Tradition
American
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Was plate tectonics a Kuhnian revolution? Geology as a test case
In discussions of Kuhn, the examples are nearly always from physics and astronomy. I wanted to test his picture on an earth-science revolution I know something about. Alfred Wegener proposed continental drift in the 1910s. He had real evidence: the fit of…
Started by Anand KurupReply first (no replies yet) -
Moral dumbfounding at a debate tournament: Haidt’s elephant and its rider
Most weekends I watch teenagers at debate tournaments decide what they believe in the first ten seconds and then spend forty minutes building reasons for it. Jonathan Haidt would not be surprised. His social intuitionist model, first set out in "The Emotional…
Started by Sam ElleryReply first (no replies yet) -
Legal realism is not a claim about what exists, and lawyers should stop treating it as one
A small irritation from evenings spent arguing with lawyer friends in Lahore. They say "I'm a legal realist" to mean one of three things: that judges decide on their prejudices and then find reasons; that law is ultimately power; or that there…
Started by Hamza QureshiReply first (no replies yet) -
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 -
Our neighborhood grant asked us to prove a mural was ‘art’, not ‘signage’
This spring our block association on the South Side applied for a small public-art grant to paint a mural on the side of a corner store. The design came from kids at the rec center and includes the store's name and the…
Started by Dana WhitfieldReply first (no replies yet) -
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 -
Rousseau said the English were free only at election time. Was he right about the rest of us?
In Book III of The Social Contract, Rousseau has a line that hit me hard: the English people think they are free, but they are badly mistaken; they are free only during the election of members of Parliament, and once those are…
Started by Dana WhitfieldReply first (no replies yet) -
Is there a fact about how many people were in Fes one morning in 1200, if nobody recorded it?
My students love questions like this one. On a particular morning in the year 1200, there was some exact number of people inside the walls of our city. Nobody counted. No register survives, and no amount of future research will ever find…
Started by Youssef Berrada5 replies -
Epistemic injustice, nearly two decades on: what has the idea actually changed?
I teach Yoruba at a secondary school in Ibadan and read a lot about Yoruba epistemic vocabulary, and one of the developments in philosophy since 1990 that matters most to me is the turn to testimony and the social side of knowledge.…
Started by Titilayo Adeyemi5 replies -
Rights by consistency: Sor Juana, Astell and Wollstonecraft on the same argument
I keep noticing the same argument shape in three women who never read one another. The shape is a consistency argument. If reason is what entitles men to education, liberty or rights, and women have reason, then you must either extend those…
Started by Valentina Ríos4 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 -
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) -
Trustee or plain citizen? Nasr’s khalifa and Leopold’s land community
A Persian garden is a strange object: entirely human-made, geometric, irrigated by channels that took enormous labour, and yet everyone who walks in feels that it is a picture of something given, not imposed. I've been reading two environmental thinkers who seem…
Started by Reza Tehrani5 replies -
Devadatta is fat but never eats by day: is Mīmāṃsā “postulation” just inference to the best explanation?
When I read about sources of knowledge comparatively, I like to point out that the European and Indian debates ask different questions. The European one asks which source does the real work, senses or reason. The Indian one asks how many irreducible…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies