Tradition
Modern European
-
Mill’s harm principle: where does it actually draw the line?
Mill's On Liberty (1859) proposes one simple principle: the only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilised community, against their will, is to prevent harm…
Started by Deepa Nair0 replies0 views -
Is human dignity a religious idea that secular law borrowed?
Article 1 of the German Basic Law (1949) declares human dignity inviolable. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) begins by recognising the inherent dignity of all members of the human family.…
Started by Hamza Qureshi1 reply0 views -
Reading group: Hobbes, Leviathan, chapters 13–17
These five chapters of Leviathan (1651) contain the core of Hobbes's political argument. Ch. 13: the natural condition of mankind. Rough equality, competition, distrust and glory lead to a war of every…
Started by Javier Morales1 reply0 views -
Reading group: Kant’s “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (1784)
This short essay appeared in the Berlinische Monatsschrift in December 1784. It can be read in an evening, but it repays a week. Kant defines enlightenment as leaving behind a self-incurred immaturity,…
Started by Henrike Vogel3 replies0 views -
Does a deterministic program “choose”?
A chess engine searches millions of positions, scores them and plays the best move. We naturally say it "chose" the knight move. Yet it's fully deterministic: same position, same settings, same move…
Started by Pieter de Jong4 replies0 views -
Rumi and Spinoza: are they describing the same God?
People sometimes say Rumi and Spinoza are describing the same reality. Everything in God, God in everything, the self dissolving into a larger whole. But Rumi's God is a beloved who longs…
Started by Reza Tehrani3 replies0 views -
Kierkegaard’s leap of faith: irrational, or beyond reason?
In Fear and Trembling (1843), written under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard considers Abraham, who is ready to sacrifice Isaac at God's command. Johannes can't understand Abraham. He calls this a…
Started by Aoife Brennan3 replies0 views -
Kant was wrong: we can know things as they are in themselves
I am posting this thesis partly to test my own reading of the first Critique. Kant holds that we know only appearances. Space and time are forms of our intuition, and the…
Started by Henrike Vogel5 replies0 views -
Spinoza’s God as Nature: an engineer’s reading of Ethics Part I
I came to the Ethics (published 1677, after Spinoza's death) because of the geometrical form: definitions, axioms, propositions, demonstrations. It looks like a specification document. Part I argues that substance is what…
Started by Pieter de Jong5 replies0 views -
Kant and the murderer at the door: can the essay be rescued?
In 1797 Kant published "On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy", replying to Benjamin Constant. He maintains that you may not lie even to a murderer who asks where your friend…
Started by Henrike Vogel4 replies0 views -
Beauty is objective
I want to defend a thesis that's unfashionable in literature departments: beauty is not merely in the eye of the beholder. Hume, in "Of the Standard of Taste" (1757), argued that though…
Started by Kavya Menon6 replies0 views -
There is no self: the Buddhist and Humean bundle views are basically right
Hume, in the Treatise (Book 1, Part 4, Section 6), says that when he looks within he never catches "himself", only some particular perception: heat, cold, love, pain. The self is a…
Started by Priya Raghavan7 replies0 views -
Are Kant’s formulations of the categorical imperative really equivalent?
I am working through the Groundwork, slowly. Kant gives several formulations of the categorical imperative: act only on a maxim you could will as a universal law treat humanity, in yourself and…
Started by Henrike Vogel3 replies0 views -
Iqbal’s khudi and Nietzsche’s Übermensch: influence or polemic?
Iqbal's Persian poem Asrar-i-Khudi (1915), translated by R. A. Nicholson as The Secrets of the Self (1920), makes the self, khudi, the centre of his philosophy. The self must be strengthened, disciplined…
Started by Hamza Qureshi4 replies0 views -
The floating man is not the cogito: Ibn Sina and Descartes compared
Ibn Sina's "floating man" appears in the De Anima of the Shifa' and again in the Isharat. Imagine a person created all at once, fully mature, suspended in the air, eyes covered,…
Started by Layla Haddad5 replies0 views -
Marx’s alienation and the gig economy
In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx describes four aspects of alienated labour: the worker is alienated from the product, from the activity of working, from their "species-being" (our nature…
Started by Javier Morales5 replies0 views -
René Descartes
French philosopher and mathematician, educated at the Jesuit college of La Flèche, who spent most of his working life in the Dutch Republic. He…
-
Baruch Spinoza
Dutch philosopher from Amsterdam's Portuguese-Jewish community who was expelled from the synagogue in 1656 and earned his living partly as a lens grinder. His…
-
David Hume
Scottish philosopher, historian and essayist, a central figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. He argued that our beliefs about causation, the self and morality rest…
-
Immanuel Kant
German philosopher who spent his whole life in and around Königsberg in East Prussia. His critical philosophy tried to settle the dispute between rationalists…
-
Friedrich Nietzsche
German philologist and philosopher who became a professor at Basel at twenty-four and later wrote as an independent author until his collapse in Turin…