31 Sunday Aug 2025
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Alison Vipond, autobiography, Canada, Claude Vipond, Dave Harkness, Facebook, Jayant Lele, mystical experience
Grief can be more complicated than we often make it out to be. In the wake of my father’s death, several people have reminded me of this point, and they’ve been right – in a way that I know a little too well, because of other experiences with grieving over the past decade.
Continue reading27 Sunday Jul 2025
Posted in Death, Emotion, Family, Gratitude, Grief, Health, Metaphilosophy, Politics, Psychology
This Friday, while I was taking my lunch break from work, my mother called to let me know that my father, Jayant Lele, had peacefully passed away.
His health had been failing for a while. It got so bad in January that we expected to be saying goodbye to him then; miraculously he survived that, but he never made anything close to a full recovery. So we knew this was coming, but we didn’t know when, which put a lot of stress on all of us.
These last months have been the hardest. I got several chances to visit this year, which I’m very grateful for. (My parents have continued living in Kingston, Ontario, where I grew up, while I live in metro Boston now.) Those visits felt to me like I imagine raising a child must feel: difficult and frustrating, but rewarding.
Continue reading20 Sunday Jul 2025
Posted in Economics, Epistemology, Family, German Tradition, Politics, Work
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Donald Trump, Gabriel García Márquez, gender, Georg Lukács, Gloria Anzaldúa, Karl Marx, Nancy Hartsock, race
Having discussed the history of standpoint theory, I now want to dive into it more philosophically. While I have plenty of outsider’s objections to standpoint theory, here I want to explore what goes wrong with standpoint theory on its own terms – noting a key tension internal to standpoint theory which I do not think it resolves.
Namely: the main justification for standpoint theory – the reasoning that gave it plausibility – was materialist, in a sense drawing on Karl Marx. But as it grew, standpoint theory lost that materialist justification, leaving it with little grounding. We can see the loss of standpoint theory’s materialist underpinnings just within the work of Nancy Hartsock, one of its key founders.
Hartsock’s original 1983 chapter, “The feminist standpoint” states what I think was standpoint theory’ in general’s core underlying claim: “If material life is structured in fundamentally opposing ways for two different groups, one can expect that the vision of each will represent an inversion of the other, and in systems of domination the vision available to the rulers will be both partial and perverse.” (285) The key word in this claim is material: for Hartsock as for her predecessors Marx and Georg Lukács, one’s viewpoint is deeply structured by the material conditions of one’s life. What Hartsock’s feminist analysis adds to Lukács and Marx is the materiality of household work and childrearing. She cites Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room to illustrate how this materiality works:
Washing the toilet used by three males, and the floor and walls around it, is, Mira thought, coming face to face with necessity. And that is why women were saner than men, did not come up with the mad, absurd schemes men developed; they were in touch with necessity, they had to wash the toilet bowl and floor. (quoted on Hartsock 292)
06 Sunday Apr 2025
Posted in Family, Flourishing, Friends, Place, Politics, Social Science
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Alasdair MacIntyre, autobiography, Canada, identity, J.D. Vance, Jason Stanley, LARP, Mark Granovetter, United States
Canadians have always had a love-hate relationship with the USA; for obvious reasons, the hate side is stronger right at the moment. The US government is doing everything it can to make the country hateable – and harder to live in. When lawful permanent residents are detained without trial for exercising their free speech, this becomes a scary place indeed. So it’s quite understandable that many of those who can leave the US for Canada are planning on doing so – like the philosopher Jason Stanley making a high-profile announcement that he’s leaving Yale for Toronto.
It’s tempting to try to do something similar myself. But I’m not going to. And I want to talk about why.
