Tradition
American
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Testimonial injustice is a failure of knowledge, not only a failure of fairness
I teach eleventh-grade English in Atlanta, and every year we read To Kill a Mockingbird. Every year a student asks why the jury did not believe Tom Robinson when the evidence was on his side. And every year I hand them Miranda…
Started by Keisha Monroe6 replies -
Ageing is a disease, and medicine should treat it as one
I'll argue this as an outsider to medicine and expect to be corrected. Ageing is the largest single risk factor for most of what kills people in rich countries: cancers, heart disease, dementia. It involves the progressive failure of almost every bodily…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Langton is right: you can be silenced while still being allowed to speak
Rae Langton's 1993 paper "Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts" changes how some people think about speech every time my reading group takes it up. I want to defend its central idea against the objection that it is a clever stretch. The idea,…
Started by Femke Bosman5 replies -
Why did Peirce abandon the word ‘pragmatism’ for something uglier?
I'm a community organizer in Chicago and I've been reading William James for a while, mostly because he writes like someone who has actually talked to people. In an introduction I read that Charles Sanders Peirce, who invented pragmatism, later renamed his…
Started by Dana Whitfield4 replies -
“The best ruler is barely noticed” is compatible with abandonment, and the Legalists exploited exactly that
Chapter 17 of the Daodejing ranks rulers. The best are those whose people barely know they exist. Next come those the people love and praise; then those they fear; then those they despise. And when the work is done, the people all…
Started by Chen Yuting6 replies -
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 -
Reading group: Eva Kittay’s Love’s Labor and the dependency critique of Rawls
Eva Kittay's Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (1999) is one of the books that turned care ethics from a set of intuitions into a challenge to political philosophy. I have dipped into parts of it for years, but I've…
Started by Femke Bosman5 replies -
Reading group: Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief” and James’s “The Will to Believe” side by side
These two essays are a classic pairing and they are both short, so I'd like to read them together over four weeks. The question they share is the one at the center of debates about rationality: should you believe only what the…
Started by Dana Whitfield6 replies -
Reading group: Gould and Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco” (1979)
Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin's paper, published in 1979 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, is one of the few biology papers whose title became a philosophical term. Its target is what they called the adaptationist programme: the habit of…
Started by Priya Raghavan4 replies -
Judges make law in hard cases, and pretending they discover it does more harm than good
Here is my thesis, from someone who has read too many judgments. Hart's famous example is a rule forbidding vehicles in the park. Cars are clearly covered. But a bicycle? A child's electric toy? A decommissioned tank set up as a war…
Started by Deepa Kartha6 replies -
Some films do philosophy that prose cannot, rather than illustrating it
I'll argue a thesis my analytic friends here find indulgent: some films do philosophical work in their own right, work that can't be fully restated in prose. The sceptic's argument is simple. Whatever philosophical content a film has can be put into…
Started by Martín Iriarte7 replies -
Reading group: William James’s Varieties, from ‘Religion and Neurology’ to the mysticism lectures
James gave the Gifford Lectures here in Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902, and they became The Varieties of Religious Experience. I have walked past the building for decades without reading the book, which seems a poor show for someone who spent his…
Started by Alistair Gow6 replies -
How did Frederick Douglass argue against the race science of the 1850s on its own terms?
I know Douglass from the Narrative and the Fourth of July speech, but someone here mentioned that he also gave a commencement address in 1854, ‘The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered’, taking on the scientists of his day. I've started reading…
Started by Dana Whitfield5 replies -
Reading group: Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), five chapters over five weeks
The Souls of Black Folk is the book I keep pushing onto the philosophy syllabus, because it was doing philosophy all along. Du Bois wrote much of it in my city, at Atlanta University. The ‘Forethought’ announces that the problem of the…
Started by Keisha Monroe5 replies -
Reading group: Weitz, Danto and Dickie on whether art can be defined
My students keep asking "but who decides what counts as art?", and I'd like to read the classic papers properly before I try to answer. Join me. Plan (three weeks): Week 1: Morris Weitz, "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics" (1956), with…
Started by Keisha Monroe4 replies -
Nishida’s pure experience dissolves the hard problem rather than solving it
I came to Nishida late, through zazen at a small temple near my house in Kyoto, after a career designing structures. Here is my thesis, stated as sharply as I can. The hard problem assumes a split. On one side, a physical…
Started by Aiko Tanabe6 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 -
William James was wrong: an emotion is not the perception of a bodily change
Our psychology textbooks still teach the James–Lange theory with a kind of affection. William James's essay "What Is an Emotion?" (1884) proposes that the order we assume is backwards. We don't tremble because we're afraid; the bodily change comes first, and the…
Started by Elif Yıldız6 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 -
Many-worlds is the most conservative reading of quantum mechanics, not the wildest
Many-worlds has a reputation as the science-fiction interpretation. I want to argue it is the opposite: the reading that adds least to the physics. Look at what the others add. Copenhagen-style views add a collapse whenever a "measurement" happens, without saying what…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen5 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 -
Was the abolition of slavery a moral discovery or a moral change? A teacher’s test case
Every July my after-school reading circle reads Frederick Douglass's 1852 speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”. This year a student asked a question I could not answer cleanly: “When people stopped thinking slavery was okay, did they find…
Started by Keisha Monroe6 replies -
Lakatos found the right middle path between Popper and Kuhn
My physics students in Lagos always ask the same thing when we reach the history of astronomy: if a single failed prediction refutes a theory, why did astronomers keep Newton when Uranus misbehaved? Popper's falsificationism seems to say they shouldn't have. Kuhn's…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha5 replies -
If objectivity belongs to communities, what happens when the community all looks the same?
Helen Longino argues that objectivity is not a property of individual scientists, who all have commitments and blind spots, but of communities. And not any community. Only one with public venues for criticism, shared standards, genuine uptake of criticism, and what she…
Started by Femke Bosman5 replies -
What did Milton Friedman actually argue in his 1970 essay on business and profit?
In every business-ethics discussion I've been in, someone quotes Friedman's line that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, and everyone either nods or sneers. Usually it's summarised as "greed is good". I've now found the essay (in the…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies -
Critical theory diagnoses domination brilliantly but cannot say why it is wrong
I work as an economist at a bank in Valencia, and Marx, Rawls, Hobbes and Ibn Khaldun share a shelf at home. I'd like to press an old objection to critical theory and see whether it still bites. Critical theory asks what…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
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 -
Reading group: Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, over four weeks
"Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" is the essay where the phrase "the myth of the given" comes from. It is famous, hard and shorter than its reputation. I would like to read it slowly with whoever is willing. Text. The Harvard…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Can trained meditative introspection count as evidence? Abhidhamma and William James
For years my study has been the Abhidhamma, the systematic part of our canon that analyses experience into momentary mental events and their factors. In the classical Theravada scheme there are fifty-two mental factors (cetasika), seven of which are said to accompany…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara4 replies