Category Archives: Applied Philosophy

On justice and activism in Pali Buddhism

28 Sunday Sep 2014

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Monasticism, Politics

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My discussion with Justin Whitaker continues after my last post, which was a response to his original post about trans* inclusiveness in Buddhism.

There followed a discussion back and forth between Justin and myself. The discussion has moved away from anything to do with trans* issues, which is fine with me because my point, and I think Justin’s too, was about something bigger: the role of justice and activism in Buddhist tradition. I won’t try to recap the discussion here because the link is available for those who haven’t seen it. I’ll just refresh your memory by quoting Justin’s most recent comment: Continue reading →

Trans* inclusiveness as an innovation to Buddhism

14 Sunday Sep 2014

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism, Politics, Sex

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On his American Buddhist Perspective blog, my friend Justin Whitaker recently posted an interesting interview on the experience of trans* people in American Buddhism. Justin uses “trans*” as a shorthand for “transgender”, “transsexual”, “transvestite” and similar terms – to denote people who have become or attempted to become, in some respect, a gender different from the one associated with their biology at birth. It is clear to me that trans* people in the US face various forms of unjust discrimination. Where the tricky questions get raised is when the struggle against that injustice intersects with Buddhism – as, for that matter, when the struggle against any injustice intersects with Buddhism. Justin and I began a conversation about this in the comments to that post, and I’d like to continue that conversation in more detail here. Continue reading →

First principles of paradigms

06 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by in Dialectic, Economics, Epistemology, Health, Logic, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Social Science

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There are two different ways to apply the distinction between dialectical and demonstrative argument, and it’s important to be aware of the difference. I draw the terms dialectical and demonstrative argument from Alasdair MacIntyre in Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry (pages 88-9), who in turn takes the distinction from Boethius‘s De topicis differentiis and ultimately from Aristotle’s Topics. The key point is that dialectical argument argues to first principles, and demonstrative argument from first principles.

But what are those first principles? Are they first principles for knowledge in general, or merely first principles within a single paradigm? Continue reading →

Of disruptive innovation

16 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by in Economics, Politics, Work

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If one follows current conversations about technological changes in higher education — which it is a major part of my job to do — one quickly encounters a great deal of praise given to “disruption” and “disruptive innovation”. Massive online open courses and various other online innovations, we’re told, will overthrow the tired old models of education and usher in a marvelous new world far better for students than the sclerotic old habits of the deadwood professorial class.

So far, none of these technological trends has yet made big changes in the way higher education is done. Over the course of my lifetime, there have been only two trends in higher education that were genuinely disruptive innovations in a literal sense – that is, innovations that have genuinely disrupted the lives of the people who make up higher education. The first of these is adjunctification; the second is tuition increase. Continue reading →

Kitsch

08 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by in Aesthetics, Christianity, Modern Hinduism, Pleasure, Politics

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baby KrishnaI cannot think very long about aesthetics without encountering the concept of kitsch. Perhaps doubly so now in the Christmas season (on which more in coming weeks), but in the rest of the year at all. One of the reasons I haven’t thought that much about aesthetics, I realize, is that I suspect most modern thinkers on the subject would consider many of my favourite artistic creations bad art – if they would consider them art at all. And the concept which would typically be used to describe them is kitsch: works with a lower-class popular appeal.

Among my favourite works of music are several power ballads of the late ’80s and early ’90s, which I enjoy non-ironically. In visual art, I love the bright Indian aesthetic in its popular manifestations: poster art of deities, temples covered in “Christmas” lights. Continue reading →

The bodhisattva complex

01 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by in Anger, Attachment and Craving, External Goods, Friends, Health, Mahāyāna, Psychology, Self, Supernatural, Unconscious Mind

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There is a destructive pattern of behaviour I’ve observed too often which, in an amateur psychological diagnosis, I have come to call the bodhisattva complex. I thought of this term as a friend of mine – a young medical resident – described the behaviours she observed among her fellow medical residents and doctors, who think nothing of working 24- or even 48-hour shifts in order to help people in their care. One wonders: what kind of patient wants to be treated by a man or woman who hasn’t slept in 48 hours?

