Category Archives: Analytic Tradition

Logic and truth as normative

13 Sunday Nov 2011

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Deity, Logic, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Psychology, Social Science, Truth

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , ,

I’ve been thinking a lot about the seventh chapter in a splendid book called The Ancients and the Moderns, by a fascinating Boston University professor named Stanley Rosen. I read the book over two years ago, but the ideas of this chapter have since continued to percolate in my brain.

Rosen argues that we need to see a much closer association between two fields of study often thought separate: logic and psychology. At first glance, the two might seem to have little in particular to do with one another. Logic concerns itself with the proper formal relationships between statements in arguments; psychology, with the empirical investigation of mind and behaviour.

But more basically, what are logic and psychology? Both, really, are the study of thought. Continue reading →

Finding value at the heart of reality

25 Sunday Sep 2011

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Deity, Foundations of Ethics, Metaphysics

≈ 34 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I previously called the problem of good. Those who believe there is an ultimate goodness central to the universe face the problem of the universe’s imperfection and badness. The most obvious form of this problem is the Abrahamic problem of suffering; it’s also a problem for Advaita Vedānta, in which it’s hard to explain how ignorance can be possible. But for those who don’t believe in that ultimate goodness – which includes Theravāda Buddhists as well as naturalistically minded scientists – there is an alternate problem, of how we explain the existence of value in the first place.

This problem is not quite the opposite of the problem of suffering. Those who don’t believe in an ultimate value of this sort – I am here going to call them “atheists” as a shorthand, though I think that runs the risk of oversimplifying the matter – have no problem explaining the existence of particular good things, the way that theists have a problem explaining the existence of hurricanes or ALS. The problem they face, rather, is in the basic question of how things can be good (or bad) at all, of how the very ideas of goodness or badness can mean anything. Continue reading →

Internalism and externalism, in epistemology and ethics

21 Sunday Aug 2011

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, Judaism, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, Sophists, Truth

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

Is man the measure of all things? Or at least, are creatures with subjective internal consciousness the measure of all things? In ancient Greece, the Sophists answered yes. In so doing, they inaugurated Western reflection on a perennial question that stretches throughout both theoretical and practical philosophy, epistemology and ethics.

I’ve briefly discussed this question before, with a focus on ethics. Afterwards, following James Doull, I examined how it gets works out in the history of Western philosophy after the Sophists – in ethics. But as Doull knew, there is an epistemological story that parallels the ethical. Continue reading →

How may we tell true from false?

24 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by in Aesthetics, Analytic Tradition, Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, Truth, Vedānta, Virtue

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

How can we, or should we, learn what is true and what is false? This is one of the most enduring and basic questions in philosophy – “basic” because it is fundamental to so many others, not because the answers are in any way easy or simple.

The question, or some form of it, came up a number of times in recent discussions of “common sense”: if common sense isn’t reliable, I was asked, what is? I’m going to try to avoid the word “reliable” as I think its different uses became confusing in the previous debate; I have little stake in its use as a term. But the basic question of determining truth from falsehood is a crucial one and worth asking.

That’s not to say, however, that it admits easy answers, for I don’t think we should expect easy answers on the most basic philosophical questions. Continue reading →

The problem with the trolley

27 Sunday Feb 2011

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Virtue

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , ,

Suppose a trolley is hurtling down a track, on which are placed five innocent people with no chance to escape in time. You are standing beside a switch that will redirect the trolley onto a track where stands one innocent person, who also has no chance to escape. Should you flip the switch, and thereby kill one to save five?

Now suppose there is no track onto which the trolley can be redirected; the five innocents will be in its path no matter what happens. Instead of being beside a switch, you are standing on a bridge over the tracks, beside a very fat man looking down over the action. You can push the man over the bridge, knowing his enormous girth will stop the trolley’s movement before it hits the innocents. Should you push the man, and thereby kill one to save five?

Michael Sandel begins his famous course on Justice with this action scene, and it’s a great way to start such a course. This trolley problem, ingeniously introduced by Judith Jarvis Thomson and the late Philippa Foot, is a wonderful way to shock beginning students out of their ethical complacency. For nearly all people faced with this problem agree they would kill one to save five in the first situation but not the second. After hearing one case they think there’s an easy principle by which to decide the right action; after hearing the second, they are forced to admit that there isn’t. Continue reading →

Living with doubt

05 Sunday Dec 2010

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Buddhism, Certainty and Doubt, Courage, Fear, French Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Humility, Leadership, Philosophy of Language

≈ 24 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

I’d like to say some more about questions of doubt and certainty, which were central to my recent discussion of Wittgenstein. I explored this question at greatest length in the post called “Certain knowledge”, but the conclusions there were tentative – which is to say, not certain.

To recap a little first: This question was Descartes‘s biggest passion. He wanted one and only one Archimedean point, one firm foundation that could not be doubted, on which he could build the rest of his philosophy. And to doubt that he was doubting would be self-contradictory, so the existence of his doubt and therefore of his own existence became certain. “I think, therefore I am.”

