Tradition
American
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Aristotle was wrong to think that manual work unfits a person for citizenship
In Book III of the Politics Aristotle asks whether manual workers, the banausoi, should be citizens, and answers that in the best city they would not be. In Book VIII he says such work leaves the body and mind unfit for the…
Started by Hugo Marchetti4 replies -
A random string and a sonnet can carry the same information? Then what is Shannon measuring?
Yesterday's lecture was about information, and the lecturer said something that has been bothering me through two full shifts: in Claude Shannon's theory, a random string of letters and a sonnet of the same length can carry the same amount of information.…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
Truth as ‘what inquiry converges on’ breaks down exactly where we most need it: ethics
Peirce wrote, in 1878, that the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth. I find that a beautiful idea for physics. Scientists disagree, run experiments, and over time opinions…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 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 -
What does Langdon Winner mean when he says artifacts have politics?
Anyone who builds puzzle games already believes that rules built into a world shape what people do in it. If I put a locked door at the end of a corridor, players will spend twenty minutes looking for a key, and none…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting4 replies -
Bridges too low for buses: what did Winner mean by “artifacts have politics”?
In a short article about philosophy of technology I read about a bridge built too low for buses to pass under, so that the people who travel by bus could not easily reach what lay beyond it. The article said a philosopher…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu3 replies -
I design systems that steer behaviour. Where does my responsibility end?
My job is to shape what players want to do next: rewards spaced so that the next one is always just ahead, social features that make leaving feel like letting friends down, events that expire so you return tomorrow. Some of it…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting5 replies -
Is the “flow state” players reach in a good game the same thing as wu wei, or a false friend?
I design puzzle games for a small studio in Tainan. Our whole craft is building challenges that match a player's skill closely enough that they lose track of time. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this "flow": deep absorption, loss of self-consciousness, action…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting6 replies -
Can a tidy ledger be beautiful? What is “everyday aesthetics” about?
There is a moment near the end of every tax return I prepare, when the columns reconcile and the ledger is clean and everything is where it should be, that gives me a feeling I can only call aesthetic. My husband laughs…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal4 replies -
Our CEO keeps announcing “paradigm shifts”. Is that what Kuhn meant?
I have sat through a lot of pitch meetings where someone announced a paradigm shift. A new app for ordering groceries: paradigm shift. Moving the team to four-day weeks: paradigm shift. My last investor used it three times in one call. I…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies -
If I try to understand a practice from the inside first, have I signed up to relativism?
I teach at a Māori-language school. When visitors come, I always ask them to understand our practices on their own terms before judging them: why we greet the way we do, why the river is treated as an ancestor, why some places…
Started by Aroha Tipene5 replies -
“It’s just a tool” is false: instrumentalism cannot survive the smartphone
Whenever my class discusses phones, someone says, "A phone is just a tool. It depends how you use it." Everyone nods, and the discussion ends. I want to argue that this sentence is false, at least about the devices my students carry.…
Started by Rowena Abellana5 replies -
A student in my prison class asked why anyone should obey an unjust law. What did Aquinas say?
This came up in my prison reading class. Last week we read part of Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail, where he says, following Augustine, that an unjust law is no law at all, and appeals to Aquinas for how to…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma4 replies -
My son’s course says ‘don’t judge other cultures’. Is that a rule for studying or a rule for living?
This week my son sent me something on cultural relativism from his anthropology course, and we argued on the phone for an hour. His course says that to understand a people you must not judge their customs by your own standards, and…
Started by Akosua Mensah5 replies -
Contextual integrity explains why my aunt’s clinic group chat felt wrong
My aunt is a nurse at a small clinic outside Kuala Lumpur. Last month she showed me the staff group chat, where a colleague had posted a photo of a patient's rash to ask the doctor whether it looked like shingles. No…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies -
Reading group: Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (1982), read forty years on
In a Different Voice is one of the most cited books in the history of ethics and one of the most misremembered. Gilligan was a psychologist, not a philosopher, and the book began as a response to Lawrence Kohlberg's scale of moral…
Started by Femke Bosman6 replies -
Hayden White was right: the historian chooses the plot before the facts mean anything
Last year I worked on a documentary about a factory closure, and I made two rough cuts from the same footage for the director. In one the closing of the gates is a tragedy: a community undone by forces it could not…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam6 replies -
What are the ‘four principles’ of medical ethics, and what do you do when they conflict?
