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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: J.B. Schneewind

Resolving cliffhangers in a book

09 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy

≈ 1 Comment

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Alasdair MacIntyre, Aristotle, ascent/descent, autobiography, intimacy/integrity, J.B. Schneewind, Karl Marx, Martha Nussbaum, Robert M. Gimello, Śāntideva, Thomas Aquinas

For some time now I have realized: it is time for me to write a book. It’s time to take ideas that I have circulated in blog-post form and develop them into a more systematic, coherent constructive argument. It has now been about seventeen years since Robert Gimello told me that the project that I had wanted to do for my dissertation was a twenty-year project, and as it turns out, I have spent much of those ensuing years working toward exactly that.

The questions that drove my dissertation – the ethics of emotion around attachment, anger and external goods – have continued to drive my thoughts over the thirteen years since I finished it, through twists and turns like declaring myself Buddhist. The dissertation could not resolve them; it ended on a cliffhanger. Śāntideva had good reasons for his views; Martha Nussbaum had good reasons for hers; where do we go from here? By 2013 I’d been thinking here about ways to resolve that cliffhanger, but I now think the approach I took at that time was exactly the wrong one: I had tried to generalize Śāntideva’s and Nussbaum’s views, viewing them as exemplars of integrity ascent and intimacy descent worldviews respectively. As I said at the time, that approach helped me spell out my problématique – but it still didn’t bring me any closer to resolving it.

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