Category Archives: Theoretical Philosophy

Is common sense merely plausible?

10 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by in Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Truth

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This week I’m going to continue the discussion of “common sense” from two weeks ago. I think it’s an important discussion because an overreliance on the concept of “common sense” can be (and seems to have been repeatedly) used to challenge the value and viability not merely of “religion” but of philosophy itself. I’m going to assume that readers of this current post have read that previous post – but not that they have read the comments on it, which have been the most numerous of any post on this blog so far (a full hundred!)

In those comments I challenged Thill to define the term “reliable,” which he had previously introduced to the discussion. I structured the post around the term “reliable” because in Thill’s previous comment, it had been at the centre of his only serious response to the point that “common sense” can be wrong (as in the case of sunrise and sunset). He said: “The fact that it is not infallible does not support the conclusion that it is not reliable!” No doubt I should have probed the definition of “reliable” further in the post – examining what Thill could have meant by it; I did not. I tried to make up for that lack in a later comment, where I asked Thill to define “reliable.” Thill responded that the onus was on me to define “reliable” since I had advanced a thesis relating to it; but my supposed thesis was intended as a response to his own thesis about the reliability of common sense, a word which, again, he introduced to the discussion. So I noted that I am happy to drop the term from the discussion as long as he, too, is willing to refrain from using the term “reliable” to refer to the epistemological status of so-called common sense. (That also applies to the others, Jabali108 and Neocarvaka, who have been exalting “common sense” in recent discussions.)

If we drop “reliable,” where are we left? Continue reading →

The good life, present and future

03 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by in Aesthetics, Buddhism, Death, Epicureanism, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Human Nature

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Every human life ends in death. A long time ago I noted that we often forget this fact; and we shouldn’t. But granted that we acknowledge that we are all going to die, just how significant is the fact of our deaths? A little while ago I treated it as a significant problem, whether for an egoist or for one seeking the good in politics: whatever we achieve comes tumbling down in the end.

There’s a strong philosophical allure to consequentialism, the view that the best actions are those that produced the best consequences (of whatever sort). But a problem with consequentialism is that consequences, by definition, happen in the future – and eventually there will be no future. Continue reading →

Lack of training is not reliable

26 Sunday Jun 2011

Posted by in Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Truth

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Several of this blog’s frequent commenters find significant philosophical value in the concept of “common sense,” and find it helpful to refute a claim on the grounds that the claim contradicts “common sense.” These commenters include not only Thill, whom I challenged on the topic several times before, but Jabali108 and Neocarvaka. (See the comments on this post for examples.) So the concept is worth revisiting if those debates are to get anywhere.

Let me start out by noting that I see some philosophical value in appeals to common sense defined in a certain way. This is the sense that I outlined in my first post on the topic: the prejudgements one brings to a given inquiry, especially as they come out of shared assumptions of one’s own society. My commenters seem to have something quite different in mind, however. Continue reading →

What I learned teaching Abrahamic monotheism

19 Sunday Jun 2011

Posted by in Christianity, Deity, Judaism, Rites, Supernatural

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I started writing this blog while I was teaching at Stonehill College, which hired me for a one-year visiting position and took me on shortly after that. A Catholic school, Stonehill requires all its students to take an introductory course in religion, and a third-year course in “moral inquiry”; faculty learn rapidly that these are the bread and butter of their teaching. In my time at Stonehill I taught one elective in Hindu tradition; the other eleven course sections were all the religion requirements.

Teaching students who did not want to be there was not always a joy. The wonderful advantage of teaching Stonehill’s required courses, though, was that there was almost no restriction on content. My love of big cross-cultural questions does not play well with the specialization taught in grad school and encouraged in academic publishing, where one must learn one thing and nothing else. But I could design these courses the way I wanted. The religion department had decided it wanted one common reference point that upper-year students could turn back to, and it had decided on the book of Exodus. But as long as you taught Exodus, the rest of the course was all up to you.

And so one semester I decided I wanted to learn more about Western monotheisms, and entitled my intro religion course “God in the West.” All that Buddhism and “Hinduism” I’d studied in grad school – never mind that. Because that was stuff I already knew pretty well. One of the things I hoped to impart to my students was a love of learning; and so I decided I would teach them a subject I wanted to learn about myself.

