Tradition
Indian
-
Consciousness is fundamental, not produced by the brain
Advaita Vedanta holds that consciousness is the one reality, and the material world appears within it. In recent years, several philosophers in the analytic tradition have defended views in the same family: Philip Goff's panpsychism (Galileo's Error, 2019), Bernardo Kastrup's analytic idealism.…
Started by Arjun Iyer9 replies244 views -
Vitaṇḍā is not always illegitimate: a critic with no thesis can still be doing philosophy
I guide trekkers on the Annapurna circuit and read in tea houses in the evenings. A monk in Manang gave me a commentary on Nāgārjuna, and I've been chewing on one problem since. The Nyāya tradition calls vitaṇḍā illegitimate: one party only…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung7 replies205 views -
Knowledge-first epistemology is surrender dressed up as a theory
After Gettier, philosophers spent decades trying to find the missing ingredient that turns justified true belief into knowledge: no false lemmas, defeasibility, causal connection, reliability, safety. Each proposal met a counterexample. Timothy Williamson's response in Knowledge and Its Limits (2000) was to…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies313 views -
Testimony is an independent source of knowledge, not reducible to perception or inference
The Nyāya school counts testimony (śabda) as a distinct means of valid knowledge (pramāṇa), alongside perception, inference and comparison. The Vaiśeṣikas and Buddhist epistemologists like Dignāga disagreed, reducing testimony to a form of inference: I infer the truth of what you say…
Started by Meera Kulkarni6 replies254 views -
Are the words of the Veda abstract objects? Mīmāṃsā’s eternal language and Frege’s third realm
I teach Pūrva Mīmāṃsā in Varanasi. My tradition holds that the Veda is authorless (apauruṣeya), that words (śabda) are eternal, and that the relation between a word and its meaning is not created by anyone. The Mīmāṃsā Sūtra says early on that…
Started by Govinda Prasad Mishra6 replies177 views -
If a machine might have interests, what do we owe it before we know?
I'm the resident sceptic in my university's effective altruism group, so of course the thing that has eaten my semester is the one I was most sceptical about: whether anything is owed to AI systems that might have interests. Here's my difficulty.…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies227 views -
Once you know how a food was produced, you cannot honestly taste it the same way
I grew up Jain, which means I have strong views on honey, onions and root vegetables, and I run a pharmacy where I think every week about animal testing. So this is not a neutral thesis for me, but I want to…
Started by Hetal Shah6 replies214 views -
Langar, the Shabbat table and Confucius’s sauce: what does eating together do?
On weekends I do seva in the langar at our gurdwara in Surrey. The idea goes back to Guru Nanak and was made central by the gurus who followed: a free kitchen where everyone, whatever their caste, faith or status, sits on…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal6 replies180 views -
The Jains were right: a beginningless universe has no need of a creator
I grew up Jain in Ahmedabad and run the family pharmacy. Jain cosmology says the universe (loka) is uncreated and eternal. Time turns in great cycles of ascending and descending half-cycles, the utsarpiṇī and avasarpiṇī, and ages of improvement and decline repeat…
Started by Hetal Shah6 replies215 views -
I judge wine for a living. Can someone be wrong about what tastes good?
I make small-batch wine in the Adelaide Hills and judge at regional shows, so this question pays my bills. Twice a year I sit at a table with three other judges and we give medals. Every year someone at the cellar door…
Started by Bec Doyle6 replies298 views -
Reading group: the first book of the Nyāya Sūtra with Vātsyāyana’s commentary
The Nyāya Sūtra, traditionally attributed to Gautama Akṣapāda and dated around the second century CE in its current form, is the root text of the school that made Indian logic and debate into a system. About three centuries later Vātsyāyana wrote the…
Started by Vikram Sethi6 replies207 views -
How do you choose a translation when you can’t read the original?
I'm an accountant in Cork and an Irish speaker by stubbornness, so I know how much changes between languages. I've been reading Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy on the train, and I recently noticed that the two translations I own feel like different…
Started by Siobhán Keane6 replies181 views -
Pacifism is the most consistent ethics of war, not a refusal to have one
I grew up among Jain neighbours in Hyderabad and came to Gandhi through them. Gandhi credited Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894) with a large influence on him, so the pacifist line I have absorbed runs from Mahavira through…
Started by Anand Pillai6 replies280 views -
If a life has a place rather than a meaning, what happens when the place is unjust?
