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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Category Archives: Analytic Tradition

On “just asking questions” as a trans philosopher

29 Sunday Jun 2025

Posted by Sandhya Lele in Analytic Tradition, Certainty and Doubt, Fear, Humility, Metaphilosophy, Politics, Work

≈ 2 Comments

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academia, Daily Nous, gender, identity, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Kathleen Stock, Willow Starr

Transgender identity raises a variety of interesting philosophical questions, and on an issue this controversial, the answers to those questions will necessarily be controversial too. I recently found myself embroiled in some of this controversy on Daily Nous, the main blog for philosophy as a profession.

I’ll start here by recapping the controversy to date, before turning to a response. There’s a new free zine out just launched, called Being Trans in Philosophy, which shares trans philosophers’ stories of their experiences. That’s not the controversial part: I think it’s great to give trans philosophers a dedicated space to tell their stories! I have no objection to the zine itself. What I objected to was this passage in the zine’s press release:

Philosophical conversations about trans people do not happen in a vacuum. They happen in a political context where trans people are relentlessly attacked and a material context where trans lives are particularly vulnerable. These contexts make it impossible to “just ask questions” about trans people. And trans people and our loved ones are not okay—in, with, and because of our discipline.

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Why philosophy must cross boundaries

22 Sunday Jun 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Karma, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Natural Science, Social Science

≈ 6 Comments

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academia, Céline Leboeuf, Charles Goodman, Christine Korsgaard

When I described philosophy in my “Why Philosophy?” interview, I hadn’t intended my description to be controversial. Only when Céline Leboeuf gave the interview a title did I realize that it is.

Leboeuf entitled the interview “philosophy crosses boundaries”, which is a phrase that had just felt obvious to me when I wrote the interview answers. But when I saw that that was the title Leboeuf had picked, I suddenly realized that it isn’t. Many philosophers, I recalled, don’t think that way.

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In memoriam: Alasdair MacIntyre

25 Sunday May 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Politics, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Roman Catholicism

≈ 4 Comments

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Alasdair MacIntyre, Aristotle, autobiography, Friedrich Nietzsche, ISME, Karl Marx, Martha Nussbaum, obituary, relativism, Scotland, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Kuhn

My photo of an elderly MacIntyre speaking in 2019 at “To What End?”

Alasdair MacIntyre is dead. He had a very good run, better than many could dream of: he was 95 years old, and produced an output significant enough to be in competition for the title of “greatest philosopher of his age”. Few indeed are the 20th- or 21st-century philosophers who have an entire learned society – in his case the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry (ISME) – devoted to pursuing the implications of their work. It seems that MacIntyre himself was a little uncomfortable with that society’s existence. The one time I ever saw MacIntyre in the flesh was at the society’s 2019 conference, held on the University of Notre Dame campus near his home, in honour of his 90th birthday – but, I was told, he only participated on condition that his name not appear anywhere in the conference title. (Thus, given his focus on teleology and the aims of human life, the conference was called “To What End?”)

Even now, MacIntyre still sits outside what is usually considered the philosophical mainstream. Though he was trained in the English-language mainstream of analytic philosophy and taught in analytic departments, he refused to confine himself to the analytic mode of philosophizing, always writing in a way broader and less precise than analytic departments were usually willing to count as good philosophy. That experience surely shaped one of MacIntyre’s more powerful philosophical insights: the recognition that philosophy itself always operates within the context of historical tradition – the conception of tradition at issue being close to Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigms. Kuhn and MacIntyre recognized that different paradigms differed not just on what claims they believed to be true and false, but on the standards by which one judged them true and false; MacIntyre knew that within philosophy, analytic philosophy’s standards were never the only ones available.

Thus MacIntyre is the sort of philosopher whom one often first encounters in unusual ways, outside being taught him in a classroom. Thus one colleague at “To What End?” helpfully started conversations with “What’s your MacIntyre story?” – imagining, rightly, that everyone had their own personal story of encountering his ideas, more interesting than being simply taught him in an Intro to Ethics class. (Now that I think of it, the one place I remember being asked a similar question was on a long tour around the Laphroaig whisky distillery in Scotland, which also began with the guide asking “What’s your Laphroaig story?” – a comparison that would likely have pleased MacIntyre, as he always took his philosophy to be deeply informed by his Scottishness.)

