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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Monthly Archives: December 2018

The case for individual teleology

23 Sunday Dec 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Biology, Flourishing, Metaphysics, Politics, Self, South Asia

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, Aristotle, Charles Darwin, Charles Taylor, Harry Frankfurt, identity, nonhuman animals, qualitative individualism, RSS

The big problem with the relative lack of philosophical attention given to qualitative individualism is that the ideal has had relatively powerful defences. Its most explicit defenders have been existentialists like Sartre, but Sartre’s best-known defence, at least, seems to fall flat. Charles Taylor has done the most to articulate the idea and how and it makes internal sense, but for the most part he is very cautious about ever actually endorsing it. Sometimes his defence of it seems to be simply on historicist grounds, as I quoted him in my first post on the subject. That is: qualitative individualism happens to be what we believe in the educated 21st-century West, and it is just for that reason important to us. Western governments therefore need to respect it just as the governments of Turkey or Indonesia need to respect Islam. Beyond politics, it is among our assumed starting points for inquiry, such that philosophically it is important to think with it (even if in the end we come to find it untenable). This point does matter.

But the point also doesn’t go far enough. Continue reading →

Existentialism is a qualitative individualism

09 Sunday Dec 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Foundations of Ethics, Free Will, French Tradition, Human Nature, Self

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

depression, existentialism, gender, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Prince Ea, qualitative individualism, René Descartes, Simone de Beauvoir

My first post on qualitative individualism attracted several helpful comments, possibly drawn here by a link from Daily Nous. A couple of these commenters pointed out that that the ideal is not as “invisible” as I made it out to be – not even to philosophers. I hear it expressed relatively rarely in philosophical works now, but this would not have been the case fifty or sixty years ago, when the philosophy that was all the rage was: existentialism. Existentialism is not the only way for qualitative individualism to be expressed philosophically, but it may well be the most influential to date. Continue reading →

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