I've been reading discussions of how different traditions answer "does life have meaning?", and one idea keeps coming up: most traditions say a life has a place rather than a meaning. Your meaning comes from your role in a family, a lineage,…
Started by Keisha Monroe6 replies205 views -
Is there a film theory that starts from ma, rasa or the imaginal world rather than from Paris?
I draw picture books and the occasional manga. Almost every film theory I've read starts from France, Russia or America: Eisenstein, Bazin, Cavell, Carroll. They're wonderful, but when I watch Ozu, I feel the most important things happen in what those theories…
Started by Rin Matsuda6 replies176 views -
Schmitt’s uncomfortable point survives: no constitution can fully govern its own emergencies
Carl Schmitt's Political Theology (1922) opens with a sentence that every journalist covering courts eventually meets: sovereign is he who decides on the exception. The argument goes like this. Constitutions specify normal procedures. Emergencies arise that those procedures did not anticipate. Someone…
Started by Sana Mir6 replies246 views -
Udayana, Ibn Sina and Leibniz: three arguments for a first cause that do not need a beginning
People often assume that arguments for a first cause depend on the universe having a beginning. I want to compare three that don't, from three traditions. Udayana (Nyāya, eleventh century). In the Nyāyakusumāñjali he gives a series of inferences for Īśvara, starting…
Started by Meera Kulkarni6 replies231 views -
Does a cut make an argument? Notes from an edit suite in Tehran
I cut documentaries and the occasional feature. My working day is spent deciding which shot follows which, and I've started to wonder what exactly I'm doing to the audience when I do it. The classic story is the Kuleshov experiment in early…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam6 replies294 views -
Is Iris Marion Young right that most injustice is not about who gets what?
I teach Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990) every year, and every year the same split appears in the seminar. Young argued that political philosophy had been captured by the "distributive paradigm": it treats justice as the fair division of…
Started by Femke Bosman6 replies294 views -
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") for my MA, 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…
Started by Meera Kulkarni6 replies252 views -
If there is no self, who has free will? Is there a Buddhist position at all?
I guide trekkers in the Annapurna region and read Madhyamaka in tea houses in the evenings. A Swiss client asked me last month what Buddhism says about free will. I said it depends what you mean, which was true but cowardly. Here…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung6 replies220 views -
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 replies258 views -
Williams was right: an endless life would eventually become unbearable
I cut films for a living, so I think about endings more than is healthy. A film that never ends is not a better film. It is a worse one, and after a while not a film at all. Bernard Williams makes…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam6 replies198 views -
Twenty years of translating have convinced me that meaning is use
I translate from German and English into French. Every day I meet words that the dictionary claims to define and that my clients use in ways the definition doesn't cover. Heimat is the famous German case, but the ordinary words are worse.…
Started by Claire Dubois6 replies222 views -
Rāmānuja’s question ‘whose ignorance?’ is the objection Advaita never answered
I teach Mīmāṃsā, which makes me a realist about the world of ritual, persons and things, and therefore no natural friend of either kind of Vedāntin. On one point, though, I side firmly with Rāmānuja against Śaṅkara. Advaita holds that brahman alone…
Started by Govinda Prasad Mishra6 replies236 views -
A role-based ethics gives too little protection to the person the roles are failing
I study constitutional law in Delhi, and Ambedkar is my lodestar. In Annihilation of Caste (1936) he attacked a social order in which a person's duties are fixed by the position they are born into, and argued that such an order leaves…
Started by Deepa Nair6 replies266 views -
Rebirth without anyone reborn: the lamp that lights another lamp
In comparative tables of what happens at death, the Buddhist row always reads awkwardly: rebirth, but no self that transmigrates. Continuity, not identity. Many newcomers to the Dhamma, and many philosophers, hear a contradiction. If nobody is reborn, what is the rebirth…
Started by Ayya Kusalañāṇī6 replies280 views -
Does it matter at the bedside whether the self is a soul, ātman or a process?
I'm a physician in internal medicine in Cairo. I've been reading comparative accounts of the self: a created soul accountable to God in Islam, the self identical with brahman in Vedānta, no permanent self in Buddhism, a rational soul in the Greeks,…
Started by Omar Farouk6 replies230 views -
Do civilisations really rise and fall in cycles, or do we just like the shape?
My shop is off Mutanabbi Street. 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…
Started by Zainab Kadhim6 replies242 views -
If Nāgasena’s chariot argument removes the self, it removes the chariot too
The chariot argument in the Milindapañha is one of the most famous arguments about parts and wholes. King Milinda arrives by chariot. Nāgasena asks him: is the pole the chariot? The axle? The wheels? The frame? All of them together? Something apart…
Started by Arjun Iyer6 replies277 views