Tradition
Greek & Roman
-
Does philosophy make you better at your actual job, or just more annoying at it?
I'm a carpenter in Tetouan. I've been reading philosophy for a few years, mostly Aristotle, because he talks about carpenters and builders so much, and lately Ibn Bājja, who was from al-Andalus and thought hard about how a person can live well…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani7 replies -
If the Stoic technique works without the Stoic cosmos, the cosmos was never doing the work
Stoicism helped me back from a bad year. I read Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and practised separating what's in my control from what isn't. I don't believe in a rationally ordered cosmos governed by providence. The practice worked anyway. I keep reading…
Started by Rohan Desai7 replies -
Vitaṇḍā is not always illegitimate: a critic with no thesis can still be doing philosophy
There is one problem in Nāgārjuna I have been chewing on for a long time. The Nyāya tradition calls vitaṇḍā illegitimate: one party only attacks and never defends a position, so they risk nothing and cannot be wrong. That seems fair as…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung7 replies -
Eighteen and on a gap year: should I read the philosophers themselves or an introduction first?
My parents still call my gap year wasting time. Last month I read al-Ghazālī's Deliverance from Error, his account of his crisis of doubt, and I haven't stopped thinking about it. It was the first time a book felt like it was…
Started by Fajar Nugroho6 replies -
Quine was right that even logic could be revised in the light of experience
Be gentle but not too gentle. We read the end of Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951) in a seminar last week, and I think its most radical claim is correct: no statement is immune to revision, logic included. The picture: our…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies -
Hobbes’s ‘sudden glory’ explains far more laughter than its critics admit
Every textbook dismisses the superiority theory in a paragraph. Hobbes says in Leviathan chapter 6 that ‘sudden glory’ is the passion that makes the grimaces called laughter, caused either by some act of our own that pleases us or by seeing some…
Started by Javier Ferrandis6 replies -
Reading group for complete beginners: Plato’s Apology, slowly, in three sittings
Several newcomers have asked where to start, and my answer is always the same: Plato's Apology. It's short (an evening's reading), it's a real trial (Athens, 399 BCE), and it's the founding scene of philosophy as a way of life. Socrates, accused…
Started by Giulia Ferrante6 replies -
Why a joke dies in Leeds and kills in Salford: notes from a stand-up
I've started reading philosophy of humour because I want to know why the exact same bit, same words, same timing, can get silence in one room and a roar in another twenty miles away. The theory that has helped me most is…
Started by Gemma Pritchard6 replies -
Plato called my trade a knack. Why did philosophy decide taste and smell don’t count?
I've started reading the philosophers on food because I'm tired of being told it's ‘just subjective’ by people who have never had to fix a split sauce on a Friday night. What I found surprised me. In the Gorgias, Socrates sorts cookery…
Started by Joel D'Souza6 replies -
If the One cannot be described, how did Plotinus manage to write so much about it?
Visitors to my workshop often tell me that this or that painting is "Neoplatonic", and I have learned to be wary of the word, because art historians argue fiercely about how much philosophy the painters actually knew. So I decided to go…
Started by Chiara Bellandi6 replies -
Does contemplating death dissolve the fear, or does it just stop us arguing about it?
In the Theravāda tradition we practise maraṇasati, mindfulness of death. Buddhaghosa's Path of Purification gives it a full treatment among the recollections, and there is a sutta where monks tell the Buddha how they practise it, hoping to live for a day…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara6 replies -
Aristotle was right that distributive justice is proportion; every quarrel is about what counts as merit
The fiercest arguments I ever heard as a school coach were about team selection. So I've been reading Aristotle to find out whether I was teaching justice or just picking teams. In Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics he says distributive justice…
Started by Gerrit Venter6 replies -
My father knew which cedar beam would split. He could never say how. Did he know?
