Category Archives: Method

On Christianity’s moderate importance

21 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by in Christianity, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Politics, Social Science

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When it comes to writing about Christianity, C.S. Lewis had an impressive talent for making claims that were witty, sincere, clever, pithy, and completely wrong. I discussed one of these – the “Lord, Liar, or Lunatic” argument – before. Recently, I’ve been seeing another one popping up in church ads on the Boston subway, where I do a lot of my writing. Lewis said:

One must keep on pointing out that Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.

The church slightly modified this quote to fit in its ads: “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.” The modified version removes a little bit of the untruth: surely there is more to the two-thousand-year history of Christian tradition, from St. Teresa’s visions to church architecture, than a mere statement. But the “statement” bit isn’t the point of Lewis’s quote, and it’s not what I want to focus on here either. Continue reading →

On the economic value of the humanities

14 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by in Economics, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Politics, Work

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[This entry will be cross-posted at the Bulletin for the Study of Religion.]

I’ve been asked to expand on some brief comments I made a little while ago in a Facebook thread. They pertain to the institutional context of the humanities – including philosophy and especially religious studies – in academia. Since my new job involves supporting an entire university and not only the humanities, I no longer have a professional stake in these debates. But they remain important for me as someone who cares deeply about the subject matter of philosophy and of much religious studies, for the academy remains central to the work done in these fields, for now at least. It may be that in my lifetime “philosopher” and “religionist” do not primarily mean “professor of philosophy” and “professor of religious studies” respectively. I would welcome such a day, but it is not here yet.
The comments I made stem from a newsletter recently published by the AAR on the topic of teaching and learning. The newsletter highlights Martha Reineke, a professor of religion at the University of Northern Iowa. In explaining Reineke’s views, it identifies some questions important to her with the introduction: “At a time when liberal education in public universities is being challenged as governing boards, state legislatures, parents, and students press for majors with narrow vocational application, questions that keep Reineke awake at night include:”. Of the questions listed there after the colon, I’m particularly interested in this one: “When others increasingly ascribe to public higher education as a narrow economic value, how can we demonstrate that knowledge of world religions builds intercultural competence that undergirds successful economic development and supports strong communities?”

My response to this question was as follows:

The rhetorical move of “When others increasingly believe that higher education should be X, how can we convince them that we are a form of X?” is an interesting one to take. When others increasingly believe that higher education should be an ice cream sandwich, how can we demonstrate that we are an ice cream sandwich?

Continue reading →

The insufficiency of the state-structure distinction

07 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by in Confucianism, Consciousness, Foundations of Ethics, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion

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My recent article, which I summarized last week, appears in the issue of Journal of Integral Theory and Practice devoted to integral religious studies. Fellow blogger Dustin DiPerna also contributed an article to the journal, which takes an approach very different from mine. As I understand it, DiPerna discusses the history of religious studies in order to explain how it might be done from an Integral (i.e. Wilberian) perspective. Recently, Gerard Bruitzman critiqued DiPerna’s article online, and DiPerna offered a response. Happily, DiPerna’s article is available as a free PDF, and the responses are freely available online as well.

I’m excited by the conversation between DiPerna and Bruitzman because I think it opens up an opportunity for online dialogue about Wilber’s approach and its merits and flaws. Continue reading →

Précis of “Beyond enacted experiences”

30 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by in Buddhism, Christianity, Consciousness, Dialectic, Judaism, Meditation, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Natural Science, Vedānta

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I’ve been wanting to refer on the blog to the article I recently wrote for the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice. Out of respect for the journal’s hardworking editors (and the law!), I will not post the article or its text on the site. But I’d like to give a summary of what I said there, so that blog readers without access to JITP will know what I’m talking about. The argument here is not as precise or careful as that in the article, and readers will need to find a copy of JITP 7(2) to get those details.

The article is above all a critique of Ken Wilber’s method in cross-cultural philosophy, a method that Wilber himself describes as a form of empiricism. Continue reading →

The trouble with phenomenological similarities

23 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Meditation, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Philosophy of Language, Roman Catholicism

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This week’s post is a slightly abridged version of a paper I wrote eleven years ago for Robert Gimello’s class on Buddhist meditation traditions. I’m posting it now for a couple of reasons: because I still enjoy its punchy rhetoric, because it’s a useful corrective to Wilberian and similar perspectives that assume “religion” is fundamentally about mystical experience, and because I think it’s likely to be relevant to posts I want to make in the months ahead. I also still agree with it to at least some extent, but I am not entirely sure what that extent is, and that is something I hope to be sorting through.

In his chapter “What would Buddhaghosa have made of the Cloud of Unknowing?”1, Ninian Smart argues that “there are phenomenological similarities between the differing practices despite the contrast in language and style between Buddhaghosa and the author of the anonymous 14th-century Christian text The Cloud of Unknowing.” Although Smart never defines “phenomenological”, I believe from the context of the article that he uses the term to refer to similarities of experience, and specifically mystical experience.

