Category Archives: Logic

How can traditions be commensurable?

02 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by in Biology, Dialectic, Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science

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I closed my previous post on method by noting I am getting increasingly skeptical of MacIntyre’s view that traditions are incommensurable with each other. Christian Hendriks made an excellent comment in response:

What would it look like for philosophical traditions to be more commensurable? It has seemed obvious to me for quite some time that many philosophical traditions are incommensurable; MacIntyre is attractive to me in large part because he addresses this problem (and addresses it as a problem rather than a neutral feature). I don’t mean “it seems obvious” to stand in for an argument here, but I can’t at this moment even imagine what it would look like for traditions to be more commensurable than MacIntyre claims. Can you elaborate on that? [emphasis in original]

It is a great question and one I will probably need to think through more fully. But I’d like to take a first stab at it here. Continue reading →

Roots of a project on method

19 Sunday Aug 2018

Posted by in Buddhism, Dialectic, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science

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How should one do philosophy across cultures? This is not an easy question, though too many people treat it as if it is. Mid-twentieth-century answers leaned to a perennialism like Ken Wilber’s, where at some deep level all the traditions are basically the same. That perennialism does not stand up to critical scrutiny: philosophical traditions are quite different from each other, and disagree with each other (and within each other) on crucial points.

But once one acknowledges those differences, one is still left trying to figure out what to do with them. It will not do to take one’s starting standard as given and judge everything that one encounters according to it – an approach characteristic of analytic philosophers, but also taken by Martha Nussbaum in Upheavals of Thought. Once one does that, there is scarcely much point left to thinking cross-culturally at all, for one already knows the answers. Given human finitude and fallibility, such confidence seems more like gross arrogance. But no better is the converse approach – typically labelled relativist – which views all the different traditions as equally right. Such an approach is a logical absurdity, since very few traditions themselves hold such a view: by declaring them right it declares them wrong.

What approach then should one take? Continue reading →

Choosing a few traditions

06 Sunday Dec 2015

Posted by in Dialectic, Early and Theravāda, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Hermeneutics, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy

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I have long had an ambition which, I am slowly realizing, is unlikely to be fulfilled. It is an ambition suggested in this blog’s title: the idea of putting together all the major philosophical traditions of the world into a full synthesis. Ken Wilber’s work has to date been the most valiant attempt anyone has made to fulfill that ambition. But I have argued in many ways that this attempt has failed. It must fail, in the perennialist form Wilber’s work takes: to claim that all the world’s wisdom (or “religious”) traditions are basically saying the same thing. That claim makes the attempt at putting the traditions together much easier. It is also false. Continue reading →

The need for substantive standards of rationality

22 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, Logic, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics

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I ended the last post with the question of how to put together the insights I have found from Western philosophies like Hegel’s, on one hand, and Buddhism on the other. That question is the twenty-year project that animated my dissertation, though it could not be the dissertation. There it was Martha Nussbaum rather than Hegel whom I juxtaposed with Buddhist thought, because she had engaged with key Buddhist ethical questions and taken opposed answers. (Engaging with Hegel at any length, on the other hand, would have required a whole ‘nother dissertation.)

But the dissertation, as noted before, ends on a “cliffhanger”: Continue reading →

First principles of paradigms

06 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by in Dialectic, Economics, Epistemology, Logic, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Social Science

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There are two different ways to apply the distinction between dialectical and demonstrative argument, and it’s important to be aware of the difference. I draw the terms dialectical and demonstrative argument from Alasdair MacIntyre in Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry (pages 88-9), who in turn takes the distinction from Boethius‘s De topicis differentiis and ultimately from Aristotle’s Topics. The key point is that dialectical argument argues to first principles, and demonstrative argument from first principles.

But what are those first principles? Are they first principles for knowledge in general, or merely first principles within a single paradigm? Continue reading →

The No True Fish fallacy

25 Sunday May 2014

Posted by in Biology, Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, Logic, M.T.S.R., Philosophy of Science, Prejudices and "Intuitions"

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Consider this dialogue:

A: “All fish breathe through gills rather than lungs.”

B: “But whales are fish, and they breathe through their lungs.”

A: “Whales may look and seem like fish, but they aren’t truly fish because they breathe through their lungs.”

To anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of biology, A’s reasoning here must seem sound. Yet among some philosophers with a scientific bent, the structure of the reasoning A employs is often criticized as a logical fallacy. Continue reading →

How dialectic transcends and includes

05 Sunday May 2013

Posted by in Dialectic, Metaphilosophy, Natural Science, Philosophy of Science

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This week I’d like to continue to think through the topic of dialectic, which I began to explore last week in the terms of a double movement transcending and including. In my most detailed previous post on dialectic so far, I got at the transcend-include distinction much more obliquely. I distinguished between dialectical thinking in a broad sense, as a progress through inadequate conceptions which are incorporated and leave their mark on the inquiry, and dialectical argument more strictly, as beginning from the opponent’s point of view and pointing out its inadequacies from within. I would say now that this dialectical argument in a strict sense is the transcending moment of dialectic, whereas the broader progress is the including moment.

In expanding on this point, let me leave aside the including moment for now and start with the transcending. Continue reading →

Synthesis via dialectic

28 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by in Dialectic, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy

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In my view, one of the most important, and often unrecognized, distinctions philosophy is between compromise and synthesis. A compromise merely finds a middle ground between two other positions; it can easily be a bad middle ground, one that takes the worst from each of the two extremes. But a synthesis, by definition, takes the best. I’d like to take the next couple weeks clarifying how synthesis is possible.

Compromise is not necessarily bad. It is essential in practical politics – in attempting to achieve positive outcomes when genuine agreement is not possible. But, I would argue, it has no role to play in philosophy, where the goal is truth.

By contrast, I find synthesis crucial to the work of cross-cultural philosophy. There are countless philosophical positions that have been taken, and contrary to perennialist views, they do not all agree. There are many perennial questions that recur throughout the history of human thought. But not only do humans continue to produce different answers to them, those different answers each get revered and enshrined. The immortal soul so essential to Christianity is denied by the Buddhists. I have always been struck by the truths to be found in radically different traditions.

But truth cannot contradict truth. If there is truth to be found everywhere – a controversial premise, I admit – then I submit that some sort of synthesis is necessary. And how may we go about finding it? Continue reading →

A book about everything

21 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by in Epics, Epistemology, German Tradition, Logic, Metaphilosophy, Natural Science, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika

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Recently I’ve been carrying around and reading a copy of G.W.F. Hegel’s masterwork, the Phenomenology of Spirit. Carrying a book with such a strange and obscure title, and no cover art, sometimes makes me think: what would I say to a curious onlooker, whether friend or stranger, who asked the deceptively simple question, “What’s that book about?”

To a simple question one wishes to give a simple answer. In the case of the Phenomenology of Spirit I think there is only one good simple answer that one can give to the question “What’s that book about?” It is a one-word answer: everything. 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 →

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