Continue reading30 Sunday Mar 2025
Posted in Family, Modern Hinduism, Politics, South Asia
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B.R. Ambedkar, Bhagavad Gītā, caste, dharmaśāstra, identity, Maharashtra, Quico Toro, race, United States, Venezuela
The analogy between Indian caste and American race – an analogy recognized by Martin Luther King, among others – is important for a number of reasons. Not least of these is that when you observe how a different society handles a similar problem, you can see how parochial your own society’s approach might have been.
I was struck by this point in reading the work of B.R. Ambedkar, the famous advocate for the rights of India’s lowest caste groups (formerly called “untouchables” and now called “scheduled caste” or SC, referred to by Ambedkar as Dalit or “oppressed”). The particular work of Ambedkar’s I was reading was a famous undelivered speech entitled Annihilation of Caste.
Continue reading15 Sunday Sep 2024
Posted in Family, Politics, South Asia
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autobiography, Barack Obama, caste, dharmaśāstra, Donald Trump, identity, Kamala Harris, law, Laws of Manu, Madison Grant, Meghan Markle, race, United States
Not long ago, Donald Trump exercised his usual penchant for making headlines by offending people, with comments about Kamala Harris “happening to turn black” and asking “Is she Indian or is she black?” In the latter question, Trump was doing what racial questionnaires have asked us racially mixed people to do for our whole lives: “Are you [ ] Black [ ] Asian [ ] White? Pick one.” (Wizards of the Coast, meanwhile, is now proud to newly erase mixed people from a game that actually represented us back in the ’80s.)
Nothing in Trump’s remarks is welcoming to racially mixed people, of course. Most news outlets and commenters predictably responded to them with righteous indignation. And that indignation might feel affirming to me… if I thought that those outlets really were trying to acknowledge racially mixed people as racially mixed. But they don’t actually do that.
News outlets regularly describe Harris simply as black, simply as Asian, or simply as both, depending on context. In the context of Trump’s remarks, nearly every story reporting on or replying to Trump’s comments will present some variant of this claim, embedded in a subordinate clause as an obvious matter of fact: “Harris, who is both Black and Asian American…”
To which I cheerfully respond: “Yes! Like Barack Obama, who is both black and white! Right?
… right?“
Continue reading04 Sunday Aug 2024
Posted in Death, Family, French Tradition, Indigenous American Thought, Place, Politics
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Anishinaabe, autobiography, Ben Koan, Benedict Anderson, Canada, Fred Kelly, J.D. Vance, Jeff Jacoby, John Ganz, Joseph Miller, natural environment, Northeastern University, Republican Party, Ronald Reagan, United States, Viola Cordova
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending a workshop on Native American philosophy – hosted by the Northeastern Ethics Institute, which I’m now Associate Director of. One of the main presenters was Joseph (Joey) Miller, a University of Washington professor of Muscogee ancestry.
Miller’s intriguing ideas focused on the importance of land in Native American thought – specifically North American, I might add, as opposed to Mesoamerican. In my limited studies of Aztec and Maya thought so far, I’ve seen no comparable emphasis placed on land and place. Miller cited the Apache philosopher Viola Cordova to the effect that “people come out of a specific place; we’re not all one race with one story.” And he spoke of a “land-based pedagogy” for his students. That is, he would have his students reflect on land and how it’s important to them: their land of origin, its future place in the world.
I kept thinking back to Miller’s talk a couple weeks later, when I travelled to Buck Lake in Ontario for a memorial service for a beloved aunt. Buck Lake was where my grandfather had a cottage for most of the time I was alive; my cousins scattered their mother’s ashes over the lake, which she had loved. As far back as I could remember, my parents had their own cottage on Milk Lake, the smaller lake beside it (where, because they were the first to build on it, there is now a road called Lele Lane). Everyone who knows me knows I’m a city person through and through; I didn’t particularly like going up to Milk Lake every weekend as a child. But going back there for the first time in years, I felt a powerful connection to that land and realized how much I missed it. I found myself excited to hear the distinctive call of the whippoorwill, which I’d heard so many times long ago but is missing from my adopted home of New England.
