I discussed already in several previous posts a project on the application of deontic logic to the understanding of the Mīmāṃsā exegesis of the Vedas. Now, the project leader, Agata Ciabattoni, made me ponder about a question I should have considered long ago, namely whether someone else has been applying deontic logic to other Sacred Texts.
At first sight, I would have thought that this would have certainly been the case, given that Sacred Texts are, at least in part, prescriptive texts.
Let us take the abstract form of a Vedic prescription:
(A.) Whoever desires to achieve something should sacrifice
It is easy for an objector to go on and argue as follows:
A Śūdra (i.e., a member of the lowest class) desires to achieve something
A Śūdra should sacrifice (PMS 6.1.25)
Welcome to the 172nd Philosophers’ Carnival! Read, enjoy, add your favourites in the comments below and submit here your proposals for the next edition of the Philosophers’ Carnival (which will be hosted by Samuel Paul Douglas).
As a general framework, let me start with Catarina Dutilh Novaes’ review of Williamson’s Tetralogue, discussing the possibility of rational dialogue to advance knowledge —that is, the reason which could make philosophy more than a Glasperlenspiel.
Should philosophy (of religion) go out of its comfort zone?
In this post, Aaron Thomas-Bolduc suggests that we should go out of our comfort zones and test our ideas outside them. A few days before, Adriano Mannino had posted here his comments on a study by Helen De Cruz and asked whether philosophy of religion is more than Christian apologetics.
This post by Michael Almeida shows that arguments about philosophy of religion can be dealt with in a purely logical way (from premisses to absurd consequences). Similarly, Eric Schwitzgebel discusses here the application to artificial intelligence of a problem originally dealt with within philosophy of religion, i.e., God’s responsibility for our well-being (and our responsibility towards AI, if we ever were to create one). By the way, the author includes in his dialogue also the Confucian approach of ethical obligations (which get stronger the closer one is to oneself, so that one has higher obligations towards one’s family than towards strangers).
Free will within and without contemporary Western philosophy
The idea of going out of one’s comfort zone brings me to the following series of posts, dedicated to free will. One can start with John Danaher‘s general summary of the possible meanings of “Liberty” and “Free will” as explained by Skinner (John Danaher has further interesting posts on freedom and work and democracy).
Next, this post by Jayarava Attwood discusses the Buddha’s defense of free will while debating with a denier of free will in a text of the Pāli Buddhist Canon. The same author has also dedicated a more general post to the issue of free will at the boundaries of philosophy and neurosciences, here. Again on Buddhism, Amod Lele discusses here how ethics is possible even within a deterministic worldview. Last for the non-Western series, this post discusses Free will vs. divine omnipotence in a Vaiṣṇava theologian, Rāmānuja. Stewart Duncan discusses here some passages of Leibniz which suggest that he might have conceived of things deterministically and of thoughts as actions, depending on the souls only.
Flickers of Freedom is the usual reference point when it comes to free will. This month, this post by V. Alan White on whether responsibility comes in degree especially recommends itself.
Language and reality
Richard Yetter Chappell discusses here an aspect of the problem entailed in the naturalistic account of meaning.
On a similar vein, Tristan Haze discusses here a paradox, namely
If you’re a brain in a vat then you don’t have hands
You don’t know that you’re not a brain in a vat
Therefore you don’t know that you have hands
Interestingly, Haze does not enter into the ontology of the topic, but rather dwells in its linguistic and logical consequences (what does it mean to say that one has hands? To what does language refer?).
On the arbitrariness of the signified and its implications for linguistics, Alexander Pruss discusses here the problems one encounters when translating English hand with Polish rȩka. Pruss closes his post with a thought on false implicature (could occur in cases such as the one described) and lying (morally problematic).
On a sidetrack, Jon Cogburn discusses here how some misunderstandings of the so-called Continental Philosophy by Analytic Philosophers might just be due to wrong translations of French expressions such as l’event or l’autre as “The Event” (=the creation? what other key event?) and “The Other” (Satan?), does creating unwanted metaphysical entities.
Concerning lying, a post at Experimental Philosophy and PeaSoup by John Turri discusses how people react when one asks them whether telling the truth while trying to lie still counts as lying. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the answers depend on how the question is phrased.
Ethics
At Practical Ethics, Hannah Maslen discusses a bias which seems to lead to more problems than it can solve, namely the hostile attribution bias, which is the cause of avoidable bloody fights, especially among teenagers, just because someone was “looking at me funny”. If you are schocked and ask yourself what could be done to interrupt this vicious circle, have a look at Eric Schwitzgebel’s memories of his father and of how he engaged young criminals, thus automatically making them relinquish crime.
Again at Practical Ethics, this post by Chris Chew discusses what could be the best death.
