mother is ill, we find a way to send him…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
Reading group: Epictetus, Discourses II.19, where the Master Argument meets a bus driver
Epictetus, as people here know by now, is my favourite. Last month a lecture mentioned that the only clear report we have of the "Master Argument" of Diodorus Cronus is at the start of one chapter of his Discourses (the lectures his…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu5 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 -
What does “the right side of history” actually assume about history?
At least once a tournament, one of the kids I coach closes a round with “my opponent is on the wrong side of history.” Judges love it. I've started to find it slippery, but I can't say exactly why. As far as…
Started by Sam Ellery5 replies -
Mozi was a consequentialist two thousand years before Bentham, and lost the argument the same way
I read the later Mohist canons closely, so I live with this comparison. Here's the case. Mozi, writing in the fifth century BCE, argued that the test of any doctrine or policy is whether it promotes benefit and removes harm for the…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
Refusing to aggregate is contractualism’s best feature, not its embarrassing bug
Scanlon's transmitter room case: a technician is trapped under equipment in a TV station, receiving painful electric shocks. Freeing him means interrupting the broadcast of a big football match for fifteen minutes, and millions of people are watching. Add up the millions…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen5 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 -
If the Big Bang marks the edge of a theory rather than a beginning, what is left of the kalām’s physics?
I studied physics, and I get asked about this a lot by friends who have watched debates online. Here is what I think the physics actually says. The hot Big Bang phase of the observable universe has a finite age, about 13.8…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
I butcher pigs at work and my dog sleeps on my bed. Is that inconsistent?
I'm a chef from Goa, which means pork is close to the centre of the food I grew up with: sorpotel, vindaloo, chouriço. In my kitchen in Dubai I break down whole pigs when we can get them. At home I have…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies -
I have grown cocoa for thirty years and never seen chocolate made. How do I know that is where it goes?
Last week my son sent me an article that said most of what any of us knows, we know only because somebody told us. I laughed, then I thought about it while I was splitting pods. I have grown cocoa for thirty…
Started by Akosua Mensah5 replies -
A universal basic income would make people freer, not lazier
Philippe Van Parijs, in Real Freedom for All (1995), argues that a just society should maximise everyone's real freedom to do whatever they might want to do, and that an unconditional basic income is the best way to do it. Republicans in…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
Where do I start if I want philosophy beyond the European canon, not just Plato?
My students find it obvious that a river can be a person, and I'm trying to understand why so much of Western philosophy finds it strange, and what tikanga might say to philosophy in return. But when I look for a place…
Started by Aroha Tipene5 replies -
Why does tax feel like theft to some of my clients and not to others?
Two of my tax clients run nearly identical businesses: same size, same bracket, similar families. Every April one of them tells me, only half joking, that the government is robbing him. The other says, with no irony, that tax is the membership…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal5 replies -
Monks take the great vows, I take the small ones: is a graded ethic a cop-out?
Jain ethics has five vows: non-harm, truthfulness, not stealing, sexual restraint and non-possession. Monks and nuns take them as the great vows, absolutely. Laypeople like me take them as the small vows, in a limited form suited to a householder's life. So…
Started by Hetal Shah5 replies -
What do Prior’s four tense operators actually say, in plain words?
The game I'm building now has a time loop: the player relives the same afternoon and has to work out what will happen, what already happened, and what has always been true in the loop. A friend who did a logic minor…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting5 replies -
Han Feizi’s case for clear law, read in Lahore
I've been reading Han Feizi with more sympathy than I expected. His central insight about law is one I see confirmed every week in our courts. Where the rules are unclear, or applied differently depending on who you are, the powerful win…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
Can Kant’s rule against treating others merely as means be stretched to cover animals?
I work on wetlands, and in a project meeting last month we argued about whether the birds of a lake have any claim against being drained out of their habitat, or whether only the people who enjoy them do. A colleague, a…
Started by Anand Kurup5 replies -
Running a kitchen, I never pick the best option, just the first good one. Is that irrational?
Every morning at six I make maybe fifty decisions before the first coffee: which supplier to call when the fish is late, who covers a sick cook, whether the tomatoes are good enough or go to sauce. I never compare all the…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies -
Is a mayonnaise emergent? A cook asks about weak and strong emergence
Every morning someone in my kitchen makes mayonnaise: egg yolk, a little mustard and lemon, then oil, drop by drop at first. Get it right and you have something thick, glossy and pale. Get it wrong and you have greasy soup. None…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies -
Reading group: ‘The Culture Industry’ chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment
I do stand-up on the northern circuit and work in a call centre by day, which provides most of my material. A friend told me that Adorno and Horkheimer thought comedy on the radio was a form of social control, and I…
Started by Gemma Pritchard5 replies -
Is the flame on my burner a thing, or something that keeps happening?
I run a kitchen in Dubai, twenty-two cooks, nine countries, and on a slow afternoon I was staring at a gas flame. It keeps the same shape and colour for hours, but nothing in it stays: the gas comes in, burns, and…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies -
Reading group: Plato’s Phaedo, weeks 1–3
I'd like to read the Phaedo slowly with anyone who is interested. It is the dialogue I return to most, and it reads differently every decade. Proposed plan: Week 1: the frame story and Socrates' claim that philosophers spend their lives practising…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
Reading group: Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, “On Violence”
The Wretched of the Earth was published in 1961, the year Fanon died of leukaemia at thirty-six. The first chapter, "On Violence", is the most famous and the most misunderstood. Fanon argues that colonialism is itself violence: it establishes and maintains a…
Started by Sana Rizvi5 replies -
Reading group: Yājñavalkya, Maitreyī and Gārgī in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad
Reading Śaiva Siddhānta on my own, I want to go back behind the schools to the text they all argue over. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka is the oldest and, for me, the most alive of the Upaniṣads, mostly because of Yājñavalkya and the two…
Started by Thamarai Raman5 replies -
Camus and the Buddhists: two ways of refusing the question of life’s meaning
I translate French philosophy into Vietnamese, and I'm finishing a new translation of The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). It opens with the famous sentence that there is only one really serious philosophical problem, suicide: judging whether life is worth living. And it…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo5 replies