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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Category Archives: Epics

A god for the real world

04 Sunday Oct 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Epics, Faith, God, Metaphysics

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Bhagavad Gītā, Edmund Burke, Elisa Freschi, Immanuel Kant, Krishna, Mahābhārata, nondualism, saksit, theodicy

I don’t believe in God. But if I did, that God might need to be Krishna.

I have come to believe that the problem of suffering is effectively insurmountable. That is, the vast suffering in the world clearly implies that there cannot be an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God, as the God of the Abrahamic traditions is generally supposed to be.

But what about a god who isn’t omnipotent or omnibenevolent?

Continue reading →

The history of rights (II)

29 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Epics, Foundations of Ethics, Greek and Roman Tradition, Metaphysics, Morality, Politics, Roman Catholicism

≈ 19 Comments

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Alasdair MacIntyre, Bhagavad Gītā, Brian Tierney, Gratian, Hugo Grotius, law, Michel Villey, rights, William of Ockham

Last time I began exploring the history of the concept of rights (as in human or civil rights), through the works of Michel Villey and Brian Tierney. I noted that the concept as we now understand it has its roots in Latin ius, which had a meaning more like law and one’s proper share than like rights. How did this concept become the concept of individual rights that we now have today?

Villey lays the blame (and for him it is blame) on one key thinker, William of Ockham (or Occam). Continue reading →

Is there Indian political philosophy?

15 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Confucianism, Epics, Islam, Metaphilosophy, Modern Hinduism, Monasticism, Politics, Vedas and Mīmāṃsā

≈ 4 Comments

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Anthony S (commenter), Arthaśāstra, Bhagavad Gītā, Disengaged Buddhism, Fred Dallmayr, Hitopadeśa, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahābhārata, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Pañcatantra, Rāmāyana, Rammohun Roy

On the Indian Philosophy Blog, commenter Anthony S asked an important and difficult question: what are good resources for thinking through Indian political philosophy?

. I’m interested not so much in comparative philosophy as comparative political thought/theory, specifically in terms of Indian and “Western” thought regarding the international/global. While I am happy comparative philosophy seems to be taking off in recent years, I wish the intensity was the same in political science/theory. If anyone has some good thoughts/resources regarding any of this, I’d be very appreciative.

I started replying in my own comments, but I think the topic deserves a post of its own. Continue reading →

The accidental Gītā

16 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by Amod Lele in Epics, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Modern Hinduism, Morality, Vedānta

≈ 4 Comments

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Aurobindo Ghose, Bhagavad Gītā, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Paul Hacker, pedagogy, Rāmānuja, Śaṅkara, Śāntideva

A strange coincidence surprised me as I designed this spring’s course in Indian philosophy – but one that I suspect is quite significant. The coincidence resulted from three of my primary concerns in selecting content for the course syllabus, and I’ll start with those. One of those was, whenever possible, to focus on primary texts – texts actually written by Indian philosophers.

A second primary concern was to stress the connections between theoretical and practical philosophy. Too often, Indian epistemology and metaphysics are seen as purely abstract activities with little relation to one’s ethical conduct or even one’s ultimate liberation, and Indian reflection on practical matters is taken to have little background in that theoretical work (as in Damien Keown’s needlessly pessmistic reflection that there is no such thing as Buddhist normative ethics). It is no wonder that Indian philosophy is so little studied when even those who study it sometimes think its questions tend not to edification.

My reading of Śāntideva convinced me that this is absolutely not the case. Metaphysics is a pervasive concern of his most celebrated text (and one of the most widely read works of Buddhist ethics), the Bodhicaryāvatāra – not only in the ninth chapter, which focuses on it, but in the other more widely read chapters as well. (I gave a talk on this topic at the SACP a few years ago, and am planning on expanding it into a paper for publication soon.) I have come to believe that this is the case more widely in Indian philosophy as well. It’s not always easy to see what the practical implications of Indian theoretical thought are, but I think that they are there, and it was hugely important to me that my course bring them out.

My final primary concern was to bring in modern Indian philosophy, in order to excite student interest and let them know it is not a dead tradition. Continue reading →

A book about everything

21 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Epics, Epistemology, German Tradition, Logic, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Natural Science, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, Philosophy of Language

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

G.W.F. Hegel, intimacy/integrity, Karl Marx, Mahābhārata, phenomenology

Recently I’ve been carrying around and reading a copy of G.W.F. Hegel’s masterwork, the Phenomenology of Spirit. Carrying a book with such a strange and obscure title, and no cover art, sometimes makes me think: what would I say to a curious onlooker, whether friend or stranger, who asked the deceptively simple question, “What’s that book about?”

To a simple question one wishes to give a simple answer. In the case of the Phenomenology of Spirit I think there is only one good simple answer that one can give to the question “What’s that book about?” It is a one-word answer: everything. Continue reading →

The ancients in New York

30 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Epics, Flourishing, Food, Greek and Roman Tradition, Happiness, Place, Virtue

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, Barry Schwartz, Bhagavad Gītā, consequentialism, Ethan C-F (commenter), Herbert Simon, Jack Layton, John Rawls, Julia Annas, New York City, utilitarianism

A month or so ago I started reading Julia Annas‘s excellent The Morality of Happiness – while visiting family in New York City. Because of the New York setting, I was particularly drawn to this passage:

It is also not surprising that ancient ethics, with one marginal exception, never develops anything like the related consequentialist idea of a maximizing model of rationality. If my ethical aim is to produce a good, or the best, state of affairs, then it is only rational to produce as much as possible of it. But ancient ethics does not aim at the production of good states of affairs, and so is not tempted to think that rationality should take the form of maximizing them. Rather, what I aim at is my living in a certain way, my making the best use of goods, and acting in some ways rather than others. None of these things can sensibly be maximized by the agent. Why would I want to maximize my acting courageously, for example? I aim at acting courageously when it is required. I have no need, normally, to produce as many dangerous situations as possible, in order to act bravely in them.

