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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: autobiography

Roots of a project on method

19 Sunday Aug 2018

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

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

ACLA, Alasdair MacIntyre, autobiography, G.W.F. Hegel, Imre Lakatos, Momin Malik, perennialism, relativism, Thomas Kuhn

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 →

Lessons from a favourite teacher

04 Sunday Mar 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in German Tradition, Place, Politics

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

autobiography, Brexit, Canada, democracy, Johann Gottfried Herder, obituary, Paulo Freire, pedagogy, Romanticism, Warwick Armstrong

This semester I’m teaching Indian philosophy and spent a lot of time thinking about pedagogy. It’s hard for me to do that for very long without thinking about the best teacher I ever had, Warwick Armstrong, who taught me as a McGill undergrad over twenty years ago. I tried to contact him recently to let him know what a difference he had made, and found that that would not be possible: Warwick Armstrong is no longer with us.

I missed my chance to tell Warwick how great he was. But I can at least let the world know. Continue reading →

The saksit of Notre-Dame

03 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Early and Theravāda, Emotion, Natural Science, Place, Psychology, Roman Catholicism, Supernatural

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Abhidhamma, architecture, autobiography, Canada, Hebrew Bible, music, Pali suttas, rasa, religion, saksit, Thailand, Thomas Aquinas, Vannapa Pimviriyakul

Basilique Notre-Dame. Photo by David Iliff. Licence: [CC-BY-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)

Basilique Notre-Dame. Photo by David Iliff. Licence: CC-BY-SA 3.0

Basilique Notre-Dame – one of the most magnificent cathedrals in North America – was the first work of architecture to leave a real impact on me, as an undergraduate in Montréal. I visited it again recently for the first time in a long time, and this time it made me think: saksit. Continue reading →

Disengaged Buddhism in the era of Trump

16 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Mahāyāna, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Psychology, Serenity

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

autobiography, conferences, Disengaged Buddhism, Donald Trump, Engaged Buddhism, Four Noble Truths, George W. Bush, IABS, Pali suttas, race, S.N. Goenka, Śāntideva, United States

Cross-posted at the Indian Philosophy Blog.

Śāntideva’s anti-political views are very commonly missed by Buddhist scholars today, especially constructive or theological ones, who are excited by the Engaged Buddhist embrace of political action. He is hardly alone among classical Indian Buddhists in expressing them. So last September I proposed a presentation to the International Association of Buddhist Studies (IABS), which I intended to turn into a paper, explaining the importance of these anti-political views and entitled “Disengaged Buddhism”.

I was expecting Hillary Clinton to win the American election. Continue reading →

The power of a beautiful temple

19 Sunday Mar 2017

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Early and Theravāda, Place, Rites, Serenity, Supernatural

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

architecture, Augustine, autobiography, Four Noble Truths, Japan, music, Robert Wilson, saksit, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Thailand, upāyakauśalya, Vannapa Pimviriyakul

We think these days a lot about Buddhist ethics, which often involves some thought about Buddhist politics. We tend to think a lot less about Buddhist aesthetics.

Now there’s an obvious explanation that could be given for this: the Buddhist dhamma teaches that worldly pleasures mire us in suffering. So aesthetics, insofar as it deals with pleasurable phenomena like art, is something Buddhists should avoid. In response I give you this:

Temple of the Emerald Buddha, Bangkok

Continue reading →

Of superstition and aesthetics

05 Sunday Mar 2017

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Early and Theravāda, Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Supernatural

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

architecture, autobiography, Jinapañjara Gathā, Justin McDaniel, Pali suttas, religion, Thailand, Vasudha Narayanan

While I was working in Thailand as a young man, my closest friend there was a pious Christian who had recently converted, as an undergraduate. He took a short vacation in Malaysia and came back deeply admiring the (Muslim) Malay people he met, saying: “They’re so religious!”

I noted, “The Thais are very religious too.” He exclaimed – “But that’s just – superstition!”

I was nonplussed by that reaction and didn’t answer it, because it left my secular self a bit confused: I hadn’t really thought there was a difference between religion and superstition. That seemed a potentially inflammatory point to make, so I left it silent. But I certainly didn’t agree with him. I was already admiring the Thai Buddhists I met, and would soon come to learn my most important life lesson from the Buddhism I found in Thailand. I would never want to dismiss it as mere superstition.

Until, perhaps, I recently started reading the works of Justin McDaniel. Continue reading →

In memoriam: Claude Vipond

23 Sunday Oct 2016

Posted by Amod Lele in Death, Family, Protestantism

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

20th century, autobiography, Canada, Christmas, Claude Vipond, generations, modernity, obituary, Stephen Leacock

My maternal grandfather, Claude Vipond, died peacefully last Tuesday. His life was long – he reached 95 years. Claude was a doctor and a World War II veteran, but I knew him entirely as a grandfather – an often larger-than-life figure at family gatherings, delivering corny jokes with an enthusiasm that made them hilarious. At large Christmas gatherings he would read to the grandchildren, not some sentimental Victorian Christmas story but Stephen Leacock‘s marvelously tongue-in-cheek Caroline’s Christmas.

The irreverence of Leacock’s self-subverting story left a strong impression on me as a boy – much like the movie The Princess Bride, which came out when I was the age of its child narratee. In a different way from my father, “Caroline’s Christmas” helped teach me the pleasures of being an outsider, with an ironic detachment expressed in humour – in ways perhaps more profound than I realized at the time. In many ways I think that story really sums up my grandfather’s spirit. 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 mindfulness meditation, Buddhist and otherwise

31 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by Amod Lele in Health, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Psychology, Serenity, Therapy

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

autobiography, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Justin Whitaker, Robert Sokolove, S.N. Goenka

Until I began my 9-to-5 job in 2011, I had only rarely had to get up before 8 or 9 in the morning on a regular basis, which suited me fine since I am a night person. Now I need get up at 6:45, and it is a struggle to get enough sleep – and so I started worrying ever more about how little sleep I was getting, which gave me insomnia.

Fortunately the job has a good health plan (essential in the USA), and I was able to seek treatment for my insomnia at the highly regarded Boston Medical Center. They suggested a number of interventions to deal with the insomnia, several of which slowly came to prove helpful. The most striking moment among these interventions, though, was when they prescribed – mindfulness meditation. Continue reading →

Choosing a few traditions

06 Sunday Dec 2015

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

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, Aristotle, Augustine, autobiography, David Hume, G.W.F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant, James Doull, Ken Wilber, Madhyamaka, perennialism, Śāntideva, Scott Meikle, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha)

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 →

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