A new blog on the philosophical problems connected with disability has helped in raising an interesting debate on whether the discussion on some problems, such as the abortion of disabled fetuses, or the moral justification of evil, should be altogether avoided. On the Philosophers’ Cocoon, Marcus Arvan summarises the discussion and adds his view.
Aesthetics
At Aesthetics for birds, Rebecca Victoria Millsop discusses the role of originality in painting and whether the research of originality at all costs does not lead astray (I agree). Rebecca is herself an artist (beside being a fifth-year PhD student in philosophy of art) and this perspective deeply enriches her post.
Politics
Last, although this is a philosophical Carnival, I hope readers will forgive me —given the high symbolic impact of the Paris attacks on the issues of freedom of thought and critique— if I add this post (which I discovered through Catarina Dutilh Novaes at NewApps) by Juan Cole, a historian of the Middle East, discussing the recent facts in Paris.
By coincidence, the colleague who will host the next Philosophers’ Carnival, Samuel P. Douglas has also a post on the epistemology of conspiracy theories, in relation to the Charlie Hebdo attack.
A few days back, I discussed (here) why one should test one’s logical hypotheses against something alien, be it a Medieval paradox or a Sanskrit text (or anything in between).
Today, I came back to the same thought while reading Adriano Mannino’s post about the diffusion of theism among philosophers of religion. Adriano discusses the worries of some philosophers who think that “philosophy of religion” is in fact a disguised Christian apologetic and is, therefore, not philosophical at all. Personally, I think that apologetics can be (and often are) philosophically interesting, but should philosophers of religion want to reply to this attack, they could try to engage in religions and theologies different than their own or at least different than the Christian one. (By the way, if you are looking for an excuse to start doing it, have a look at this call for papers).
What are your favorite examples of the need of engaging with non-Western, non-contemporary, non-mainstream philosophical ideas?
How much of our philosophical ideas are in fact conditioned by the language we use?
You can read, for instance, these critical comments on the Ten Commandments and their form in Hebrew. One way to avoid the risk of mistaking the appeal to one’s intuition with the appeal to one’s working language, is to test one’s ideas within different cultural milieus (see, in this regard, this post).
On a related vein, you might want to check this and similar posts by Gabriele Contessa on the need for Analytic Philosophy to welcome more scholars not having English as their mother tongue.
I am currently working with some amazing colleagues at the Vienna University of Technology on the formalisation of Mīmāṃsā deontic logic (for further information, read this post). One of the problems we are facing is that duties prescribed in Vedic prescriptions appear to be interpreted as regarding only specific eligible people, the adhikārins. For instance, one needs to perform a Kārīrī sacrifice if one desires rain, so that the duty to perform it does not apply generally to all. Even in the case of a sacrifice one has to perform throughout one’s life, such as the Agnihotra, the same restriction applies, since Mīmāṃsā authors interpret it as meaning that one has to perform it if one desires happiness, i.e., throughout one’s life, since one always desires happiness.
In the case of the Śyena and the Agnīṣomīya rituals, violence is once condemned and once allowed, causing long discussions among Mīmāṃsā authors. Similarly, the prohibition to eat kalañja, onion and garlic is interpreted differently than the prohibition to look at the rising sun. Why this difference?
The Mīmāṃsā school of Indian philosophy has at its primary focus the exegesis of Sacred Texts (called Vedas), and more specifically of their prescriptive portions, the Brāhmaṇas. This means that the epistemic content conveyed by the Vedas is, primarily, what has to be done. In order words, the Veda is an epistemic authority only insofar as it conveys a deontic content.
I am working on the formalisation of the prescriptions regarding the Full- and New-Moon sacrifices in the Baudhāyana Śrautasūtra. In Kashikar’s edition, they cover about 32 full pages of Sanskrit. And they are overtly boring in their pedantic prescription of each sacrificial detail. Thus, instead of reading the BaudhŚrSū, have a look at what follows for what is interesting in them:
Some months ago, departing from Decemeber 2013, I started working on a fascinating project, the formalisation of the deontic logic of some Mīmāṃsā authors (Kumārila, Prabhākara and Maṇḍana). Given that I am not an expert on formal logic, the project has been conceived together with some colleagues working on formal logic and on the IT tools for automating it. After some preliminary work, we submitted a project within the “Mathematics and…” call of the WWTF. The other principal investigator was Agata Ciabattoni and the other collaborators were Björn Lellmann and Ekaterina Lebedeva. Agata and Björn would have been working with me on selecting the logical rules from the relevant Sanskrit texts, translating them in formal logical language and developing automated deduction methods to reason about them.
Ekaterina, as a linguist and an expert of the intersection of language and logic, would have taken care of the fact that our translations of Sanskrit passages into logical rules did not entail logical ambiguities.