Tradition
Greek & Roman
-
Does every culture have a word for ‘art’? Technē, kalā and the Japanese ‘ways’
I spend a lot of time warning people about false friends in comparison. One of the biggest sits under the whole debate about defining art. Greek technē is usually translated "art", but it means skilled making of any kind: medicine, shoemaking, navigation,…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
Reading group: Gettier’s three pages, with Russell’s clock and Dharmottara’s mirage alongside
The thing I love most about Gettier's paper is that it works like a failing test case. One counterexample, cleanly stated, and a definition that looked settled stops compiling. It is also the shortest famous paper I know, so it is an…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Al-Fārābī’s virtuous city looks different on a bad day in a bookshop
On quiet afternoons in the shop I read al-Farabi, who lived and taught in this city a thousand years before me. In The Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City he compares the excellent city to a healthy body, in which…
Started by Zainab Kadhim5 replies -
Reading group: Longinus, On the Sublime, in four sittings
Before Burke and Kant there was a short Greek treatise, probably from the first century CE, by an author we do not really know. The manuscript names "Dionysius or Longinus", and scholars have argued about who wrote it and when ever since.…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
Reading group: Plotinus, “On Beauty” (Ennead I.6), the treatise he is said to have written first
I work in a library in Alexandria, and Plotinus studied philosophy here with Ammonius Saccas before he moved to Rome. That is reason enough for me to propose reading him together. "On Beauty" is the obvious place to start. It is short,…
Started by Mona Fathy5 replies -
When philosophers ask what exists, what would even count as an answer?
I come to this from literature, so forgive me if the question is naive. In a seminar last week someone said ontology is "the study of what there is". I nodded along, and then on the bus home I realised I had…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies -
When rhetoric and poetry were counted as logic: the Arabic Organon and al-Jāḥiẓ on eloquence
I keep a secondhand bookshop off Mutanabbi Street. People come in for poetry far more often than for logic, and they are surprised when I tell them that for centuries the two were shelved together. In the Arabic tradition, following late-antique practice,…
Started by Zainab Kadhim5 replies -
Logic is the one part of philosophy that settles questions, and the rest should take note
People like to say that philosophy never makes progress, that we're still arguing about the same questions as Plato. Logic is the counterexample. For two thousand years, Aristotle's syllogistic could not handle inferences involving relations. "Every horse is an animal, so every…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Aquinas’s metaphysics is unintelligible without Ibn Sina
My students arrive believing that Aquinas is a Catholic synthesis of Aristotle and the Bible. That leaves out the man in the middle. My thesis is strong: Aquinas's metaphysics cannot be understood without Ibn Sina. The centre of Thomist metaphysics is the…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies -
How can death be bad for someone who no longer exists to be harmed?
We did Epicurus in my ancient philosophy module and I can't get past the argument, even though I don't believe the conclusion. As I understand it: harm requires a subject. While I'm alive, death isn't here. When death is here, I'm not.…
Started by Aoife Kilbride5 replies -
Reading group: Plato’s Theaetetus, the three definitions of knowledge
Every year I teach the Theaetetus to my liceo students in fragments, and every year I promise myself I'll read it whole again with adults. This is that promise. It is the founding text of epistemology and also one of Plato's most…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
Reading group: Plato’s Gorgias in five weeks, one interlocutor at a time
I teach theology at a secondary school in Thessaloniki, and every year a student asks whether politicians are "just good at talking". I always want to hand them the Gorgias, and I have never read it closely with adults. Let's do that.…
Started by Nikos Theodoridis5 replies -
An infinite chain of reasons is not a defect: the case for infinitism deserves more than a smirk
When students first meet the regress problem they are told there are three options and one of them is obviously absurd. Foundations, coherence, or an infinite regress; and who could believe in an infinite regress? I want to argue that infinitism, defended…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak5 replies -
Reading group: Stoic logic in Diogenes Laertius, Lives Book VII
Chrysippus is said to have written hundreds of books, a large share of them on logic, and almost all are lost. What we have of Stoic logic comes mostly through later writers: Diogenes Laertius, who gives a summary of Stoic dialectic in…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
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 -
Is a promise to someone who has died still binding if no one living would know?
