Tag Archives: conferences

From snark to smarm

10 Sunday May 2020

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

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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.

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Festival of the Middle Way

06 Monday Apr 2020

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Barry Daniel, who interviewed me a couple years ago on the idea of literal conservatism, dropped me a line to mention that his Middle Way Society is now hosting a virtual online festival on April 18-19, on UK time but open to anyone. Presenters include Stephen Batchelor. It sounds like a great way to connect for philosophical conversations in a trying and difficult time. Check it out!

Bedtime for Minerva?

24 Sunday Nov 2019

Posted by in German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Politics

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Hegel has a famous phrase in the preface of the Philosophy of Right: “Only with the falling dusk does the owl of Minerva start its flight.” (Die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug.) The idea is that a historical era can only really be comprehended when it is complete: “Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready.” Only then is Minerva or Athena, the Roman and Greek goddess of wisdom personified as an owl, able to fly.

Hegel-and-Napoleon-in-Jena-1806It’s a powerful image, but seems strange put up against Hegel’s own life and practice. Hegel famously finished his most celebrated work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, “in the middle of the night before the Battle of Jena” – just as Napoleon was moving in and conquering the town of Jena where Hegel lived. Hegel gave the manuscript to a courier who rushed across French battle lines to bring it to the publisher. That hardly seems like the dusk of a historical era – more like its noontime, the bright light of day. How could Hegel be doing philosophy then? Continue reading →

Don’t give a paper

01 Sunday Sep 2019

Posted by in Aesthetics, Metaphilosophy, Reading and Recitation, South Asia

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Studies of Indian philosophy often rightly call attention to the varied genres in which they are composed: the sparse pith of the Yoga Sūtras, Śaṅkara’s expositing his own views as commentary on someone else’s, the Milindapañhā’s dialogue evocative of Plato’s Socrates. Such differences call to mind Martha Nussbaum’s famous claim in Love’s Knowledge that “Style itself makes its claims, expresses its own sense of what matters.”

As is far too often the case, though, the gaze that modern Western academics apply to distant places and times is one they steadfastly avoid turning on themselves. We are far too reluctant to think about differences of genre in our own composition.

Most notably: the venues of scholarly productivity come in at least two completely different genres. There is the written article or book, subjected to peer review and editorship, with its hypertextual infrastructure of footnotes and its bibliography. And there is the oral presentation, at a conference or workshop, of a work-in-progress with that citation infrastructure omitted, delivered to a room at a single time and place who can then begin a Socratic and dialogical back-and-forth.

So why do we insist on acting as if these two venues are the same? Continue reading →

Does Śāntideva think bodhisattvas are happy?

24 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by in Compassion, External Goods, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Happiness, Hermeneutics, Mahāyāna, Patient Endurance

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A while ago William Edelglass put up a paper for discussion on academia.edu about Śāntideva and happiness. I made some suggestions for changes in a way that turned out to be unhelpful, since William informed me that the paper was already on its way to publication and he had only put it up by accident! Now, though, the paper has been published, as a chapter in David McMahan and Erik Braun’s valuable and readable volume on meditation, Buddhism and science. So perhaps now is the time to take my old suggestions and reframe them here as part of an ongoing public discussion.

William’s purpose in the chapter is to critique what he calls the “happiness turn” in Western Buddhism, in which Buddhist advocates cite Buddhism’s ability to make its practitioners happy. The most prominent such case is Matthieu Ricard, the Tibetan monk whose fMRI scans showed record levels of activity in the parts of the brain associated with happiness. William thinks this emphasis on happiness misrepresents significant elements of Buddhism, and cites Śāntideva at length to prove his case.

Overall, I do not find myself convinced. Continue reading →

Śāntideva vs. Singer

26 Sunday Nov 2017

Posted by in External Goods, Foundations of Ethics, Generosity, Mahāyāna, Morality

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I’ve been fortunate in the past year and a half to meet Charles Goodman at three different conferences, and to have long and stimulating discussions with him. Since our researches have both focused on Śāntideva’s ethics, we can critique each other’s ideas at a highly detailed level – one that has often involved whipping out a physical copy of Charles’s excellent new translation of the Śikṣā Samuccaya to confirm our points.

