Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category

Thoughts arising from the problem of ‘proportionality’ in Just War Theory

Friday, August 29th, 2014

HAMAS vs Israel In the recent ‘war’ between the HAMAS government of the Gaza Strip and Israel, there have been a lot of accusations that the Israeli action is ‘disproportionate’. The principal fact that seems to be motivating this accusation is that the death and injury toll of Gazans claimed by ...

The Rights of Zombies

Monday, February 10th, 2014

An article by Peter at Conscious Entities considers the question of whether philosophical zombies have rights. It seems to me that under most forms of ethical theory that have been attractive to philosophers they would do. Let’s consider them systematically: (a) Teleological theories a.1 – Consequences are Utilities A consequentialist theory – if ...

The Evolutes of Prakriti

Sunday, January 19th, 2014

In the course of researching the Samkhya cosmogony, I noticed that the diagrams indicate a great variety of interpretations. I thought it would be interesting to display them here.    

Is Confucianism a Religion?

Monday, February 20th, 2012

Peter Berger in The American Interest (February 15, 2012) asks: ‘Is Confucianism a Religion?’ It’s an old question and Berger himself goes through some of the issues involved – though he does not much consider the many ways that ‘Confucianism’ (ru jia) changed over time, some of which seemed to ...

Does Mars have Value?

Saturday, February 4th, 2012

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How we got Rights

Sunday, December 19th, 2010

In a review (“Utopia Lost” Democracy #19, 2011) of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History by Samuel Moyn (Harvard University Press, 2010) Yehudah Mirsky begins by noting that “many claim that these rights have a long ancestry in the history of human thought” and that Moyn’s preliminary historical survey shows ...