Before she died, my husband's grandmother made me promise that the recipe for our bakery's bread would stay in the family. It is not a secret of state. It is flour, water, salt, a little of something, and the way you fold…
Started by Dilnoza Karimova4 replies -
Teaching the Euthyphro to sixteen-year-olds: what works and what doesn’t?
The central question (10a) is whether the pious is loved by the gods because it is pious, or pious because it is loved by the gods. My students grasp the dilemma in about four minutes. What they struggle with is the Greek…
Started by Giulia Ferrante4 replies -
What do the strange names Barbara, Celarent and Darii actually mean?
I'm working through an old logic textbook my uncle left at our house. There is a page with a Latin verse that starts "Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferioque..." and then a lot of other names like Cesare and Baroco. The book just says…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies -
What is the actual difference between Pyrrhonian and Academic sceptics?
I have been reading about doubt, mostly because of al-Ghazālī. Every book I pick up mentions two kinds of ancient sceptics, Pyrrhonians and Academics, and then moves on as if the difference were obvious. It is not obvious to me. From what…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies -
Did the Stoics really think all emotions are bad?
I keep hearing that the Stoics wanted us to feel nothing, to be like robots. But when I read Seneca's letters, he clearly feels grief, friendship and even joy. He writes very warmly to Lucilius. So what did they actually think about…
Started by Elin Hedqvist4 replies -
Founders and Stoicism: real philosophy or corporate self-help?
In the startup world, Stoicism is everywhere. Podcasts, newsletters, Marcus Aurelius quotes on office walls. I got into it during a bad year, and honestly it helped. But I'm starting to wonder if what we're doing is Stoicism at all. The startup…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies -
Persian gardens, proportion, and Plato’s Timaeus
The classical Persian garden, the chahar bagh, is divided into four parts by water channels meeting at a centre. Visit the Fin Garden in Kashan or Bagh-e Eram in Shiraz and you feel the order before you understand it. In the Timaeus,…
Started by Reza Tehrani4 replies -
Found the Master Argument in Epictetus, between two bus stops
Another find from my recordings. Last week it was Epictetus, Discourses Book 2, and in the middle of a chapter he mentions an argument by Diodorus Cronus that clever people used to show off with. I had to pull my attention back…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
What did Gorgias actually say about the power of speech in the Encomium of Helen?
Persuasion is literally my rent. A mate who did classics told me there's an ancient Greek speech where Gorgias argues that words work on people like drugs, and that it's all in a speech defending Helen of Troy, of all people. That…
Started by Gemma Pritchard4 replies -
Why does logic count ‘if the moon is cheese, then 2 + 2 = 5’ as true?
Half my jokes are conditionals. So I was pleased to find a whole branch of logic about "if". Then I hit the truth table and it broke my brain. Apparently in propositional logic "if P then Q" is false only when P…
Started by Gemma Pritchard4 replies -
Is the Allegory of the Cave a theory of education first and a metaphysics second?
The cave in Republic VII is usually read as a story about two worlds: shadows down here, Forms up there. That's not wrong, but I've come to think it isn't the emphasis Plato gives it. Socrates introduces the image as a picture…
Started by Giulia Ferrante4 replies -
If numbers aren’t physical, how could we ever know anything about them?
I count tablets all day. Three tablets, thirty tablets, a strip of ten. The tablets are physical: I can drop them, and I do. But the three is not in any of them. You can't drop a three. My son's maths teacher…
Started by Hetal Shah4 replies -
What does Hume mean when he says reason is the slave of the passions?
Yesterday a lecturer quoted Hume saying that reason is the slave of the passions, and then the traffic got bad and I missed the explanation. It worries me. Epictetus is the philosopher who makes most sense to me in traffic, and he…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
When Aristotle calls humans political animals, does he mean we need a government?
At least once a debate tournament some student cites Aristotle: "man is a political animal." It always gets used to mean that people need government, or that humans are naturally into politics, like campaigning and voting. I have a nagging feeling that's…
Started by Sam Ellery4 replies -
I know I shouldn’t shout at drivers who cut me off, and I still do. How is that possible?
When someone cuts in front of my bus at a stop, I shout. I know it does nothing. I know it is bad for my heart, bad for the passengers, and that the other driver cannot hear me. I have decided, many…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies