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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Category Archives: Work

A dream of democratic socialism

17 Sunday Jan 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Politics, Work

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Communism, democracy, Karl Marx, Martin Hägglund, Martin Luther King Jr., Pius XI, qualitative individualism

Martin Hägglund develops a neo-Marxist politics that is deeply informed by qualitative individualism – quite appropriately, since qualitative individualist ideas inform Marx himself, especially in the theory of alienation. Hägglund wants to envision what a social world without alienation would look like.

Possibly the core distinction in Hägglund’s thought is between a “realm of freedom” and a “realm of necessity” – and he identifies time as central to both of these.

Continue reading →

From snark to smarm

10 Sunday May 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Happiness, Leadership, Metaphilosophy, Politics, Work

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

academia, autobiography, Chrystia Freeland, conferences, gender, niceness, race

Back in 2013, the Canadian journalist Chrystia Freeland decided to make a major career move: she left journalism to become an elected politician. (She now serves as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, in the Liberal cabinet under Justin Trudeau.) The move horrified a number of people close to her: according to a New York editor she admired, “if I entered politics I would never again be able to tell the truth—and that even if I tried, people wouldn’t listen to me, on the grounds that I was a politician, and therefore a liar.”

Soon after she was elected, Freeland wrote about her career transition in an excellent piece considering the larger implications of the move and the suspicion it evoked. Freeland frames the issue at hand in terms of a distinction between snark and smarm. She doesn’t specifically define either term, but evokes a common cluster of meanings of them: the fight between snark and smarm is a “fight between the cynics and the true believers, the pessimists and the optimists, the naysayers and the cheerleaders.” Politicians present themselves as smarmy true believers, optimists, cheerleaders; journalists present themselves as snarky cynics, pessimists, naysayers.

Continue reading →

On mindfulness

15 Sunday Sep 2019

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Psychology, Work

≈ Comments Off on On mindfulness

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autobiography, Boston University, Erik Braun, Greg Topakian, Jay Garfield, Noble Eightfold Path, Pali suttas, Ron Purser, Śāntideva, T.W. Rhys Davids

The term mindfulness is ubiquitous in English-language discussions of Buddhism – and beyond, in secular meditation techniques. When I first encountered Buddhism in Thailand, the English word “mindfulness” was central to my understanding of the tradition. My journals in 1997 described mindfulness as “the Buddhist virtue”, and identified it with “detachment from negative emotions, the ability to sit back and go ‘Y’know, there’s really no reason to be pissed off about this here.’” It was not a word I encountered anywhere outside my own study of the tradition.

Seventeen years later, I realized that “mindfulness” had become mainstream when my hospital had prescribed mindfulness meditation for my insomnia. It has already become considerably more mainstream in the few years since. A couple years ago I participated in a new and popular mindfulness program through my employer, Boston University. I should stress that this program had nothing to do with the religion or philosophy departments, the Center for the Study of Asia, the Buddhist students’ organization, or any other such Buddhism-related part of the university. No, it was offered through Information Services and Technology, as part of my day job assisting professors to teach with technology – whether they are professors of chemistry, public health, hospitality administration, or anything else. Continue reading →

Podcast interview on qualitative individualism

06 Monday May 2019

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, Economics, Foundations of Ethics, Health, Human Nature, Politics, Psychology, Self, Virtue, Work

≈ Comments Off on Podcast interview on qualitative individualism

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20th century, academia, Catharine MacKinnon, Friedrich Nietzsche, gender, generations, Georg Simmel, Hans-Georg Gadamer, identity, Immanuel Kant, interview, John Locke, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, Monty Python, music, qualitative individualism, race, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Romanticism, Stefani Ruper, United States, virtue ethics

Stefani Ruper interviewed me for her video podcast a while ago, and the interview is now live. It focuses on the topic of qualitative individualism, elaborating on ideas from my earlier series of posts. It gets into some topics that are a bit more intense than I’ve covered on the blog in recent years, but I’m pleased with it. Thanks to Stefani for this opportunity.

I’ve embedded the video above, so you can watch it here, and I also highly recommend you check out Stefani’s excellent philosophy podcast in general:

iTunes: http://stefaniruper.com/listen

Spotify: http://stefaniruper.com/listenspotify

Youtube: http://stefaniruper.com/watch

Stream & other outlets: http://stefaniruper.com/podcast

 

 

The material conditions of qualitative individualism

27 Sunday Jan 2019

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Flourishing, Politics, Self, Work

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

20th century, Anthony Woodiwiss, autobiography, Charles Taylor, Existential Comics, generations, Jayant Lele, Jim Wilton, Karl Marx, modernity, qualitative individualism, Students for a Democratic Society, United States

When I first started reading Charles Taylor on qualitative individualism in my 20s, my Marxist father complained that Taylor paid too little attention to material conditions. I didn’t really get the criticism at the time, but I do now, for reasons that go well beyond reading and writing.

