Tradition
Indian
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The deviant causal chain shows the causal theory of action cannot be repaired
I care about analyses that can be stated precisely, and this one, I'll argue, can't be. Davidson's causal theory: a movement is an action when it's caused in the right way by the agent's reasons, a belief–desire pair. Davidson's own counterexample, the…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak6 replies -
Strong moral intuitions count as evidence, in the same way that perceptions count as evidence
In my ethics seminar we were told that appealing to intuitions is unscientific: they are just gut feelings shaped by upbringing. I want to argue the opposite. W. D. Ross, in The Right and the Good (1930), compared the considered moral convictions…
Started by Aoife Kilbride6 replies -
Illusionism is the only view of consciousness that takes neuroscience seriously
I'm a materialist who builds machine-perception software, and I'll defend the position most people here find hardest to swallow. Illusionism, associated with Dennett and developed by Keith Frankish, says the hard problem is generated by a misleading introspective model. When we introspect,…
Started by Priya Raghavan6 replies -
Reading group: the Nyāya-sūtra on debate, from the sixteen categories to the points of defeat
Several threads here have touched on the Nyāya distinction between vāda, jalpa and vitaṇḍā. I'd like to read the primary text together, since most of us (me included, honestly) know it through summaries. Text. The Nyāya-sūtra attributed to Gautama (Akṣapāda), with Vātsyāyana's…
Started by Meera Kulkarni6 replies -
Reading group: A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (1936), chapters 1, 2, 4 and 6
Every year a student asks me whether mathematics "says anything about the world". Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic gives the boldest answer I know (no, it is all tautology) and the boldest dismissal of metaphysics. He was in his mid-twenties when he…
Started by Vikram Sethi6 replies -
Reading group: Nāgasena’s chariot and flame in the Questions of King Milinda
The Milindapañha, the Questions of King Milinda, is a dialogue between a king usually identified with the Indo-Greek ruler Menander and a monk called Nāgasena. It is a composite text that grew over centuries, so I read Nāgasena as a literary interlocutor…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara6 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 -
The West’s picture of ‘Indian philosophy’ is Vedanta-shaped, and it has hidden everyone else
You can probably guess where I stand on most metaphysics. But this isn't an attack on Vedānta. It's a complaint about how Indian philosophy got packaged. The thesis: what reaches Western readers as "Indian philosophy", or worse "Eastern philosophy", is overwhelmingly Vedāntic…
Started by Arvind Poojary6 replies -
The Gita’s svadharma cannot be cleanly separated from varṇa, and readers should face Ambedkar’s reading
I want to raise this respectfully, because the Bhagavad Gita is sacred to many people I love, including my own grandmother. But I think a popular modern reading of it avoids a hard question. The verse everyone quotes is that it is…
Started by Deepa Kartha6 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 -
Locke was right that the mind starts without ideas, and the argument from the newborn’s hunger fails
I'm biased towards Locke, I admit. But I came across an argument for innate knowledge from the Nyāya tradition that I had never seen, and I want to test my bias against it. Locke's case in Book I of the Essay is…
Started by Arvind Poojary6 replies -
The self-defeat charge against the Cārvākas attacks a position they probably did not hold
I have a soft spot for the Cārvākas, India's materialists, who accepted perception as the only independent means of knowledge (pramāṇa) and rejected rebirth, the soul and the authority of scripture. Every rival school gave them the same knock-down reply: you reject…
Started by Arvind Poojary6 replies -
Reading group: Prior Analytics I.1–7, slowly, with a Nyāya inference on the table
Everyone says Aristotle invented formal logic, and I realise I have never read the Prior Analytics closely in company. So here is a proposal: the first seven chapters of Book I, over five weeks, which is where the whole assertoric system is…
Started by Giulia Ferrante6 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 -
Brute facts are not a cop-out: some things just are, and the universe may be one of them
When I talk with believers in the villages where our association works, the conversation often reaches this point: "But who made the universe? Everything has a cause." When I say the universe may simply exist, with no further explanation, I'm told I…
Started by Arvind Poojary6 replies -
Every cognition should be trusted until something defeats it: the Mīmāṃsakas were right
Let me defend my own school. One of our school's central doctrines is svataḥ prāmāṇya, the intrinsic validity of cognition. Kumārila Bhaṭṭa argued that when a cognition arises, its validity arises with it. We do not need a second cognition to certify…
Started by Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya6 replies -
Reading group: Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses, and whether ‘mind-only’ means idealism
Vasubandhu's Twenty Verses (Viṃśatikā), with his own short commentary, is the most compact argument for the Yogācāra claim that there is "only consciousness" (vijñaptimātra). It is also the text that most invites the question of whether Yogācāra is a form of idealism,…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 replies -
If syllogistic logic couldn’t handle relations, why did it last two thousand years?
