• About me
  • About this blog
  • Comment rules
  • Other writings

Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Category Archives: Roman Catholicism

A beef with Hindutva

18 Sunday Jun 2023

Posted by Amod Lele in Food, Islam, M.T.S.R., Modern Hinduism, Politics, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, Vedānta

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

BJP, D.N. Jha, fundamentalism, Ireland, Milan Singh, nonhuman animals, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Upaniṣads

When I was getting ready for my PhD program to study Indian philosophy, I figured I should get more acquainted with the classics, so I sat down to read through the Upaniṣads in their entirety. I was making my way through a passage about what a man should ask his wife to do if they want a good and learned son. I saw it advance through progressively better outcomes, a son who knows one Veda, two Vedas, three. And then it culminated in this passage:

‘I want a learned and famous son, a captivating orator assisting at councils, who will master all the Vedas and life out his full life span’—if this is his wish, he should get her to cook that rice with meat and the two of them should eat it mixed with ghee. The couple thus becomes capable of begetting such a son. The meat may be that of a young or a fully grown bull. (Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 6.4.18, Olivelle translation)

I was startled. One of the first things you would typically learn in “Hinduism 101” is that “Hindus” are supposedly forbidden from eating beef, that that is one of the key requirements of their “religion”. And that certainly fit my own experience with the Indian side of my family, who consider themselves Hindu and don’t eat beef. I had vaguely heard of D.N. Jha’s The Myth of the Holy Cow, and its argued that the prohibition on eating beef was not as ancient as we think it is. But I hadn’t expected to encounter the very opposite – an instruction to eat cows right there in the Brḥadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad.

Continue reading →

A hymn to Ecclesiastes

26 Sunday Mar 2023

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Death, External Goods, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, God, Happiness, Judaism, Metaphysics, Roman Catholicism

≈ 24 Comments

Tags

Aztec, Cantares Mexicanos, Desiderata, Hebrew Bible, James Doull, justice, Leonard Cohen, music, Stonehill College

I don’t remember when I first read the book of Ecclesiastes. I first taught it at the Catholic Stonehill College. There we were free to teach Intro to Religion however we wanted, so to follow my own intellectual curiosity I made it “God in the West”. The one thing we were required to teach was the book of Exodus, which I suspect the department had selected for an uplifting social-justice message in which God acts to free a people from slavery. But the Hebrew Bible, let alone the whole Christian Bible, has never spoken with a single voice, and I selected Ecclesiastes to teach alongside Exodus because the contrast between them is so remarkable.

Much like the Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon), which it immediately precedes, Ecclesiastes is a book you don’t expect to find in the Bible. It makes you wonder: what is this book doing here? The Song of Songs bears the most obvious contrast with what we think we know about the Bible: here is a text that is obviously about a young couple having sex, seemingly celebrating it, and they don’t even appear to be married. That’s not the sort of thing that we are led to imagine would appear in the Bible. But it’s in there.

Ecclesiastes’s contrast to the rest of the Bible is a little subtler, but it’s still notable. Exodus, and other prophetic books, give you a God who acts in the world with righteousness, freeing his chosen people from slavery with terrifying wonders. Ecclesiastes gives you a God who does not.

Continue reading →

A very brief survey of Latin American philosophy

12 Sunday Feb 2023

Posted by Amod Lele in African Thought, Indigenous American Thought, Metaphilosophy, Place, Politics, Roman Catholicism, Western Thought

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, Auguste Comte, Aztec, Bartolomé de las Casas, Brazil, Brian Tierney, Cantares Mexicanos, gender, Gustavo Gutiérrez, José Enrique Rodó, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, liberation theology, Mayan, Mexico, Pope Francis, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, United States

When one aspires to love all wisdom, one should look for it worldwide – and that task is not easy. Typically, when we philosophers look outside the West, we look above all to Asia. But within the West (at least after the fall of the Roman Empire), we also tend to narrow our focus to the United States and Western Europe, with occasional bones tossed to Canada and Australia. And there’s a lot we miss when we do.

Like Eastern Europe and the Middle East, Latin America is largely a Western culture, even if it has been on the periphery of the West’s overall attention. (Latin America and Eastern Europe each pay more attention to the USA and Western Europe than they pay to each other.) Like Africa, it is a continent-sized region of the world that gets much less philosophical attention than does Asia. Two years ago I gave African philosophy a survey post here – still less than it deserves – but have not yet done the same for Latin America. I’d like to fix that now.

Continue reading →

Who cares about phenomenological similarities?

