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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Category Archives: Epistemology

Integrators and operators at the APA

24 Sunday Oct 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Asian Thought, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Politics, Prejudices and "Intuitions"

≈ 9 Comments

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APA, Aztec, Bernard Lonergan, conferences, Korea, Matthew Yglesias, Mexico, race, United States

The Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association held its 2021 annual meeting last winter. It could not meet in person, of course. I forget where it was originally scheduled to meet, but that hardly matters now. Rather: since attending philosophy conferences is usually not related to my day job, I need to use my own money and precious vacation time to travel there, so under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have attended. This year, though, since it was virtual (and spread over two weekends), I had a chance to participate and see several of the sessions.

What immediately struck me on perusing the meeting program was how drastically different the meeting’s content was from previous years. It seemed barely recognizable as the same organization. On the kinds of abstract analytical topics that are the APA’s traditional bread and butter – epistemology, philosophy of language, meta-ethics – there were surprisingly slim pickings. The sessions I’d found most valuable in past years were on interpreting and applying philosophers of the Western canon – Aristotle, Hume, Hegel – and this year, those too were in short supply. Neither kind of session was gone, their numbers were just notably smaller, at least in proportion.

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Why philosophy needs history

04 Sunday Apr 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Epistemology, German Tradition, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Truth

≈ 3 Comments

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Benjamin Bloom, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Imre Lakatos, Thomas Kuhn

After writing my previous post about history and the love of literature, I realized there’s a lot more one could say about the way history can deepen our appreciation of a work of literature – and perhaps even more so of philosophy, where I’ve thought about the question a lot more. I noted Herder’s recognition of the differences between eras, but there’s a lot more to say beyond that. It’s a particularly important point to make within philosophy, since it’s at the heart of the analytic-continental divide: analytic philosophers typically appreciate the truth of philosophical texts but without reference to their historical context, and continental philosophers typically learn about the historical context of texts without reference to their truth.

I am not satisfied with either of these approaches, because I think learning the historical context of a text is directly relevant to assessing its truth. And I think it’s time to unpack what I mean by that a bit more.

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The reasons for nondualism

21 Sunday Mar 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Psychology, Reading and Recitation, Sufism, Vedānta

≈ 10 Comments

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Advaita Vedānta, Alasdair MacIntyre, Aristotle, conventional/ultimate, drugs, G.W.F. Hegel, Gārgī Vācaknavī, Muhyiddin ibn 'Arabī, mystical experience, Nathan (commenter), nondualism, pramāṇa, Roland Griffiths, Śaṅkara, Thales, Upaniṣads, Zhiyi

I said previously of nondualism, “I’m not sure I can think of any other major philosophical idea that flowered so much in so many different places, more or less independently. I think that gives us prima facie reason to think the nondualists were on to something important.” Nathan reasonably took me to task for this claim in a comment: “Amod seems to overlook that ideas can be successful without being true.”

I don’t think it’s fair to say I overlooked that point: I said the pervasiveness gave us reason prima facie – at first glance – to say think the nondualists were on to something. That doesn’t mean nondualism is true, and I didn’t say that it was. Second glances might reveal something different. And where I think Nathan is right is in asking us to take those second glances. Is nondualism widespread for a reason other than its being true?

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How a fundamentalist gave us fallibilism

29 Sunday Nov 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Certainty and Doubt, Epistemology, Islam, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Science, Roman Catholicism

≈ 2 Comments

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al-Ghazālī, David Hume, fundamentalism, ibn Rushd, Immanuel Kant, Nicholas of Autrecourt, Nicolas Malebranche, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham

Fallibilism is one of the most important modern ideas. By fallibilism I mean the idea that no idea is in principle immune to revision. It is among the most important methodological principles for natural science. As Ann Druyan said, science “is forever whispering in our ears, ‘Remember, you’re very new at this. You might be mistaken. You’ve been wrong before.’” Many of the claims a Newtonian physicist would once have confidently made, have been shown to be false by Einsteinian and quantum physicists.

As it turns out, this crucial idea has important roots in Muslim thinkers who might reasonably be called fundamentalist.

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The need for subjectivity

25 Sunday Oct 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Death, Epistemology, Metaphysics, Natural Science, Self

≈ 5 Comments

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Augustine, conventional/ultimate, G.W.F. Hegel, Graham Harman, Kyoto School, Nishida Kitarō, nondualism, Quentin Meillassoux, Śaṅkara, Speculative Realism, Wilfrid Sellars

I first read Quentin Meillassoux in a local reading group in summer 2016, and thought at first that I was largely in agreement with him. That changed in 2019 when the same group read the Kyoto School‘s Nishida Kitarō.

Nishida reminded me of the importance of subjectivity in our thought about the world – something which Meillassoux is at pains to deny. It was particularly striking to hear this from Nishida since he was a self-proclaimed Buddhist – a tradition so often thought to deny subjectivity. Nishida says:

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Right view vs. true statements

13 Sunday Sep 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Attachment and Craving, Early and Theravāda, Epistemology, Philosophy of Language, Truth

≈ 4 Comments

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Abhidhamma, Buddhaghosa, Noble Eightfold Path, Pali suttas, Paul Fuller, Wilfred Cantwell Smith

Paul Fuller’s The Notion of Diṭṭhi in Theravāda Buddhism, as its title might suggest, is a dry, abstract, technical monograph. It may also be one of the more spiritually beneficial books I have ever read.