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Of offbeat philosophers

02 Sunday Feb 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Analytic Tradition, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy

≈ Comments Off on Of offbeat philosophers

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Clive Bell, Donna Haraway, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Jalal al-Din Rumi, Jayarāśi, Lawrence Harvey, Mozi, music, Zera Yacob

Writing advice often rightly asks authors: “When was the last time you wished a book was longer?” Well, now I can say: it was when I recently read Lawrence Harvey’s Offbeat Philosophers: Thinkers Who Played A Different Tune (whose publishers offered me a review copy). This book clocks in at a mere 73 pages, plus bibliography. Fortunately it’s priced accordingly ($10 for the paperback, $8 for the e-book), but Harvey doesn’t leave himself a lot of room to do the job. The book catalogues ten “offbeat” philosophers; it could have used more of them, but more than that, it could have given them each more space. They get about six pages each (including a list of questions-for-further-reflection), which leaves little room to explore the depth that makes a philosopher’s thought exciting.

Harvey doesn’t say a lot about what makes a philosopher “offbeat”, or his criteria for inclusion. He develops the musical metaphor: as in musical syncopation, where “the regular rhythmic flow is disrupted with accents and stresses occurring out of step with the expected norms”, so “the philosophers in this short anthology all play to what might be termed a different tune – one that serves to disrupt and unsettle the fixity of rhythmic thought.” (1) That’s a very imprecise way of putting things, the sort of imprecision that might drive an analytic philosopher crazy, but perhaps that’s just the point: in a philosophical world still ruled by the analytic tradition, to be “offbeat” may well mean to avoid putting precision first.

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The scientific self is not reductionist

08 Sunday Dec 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Biology, Early and Theravāda, Metaphysics, Modernized Buddhism, Philosophy of Science, Self

≈ 4 Comments

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Buddhaghosa, Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, conventional/ultimate, expressive individualism, Wilfrid Sellars

Any serious contemporary Buddhist intellectual needs to think through the connection between Buddhist ideas and the relevant claims of natural science. Many of us, too, are expressive individualists: we believe that there is something valuable in the project of discovering one’s true self. The expressive individualist view of self-discovery and self-expression – put perhaps in most recent terms as “let your freak flag fly” – is that’s an uncomfortable fit with a tradition that has proclaimed for millennia that there is no true self.

There are at least three different metaphysical understandings underlying each of Buddhism, natural science, and expressive individualism, and at least at first glance they all appear to be in conflict. Resolving this conflict is not easy, and recently my views on how to do it best have significantly changed. I often find I get the best sense of what’s important in other people’s philosophies by figuring out what they changed and why, so I thought it would be helpful to show the changes in my own.

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In defence of bullshit Marxism

08 Sunday Sep 2024

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

≈ 14 Comments

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Ben Burgis, Brendan Larvor, Erik Olin Wright, G.A. Cohen, G.W.F. Hegel, John Rawls, Joseph Heath, Karl Marx, nescio13, Plato, Thomas Kuhn

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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In defence of moral laxity

05 Sunday May 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Generosity, Morality, Shame and Guilt

≈ 4 Comments

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Bernard Williams, consequentialism, obligation, Richard Chappell, Robin Dillon, virtue ethics

Richard Chappell recently had a lovely post asking people to disagree with him. I obliged by expressing my misgivings about what he calls beneficentrism, “The view that promoting the general welfare is deeply important, and should be amongst one’s central life projects.” I argued instead for

a relatively strong partialist account, in which one is obligated to promote the welfare of those one is directly engaged with – co-workers, family, friends, fellow organization members, maybe neighbours – but going beyond that is supererogatory. (Beyond that circle there are harms that one is obligated not to cause, but harm and benefit are not symmetrical.)