A drug rep who also teaches a short course mentioned "the four principles" as if everyone knew them, and I nodded and then looked them up: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice. I understand each one on its own. My problem is a…
Started by Hetal Shah3 replies -
Reading group: Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, from the shack to the land ethic
Leopold's A Sand County Almanac was published in 1949, the year after he died helping fight a neighbour's grass fire. It's short, it's beautiful, and its last essay, "The Land Ethic", is one of the founding texts of environmental ethics. I work…
Started by Anand Kurup5 replies -
Friedman’s billiard player: is predictive success really all a model owes us?
My models predict, quite well, who will repay a small loan, using patterns in phone and payment records. They do not describe why anyone repays. Some of the strongest predictors are things that have no plausible causal story at all. A colleague…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga4 replies -
What did McLuhan mean by ‘the medium is the message’? It sounds like a slogan
Colleagues at work quote ‘the medium is the message’ at least once a week, usually when they want to sound deep about social media. I finally looked it up: it's the title of the first chapter of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media (1964).…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies -
Freire’s banking model is unfair to the lecture, and to the teachers who give good ones
Every few years a pedagogy course reminds me that I am a banker. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed Freire describes the "banking" concept of education: the teacher deposits, the students receive, file and store. The teacher talks, the students listen meekly. He…
Started by Giulia Ferrante6 replies -
Is Iris Marion Young right that most injustice is not about who gets what?
Whenever my reading group discusses Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990), the same split appears. Young argued that political philosophy had been captured by the "distributive paradigm": it treats justice as the fair division of a stock of goods, income,…
Started by Femke Bosman6 replies -
Knowledge as a building or a raft? Neurath’s boat, seen from a community organiser’s chair
I'm a community organiser in Chicago and used to teach in public schools. I've always loved pragmatism because it treats knowledge as something you do with other people. Lately I've been reading about the structure of justification and want to test the…
Started by Dana Whitfield5 replies -
Skilled manual work demands more thinking than most office work
My cousin works in an office in Casablanca and earns three times what I do, and the family assumes his work is the one that uses the head. Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft argues the reverse, and I want to defend…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani6 replies -
Is Wheeler’s “it from bit” a physics proposal or a piece of metaphysics?
John Wheeler's slogan "it from bit" says that every physical thing derives its existence from answers to yes-or-no questions: that reality is informational at the bottom. Anyone who spends time around physicists hears versions of it constantly, usually late in the evening.…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
Dreyfus’s critique of AI has aged better than Searle’s Chinese Room
I want to defend an unfashionable ranking. Of the two classic objections to the idea of thinking machines, the one that has earned its keep is Hubert Dreyfus's, not John Searle's. Searle's argument rests on an intuition about what the man in…
Started by Derek Hollis7 replies -
Affirming the consequent on a hospital ward
My nephew is a medical student in Cairo, and listening to him describe his ward rounds I've realised that his teachers spend a lot of their time correcting a logical fallacy, and also committing it. A student says: if this patient had…
Started by Omar Ragab5 replies -
Reading group: Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, three essays
Sitting in job centres and taking notes, as I often do, I've realised I'm doing amateur ethnography without having read the ethnographers properly, so I'm proposing three essays from Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). Week 1: ‘Thick Description: Toward an…
Started by Johanna Reinhardt6 replies -
Reading group: William James, The Principles of Psychology, three chapters
William James published The Principles of Psychology in 1890, after twelve years of work. It is two huge volumes, and nobody should read it straight through. But three chapters are among the best things written about the mind, and they read like…
Started by Dana Whitfield5 replies