Tradition
Indian
-
Tagore would not define art, and asked why we make it at all
My father sang Baul songs, and Tagore loved the Bauls: he collected their songs and admired Lalon. So I came to Tagore's lecture "What Is Art?" in his book Personality (1917) with my father's voice in my head. What I like is…
Started by Farhana Akter5 replies -
Before the Axial Age: the Nāsadīya hymn, Egyptian instructions and the gradualist objection
One of the first hymns my grandfather made me memorise was the Nāsadīya Sūkta of the Ṛgveda, the hymn of creation. It begins before being and non-being and ends with doubt: who truly knows how this arose? Perhaps the one who watches…
Started by Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya5 replies -
‘With us or against us’ sounds like logic. Is it?
One sentence I've heard in Colombia from armed men of every stripe, and sometimes from people on the other side of the table, is "if you're not with us, you're against us". In villages that wanted nothing to do with any armed…
Started by Andrés Zuluaga4 replies -
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 replies -
Does a cut make an argument? Notes from an edit suite in Tehran
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 Soviet cinema. As it's usually told, an…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam6 replies -
Rasa and ordinary emotion: why can grief in a play be a kind of delight?
Rasa theory seems to answer a question the emotion threads here haven't asked: why do we enjoy sad things? In Bharata's Nāṭyaśāstra, rasa is produced when the causes of an emotion (the situation and characters), its outward expressions and its passing accompanying…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies -
Frege said logic is not psychology. A materialist would like a word
In the introduction to The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884), Frege lays down as his first principle that the psychological must be sharply separated from the logical, the subjective from the objective. Husserl later made the anti-psychologism case at length in the Prolegomena…
Started by Priya Raghavan4 replies -
A thousand years of Buddhists and Vedāntins arguing about the self: failure or success?
Here is a question I keep returning to on long evenings. Something I read recently put it starkly. Vedānta says the innermost self is identical with ultimate reality. Buddhism says there is no permanent self at all. Two traditions, the same region,…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung5 replies -
Does a language model mean anything by what it writes?
At work in Kuala Lumpur I evaluate text-generating systems for fairness. Last month a colleague said, half joking, that one of our models "meant" something offensive. Everyone laughed and then nobody could say whether that was false. The usual philosophical framing seems…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies -
Dharma, li, sharia, natural law: four words English keeps flattening into “duty” or “law”
Last week an engineering student in the evening class on Indian philosophy that I help with asked a good question: “If dharma is not duty, what is it like? Is there anything in other cultures that works the same way?” I tried…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
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 Nirmala Jayasekara6 replies -
Why the translators skipped Greek tragedy, and what Ibn Rushd made of Aristotle’s Poetics
At the statue of Ibn Rushd near Córdoba's old walls I often tell visitors about Borges's story "Averroes' Search". Borges imagines the great commentator puzzling over two words in Aristotle's Poetics, "tragedy" and "comedy", for which his world has no examples, while…
Started by Rafael Lucena Prieto4 replies -
Carneades at three in the morning: how much certainty does a decision need?
I have been reading what Sextus Empiricus reports of Carneades, the Academic sceptic, and I think he described night work better than any training course I've been sent on. Carneades, as far as we can reconstruct him, said we never have certainty,…
Started by Elin Hedqvist5 replies -
Dignāga cut the Nyāya inference from five members to three. What did the example member become?
I have been translating some passages on Buddhist logic for a seminar in Pune and keep getting stuck on one question. The Nyāya inference for others has five members: thesis, reason, example, application, conclusion ("this hill has fire, because it has smoke,…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Dignāga’s apoha and Frege’s sense are answers to different questions
In a seminar this term somebody summarised apoha as "basically Frege's sense", and someone else said "no, it's Saussure: meaning by difference". I want to resist both, or at least slow them down. Dignāga's claim (c. 480–540) is that a word like…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies -
Why a sad film consoles where good advice doesn’t
At work, after a night when we lose someone we were close to, some of us have a ritual. We go to someone's flat, open a bottle of something, and watch a particular old film that makes everyone cry. I have done…
Started by Elin Hedqvist4 replies -
If the past no longer exists, what exactly is my regret about?
I served twenty-two years in the army, the last part on the DMZ. There are a few decisions I regret, none of them dramatic, all of them still with me. Reading about the philosophy of time has given me a strange new…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun5 replies -
Epsilon-delta is two nested quantifiers, and that is why my students struggle
Every year I teach limits to senior secondary students in Delhi, and every year the same thing happens. They can compute limits perfectly well. Then I write the definition: For every ε > 0 there exists a δ > 0 such that…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies -
Seeing before naming: are Dignāga and Merleau-Ponty saying the same thing about perception?
Two accounts of perception seem to me to speak to the moment just before a word arrives, which is where a translator spends her days. Dignāga, the Buddhist epistemologist of the late fifth and early sixth centuries, defines perception as cognition free…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
Keeping the losing opinion on the page: is disagreement inside a tradition as deep as disagreement between traditions?
In my Tuesday Talmud study group we recently read the story in tractate Eruvin about the houses of Hillel and Shammai, who argued for years until a heavenly voice declared that "these and these are the words of the living God", and…
Started by Eliana Halpern5 replies -
Is Yogācāra “consciousness-only” idealism? Three readings and a false friend
Every year someone in my reading group says "Yogācāra is Buddhist idealism, like Berkeley". It's one of the more interesting mistakes, because it's partly right. The Yogācāra school, systematised by Asaṅga and Vasubandhu in the fourth and fifth centuries and carried to…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 replies -
Nāgārjuna says he has no thesis. Is “I have no thesis” itself a thesis?
There is a question I keep returning to, the oldest one in the long argument between Advaitins and Mādhyamikas. In the Vigrahavyāvartanī, answering a critic who says his claim that all things are empty refutes itself, Nāgārjuna says (I paraphrase): if I…
Started by Arjun Iyer5 replies -
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 -
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 -
Kumārila said a cognition is valid until shown otherwise. Is that internalism or externalism?
The Mīmāṃsā school I follow holds a doctrine called svataḥ prāmāṇya, intrinsic validity. I have been reading the internalism and externalism debate in English, and I would like to know whether this doctrine belongs on one side, or whether the map does…
Started by Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya5 replies -
“A hundred scriptures cannot make fire cold”: Śaṅkara’s rule for when scripture and perception collide
Discussions here of reason and revelation usually draw on Ibn Rushd and Maimonides. They deserve it. But the Advaita tradition worked out its own conflict rule, and I think it belongs in the same conversation. For Śaṅkara, scripture (śruti) is a means…
Started by Arjun Iyer5 replies -
Navya-Nyāya’s language of limitors, and what it was built to do
Every few months someone tells me that Navya-Nyāya was "Indian predicate logic". I'd like to test that claim with people who know Frege better than I do. The school is usually dated from Gaṅgeśa's Tattvacintāmaṇi in the fourteenth century. What Gaṅgeśa and…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
A scripture with no author: what Mīmāṃsā does to the intention debate
The Western argument about artistic intention assumes there is an author whose mind we either consult or ignore. My tradition has a case where, on its own account, there is no author at all. Pūrva Mīmāṃsā holds that the Veda is apauruṣeya:…
Started by Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya4 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 -
‘Illa, kāraṇa, gù: what each tradition’s word for ’cause’ lets it ask
I've been thinking about how the translators of the ninth and tenth centuries handled Aristotle's aitia. They used 'illa and sabab, and here is the interesting part: 'illa already had, or soon acquired, a second life in law. In Islamic jurisprudence, the…
Started by Layla Sfeir6 replies