I suppose maybe both of these things are appropriate to the book’s subject matter, the Pali Canon. One of the Canon’s “three baskets”, the abhidhamma, is notorious for its level of technical abstraction – and yet Theravāda tradition has consistently held it to be of great spiritual benefit. Erik Braun has demonstrated how the modern Burmese traditions of vipassanā meditation, now enormously popular around the world, have their origins in study of the abhidhamma.

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Resolving cliffhangers in a book

09 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy

≈ 1 Comment

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Alasdair MacIntyre, Aristotle, ascent/descent, autobiography, intimacy/integrity, J.B. Schneewind, Karl Marx, Martha Nussbaum, Robert M. Gimello, Śāntideva, Thomas Aquinas

For some time now I have realized: it is time for me to write a book. It’s time to take ideas that I have circulated in blog-post form and develop them into a more systematic, coherent constructive argument. It has now been about seventeen years since Robert Gimello told me that the project that I had wanted to do for my dissertation was a twenty-year project, and as it turns out, I have spent much of those ensuing years working toward exactly that.

The questions that drove my dissertation – the ethics of emotion around attachment, anger and external goods – have continued to drive my thoughts over the thirteen years since I finished it, through twists and turns like declaring myself Buddhist. The dissertation could not resolve them; it ended on a cliffhanger. Śāntideva had good reasons for his views; Martha Nussbaum had good reasons for hers; where do we go from here? By 2013 I’d been thinking here about ways to resolve that cliffhanger, but I now think the approach I took at that time was exactly the wrong one: I had tried to generalize Śāntideva’s and Nussbaum’s views, viewing them as exemplars of integrity ascent and intimacy descent worldviews respectively. As I said at the time, that approach helped me spell out my problématique – but it still didn’t bring me any closer to resolving it.

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Absurd trolleys

15 Sunday Mar 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Action, Analytic Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Play, Prejudices and "Intuitions"

≈ 1 Comment

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Cyanide and Happiness, Michael Schur, pedagogy, Philippa Foot, technology, trolley problem

It appears that the trolley problem is, as they say, having a moment. Possibly due to its newfound relevance to autonomous cars and other robots – a relevance that would have been entirely science-fictional when Philippa Foot formulated the modern version of the problem in 1967 – it is now making multiple appearances in popular culture. In that respect it is a notable counterpoint to the claim I made years ago that analytic philosophy doesn’t make for good visual media.

Two years ago I noted how the problem is the focus of an excellent episode of Michael Schur’s The Good Place. The Wikipedia entry on the trolley problem lists several other appearance from the past decade. Perhaps most entertainingly of all, the writers of the webcomic Cyanide and Happiness have released a hilarious party game (in the matching style of Apples To Apples or Superfight) called Trial By Trolley.

trial by trolley

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An invisible ideal that we cherish

14 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Foundations of Ethics, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Politics, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Self, Sex, South Asia, Western Thought

≈ 18 Comments

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Charles Taylor, Gretchen Rubin, identity, law, music, Prince Ea, qualitative individualism, race, Supreme Court of India

When we study non-Western cultures it is difficult to separate out the study of “philosophy” from the study of “religion”. Those of us who study the brilliant arguments of élite men are often told we should pay more attention to the lived culture, to what people there actually say and do. There are advantages and disadvantages to studying other cultures this way. But one of the things we often don’t do is turn that same gaze on our own.

What if, as philosophers in the West, we paid more attention to the ideas that actually underlie our everyday lives and cultures and arguments rather than to prestigious theories? As “religious studies” scholars do, in ways that do not and should not depend on the concept of “religion”? I think that if we approached contemporary Western philosophical culture in this way, we would discover how much of our ethical life is animated by an important ethical ideal that has not had a defender as philosophically rigorous and articulate as a Kant or a Rawls. Continue reading →

How can traditions be commensurable?

02 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Biology, Dialectic, Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science

≈ 4 Comments

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Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Darwin, Christian Hendriks, Imre Lakatos, Thomas Kuhn

I closed my previous post on method by noting I am getting increasingly skeptical of MacIntyre’s view that traditions are incommensurable with each other. Christian Hendriks made an excellent comment in response:

What would it look like for philosophical traditions to be more commensurable? It has seemed obvious to me for quite some time that many philosophical traditions are incommensurable; MacIntyre is attractive to me in large part because he addresses this problem (and addresses it as a problem rather than a neutral feature). I don’t mean “it seems obvious” to stand in for an argument here, but I can’t at this moment even imagine what it would look like for traditions to be more commensurable than MacIntyre claims. Can you elaborate on that? [emphasis in original]

It is a great question and one I will probably need to think through more fully. But I’d like to take a first stab at it here. Continue reading →

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