Category Archives: Philosophy of Language

The lost Buddhisms

26 Sunday Oct 2025

Posted by in Buddhism, Early and Theravāda, Mahāyāna, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Philosophy of Language, Self, South Asia

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One of the first things you’d learn in any Intro to Buddhism course is that most Buddhists alive today are part of the Mahāyāna tradition, in which one aspires to be a bodhisattva (and eventually become a buddha). Mahāyāna is the majority tradition because it’s the one practised in Japan, Korea, most of Vietnam, and China including Taiwan and Tibet. (Tibetans sometimes refer to their tradition as “Vajrayāna”, but they know that that’s still a form of Mahāyāna; there are no non-Mahāyāna Vajrayānists.) The name “Mahāyāna” (translated as “Great Vehicle”) is not in dispute; everybody agrees that that’s the preferred term. That part is easy.

Now here’s a question: what do you call all the other Buddhists?

Your typical intro Buddhism course gets around that question pretty easily, because there’s a simple answer if you’re exclusively talking about Buddhists today, in the modern era. As of about 1850, basically all the non-Mahāyāna Buddhists in the world identified as part of the Theravāda tradition, practised throughout Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia. The only Buddhists who might identify as something else are more recent modernist Buddhists of one stripe or another – hippyish Western Buddhists who don’t want to be pinned down to specifics, or perhaps B.R. Ambedkar’s Navayāna – and they understand they’re doing something new and a little weird. (“Navayāna” means “new yāna”.) In general, it’s pretty reasonable to say that the Buddhism existing in the past thousand years or so has been divided into the two traditions of Mahāyāna and Theravāda.

But go back before that, and things look very different.

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What is a woman?

05 Sunday Oct 2025

Posted by in Biology, Philosophy of Language, Politics

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A common paraphrase of H.L. Mencken says: “For every complex question there is an answer that is clear, simple – and wrong.” These days we see how helpful that quote is, when it is applied to the question “What is a woman?”

The OED’s first definition of “woman” is “an adult female human being”. Webster says “an adult female person”. It has become a commonplace on the right, of late, to feel so very clever by defining “woman” as “adult human female” – roughly but not exactly following the dictionary definitions – and then watch others struggle to provide their own definition. UK activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull put up billboards proclaiming as much; director Matt Walsh even made a whole movie with this definition as its thesis. The intended point of this exercise, of course, is to say that transgender women are not really women and that presumably this should be obvious. And while I do think it can reasonably be debated whether trans women are women, this particular piece of rhetoric does far more to illustrate foolishness on the anti-trans side than the pro-trans side.

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What should we call the movement?

04 Sunday May 2025

Posted by in Philosophy of Language, Politics

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In my view the most important thing to acknowledge about the 2010s movement around racial and gender issues is that it exists – something a surprising number of people try to deny. Support it or oppose it or be somewhere in the middle, we need to be able to acknowledge it and discuss it. What we call it is of secondary importance.

That said, in order to talk about it we do need to call it something, so it’s worth spending a little time thinking about what terminology to use. (While I have so far just called it by the neutral term “the new movement”, that term’s accuracy rapidly decreases for a movement more than a decade old, whose influence is beginning to fade.) Here, of course, the problem is that the movement is notoriously averse to being named. But that aversion is one of the movement’s dumbest and most obnoxious traits – as Freddie deBoer rightly notes, it is part of a demand to be exempted from the regular practices of politics – and even those of us who sympathize with the movement in general should find that aversion a little cringeworthy. There is no reason at all for us to follow it.

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Yes, there is a movement

27 Sunday Apr 2025

Posted by in Philosophy of Language, Politics

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A few years ago I attempted to depict the new race/gender movement of the 2010s in a way as neutral, bland, and inoffensive as possible. I got strong pushback even on that much, with a denial that the movement even exists.

I knew that the movement I’m describing is highly resistant to being named. What I hadn’t expected was that even the acknowledgement of its existence is controversial. But I suppose that that controversy, at its heart, is tied to its resistance to being named: the movement tends to present its ideas as if they are just the common sense that everyone already believes, while at the same time demanding drastic and radical changes (open borders, “defund the police”).

Thus Afua Hirsch in the Guardian claims that the anti-woke “define themselves in opposition to an identity that doesn’t actually exist. They are anti-woke, even though there is no ‘woke’.” Some go so far as to claim that “woke” is a racial slur.

So, let’s get down to establishing a basic point: yes, whatever you call it or don’t call it, starting in the mid-2010s there has been a major radical movement around race and gender (including gender identity and sexual orientation), one which worked at length to limit public disagreement with it. You can support this movement or oppose it (or better yet support some parts of it and not others, as I do). But in the places where it has been influential (like North American universities or other educated urban enclaves), it has been such a powerful force that it makes no sense to deny its existence. You could more reasonably say it’s not one movement but a set of (real, existing) smaller ones – but I think there are good reasons to speak of it as one.

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Why we sometimes need to deadname

20 Sunday Apr 2025

Posted by in Friends, Morality, Philosophy of Language, Politics, Self

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A little while ago I was at a party en femme and met an older man who didn’t know many transgender people but was interested in talking about it. He mentioned someone else he knew who’d transitioned, and asked about how to refer to that person when discussing things they’d done together before the transition. He said that in that context it felt more natural to refer to them by their old name and pronouns. While I understood that, I responded “It’s considered polite to refer to someone who’s transitioned by their new name and pronouns, even when you’re talking about them before the transition.”