I’ve also been thinking back to Miller’s talk in watching the reaction to J.D. Vance’s nomination speech. In his remarks accepting the Republican nomination for vice-president, Vance said this:
Continue reading22 Sunday Oct 2023
Posted in Action, Anger, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Family, Health, Meditation, Practice, Psychology, Virtue
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autobiography, cancer, insomnia, Laozi, Martha C. Nussbaum, Martin Broadwell, Nancy Houfek, Ted Slingerland, Zhu Xi, Zhuangzi
In previous years I have aimed to provide what are now known as content warnings when my posts contained swear or curse words. But just in the years since LoAW began, English swear words have undergone a striking shift; the formerly shocking F-word has become relatively unremarkable, while a six-letter derogatory term for black people is now regarded with horror. In keeping with the likely shift in audience expectations, in future posts I will be warning only about the new crop of swear words rather than the old. I use this post as an occasion to make this transition because the F-word appears in it quite frequently, as the title indicates. That title is probably the last time I will mark that word with asterisks; the word is uncensored in the text.
My wife’s previous round of cancer treatment, in 2015, was one of the most difficult periods in my life. Near the beginning of it I started describing myself as a Buddhist, based on a mere passing question in her hospital survey. But by the end I had become a practising Buddhist, having derived a great deal of support and comfort from Buddhism and its practices.
In the middle, though, I was still experimenting with a variety of ideas and practices from different traditions. The Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi reminded me of the spiritual benefit of practising scriptural reading, and I turned to multiple traditions for help in that regard. Buddhism proved the most valuable by the end, after a long period of learning from other traditions. Among these, I had a particularly powerful reaction to Daoism – perhaps I should say, against Daoism.
Continue reading08 Sunday Oct 2023
Posted in Family, Modern Hinduism, Politics
≈ Comments Off on Of races and other castes
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autobiography, caste, Cornell University, Isabel Wilkerson, Jayant Lele, Maharashtra, race, United States
While studying development sociology at Cornell in my early twenties, I took a trip to see my Marathi family in India. I was pleasantly sipping tea with older relatives whom my father was making conversation with.
“One of Amod’s colleagues in his graduate program is Marathi,” he said. The family members nodded appreciatively and expressed their approval.
“And her name is Rukmini,” he added. The family nodded appreciatively again. “Ah! Rukmini! Very nice.”
Wanting to add to the conversation, I chimed in: “Yes, Rukmini Potdar.”
Suddenly the tone in the room took a dramatic shift. “Oh, Potdar,” one of them spat as they all rolled their eyes and shook their heads. I looked around in bewilderment – what was so wrong with being called Potdar? – but no further explanation came up. The conversation just moved on to different topics.
After we left, I turned to my father. “What happened there?” I asked him. Rukmini was a perfectly nice person and Potdar seemed to me a perfectly nice name. What did they have to object to?
“Well,” he said, “Rukmini is a nice old-fashioned Marathi name, so they appreciated that. But Potdar is a Bania name.”
I had stumbled into the world of modern Indian caste prejudice.
Continue reading10 Sunday Sep 2023
Posted in Confucianism, Family, Foundations of Ethics, Leadership, Morality, Philosophy of Language, Politics, Work
I recently passed the examination to be a project management professional. In the Standard for Project Management – the Project Management Institute‘s statement of principles underlying project management – one particular principle caught my eye for its ethical significance. That is the principle they call stewardship.
The closest thing to a definition of stewardship in the Standard is:
Stewardship has slightly different meanings and applications in different contexts. One aspect of stewardship involves being entrusted with the care of something. Another aspect focuses on the responsible planning, use, and management of resources. Yet another aspect means upholding values and ethics. (25)
That definition covers a lot of ground, but the part that struck me in particular was being entrusted with the care of something. That idea resonated with an ethical principle that I’ve found important as a manager – one which I have drawn above all from Confucianism.
Continue reading