Why is this passage particularly striking in New York? Because as I discussed before, New York life is all about maximizing. Continue reading →

Of real and imaginary evils and goods

31 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Daoism, Epics, Flourishing, Greek and Roman Tradition, Happiness, Serenity

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Amy Winehouse, drugs, Homer, Mahābhārata, Martha Nussbaum, music, obituary, Plato, Simone Weil

A week ago today, the talented young British R&B/pop singer Amy Winehouse died. I think I can sum up the popular reaction thus: everybody was sad; nobody was surprised. The chorus to Winehouse’s most popular and famous song went: “They tried to make me go to rehab; I said no, no, no.” The lifestyle she lived matched her lyrics exactly – as when she was hospitalized for an overdose of heroin, ecstasy, cocaine, ketamine and alcohol.

It’s a shame that the world lost such a great singer so early. And yet, the same louche excess that killed Winehouse was part of the appeal of her songs. Nobody wants to hear a soulful voice sing “I ate all my vegetables and flossed daily,” even if this idea is put in more poetic cadences.

Since her death I’ve been thinking about the 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil – who was not much older than Winehouse when she died herself. Continue reading →

Ascent-descent and intimacy-integrity together

26 Sunday Sep 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Christianity, Confucianism, Epics, Family, Flourishing, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Jainism, Judaism, Pleasure, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Social Science

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

ascent/descent, Augustine, Confucius, intimacy/integrity, Ken Wilber, Maimonides, Martha Nussbaum, Max Weber, Mozi, Plato, Prabhupada, puruṣārthas, Stephen Walker, Tattvārtha Sūtra, Teresa of Ávila, Thomas P. Kasulis, Yoga Sūtras

I’ve been thinking further about what kind of categories one may best use to classify philosophies and their associated ways of life. I do think my earlier classification of three basic ways of life hits on something quite important; but I also think Stephen Walker’s criticisms of that scheme (addressed here) are on point. Among those who reject traditional ways of life and knowing on non-ascetic grounds, there is more going on than the pleasure-seeking I identify with the concept of “libertinism.” That’s why I toyed in the same post with expanding the conception based on the Sanskrit puruṣārthas, the “four aims” of worldly success, pleasure, traditional duty and liberation. But as I mused at the bottom of that post, the puruṣārtha scheme loses the far-reaching nature of the three-ways-of-life comparison. The differences between asceticism, traditionalism and libertinism are not only differences in ways of living; they reach down to epistemology and ontology, theoretical ways of understanding the world. When the “libertine” mode of living and thinking is formally subdivided into artha and kāma, these two supposedly separate modes no longer look all that distinct from one another.

Instead, I now turn back to a different categorization I didn’t have time to mention in the puruṣārtha post: the intersecting axes of ascent and descent, and intimacy and integrity. These two ways of classifying philosophies seem to me to do more justice to East Asian thought, while still going “all the way down”: extending from theoretical foundations all the way up to life as lived. Continue reading →

Virtuous and vicious means

22 Wednesday Sep 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Attachment and Craving, Epics, External Goods, Greek and Roman Tradition, Mahāyāna, Psychology, Shame and Guilt, Virtue

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

AAR, Andrew Morrison, Aristotle, Bhagavad Gītā, George Bernard Shaw, justice, Mark Berkson, Martha Nussbaum, narcissism, Śāntideva

I generally agree with Aristotle that virtue is a mean between two vices – even in cases like justice, which are often taken as counterexamples. If one goes too far in one direction (say, cowardice or sense of entitlement), one misses the best way to be; the same applies in the other direction (foolhardiness or submissiveness), though it may sometimes be harder to see.

It’s easy, though, to misinterpret the idea of virtue as a mean. Virtue is not merely the middle ground. It is not a combination or a compromise between two vices. Virtue requires that the middle ground one occupy be specifically a good middle ground. It needs, essentially, to preserve what is best in each vice – to be a synthesis rather than a compromise. Continue reading →

The four puruṣārthas across cultures

15 Wednesday Sep 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Christianity, Confucianism, Consciousness, Daoism, East Asia, Epics, Epicureanism, Epistemology, Flourishing, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Pleasure, Social Science

≈ 34 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, Augustine, Confucius, Epicurus, Jeremy Bentham, John Rawls, Mahābhārata, Max Weber, Mozi, Plato, puruṣārthas, Stephen Walker, utilitarianism

In private messages, Stephen Walker recently came back to points he’d made before about the three basic ways of life I had identified before (asceticism, traditionalism and libertinism). He noted, correctly I think, that that scheme as it stands is Indo-Eurocentric; many Chinese thinkers (especially pre-Buddhist ones) do not fit it comfortably.

The problem is not merely a matter of some thinkers lying between ways of life – if, say, Mozi lies between traditionalism and libertinism, as Aquinas lies between traditionalism and asceticism. Schemes like this are (and probably must be) Weberian ideal types: the possibility that real-world examples will fall somewhere in between the categories is not just anticipated, it’s intended. The point is to have a universal heuristic to understand the particulars better, not to have a classification where one can file everything neatly into one folder or the other. (There is something rather Platonic about the ideal-type method, in that one never expects to encounter a perfect or exact manifestation of the category in the real world.)

No, the serious problem is more particular to the scheme, with its third category of “libertinism” encompassing those thinkers who do not embrace asceticism and whose critiques of tradition are relatively radical. Chinese tradition features many such thinkers – but, contrary to my category of “libertinism” as defined in the earlier post, almost none of them highlight pleasure as a (let alone the) central feature of a good life. Continue reading →

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