But Descartes was wrong: the existence of the thinking self can be, and is, doubted all the time. Almost all Buddhist tradition rests on just such a doubt: the self is not real. If there is an indubitable Cartesian foundation, one must take it back to “There is thinking, therefore there is being.” But is there even this? Descartes argues that to doubt one’s own doubt (or doubt one’s own thinking) is self-contradictory. To establish this point for certain, however, does require that one accept the logic law of non-contradiction – and accept it as an absolute law, brooking no exceptions ever. Graham Priest’s dialetheist epistemology denies this very point: only by allowing that certain contradictions can be true, he says, can we successfully resolve the liar paradox or Zeno’s paradoxes. Continue reading →

The bewitching Wittgenstein

21 Sunday Nov 2010

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Epistemology, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Philosophy of Language, Play

≈ 40 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

In the previous post I noted that I am completely unimpressed by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. What I know of the rest of his work, at least the Philosophical Investigations, has done little to impress me either. (Most of what I read serves to convince me more strongly that he is wrong.)

I suppose I’ve long been predisposed against Wittgenstein because of the unfortunate ways his thought is used in religious studies. Continue reading →

A quick look at On Certainty

17 Wednesday Nov 2010

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Certainty and Doubt, Consciousness, Daoism, French Tradition, Metaphysics

≈ 95 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

It is probably uncontroversial to describe Ludwig Wittgenstein as one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers. In my less charitable moods I’d be tempted to say that this is rather like being one of Kansas City’s tallest buildings. Still, his vast influence over the philosophies that come after him is undeniable – but I often wonder why.

I’m led to think about Wittgenstein by a few recent comments from Thill, quoting a text called On Certainty. Readers might recall that in my most extensive reading of Wittgenstein to date – looking at the Philosophical Investigations – the main effect he had on my thought was to push me away from his thought and closer to the thinkers he disliked, like Plato and Augustine. But a brief look at On Certainty does even less for my estimation of Wittgenstein as a thinker. Continue reading →

Universals and history in metaphilosophy

13 Wednesday Oct 2010

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Buddhism, Epistemology, French Tradition, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Pre-Socratics, Truth

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , ,

I argued before that categories like ascent-descent and intimacy-integrity are important because they help us identify perennial questions, questions that appear (together with their usually opposing answers) throughout the history of philosophy. The debate between ascent and descent is a debate between the Chinese Buddhists and the Confucians as much as it is between Plato and Aristotle. The identification of such universal questions seems to me an important part of metaphilosophy: the study of philosophy itself, and not merely of philosophy’s varied subject matter.

The attempt to identify such universal categories, I think, is central to the work of analytic philosophy. It drives the characteristically analytic attempt to classify Buddhist ethics according to the categories of 20th-century ethics: is Buddhist ethics consequentialism or virtue ethics? For that matter, is Śāntideva a determinist or a compatibilist? The problem with such attempts, in my book, is that they take it for granted that the questions of 20th-century ethics (consequentialism, deontology or virtue?) are the most important ones to ask. Such an approach, it seems to me, strongly limits one’s ability to learn anything of substance from other traditions. Foreign traditions (and this includes the Greeks and the medieval Christians as much as the Confucians or Vedāntins) can teach us different questions to ask, not merely different answers to those questions. That’s why it’s important to me that when we do think in more universal categories, we try to involve categories (like ascent-descent) that are derived from the study of multiple traditions.

Part of the point of thinking across traditions in this way, to me, is that metaphilosophy shouldn’t only be about universals, but about particulars – specifically, historical particulars. I have no problem in saying that philosophy aims at universal truth; but it does so only through the eyes of individual philosophers, who are all finite, particular and historically limited human beings, shaped greatly by their historical context. And for any given philosophy – including one’s own – that context is an essential reason why it is the way it is.
Continue reading →

The four puruṣārthas across cultures

15 Wednesday Sep 2010

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Christianity, Confucianism, Consciousness, Daoism, East Asia, Epics, Epicureanism, Epistemology, Flourishing, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Pleasure, Social Science

≈ 34 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

In private messages, Stephen Walker recently came back to points he’d made before about the three basic ways of life I had identified before (asceticism, traditionalism and libertinism). He noted, correctly I think, that that scheme as it stands is Indo-Eurocentric; many Chinese thinkers (especially pre-Buddhist ones) do not fit it comfortably.

The problem is not merely a matter of some thinkers lying between ways of life – if, say, Mozi lies between traditionalism and libertinism, as Aquinas lies between traditionalism and asceticism. Schemes like this are (and probably must be) Weberian ideal types: the possibility that real-world examples will fall somewhere in between the categories is not just anticipated, it’s intended. The point is to have a universal heuristic to understand the particulars better, not to have a classification where one can file everything neatly into one folder or the other. (There is something rather Platonic about the ideal-type method, in that one never expects to encounter a perfect or exact manifestation of the category in the real world.)

No, the serious problem is more particular to the scheme, with its third category of “libertinism” encompassing those thinkers who do not embrace asceticism and whose critiques of tradition are relatively radical. Chinese tradition features many such thinkers – but, contrary to my category of “libertinism” as defined in the earlier post, almost none of them highlight pleasure as a (let alone the) central feature of a good life. Continue reading →