When I refer to the bodhisattva complex, I do not mean that actual bodhisattvas – ideal Mahāyāna Buddhist beings – are psychologically unhealthy. Some might make that argument (Martha Nussbaum has done so, more or less), but I would not at all. Rather, the bodhisattva complex refers to something which I think is far more common than actual bodhisattvas: you suffer it if you believe you are a bodhisattva, but aren’t. Continue reading →

New article on Śāntideva, gifts and politics

15 Friday Nov 2013

Posted by in External Goods, Mahāyāna, Politics

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I’ve just got a new article published in the Journal of Buddhist Ethics. It takes up a theme that emerged in my dissertation writing but didn’t quite fit with the broader idea of the dissertation. I’ve touched on it here a couple of times, especially in writing about Śāntideva’s anti-politics. In the article I go into more detail about Śāntideva’s rejection of political institutions, and why other writers have missed it – leading into it with the curious question of why Śāntideva advocates that his readers give gifts of sex, drugs and weapons.

One of the reasons I chose the online-only JBE for this publication is that they are, wonderfully, entirely open-access. That means absolutely anyone with an internet connection can read it, whether or not they have an academic affiliation. Have a look!

Putting intimacy/integrity back together

10 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by in Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Science, Play, Work

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Last week I submitted Thomas Kasulis’s dichotomy of intimacy and integrity worldviews to critical scrutiny. I pointed out the distinction between the epistemological element on one hand, in which intimacy knowledge is somatic and affective while integrity is self-reflective and public, and the ontological element on the other, in which intimacy sees the world as composed of internal relations and integrity sees it as made up of external relations. I noted Hegel appears to have an intimacy ontology and an integrity epistemology, while the Pali Buddhist texts appear to be the opposite – suggesting that rather than speaking of intimacy and integrity as a unity, perhaps we should break them up.

And yet while one can separate the two elements of these ideal types in this way, I suspect that one shouldn’t – because they turn out to have a deep logical relation to each other. It is one that I think Kasulis tends to leave unstated, partially because he doesn’t split up these two elements in the first place. Continue reading →

Students are not customers

11 Sunday Aug 2013

Posted by in Economics, Politics, Work

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My job leads me to think a lot about the contemporary conditions of academic institutions. Regular readers will have noticed that I have returned to these issues quite frequently in recent months. I want to make sure that I keep Love of All Wisdom focused on philosophy broadly defined, which is already a very big focus in itself, so I debate how much time I should spent on such a topic that is not itself philosophy. I think the topic of academia merits attention for two reasons: first, it provides opportunities for thinking philosophically in general about how human institutions should be run; second and probably more importantly, academic institutions remain the place where the vast majority of philosophy per se gets done today. I wouldn’t be surprised if that changes in my lifetime, but it is the case now. So we who care about philosophy have good reason to care about academia, even if our own livelihoods do not depend on it.

With that in mind: In both my academic administrative work and my computer-science classes, there’s a disturbing frequency with which I hear university students described as “customers”. Continue reading →

Hegel after Hegel (II)

04 Sunday Aug 2013

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Economics, French Tradition, German Tradition, Politics

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Last time I explored how James Doull – from a Hegelian perspective – understood the world in the century or two after Hegel, up to the fall of fascism and Communism. This week I’m following up with his analysis of the world he lived at his death in 2001 – still the world we live in today.

In reading Doull’s discussion of post-1989 politics I keep thinking back to Benjamin Barber‘s splendidly evocative title, Jihad vs. McWorld – originally a 1992 Atlantic Monthly article, expanded into a bestselling 1996 book. Doull’s staid prose would never feature such popular terms as “Jihad” and “McWorld”, but it seems to me that his analysis nevertheless rests on roughly the same contrast: a particularist embrace of divisions based on language, culture and “religion”, which emerges stronger as a response to a universalistic globalized technological capitalism. Continue reading →