Monthly Archives: March 2013

Modernity and modernism

31 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by in Metaphilosophy, Politics, Social Science

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It can feel pedantic to insist on the distinction between modernity and modernism (as I do in my tag cloud). I’ve seen eyes roll when I do it, and understandably so. Two nouns both deriving from the word modern: surely between them is the ultimate example of a trivial distinction, a hair-splitting, a difference that does not make a difference?

In fact the difference between modernity and modernism can make all the difference in the world. The importance of the distinction may become a little bit clearer when we move from the nouns to their corresponding adjectives. Modernity is simply the noun form of “modern”, as we might expect. But modernism is not. Modernity is merely the state of being modern. Modernism is the state of being modernist. And that is a difference that makes a huge difference. Continue reading →

The twenty-year project

24 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by in External Goods, Mahāyāna, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Stoicism

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I mentioned two weeks ago that there were two reasons I didn’t think my dissertation would become a book. The previous week I focused on the practical and political reason: I believe in free open access, and now that I’m not on the faculty track I can put my money where my mouth is.

The other reason, which is far more interesting to me, has to do with the dissertation’s content. I think back to when I was proposing a first inchoate version of the project, perhaps ten years ago or so now, knowing I wanted it to involve some amount of constructive dialogue between the ideas of Śāntideva and of Martha Nussbaum. Robert Gimello, on my committee at the time, said to me that he didn’t think that this would be an appropriate project for a dissertation. Not because those questions were inappropriate for a scholar to ask; indeed, he approved of them. Rather, he thought, that project seemed like a twenty-year project, much larger than a dissertation. For the dissertation I should buckle down and just try to understand Śāntideva himself.

I didn’t follow Gimello’s advice, and I’m glad I didn’t. Continue reading →

Fixed tag and category bug

23 Saturday Mar 2013

Posted by in Blog Admin

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I’d been doing a bit of tinkering with Love of All Wisdom on the back end, which made the blog tags and categories stop working for about a week. (The tags and categories are the way the blog is organized – labels like “Xunzi” and “Jainism” that attach to every post that addresses a given topic, listed down in the right sidebar. I’ve written in greater detail about that organization before.) I think the problem is fixed and you should be able to find posts by tag and category again. I encourage you to give it a try as a way of exploring the site. If you find anything that doesn’t work, please let me know.

New pope, new hope?

17 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by in Generosity, Hope, Politics, Roman Catholicism, Sex

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Last week I discussed the first reason you can read my dissertation on this site, and said that this week I would talk about the second reason. But I’m going to put that off until next week, to speak this week of a current event.

Pope FrancisI refer, of course, to the election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis. The selection of a pope is a philosophically significant event, for a pope is in some respects among the modern age’s closest equivalents to a philosopher-king: a man trusted by millions or even billions of people to decide the truth about ultimate reality and what is good. And the selection of this pope in particular seems to me an excellent one, a man much better suited for this role than I expected him to be. Continue reading →

Why you can read my dissertation on this site

10 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by in Place, Politics, Work

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It was about five and a half years ago now that my dissertation on Śāntideva was approved and I could receive my PhD. Most doctoral graduates try very hard to turn their dissertations into a published or at least publishable book. I can say with some confidence that that will not happen.

There are two key reasons for this, and I’ll address the second next week. The first, which I will discuss here, is practical and political. I have removed myself from the meatgrinder that is the faculty job market, and that fact creates new possibilities for me. My dissertation has been available free online here to you the readers ever since Love of All Wisdom began. I sent a link to the blog to a friend and colleague of mine; as soon as he received it, he sent me a Google instant message full of shock: “You posted your entire dissertation! Aren’t you interested in publishing it as a book?” His surprise was understandable. What publisher would want to sell a book whose contents are available for free? By making my diss free and easily available, it would seem, I had just made it that much harder to get on the traditional path: get your diss published, get tenure. Continue reading →

Continental intimacy, analytic integrity

03 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Epistemology, French Tradition, German Tradition, Hermeneutics, Logic, Metaphilosophy

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The distinction between intimacy and integrity seems to me likely the most enduring of the perennial questions. Thomas Kasulis coined it as a way of understanding the difference between modern Japan and the modern US. But I have noted that the same distinction seems to map well onto the distinction between supposedly masculine and feminine spheres of value – and also between ancient Indian and ancient Chinese thought. And beyond all that, I think it also helps us understand the most longstanding divide in the practice of philosophy in the 20th- and 21st-century West: the divide between analytic and continental philosophy. Continue reading →