Working inside predicate logic every day, I'm often reminded how much it can do that the syllogism can't. The textbook example (usually credited to De Morgan) is: all horses are animals, therefore every head of a horse is the head of an…
Started by Derek Hollis6 replies -
Reading group: Tarski’s “The Semantic Conception of Truth” (1944) in three sittings
Tarski's technical work on truth is hard going, but in 1944 he wrote a non-technical paper for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research that explains the ideas for philosophers. It is clear, polemical in places, and only thirty-odd pages. I propose we read it…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak6 replies -
Epictetus was a slave and I drive the 413. What counts as ‘up to us’ at work?
I drive the 413 across Ankara. Eight hours, two breaks, roughly three hundred passengers a day. I listen to philosophy lectures between stops, and Epictetus is the one I keep coming back to. The Handbook opens by dividing things into what is…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu5 replies -
If consent of the governed is the newcomer, what did legitimacy rest on before it?
My students are learning about government this term. I showed them a comparative table of answers to the question "how should we be governed?" across many traditions: Greek, Chinese, Indian, Islamic, European. The thing that surprised them most was that only the…
Started by Aroha Tipene5 replies -
Epictetus says some things are up to us. What did that depend on for him?
Epictetus is still my favourite. The Handbook begins by saying some things are up to us and some are not: our opinions, desires and aversions are up to us; our body, property, reputation and office are not. In traffic this is very…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu5 replies -
I have grown cocoa for thirty years and never seen chocolate made. How do I know that is where it goes?
Last week my son sent me an article that said most of what any of us knows, we know only because somebody told us. I laughed, then I thought about it while I was splitting pods. I have grown cocoa for thirty…
Started by Akosua Mensah5 replies -
Where do I start if I want philosophy beyond the European canon, not just Plato?
My students find it obvious that a river can be a person, and I'm trying to understand why so much of Western philosophy finds it strange, and what tikanga might say to philosophy in return. But when I look for a place…
Started by Aroha Tipene5 replies -
Why does tax feel like theft to some of my clients and not to others?
Two of my tax clients run nearly identical businesses: same size, same bracket, similar families. Every April one of them tells me, only half joking, that the government is robbing him. The other says, with no irony, that tax is the membership…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal5 replies -
Monks take the great vows, I take the small ones: is a graded ethic a cop-out?
Jain ethics has five vows: non-harm, truthfulness, not stealing, sexual restraint and non-possession. Monks and nuns take them as the great vows, absolutely. Laypeople like me take them as the small vows, in a limited form suited to a householder's life. So…
Started by Hetal Shah5 replies -
Can Kant’s rule against treating others merely as means be stretched to cover animals?
I work on wetlands, and in a project meeting last month we argued about whether the birds of a lake have any claim against being drained out of their habitat, or whether only the people who enjoy them do. A colleague, a…
Started by Anand Kurup5 replies -
Reading group: Yājñavalkya, Maitreyī and Gārgī in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad
Reading Śaiva Siddhānta on my own, I want to go back behind the schools to the text they all argue over. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka is the oldest and, for me, the most alive of the Upaniṣads, mostly because of Yājñavalkya and the two…
Started by Thamarai Raman5 replies -
Kirat karni: is honest work a form of worship, or is that just a nice story about work?
This question follows me from the office to the langar. Guru Nanak's teaching is often summed up in three practices: naam japna, remembering the divine Name; kirat karni, earning by honest work; and vand chakna, sharing what you have. There's a story…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal5 replies -
Shankara’s rope and snake: what kind of “unreality” is maya?
The most famous image in Advaita Vedanta: at dusk a man sees a rope and takes it for a snake. He is frightened, he may even run. When a lamp is brought, the snake vanishes, and he sees that there was only…
Started by Arjun Iyer5 replies