Probably our central point of disagreement: Charles is known for presenting a consequentialist interpretation of Buddhist ethics, and especially of Śāntideva; in his talk at the IABS, referred to Śāntideva as “the world’s first utilitarian”. Since I discovered Buddhism in part as an alternative to an unsatisfying utilitarianism, this has not sat particularly well with me. Continue reading →

The political path vs. the Buddhist path

29 Sunday Oct 2017

Posted by in Anger, Early and Theravāda, Gentleness, Mahāyāna, Politics, Serenity

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I presented about Disengaged Buddhism at the International Association of Buddhist Studies conference in August. My talk was paired with a presentation by Frédéric Richard on a topic that did not initially appear to be related: the Tibetan government in exile. As it turned out, the papers proved fascinating mirror images of each other. Continue reading →

Paper on methodology up at Prosblogion

28 Friday Apr 2017

Posted by in M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy

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The philosophy-of-religion blog Prosblogion asked me if I would contribute a paper in progress to their “virtual colloquium”. I obliged, and sent them a draft paper that I recently presented at the Metaphysical Society of America (MSA) conference in March. It is on methodology in cross-cultural philosophy – how we might responsibly resolve disagreements across philosophical traditions, whether in metaphysics, ethics or otherwise. It draws heavily from Alasdair MacIntyre’s methodological views, expanding on some of the points I have made about MacIntyre’s thought in recent years. (In this Sunday’s post I will say something about where I disagree with MacIntyre most.) You could describe significant parts of the paper as an attempt to “reverse-engineer” MacIntyre’s proposed methodology – to go to his sources (especially Aristotle and the historicist philosophers of science, Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos) in order to expand on those parts of his methodology that he leaves unstated, and hopefully improves on weaknesses in that methodology.

This paper is very much a work in progress; I am not entirely happy with its position and expect that it will be heavily revised before it ever hits publication (which I don’t expect to be for a while). But it is a current and fleshed-out statement of a project I’ve now been working on for over two years, so I thought it deserved to see the light of day somewhere. I’ll probably blog about elements of it in the coming months.

The paper’s abstract is posted directly at the Prosblogion, and you can download the full paper there at the bottom. I would be happy to hear your thoughts.

Disengaged Buddhism in the era of Trump

16 Sunday Apr 2017

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

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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 →

Why give Cthulhu a happy ending?

03 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by in Aesthetics, Biology, Christianity, God, Metaphysics, Natural Science

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A few years ago, Skholiast wrote a lovely post on the philosophical significance of J.R.R. Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft, two early 20th-century writers who shaped the genres we now call fantasy and horror, respectively. I was reminded of it this year at an enjoyable AAR panel entitled “Cthulhu’s Many Tentacles”.

Cthulhu Cthulhu, of course, is the best-known character (if that is the word) from Lovecraft’s stories, enough that the fictional pantheon he created has become known as the “Cthulhu Mythos”. Cthulhu is one of a set of “Elder Gods”: horrifying, vaguely amorphous, often tentacled monstrosities that have lain dormant for millennia and will soon devour humanity; their horror is such that the mere knowledge of them could drive one mad. The AAR panel gave recognition to many aspects of Lovecraft’s work: starting with a presentation on the man and his work itself, the presenters proceeded to examine the varied dimensions of the fandom that has grown up around Lovecraft (noting, in particular, that fan creativity has been greatly enabled by Lovecraft’s work rising into the public domain).

The most interesting point I took away from the panel came from a talk by David McConeghy (who also, coincidentally, was the respondent to my paper on teaching with technology). McConeghy noted that while a great deal of modern speculative fiction (he cited Mike Mignola’s comic-book series Hellboy) is clearly inspired by Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and makes references to it, these works also typically have happy endings. Continue reading →