And learn I did. Continue reading →

Mou Zongsan’s theories across cultures

05 Sunday Jun 2011

Posted by in Confucianism, Deity, East Asia, Judaism, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Sufism, Vedānta

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I have recently taken on a position as interviewer for the New Books Network, an exciting new project to hold podcast interviews with the authors of recently published scholarly books. I will be interviewing for New Books in Buddhist Studies, a position I share with Scott Mitchell. I’ve completed a first podcast which is not yet available online, but I’ll let you know when it is.

I mention this now because that first podcast is with Jason Clower on his The Unlikely Buddhologist, the study I recently mentioned of 20th-century Confucian Mou Zongsan. The podcast is there to explore Clower’s ideas; here I’d like to add my own.

The book asks why Mou, a committed Confucian, spent a great deal of time thinking and writing about Buddhism. Its answer is that Mou found East Asian Buddhists expressing metaphysical distinctions with a clarity that the Confucians had not. Mou is deeply concerned with the metaphysics of value – specifically, the relationship between ultimate value and existing things. One might refer to this as the relationship between goodness and truth, or between God and world, even creator and creation. Continue reading →

Buddhist human nature from India to China

22 Sunday May 2011

Posted by in Confucianism, East Asia, Human Nature, Mahāyāna, South Asia

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The translation of a small passage can turn out to tell us a great deal. Consider section 4B12 of the Mencius. Mencius says in this section that the great man is one who retains, or does not lose, chizi zhi xin 赤子之心. This Chinese phrase translates literally as something like “heart/mind of baby.” Most translators have followed the interpretation of the great Neo-Confucian synthesizer Zhu Xi, which dovetails smoothly with the optimistic view of human nature generally attributed to Mencius: in D.C. Lau’s translation, “A great man is one who retains the heart of a new-born babe.” We are born naturally good as babies, and become bad only if something intervenes to impede our natural development. (Contrast Augustine in the first chapter of the Confessions, who observes babies as creatures of desire and envy.)

Bryan Van Norden’s recent translation of Mencius challenges this interpretation. He translates 4B12 as “Great people do not lose the hearts of their ‘children.'” And he notes that in this he is following the early commentator Zhao Qi – for whom “children” refers to the subjects of a ruler, whose hearts must be won over. Nothing here about babies or children being naturally good.

Van Norden could be right about Mencius to this point; I’m far from a Mencius scholar and wouldn’t be able to tell. What struck me as far more surprising, though, is what Van Norden says next. Continue reading →

Sudden liberation in pessimism

01 Sunday May 2011

Posted by in Buddhism, Christianity, East Asia, Epicureanism, External Goods, Free Will, Happiness, Hope, Humility, Politics, Psychology, South Asia, Stoicism, Supernatural, Virtue

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Judging by the comments, many readers found my diagnosis-prognosis post to be dark and pessimistic. Going back to the post, it’s not hard to see why. I endorse there the dark view of our existing human problems shared by Augustine, Marx and the Pali suttas; and yet I don’t think any of their solutions work. The essay effectively ends with a rejection of hope. The logical conclusion to draw from the essay might seem to be “life sucks.”

The understandable reactions to the essay’s pessimism nevertheless surprised me. For as I wrote it, I felt light, happy, life-affirming. Why? Continue reading →

Can collectivities be virtuous?

24 Sunday Apr 2011

Posted by in Action, Buddhism, Christianity, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, Humility, Philosophy of Science, Politics, Social Science, Virtue

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There’s been a great discussion going on in the comments to last week’s post on humility and science. This week I’m going to focus on only one of the themes mentioned, which takes us in a different direction from that post but is interesting in its own right.

My post recounted Carl Sagan’s claim that although “religions” claimed an ideal of humility, science was actually more humble; I argued that the two were in fact very similar. A comment from Ben acutely pointed out something I had been missing, a way in which Sagan was right that the tradition was different. Sagan, Ben points out, is defending “not the humility of individuals, but the humility of the whole tradition.” Science as a whole is able to admit when it is wrong, in a way that Christianity and Buddhism are not. In a following dialogue, Ben and I agree that science maintains an institutional humility that “religious” traditions do not, though those other traditions likely do a better job of promoting individual humility.