Taylor’s discussion of qualitative individualism (or “expressivism” or the “ethics of authenticity”) takes place largely in the realm of ideas, as mine also has so far. I have tried to trace the history of the ideas of qualitative individualism. But such a history is incomplete. Continue reading →

On making America great again

10 Sunday Apr 2016

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Politics, Work

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

20th century, academia, autobiography, Canada, conservatism, Donald Trump, Eric Hobsbawm, gender, generations, identity, Jayant Lele, Karl Marx, Martin Luther King Jr., race, United States

In the early 1960s, my father finished his PhD in political science from Cornell. Under the restrictive and racialized American immigration rules of the day, he needed to work in a neighbouring country for two years before he could come to the US. So he applied for six tenure-track faculty jobs in Canada. He was offered five of them. The sixth, at the relatively low-prestige Memorial University of Newfoundland, turned him down with a curt letter that said “In our competition, you failed to qualify.” He found it amusing that such a lower-tier school would say such a dismissive thing when he had offers from so many places higher in the hierarchy.

This story ceased to amuse me when I received my PhD from Harvard in the late 2000s and began applying for faculty teaching jobs myself. I sent out nearly two hundred job applications, most of them for tenure-track jobs, across Canada and the United States, and a few off the continent. I received not one tenure-track offer anywhere. If Memorial University of Newfoundland had offered me a position, I would have taken it without hesitation and been grateful to have the opportunity. The same applies to most of my generation in academia. To those coming of age in the 21st-century university, my father’s story sounds as implausible as if he had wandered into the White House, said “I’d like a job as President of the United States”, and been offered it on the spot. But it was and is true. His experience was in Canada, but as far as I know, those faculty of his generation with a similarly prestigious degree who could apply for jobs in the United States had a comparably wide range of opportunities.

This intergenerational experience should highlight how the story in the academic humanities and social sciences from the 1960s to the 2010s has been above all a story of decline. Many North American leftists look at the real accomplishments made in areas of race, gender and sexuality and see this period as a time of unalloyed progress. I cannot. Continue reading →

Of disruptive innovation

16 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Politics, Work

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

academia, Clayton Christensen, conservatism, pedagogy, technology, William F. Buckley

If one follows current conversations about technological changes in higher education — which it is a major part of my job to do — one quickly encounters a great deal of praise given to “disruption” and “disruptive innovation”. Massive online open courses and various other online innovations, we’re told, will overthrow the tired old models of education and usher in a marvelous new world far better for students than the sclerotic old habits of the deadwood professorial class.

So far, none of these technological trends has yet made big changes in the way higher education is done. Over the course of my lifetime, there have been only two trends in higher education that were genuinely disruptive innovations in a literal sense – that is, innovations that have genuinely disrupted the lives of the people who make up higher education. The first of these is adjunctification; the second is tuition increase. Continue reading →

Putting intimacy/integrity back together

10 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Science, Play, Work

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

intimacy/integrity, ITIL, Ken Wilber, mystical experience, sports, Thomas P. Kasulis

Last week I submitted Thomas Kasulis’s dichotomy of intimacy and integrity worldviews to critical scrutiny. I pointed out the distinction between the epistemological element on one hand, in which intimacy knowledge is somatic and affective while integrity is self-reflective and public, and the ontological element on the other, in which intimacy sees the world as composed of internal relations and integrity sees it as made up of external relations. I noted Hegel appears to have an intimacy ontology and an integrity epistemology, while the Pali Buddhist texts appear to be the opposite – suggesting that rather than speaking of intimacy and integrity as a unity, perhaps we should break them up.

And yet while one can separate the two elements of these ideal types in this way, I suspect that one shouldn’t – because they turn out to have a deep logical relation to each other. It is one that I think Kasulis tends to leave unstated, partially because he doesn’t split up these two elements in the first place. Continue reading →

Students are not customers

11 Sunday Aug 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Politics, Work

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

academia, Boston University, Josipa Roksa, Michael Sandel, pedagogy, Richard Arum, United States

My job leads me to think a lot about the contemporary conditions of academic institutions. Regular readers will have noticed that I have returned to these issues quite frequently in recent months. I want to make sure that I keep Love of All Wisdom focused on philosophy broadly defined, which is already a very big focus in itself, so I debate how much time I should spent on such a topic that is not itself philosophy. I think the topic of academia merits attention for two reasons: first, it provides opportunities for thinking philosophically in general about how human institutions should be run; second and probably more importantly, academic institutions remain the place where the vast majority of philosophy per se gets done today. I wouldn’t be surprised if that changes in my lifetime, but it is the case now. So we who care about philosophy have good reason to care about academia, even if our own livelihoods do not depend on it.

With that in mind: In both my academic administrative work and my computer-science classes, there’s a disturbing frequency with which I hear university students described as “customers”. Continue reading →

ePortfolio

26 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Work

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

autobiography, technology

My paid work at BU involves supporting many educational technologies, but especially ePortfolios: websites that showcase personal learning and make it visible. As a demonstration for others to see, I’ve created an extensive portfolio about myself, displaying my scholarly and professional history. If you’re interested in my background, feel free to have a look. You’ll probably be able to learn more about me than you ever wanted to know.

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