Tag Archives: conferences

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, Tranquility

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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, 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 →

To say something is to negate something

21 Sunday Jul 2013

Posted by in Epistemology, German Tradition, Metaphysics, Vedānta

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Not long ago I attended a conference on a particular genre of educational technology. The conference presenters were endlessly positive, uplifting – they sought to inspire the attenders with the potential that their subject could offer for student learning. But some discontent rumbled among the attenders, rightly I think: these presenters are not really saying anything. Their theories are abstractions, perhaps even platitudes, that are difficult to disagree with but mean very little in application. Emotionally they can inspire us; rationally they give us no value.

In the conference’s smaller- group discussions (of which there were fortunately many), there was more of a chance to speak of problems, to complain, to be negative – and paradoxically, by being negative they were able to be more constructive. Why? It is far easier to understand what to do when you understand what not to do; you learn what’s true in part by learning what’s false. Endless affirmation of how good something is won’t tell you anything about what makes it good, let alone about how to put it into practice successfully.

As it happens, on the way to this conference I had been reading a book about Kant. Continue reading →

Skepticism in two directions

29 Wednesday Dec 2010

Posted by in Cārvāka-Lokāyata, Epistemology, Mahāyāna, Prejudices and "Intuitions", South Asia

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I attended a great panel yesterday at the Eastern APA. Two of the presentations addressed each other directly on a topic I’ve discussed before: skepticism in Indian thought. The presenters, Ethan Mills and Laura Guererro of the University of New Mexico, had clearly been engaged in a longstanding debate with each other on the subject beforehand, which I think helped sharpen their thoughts nicely for the talk.

Mills presented on Jayarāśi, whose Tattvopaplavasiṃha (“The Lion that Afflicts Categories”) is the only extant full text attributed to a member of the Cārvāka-Lokāyata, the atheist and materialist school of ancient Indian thought. But Jayarāśi takes the Cārvāka school’s thought much further than it is usually thought to go. Whereas this materialist school is normally understood to merely deny the existence of gods and karma, Jayarāśi denies the existence of pretty much everything. Previous Cārvākas were said to believe that the world was made up entirely of the four elements; Jayarāśi says, “Even the view of world as elements is not well established. How much less are all the others?” He is, in short, a skeptic. Continue reading →

Nishida’s encounter

20 Sunday Jun 2010

Posted by in East Asia, French Tradition, Humility, Judaism, Mahāyāna, Self, Sufism

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I’m currently at the 2010 SACP conference in Asilomar. I had the good fortune to be on a panel about emptiness with Bret Davis, who was presenting on the Kyoto School philosophy, especially Nishida Kitarō. Davis’s discussion of Nishida and Ueda pushed me to think further about the idea of irreducible encounter, which I’d recently examined in posting about Skholiast and Ken Wilber.

I’ll admit often feeling a certain impatience with philosophers of encounter like Lévinas (which probably makes me what Skholiast called an “ātmanist”). It has never been clear to me why, exactly, we’re supposed to be so limitlessly bound by “the Other” (usually with the capital letters). Lévinas’s philosophy strikes me as ruthlessly Abrahamic: at its core is a bowing and scraping before God, drastically opposed to any embrace of the divine with ourselves, parallel to Sirhindī‘s insistence on God’s distance from his creation. As I noted in the comments to that post, Sirhindī advocated not merely intolerance to, but subjugation of, indigenous Indian traditions. Likewise Davis, in our conversation after his talk, noted that Lévinas uses the term “pagan” in an extraordinarily negative sense; his Abrahamism reminds me of Tertullian asking rhetorically “What has Athens do to with Jerusalem?” And while I am somewhat uncomfortable with the lack of humility expressed in a humanist view, I’m even more uncomfortable with trusting an Abrahamic god.

Davis’s talk, however, helped me put many of these ideas in perspective. Nishida’s thought, it turns out, is close to Lévinas’s in a number of ways, though far removed from Abrahamic traditions. (Intriguingly, Nishida even wrote a book entitled I and Thou, while apparently entirely unaware of Buber‘s work of the same title.) Nishida tells us that “there is no universal that would subsume I and thou,” for that would deny the individuality and otherness of the two terms. The other must remain other. Nishida has a Zen take on the matter rather than an Abrahamic one: there must be something shared between the self and the other or no encounter can take place; but one must speak of this shared universal as emptying itself out, a “None” rather than a “One.”

But why should we think this way? A particularly evocative quote in Davis’s talk helped give me a clue in explanation: “I am truly myself by way of not being myself; I live by dying.” Now it seems like we are dealing with the paradoxes of hedonism: when all we seek is our own happiness, we don’t get it. We are most fulfilled when we live for something bigger than ourselves; a life centred entirely on the self will fail even on its own terms. Perhaps I’m getting more sympathetic to this sort of view as I approach marriage – realizing the fulfillment in a life choice that requires a certain self-overcoming, requires you to live for someone else as they live for you.

Praying to something you don’t believe in

28 Sunday Mar 2010

Posted by in Faith, God, Grief, Karma, Mahāyāna, Prayer, Psychology, Roman Catholicism, Supernatural

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My fiancée, who believes in God, once told me that God seems much too distant to pray to. Despite not having any Catholic background, when she feels like praying, she prays to saints. When I was in the running for a good tenure-track job in our area, she prayed to St. Thomas Aquinas, as the patron saint of academics and philosophers, that I would get it. Until that point I don’t think I’d even made the connection between the saints people pray to and actual historical people – I’d only thought of Thomas as a natural law theorist and systematic theologian.