To what extent does Smart’s chapter succeed in its project? Continue reading →

New article published on Wilber

17 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion

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I’ve just published a new article critiquing Ken Wilber‘s recent work in the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, a journal devoted to his thought. Sadly, it’s behind a pay wall, as JITP is a conventional academic journal rather than a free online journal. (This is entirely understandable, since unfortunately free online journals do tend to get less academic credibility, despite making their work available to a much wider audience.) Most universities don’t have this journal yet, but if you’d like to see the article and you’re academically affiliated, you can request it through interlibrary loan (or better yet ask your library to subscribe to the journal!) Here’s the reference:

Lele, Amod. 2012. “Beyond enacted experiences.” Journal of Integral Theory and Practice 7(2): 72-87.
[JITP is published by SUNY Press in Albany.]

At some later point I might post a blog-post-length précis of the article here, but for now I’ll just say the article criticizes Wilber’s perennialist view that mystical experience is at the core of the various “religious” traditions. The critique is primarily historical, but I also make sure to address the implications of the historical critique for constructive philosophy and integral thought (which I think are pretty major).

In praise of questions which tend not to edification

12 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Monasticism, Social Science

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The Shorter Māluṅkya Sutta, in the early Pali Buddhist sutta texts, opens with the Buddhist monk Māluṅkyaputta meditating and thinking as follows:

These positions that are undeclared, set aside, discarded by the Blessed One [the Buddha] — ‘The cosmos is eternal,’ ‘The cosmos is not eternal,’ ‘The cosmos is finite,’ ‘The cosmos is infinite,’ ‘The soul and the body are the same,’ ‘The soul is one thing and the body another,’ ‘After death a Tathagata exists,’ ‘After death a Tathagata does not exist,’ ‘After death a Tathagata both exists and does not exist,’ ‘After death a Tathagata neither exists nor does not exist’ — I don’t approve, I don’t accept that the Blessed One has not declared them to me. I’ll go ask the Blessed One about this matter. [Majjhima Nikāya i.426, Thanissaro Bhikkhu translation]

The absence of answers to these questions frustrates Māluṅkyaputta enough that he is ready to leave the monkhood and become a layman if the Buddha doesn’t answer him. Continue reading →

The classical enumeration of categories, and why it matters

22 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by in Epistemology, Logic, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Natural Science, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, Philosophy of Language, Physics and Astronomy, Truth, Vedānta

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There’s a recurring theme in Indo-European thought that has often perplexed me: categories. The Indian Vaiśeṣika school of thought is known primarily for enumerating a set of categories (padārthas) with which to understand reality. I always had a hard time getting why they spent so much time doing that. The thing is, they’re hardly alone in doing it. In an introductory class I took on reading philosophical Sanskrit, we read an 18th-century Sanskrit introduction to the thought of Rāmānuja, a thinker quite far removed from Vaiśeṣika – and that too was all about dividing the world into categories. I have not yet delved much into Aristotle’s difficult theoretical philosophy, especially his Metaphysics – but most introductions to that work will tell you that it too is all about categories. What’s going on here? Why would so many major thinkers do this sort of thing?

I think a key reasons the categories have puzzled me is that, like the majority of my readers, I have been brought up in a worldview heavily infused by scientism. In the English-speaking world, at least, we usually take it for granted that reality is made of matter; we are materialists. And we are wrong. Continue reading →

Relativism and reason (II)

15 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by in Epistemology, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Sophists, Truth

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In last week’s post I began responding to my friend Momin Malik, who had defended relativism against ideas of universal truth. Momin had argued for relativism based on the need for internal understanding: we need to understand others in terms that make sense to them. I agreed with this – noting that every universalism needs a theory of error, and one which understands others in those kinds of internal terms is the best one.

Momin responded that this was not possible: “An internalist theory of error would require the universalist to give credence to the internal dynamics of another system, which would violate its universalism.” Continue reading →

Relativism and reason (I)

08 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by in Epistemology, Metaphilosophy

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A week or two ago, my friend Momin Malik responded on Facebook* to my first post on Leah Libresco’s conversion. He took issue in particular with my very brief negative reference to relativism. I have argued against relativism at some length before, in response to Peimin Ni, and also to postmodernism. But in those posts I argued against relativism on pragmatic and performative grounds, because it was mainly being defended in pragmatic and performative terms. I’m interested in Momin’s position because, as far as I can tell, he argues for relativism on rational terms, tries to convince us of relativism because it is in some sense true, not just effective.

According to Momin, relativism says (his emphasis and brackets): “there is no universal or neutral perspective from which we can [rationally] arbitrate between competing viewpoints. So, it’s not that we can’t say Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were wrong and horrible, it’s that such a statement is made from within our own values, and not a universal or neutral perspective.” Continue reading →