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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Paul Williams

The Buddhist problem of value

16 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, God, Karma, Mahāyāna, Self

≈ 21 Comments

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Alasdair MacIntyre, Andrew Skilton, autobiography, Damien Keown, Friedrich Nietzsche, G.E. Moore, John Stuart Mill, Kate Crosby, Paul Williams, Penelope Trunk, Sam Harris, Śāntideva

Today’s post follows up on those from two and three weeks ago, and there’ll be another one next week. I intend the four posts, taken together, to make a statement about the continuing importance of the idea of God: why, in the face of the very real problem of suffering and the scientific ability to easily do without God as an explanation of life’s apparent design, God is still hard to do away with. I mean this on an intellectual and philosophical level, not merely an emotional one; it is not just that we need to bother with God because so many people out have some neurological need for him, but that there yet remain ways in which God helps us to make sense of reality.

I’m going to begin this week not with God, but with Buddhism. Continue reading →

Of anātman and altruism

06 Sunday Mar 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Foundations of Ethics, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Metaphilosophy, Self

≈ 45 Comments

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Damien Keown, David Cooper, Ethan Mills, Paul Williams, Śāntideva, Stephen Harris

The new Journal of Buddhist Ethics has an interesting article up on Śāntideva, by Stephen Harris, a grad student at U of New Mexico. Harris is a colleague of Ethan Mills, who gave the APA talk about skepticism that I discussed in late December (and who has since made thoughtful contributions to this blog’s comments); Harris also gave a talk about Śāntideva on Mills’s panel.

Harris’s article returns us to the most famous passage in Śāntideva’s work: the meditation on the equalization of self and other in Bodhicaryāvatāra chapter VIII, in which Śāntideva takes metaphysical arguments for the nonexistence of self (Buddhist anātman) and uses them as a premise to argue for altruism, ethical selflessness. He asks: “Since both others and myself dislike fear and suffering, what is special about my self that I protect it and not another?” The self that I was three minutes ago is a different entity from the self I will be three minutes from now; the present self has as much reason to protect others as it does its future self. He adds: if you object that suffering should be prevented only by the one it belongs to, well, your foot’s suffering does not belong to your hand, so why should the hand do anything to protect the foot?

The Catholic Buddhologist Paul Williams has criticized this passage in depth, arguing that altruism makes no sense without selves. I’ve discussed Williams’s criticisms twice before, though I haven’t taken a position on the debate yet. I will note that several Buddhologists have already come to Śāntideva’s defence on these arguments – with varying degrees of success.

Harris is the first writer I’m aware of to defend Williams’s position (other than Williams himself). Continue reading →

Two concepts of altruism

08 Sunday Aug 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Early and Theravāda, Epicureanism, Foundations of Ethics, French Tradition, Judaism, Mahāyāna, Modern Hinduism, Morality, Roman Catholicism, Self, Vedānta

≈ 31 Comments

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Aristotle, Buddhaghosa, Christine Korsgaard, Derek Parfit, Emmanuel Lévinas, Epicurus, nondualism, obligation, Paul Hacker, Paul Williams, Śaṅkara, Śāntideva, Swami Vivekānanda

The Catholic Pauls, it seems clear to me, oppose ethical egoism in strong terms. Interestingly, however, they do not spend much time attacking it; instead, they attack a kind of altruism that is very different from their own. And their positions interest me greatly because of the way it highlights differences among philosophical concepts of altruism.

Ethical egoism of some description – say, as advocated by Epicurus – is a perfectly respectable philosophical position. One can say that one’s reasons to benefit others are all ultimately based on benefit to oneself, if one’s own self-interest is rightly understood. Neither Paul has a great deal of sympathy for this position, as far as I can tell, but it is not what they take as a target for their attack.

Rather, they reserve their greatest ire for a position that derives other-orientation from ātmanism – or at least from nondualism. Continue reading →

The Catholic Pauls against nondualism

04 Wednesday Aug 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Bhakti Poets, Foundations of Ethics, French Tradition, Judaism, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Morality, Roman Catholicism, Self, Sufism, Vedānta

≈ 62 Comments

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Advaita Vedānta, al-Hallāj, Eknath, Emmanuel Lévinas, Hugh van Skyhawk, nondualism, Paul Hacker, Paul J. Griffiths, Paul Williams, Ramprasad Sen, Śāntideva, Swami Vivekānanda, T.R. (Thill) Raghunath, Wilhelm Halbfass

A curious phenomenon in the study of South Asian and especially Buddhist traditions is the number of Catholic scholars named Paul who have approached these traditions – and especially what Skholiast has called their ātmanism – with a critical eye. The two thinkers I have primarily in mind are the late Paul Hacker (whom I discussed last time, and the living Paul Williams. (The thought of Paul J. Griffiths, who moved in his writings from Buddhology to Catholic theology, bears a strong resemblances to these other Pauls, though I have less to say about him today.) That these men are all named Paul can only be a coincidence. That they are all Catholic is less so; for there are striking affinities in the ways that they (in many respects independently of one another) approach South Asian and Buddhist tradition, affinities that are far less coincidental.
Continue reading →

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