I liked Chappell’s main response, which seemed to deemphasize obligation, and I didn’t find much to object to:

we would do well, morally speaking, to dedicate at least 10% of our efforts or resources to doing as much good as possible (via permissible means). Whether this is obligatory or supererogatory doesn’t much interest me. The more important normative claim is just that this is clearly a very worthwhile thing to do, very much better than largely ignoring utilitarian considerations.

But he also linked to a backgrounder on obligation, and there I found much more to disagree with. I agree with Chappell’s most basic point in the backgrounder: that it is “unfortunate” that “Delineating the boundary between ‘permissible’ and ‘impermissible’ actions… has traditionally been seen as the central question of ethics”. But I disagree entirely with his reasoning for this view.

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You don’t have to drop philosophy for activism

21 Sunday Apr 2024

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

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Bertrand Russell, democracy, George Boole, Helen De Cruz, Judith Simmer-Brown, Nathan J. Robinson, Noam Chomsky, Peter Singer, United States, war

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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Mystics, Marx, and negating the negation

28 Sunday Jan 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Deity, Dialectic, Economics, German Tradition, Logic, Metaphysics, Politics, Roman Catholicism

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Alfred North Whitehead, Bernard McGinn, Bertrand Russell, Edmund Colledge, Friedrich Engels, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Meister Eckhart, nondualism

The phrase negation of the negation is best known from Karl Marx’s work, as when he uses it to describe capitalist production in Capital. It’s an odd phrase that seems simply redundant in the formal logic taught to analytic philosophers and computer scientists. There, the principle of double negation elimination tells you ¬¬P -> P: that is, the negative of the negative is the positive, and nothing more. Russell and Whitehead in Principia Mathematica say simply: “a proposition is equivalent of the falsehood of its negation.” On that account, to “negate the negation” of something just leaves you with its affirmation, the original thing you were negating: all you’re doing is being unnecessarily wordy, by saying not-not-P when you could have just said P.

But in Marx’s inspiration Hegel, there is much more to the phrase than this redundancy. A great deal of Hegel’s thought proceeds in the kind of three-part progression that introductions to Hegel often call thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (though Hegel never used those terms in that way). When thinking through a particular idea we begin in a first, unquestioned or immediate, position – a prejudice. This idea gets challenged by its opposite, the negation or negative moment. The third and final step is in some ways closer to the first than to the second, but it is crucially different: it takes up the truth of the second within it, transcends and includes it. This is negating the negation: negating here is a process, not a simple inversion or opposite but a rational movement forward. That movement is at the heart of Hegel’s thought.

I was startled recently to encounter the phrase “negation of negation” in a rather different place: the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart. At first, Eckhart’s only obvious commonality with Hegel and Marx is that they are all German. But the commonalities go deeper, at least with Hegel. Hegel isn’t obviously a mystic: his logocentrism leaves little room for ineffability or mystery, and leaves him to be disdainful of mystical experience. Yet depending on how one defines mysticism, there is a mystical dimension at least in Hegel’s nondualism, where everything comes back to a spirit or mind (Geist) that is both subject and object, both God and self. And Hegel traces that nondualism directly back to Eckhart himself. In the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel describes Eckhart as having “a thorough grasp of the divine depth” in this passage from Eckhart’s sermons:

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Video debate: “Śāntideva: utilitarian or eudaimonist?”

15 Thursday Dec 2022

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Generosity, Happiness, Karma, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Supernatural

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Charles Goodman, consequentialism, Evan Thompson, Mozi, Peter Singer, Princeton University, Śāntideva, utilitarianism

This November, Charles Goodman and I had a wonderful debate at Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society and Religion, on the interpretation of Śāntideva’s ethics: Charles claims that Śāntideva is a utilitarian, I claim that he is a eudaimonist. You can now watch the video of the debate on the Center’s website; I hope you enjoy!

Charles and I refer a lot in the debate to the handouts we created; I’m attaching them here.

Lele handoutDownload
Goodman handoutDownload
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