I stand by that response, and I think that that custom is quite appropriate. For most trans people, their new identity is important to them, they have gone to some struggle to reach it, and that’s how they prefer to be thought of in general; they’d prefer to turn the page on the chapter of their life where they had been called something else. So where there are not other major considerations that override, it’s generally polite and preferred to respect their wishes to be referred to by their new name and pronouns, even retrospectively. That norm seems to me extremely reasonable. What I disagree with is an emergent norm that goes much further than this.

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Of course “racist” is a pejorative

06 Sunday Oct 2024

Posted by in Morality, Philosophy of Language, Politics

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Consider what happens when you call someone an introvert. They may agree or disagree with you, but they will probably not feel particularly flattered or offended. That’s because, functionally, “introvert” is a merely descriptive term. We sometimes value extroversion more than introversion, but we get that introversion can be valuable in its own way and we don’t think it’s morally wrong.

Next, consider what happens when you call someone a liar. They are only likely to agree with you if you have caught them red-handed, and that agreement is going to be painful for them and have social consequences. More likely, they are going to deny it, and understandably so, because the act of lying is generally a bad thing, and to be a liar – being the kind of person who lies – is to have a moral character flaw.

Now consider in turn what happens when you call someone a racist. Are they going to react the way they do when you call them an introvert, or the way they do when you call them a liar?

They will react the way they do when you call them a liar, of course. As they should. Because we widely agree that being a racist, like being a liar but unlike being an introvert, is a moral failing. Racism is very bad. To call someone a racist is to seriously malign their moral character. Given all the disastrous harm that racism has caused over the centuries, you wouldn’t think that anyone would dispute that point. But it turns out that someone does, and that someone is Ibram X. Kendi.

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In defence of bullshit Marxism

08 Sunday Sep 2024

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Dialectic, Economics, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Language, Politics

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There’s been a lively discussion on Substack recently about a school of thought called analytical Marxism – which also likes to style itself as “no-bullshit Marxism”. This school (whose most prominent members are the sociologist Erik Olin Wright and the philosopher G.A. Cohen) call themselves the No-Bullshit Marxism Group. What makes them supposedly “no-bullshit” is their adoption of precise and formal methods within their respective disciplines, attempting to exorcise vagueness above all.

The discussion was triggered by Joseph Heath’s “John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism”, which argued that John Rawls had basically already accomplished everything the analytical Marxists were trying to do, enough that the analytical Marxists eventually stopped being Marxists and just became Rawlsians.

Nescio13 agreed with the overall frame that analytical Marxists became Rawlsians, but laid the blame more on weaknesses in the analytical Marxist position than strengths in Rawls’s. By contrast Ben Burgis, who is something of an analytical Marxist himself, thinks that the core of Heath’s argument makes little sense – but in part because he sees no contradiction between being a Marxist and being a Rawlsian.

I’ve read very little of the analytical Marxists’ work to date, so I’m not going to weigh in on specific supposed problems in their work, or on the story of what happened to it. What I do want to do is defend the non-analytic style of Marxism – the kind that I think is actually found in Marx’s work, and which the analytical Marxists implicitly describe as bullshit.

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You don’t have to drop philosophy for activism

21 Sunday Apr 2024

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Buddhism, Foundations of Ethics, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Philosophy of Language, Politics

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The United States has always been a relentlessly pragmatic place, which doesn’t leave it much room for philosophy. Watching three Republican presidential candidates all take pot-shots at philosophy on the same night was only the most vivid recent example. But it’s not just right-wingers. Today Helen De Cruz discussed a recent article from socialist former philosopher Nathan J. Robinson that wonders whether we should do philosophy at all – whether, in fact, we have an obligation not to do philosophy. He claims, “I definitely feel, though, that I couldn’t have justified spending a career as an academic philosopher” – not because there are so few such jobs out there and you’re taking them from people who want them more, but because the time you spend on such a career is supposedly abdicating a larger political responsibility.

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In defence of ultimate meaning and truth

24 Sunday Mar 2024

Posted by in Aesthetics, Buddhism, Epistemology, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Greek and Roman Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Language, Self, Truth

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While the cover of Seth Zuihō Segall’s The House We Live In claims the book draws its account primarily from Aristotle, the Buddha and Confucius, the deeper, animating influence turns out to be pragmatism. There’s no problem with taking inspiration from pragmatism as such; the problem is that Seth’s pragmatism is so relentless and extreme that it rules out of court all opinions that differ from it – including, it turns out, those of Aristotle, the Buddha and Confucius.

The excessive pragmatism in question is expressed above all in this sentence: “whenever we ask ‘what’s the meaning of “X?”‘, we are really asking, ‘what is the significance of “X” for maintaining and enhancing our lives.'” (107) This pragmatic claim is simply not true. Some of us are really asking the latter question when we ask the former. Seth would like it to be the case that all of us are asking the latter question. But it’s not.

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The Confucian obligations of a manager

10 Sunday Sep 2023

Posted by in Confucianism, Family, Foundations of Ethics, Leadership, Morality, Philosophy of Language, Politics, Work

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I recently passed the examination to be a project management professional. In the Standard for Project Management – the Project Management Institute‘s statement of principles underlying project management – one particular principle caught my eye for its ethical significance. That is the principle they call stewardship.

The closest thing to a definition of stewardship in the Standard is:

Stewardship has slightly different meanings and applications in different contexts. One aspect of stewardship involves being entrusted with the care of something. Another aspect focuses on the responsible planning, use, and management of resources. Yet another aspect means upholding values and ethics. (25)

That definition covers a lot of ground, but the part that struck me in particular was being entrusted with the care of something. That idea resonated with an ethical principle that I’ve found important as a manager – one which I have drawn above all from Confucianism.

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