Fast forward: a little while ago, things were a little rough in my home. My fiancée and I tried to adopt a big beautiful black dog, which turned out not to be the right pet for our situation. The dog found a very good home and we’ll be able to get another dog soon enough, but losing the dog was pretty rough on us, especially my fiancée. It didn’t help that it was late winter, when everything was dark and cold, without the novelty of snow’s first arrival or the joys of Christmas. The stress of wedding planning didn’t help either. I was intending to ease some of my fiancée’s distress by planning a surprise party for her approaching milestone birthday. Of course, while the planning was happening, I couldn’t tell her about the party to comfort her; and hiding the event from her was its own source of stress.

It was a hard thing to take. Even though I knew I was doing something that would make her happy in the end, the combination of the secrecy and the present suffering was hard for me to handle emotionally. And so I found myself offering a prayer to Mañjuśrī, the celestial bodhisattva to whom Śāntideva offers his devotion. I prayed, tearfully, for him to give me the strength I needed to help me through my loved one’s suffering. At one point while doing this I wound up calling him Maitreya, because (I admit sheepishly) I sometimes have difficulty remembering the difference between the two.

All this is no small deal for me, because I don’t actually believe in Mañjuśrī or Maitreya, at least not in any standard sense of the term. Continue reading →

Technology is not a category

10 Wednesday Mar 2010

Posted by in Work

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Teaching and learning in the humanities, including philosophy, are changing rapidly as technology advances; that’s pretty much a truism when every faculty member has an email address. Now, general discussions of technology often begin with the point that pretty much every object in our lives is a technology: the pencil, the staircase, the chair. (And similarly, books are information technology.) But this is usually just said to get the point out of the way before they get to Web 2.0 and cloud computing and all the fancy new stuff people are excited about. But the most important thing I realized at this week’s NERCOMP conference is that the point has really significant implications for the way we think about technology in the humanities and academia, and about generational differences more generally.

At lunch I talked to a professor who was surprised to find that students had a hard time using a wiki; other attenders tweeted their surprise that most students had never used blogs before, when the students text and tweet and use other technologies so regularly. How could the students have a hard time with these technologies when they’re so tech-savvy?

Here’s the trick: undergraduate students are not “tech-savvy,” not in the sense that previous generations think of that term. Continue reading →

In defence of Buddhist sectarianism

16 Monday Nov 2009

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Modernized Buddhism, Social Science, Truth

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It was a delight to attend the American Academy of Religion conference this year – and not only because it was in Montréal, possibly my favourite place in the world. There were many interesting presentations and conversations. I was particularly happy to attend a session of the Buddhist Critical-Constructive Reflection group, a group whose area of interest is quite dear to my heart. (A little while ago I published a paper on constructive Buddhist studies in a book for Deepak Heritage Press.)

I was particularly excited by Rita M. Gross‘s presentation, on the connection between academic historical work and Buddhist communities. Gross noted that in many Western “dharma centres” – centres of Yavanayāna Buddhist practice, such as monasteries and meditation centres – Buddhists uncritically accept the claims of Buddhist texts, even on historical matters. Most startlingly, they’ll accept the claim of the Mahāyāna s?tras that they were preached by the historical Buddha in his lifetime: if a s?tra says it was a discourse given by the historical Buddha in R?jag?ha, India, then it must be exactly that. Continue reading →

Ethicists aren’t especially ethical

04 Tuesday Aug 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Social Science, Virtue

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I’ve been waiting for these survey results, by philosophy professors Eric Schwitzgebel and Joshua Rust, to come out. (Schwitzgebel is a fellow blogger whom I referred to last time.) I was among the 200 philosophers they surveyed at the 2007 APA conference, identifying myself as an ethicist. The answers I gave appear to match the answers most other people gave: ethicists are not usually better people than non-ethicists. That is (respondents said when they elaborated their opinions), ethicists are not typically more conscientious, fair, generous, honest, kind, selfless or thoughtful than other philosophers, or than non-academics.

Schwitzgebel and Rust surveyed philosophers as the people who presumably knew ethicists the best. Obviously there are problems with the extremely non-random sample in the survey methodology (whoever wanted a cookie or candy at the conference filled out the survey). Still it’s useful because the result is, on the one hand, pretty obvious to anyone who hangs around philosophy departments (I had no doubt the results would turn out as they did), and on the other hand, somewhat troubling. If studying ethics doesn’t make us more ethical, in some sense, then is it worth doing?

The question is unfair to some extent. Many ethicists focus on the application of ethics to very specific contexts, where it’s not obvious what the right thing to do is. Others focus on the nature of ethical claims: how can we really say something is good or right, in the first place? Answering either of these questions isn’t really supposed to make us more virtuous people, any more than studying sociology or physics is.

And yet there’s still a problem here. What if we do want to be better people? Academic ethics, at least in some cases, should teach us what it is to be a good person. But that doesn’t make us good people, any more than we become good soccer players just by knowing what a good soccer player does. It might help, but really we need something else. What is that something else? I’ll try to say more in my next post.

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