When I was a boy my father would walk past a stack of beams and tap one with his knuckle and say: not that one, it will split when we carve it. He was almost always right. If you asked him how…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani6 replies -
Epicurus’s argument about death still works if you throw away the atoms
As a volunteer in Montreal, I spend a lot of my evenings with people who are dying. Epicurus helped me think about death without flinching, so I want to defend him against a claim I keep reading: that his consolations about death…
Started by Nadia Haddad6 replies -
Splitting causation from explanation was a modern mistake, not an Aristotelian one
Reading Maturana and Varela, the Chilean biologists who described living things as self-producing systems in the early 1970s, I keep running into the same problem. To explain why a kelp forest is the way it is, I need to say what it's…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo6 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 -
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 -
Reading group: Porphyry’s Isagoge and the three questions he refused to answer
Porphyry wrote the Isagoge, a short "Introduction" to Aristotle's Categories, in the late third century. In the opening lines he raises three questions about genera and species, and then declines to answer them because they need a deeper inquiry: Do they subsist,…
Started by Siobhán Keane6 replies -
Nāgārjuna asked what proves the means of knowledge. Is that Agrippa’s trilemma in Sanskrit?
I have been translating parts of Nāgārjuna's Vigrahavyāvartanī (often rendered "The Dispeller of Disputes"), and one argument keeps reminding me of the Agrippan problem people discuss under foundationalism and coherentism. The opponent is a realist of the Nyāya type who says objects…
Started by Meera Kulkarni6 replies -
Asking a smoker to picture their daughter’s wedding is not manipulation
At the hospital where I interpret, a lot of the work is trying to get people to stop doing things that will kill them. Here's a familiar situation. A doctor I work with gives a patient the figures on smoking: mortality, heart…
Started by Tsion Bekele6 replies -
Can you be a good person in a role that sometimes requires you to do bad things?
I am thinking of my years in the army, and I am not talking about atrocities. I mean ordinary things the role required: enforcing a punishment I thought was disproportionate because the regulation was clear, sending a capable young private on a…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun6 replies -
Is it fair to call Nāgārjuna or Śrīharṣa a sceptic at all?
In English books on Indian philosophy two names are regularly filed under "scepticism": Nāgārjuna, the Buddhist founder of Madhyamaka, and Śrīharṣa, the twelfth-century Advaitin whose Khaṇḍanakhaṇḍakhādya (roughly "The Sweets of Refutation") takes apart the Nyāya definitions of valid cognition one after another.…
Started by Arjun Iyer6 replies -
The Axial Age is defined by its exclusions, and that makes the thesis unfalsifiable
Every survey of world philosophy I've read includes the Axial Age: between about 800 and 200 BCE, in Greece, India, China and Israel, with no documented contact between them, something similar happened. People began defending claims against stated objections, named individuals disagreed…
Started by Mateo Quispe6 replies -
Take away the rational cosmos and Stoic ethics becomes a coping technique
My students discover Marcus Aurelius on their phones before they discover him in my classroom, usually as short videos about controlling what you can control. I am glad they find him. But I want to defend a thesis that spoils the mood…
Started by Giulia Ferrante6 replies -
Emanation cannot be squared with a God who freely creates, and al-Ghazālī saw exactly why
I spend my working days with systems where outputs follow necessarily from inputs, and perhaps that's why the Neoplatonic picture of the world troubles me. In that picture, everything flows from the One the way light flows from the sun: necessarily, eternally,…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam6 replies -
Hume’s Dialogues had answered the watchmaker before Paley set it ticking
Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion were published in 1779, three years after his death, which is a fair measure of how risky he thought they were. William Paley's Natural Theology, with its famous watch found on a heath, appeared in 1802. My…
Started by Alistair Gow6 replies -
Do civilisations really rise and fall in cycles, or do we just like the shape?
Customers who come in to browse almost always tell me the same story: Baghdad was the centre of the world under the Abbasids, it fell to the Mongols in 1258, and everything since has been a long decline with brief recoveries. Some…
Started by Zainab Kadhim6 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 -
“I know what I saw”: what is a witness actually claiming?
I cover courts and human rights in Karachi. The sentence I hear most often in witness boxes is "I know what I saw." It's said with total conviction, often by people who are mistaken. Psychologists have shown how fragile this is. Elizabeth…
Started by Sana Rizvi6 replies -
A source that is not one of the things it produces: Anaximander’s apeiron and Plotinus’s One
In my library we keep a small display on the Alexandrian Neoplatonists, and I have been rereading Plotinus between cataloguing jobs. What strikes me is a move that appears, in different forms, at both ends of Greek philosophy. Anaximander, very early, said…
Started by Mona Fathy6 replies