Other commenters took issue with this agreement, however. If you follow the comment threads on this site with any regularity, you will know that Thill and Jim Wilton do not usually agree on very much. But this time, they unanimously condemn the point shared by Ben and myself: “There is a category mistake here,” says Thill. “Traditions cannot be said to be humble or arrogant. Only individuals can be said to be humble or arrogant.”

And this is a question that well deserves further philosophical exploration. Can an institution or a tradition possess a virtue? Can a government be courageous? Can a corporation be honest? Can a tradition be humble? Continue reading →

Humility in science and other traditions

17 Sunday Apr 2011

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Christianity, Humility, Philosophy of Science, Social Science

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I’ve lately been reading and enjoying The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan‘s manifesto against pseudoscientifc beliefs (such as alien abductions). One of the more enjoyable and thought-provoking sections of the book is a discussion of scientists’ humility: “I maintain that science is part and parcel humility. Scientists do not seek to impose their needs and wants on Nature, but instead humbly interrogate Nature and take seriously what they find. We are aware that revered scientists have been wrong. We understand human imperfection.” (32) The ideal scientist humbles herself before the truths about the natural world that she finds in her work. He quotes his wife Ann Druyan to the effect that science “is forever whispering in our ears, ‘Remember, you’re very new at this. You might be mistaken. You’ve been wrong before.'” (34-5) I hadn’t thought of science in these terms before, but I think Sagan is quite right about this – to an extent, as I’ll discuss below. Sagan repeatedly and rightly stresses the importance of uncertainty for a scientist; to live up to the ideals of scientific research requires the ability to admit we are wrong. A scientist must never be too confident in her own rightness; what first seems obvious is often exactly what turns out to be wrong, overthrown by the evidence. I think this is excellent advice for scientists to follow – or anyone else.

After quoting Druyan, Sagan proceeds immediately to add: “Despite all the talk of humility, show me something comparable in religion.” And this is where he goes astray. Continue reading →

How not to conduct interreligious dialogue

03 Sunday Apr 2011

Posted by in Christianity, Deity, Islam, Judaism, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modern Hinduism, Politics, Truth, Vedānta

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When I taught an introductory religion class at Stonehill, one of my favourite texts to teach was Jon Levenson’s Commentary article, “How not to conduct Jewish-Christian dialogue.” Levenson’s article is a critique of Dabru Emet, a brief statement made by four professors of Jewish studies. Dabru Emet emphasizes the commonalities between Jews and Christians: they worship the same God, seek authority from the same Hebrew Bible, and accept the moral principles of that text.

Levenson responds: wait a minute. For Trinitarian Christians (the vast majority today and for most of Christianity’s history), Jesus is God in a fundamental sense; but for a Jew (or Muslim), to say that a man is God is an idolatry that drastically compromises God’s fundamental oneness and uniqueness. While the content of the Tanakh – the Hebrew Bible as understood by Jews – may be mostly the same as that of the Old Testament, they are read in a very different light. To understand the Tanakh, Jews turn to Mishnah and Talmud; to understand the Old Testament, Christians turn to the New. As a result, the stories of the Hebrew Bible unfold very differently in each – they are even placed in a different order, so that the Tanakh culminates with the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, while the Old Testament ends with a prophesy heralding the “coming of the Lord.” And this isn’t just a matter of arcane scriptural study: it affects one’s ethics, one’s idea of the good life. Jewish ethics have been traditionally focused on following God’s laws and commandments as revealed in Torah, Christian ethics on following Jesus’s example – or even more so on faith in him and his saving grace.

Now my interest in Levenson is not in the particulars of Jewish and Christian traditions, since I identify with neither tradition. Rather, what I deeply appreciate is his criticism of Dabru Emet‘s method. Such documents, Levenson argues, “avoid any candid discussion of fundamental beliefs,” and “adopt instead the model of conflict resolution or diplomatic negotiation.” Continue reading →