Tag Archives: David Hume

How a fundamentalist gave us fallibilism

29 Sunday Nov 2020

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Epistemology, Islam, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Science, Roman Catholicism

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Fallibilism is one of the most important modern ideas. By fallibilism I mean the idea that no idea is in principle immune to revision. It is among the most important methodological principles for natural science. As Ann Druyan said, science “is forever whispering in our ears, ‘Remember, you’re very new at this. You might be mistaken. You’ve been wrong before.’” Many of the claims a Newtonian physicist would once have confidently made, have been shown to be false by Einsteinian and quantum physicists.

As it turns out, this crucial idea has important roots in Muslim thinkers who might reasonably be called fundamentalist.

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The consolations and pleasures of philosophy

05 Sunday Jul 2020

Posted by in Greek and Roman Tradition, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Patient Endurance, Pleasure, Serenity, Stoicism

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The ongoing COVID-19 crisis has been a struggle for everyone, and some more than others. It has been a heartbreak for those who have lost loved ones, a terror for those who have lost jobs, and a great struggle for those who must suddenly take care of their children full-time while simultaneously trying to do their full-time jobs as well.

I am lucky not to have fallen into any of these three troubled categories – yet, at least. But I have noticed how difficult these times have been even for others who share my relatively lucky position – simply because everything is cancelled. We may not have parties. We may not go out to eat. We may not go to the movies. We may not travel, not without severe quarantine restrictions. We may not play sports; we may not even watch sports. We may not watch, or play, live music. Most of our social interactions must be through a medium where we cannot tell whether others are looking at us or at something else on their screen. Even as we recognize others’ difficulties are considerably greater, this is all still a major loss of the things we love.

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Rights are instrumental

28 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, Metaphilosophy, Modernized Buddhism, Politics

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The key reason I have turned to MacIntyrean tradition-based inquiry is to make progress on the ethical inquiries that have proved very difficult to resolve. So far, too many of those inquiries have turned out to be cliffhangers. But by taking the approach I have, of identifying the collection of Aristotle, Buddha, Hume and perhaps historicism as at some level the best story so far, it is now possible for me to move closer to concrete conclusions of at least an early and preliminary kind.

I see this point as I reexamine a particular cliffhanger from last year. I posted a four–post series on human rights, and yet by the final post I had still not advanced a substantive theory about them. I said we need reasons for rights, but was not willing to say anything about what those reasons are. 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 →

Śabda and the sciences

12 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by in Cārvāka-Lokāyata, Epistemology, Faith, Foundations of Ethics, Hermeneutics, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Science, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Sāṃkhya-Yoga

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One of the key debates in Indian philosophy is what counts as a pramāṇa: an instrument of knowledge, a “reliable warrant”, a means of knowledge reliable enough that one can be reasonably confident to take its conclusions as true. What counts as a pramāṇa? Many Indian philosophers will provide a numbered list of them.

In the empiricist tradition that remains popular in the West, boosted by the discoveries of natural science, only experience is admitted as a pramāṇa: to a full-blown empiricist, nothing counts as knowledge if it doesn’t ultimately have its roots in experience, based in some sort of direct perception. (Ken Wilber’s thought has come to take this position more and more over the years, to its detriment.) The debate over pramāṇas in modern Western philosophy is often framed as one between empiricism and rationalism. That is, where empiricists admit only experience as a pramāṇa, rationalists also allow reasoning an independent validity: some things can be rationally known a priori, independently of sense experience.

Some Indian philosophers have agreed with these views. Continue reading →

Universals and history in metaphilosophy

13 Wednesday Oct 2010

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Buddhism, Epistemology, French Tradition, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Pre-Socratics, Truth

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I argued before that categories like ascent-descent and intimacy-integrity are important because they help us identify perennial questions, questions that appear (together with their usually opposing answers) throughout the history of philosophy. The debate between ascent and descent is a debate between the Chinese Buddhists and the Confucians as much as it is between Plato and Aristotle. The identification of such universal questions seems to me an important part of metaphilosophy: the study of philosophy itself, and not merely of philosophy’s varied subject matter.

The attempt to identify such universal categories, I think, is central to the work of analytic philosophy. It drives the characteristically analytic attempt to classify Buddhist ethics according to the categories of 20th-century ethics: is Buddhist ethics consequentialism or virtue ethics? For that matter, is Śāntideva a determinist or a compatibilist? The problem with such attempts, in my book, is that they take it for granted that the questions of 20th-century ethics (consequentialism, deontology or virtue?) are the most important ones to ask. Such an approach, it seems to me, strongly limits one’s ability to learn anything of substance from other traditions. Foreign traditions (and this includes the Greeks and the medieval Christians as much as the Confucians or Vedāntins) can teach us different questions to ask, not merely different answers to those questions. That’s why it’s important to me that when we do think in more universal categories, we try to involve categories (like ascent-descent) that are derived from the study of multiple traditions.

Part of the point of thinking across traditions in this way, to me, is that metaphilosophy shouldn’t only be about universals, but about particulars – specifically, historical particulars. I have no problem in saying that philosophy aims at universal truth; but it does so only through the eyes of individual philosophers, who are all finite, particular and historically limited human beings, shaped greatly by their historical context. And for any given philosophy – including one’s own – that context is an essential reason why it is the way it is.
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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 →

The three basic ways of life

20 Sunday Dec 2009

Posted by in Aesthetics, Cārvāka-Lokāyata, Christianity, Confucianism, Early and Theravāda, East Asia, Epics, Epicureanism, Epistemology, Family, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Jainism, Judaism, Metaphysics, Monasticism, Pleasure, Roman Catholicism, South Asia, Vedānta, Work

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One reason I turn back to premodern philosophies so much is that they often show us questions larger than those generally asked in philosophy today. Especially important among these: “what kind of life should I live?” What sorts of major life decisions should I make? It still surprises me how rarely academic philosophers concern themselves with these questions, when we spend so much time teaching people in their late teens and early twenties – for whom these questions are in the foreground.

Lately in my mind I’ve been tossing around the hypothesis that the answers to the question “What kind of life should I live?” roughly boil down to three – and that each of the three is tied to some sort of metaphysics, a theoretical as well as a practical philosophy: Continue reading →

E.O. Wilson and the limits of empiricism

29 Sunday Nov 2009

Posted by in Christianity, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, Free Will, German Tradition, Philosophy of Science

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Browsing in the library I recently stumbled across Edward O. Wilson‘s ambitious book Consilience, in which the famous biologist tries to propose a unified account of knowledge – one in which the natural sciences take a supreme role. I have a certain sympathy with Wilson’s project – his attempt to unite the different realms of human knowing is not so different from my own long-term goal of constructing a philosophy that draws from many (and preferably all) traditions of inquiry. It’s unfortunate, then, that Wilson’s attempt falls flat in a wide variety of ways – but they can, at least, be highly instructive ways. They do very well, especially, at illustrating the limits of an empiricist account of knowledge. Continue reading →