20 Sunday Nov 2022

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, Epistemology, God, M.T.S.R., Meditation, Roman Catholicism

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Buddhaghosa, Cloud of Unknowing, early writings, mystical experience, Ninian Smart, perennialism, phenomenology

I think one often learns the most about a philosopher from those points where her views change. With that in mind, I’d like to highlight a way I think my own thought has changed recently. Ten years ago on this blog, I posted an essay that I had written ten years before that, for Robert M. Gimello’s graduate course on Buddhist meditation traditions. That paper critiques Ninian Smart’s chapter “What would Buddhaghosa have made of The Cloud of Unknowing?” (in Steven Katz’s Mysticism and Language). My now twenty-year-old essay tears Smart to pieces for his comparison between Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga and the fourteenth-century English The Cloud of Unknowing. And in the light of my more recent thoughts on mystical experience, I now think that tearing up went too far.

Continue reading →

On chemically induced mystical experience

25 Sunday Sep 2022

Posted by Amod Lele in Biology, Certainty and Doubt, Emotion, Epistemology, Psychology, Roman Catholicism

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

drugs, Michael Pollan, mystical experience, Richard Boothby, Roland Griffiths, Thomas Aquinas, William James

One of the more exciting scholarly developments of the century to date has been the growth of studies – previously hindered for too long by legal barriers – into mystical experiences induced by psychedelic drugs. In a landmark 2006 experiment, rigorously controlled and double-blind, Roland Griffiths’s research team at Johns Hopkins University found that people given high doses of psilocybin – the active ingredient in magic mushrooms – typically had experiences they described as “having substantial personal meaning and spiritual significance”, and bore several other characteristics in common with a certain kind of non-drug-induced mystical experience: a sense of merging with ultimate reality, a nondual sense of the unity of reality, a sense of awe or sacredness. This sort of mystical experience, it seems, can be chemically induced.

Continue reading →

Among the MacIntyreans

18 Sunday Jul 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Foundations of Ethics, Metaphilosophy, Politics, Roman Catholicism, Work

≈ Comments Off on Among the MacIntyreans

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, conferences, conservatism, ISME, Karl Marx, liberation theology

I’ve had the good fortune in the past couple years to attend multiple events held by the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry (ISME). (To answer the question that is most often asked when I first mention the ISME: yes, it exists!) The 2020 and 2021 events (the second of these happening last week) were virtual, for the unfortunate reasons of the COVID pandemic, but that virtual status did give me the ability to attend. Previously in summer 2019 I had a wonderful time at a conference called To What End?, on the campus of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. It was only unofficially the annual ISME conference, held in honour of Alasdair MacIntyre’s 90th birthday: unofficially on both counts, apparently because the guest of honour did not want to attend a conference named after himself.

Attend he did, and it was my first (it could well be my only) chance to see MacIntyre in the flesh. But perhaps the more interesting phenomenon was to be in several rooms full of MacIntyreans. (And to find out that apparently others pronounce it “mac-in-TEE-ree-an” rather than the more obvious “mac-in-TIE-ree-an”.) It was a lovely opportunity to think and discuss more about the living thinker I have probably learned most from in my lifetime. And, perhaps, to observe the sociology of my fellow admirers of him: something MacIntyre would likely approve of, since his philosophy has always had a sociological bent.

Continue reading →

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

Tags

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.

Continue reading →

God’s natural law?

22 Sunday Nov 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Biology, Foundations of Ethics, God, Islam, Metaphysics, Mu'tazila, Philosophy of Science, Roman Catholicism, Sex

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, Aristotle, Charles Darwin, fundamentalism, George Hourani, hadith, ibn Hazm, ibn Ṭufayl, intelligent design, Lady Gaga, law, Qur'an, Thomas Aquinas

A few years ago I discussed why the debate between intellectualist and voluntarist conceptions of God (is God an intellect or a will?) was so important in the medieval Western world. (The West here includes medieval Muslims, who not only started the debate, but were often further west than the Christians – in what is now Spain and Morocco rather than France and Italy.) I followed up by speaking of the modern practical implications of this debate: how it shows up in modern conceptions of law, and democracy. I think there are also some interesting things to say about the ethical implications of the debate in its own context.

Above all, if God is taken as a supremely good being, then our conception of him is inextricable from our conceptions of goodness and morality as such – and for that matter, of how we can tell what is good. This was the context for the debates that raged in early Muslim ethics, perhaps best chronicled by George Hourani. Muslims of the time agreed that the good life should be thought of in terms of law (shari’a): the prohibitions and obligations set out by God. But how do we know what God’s law is, exactly? It depends on what God is.

Continue reading →

The metaphysical prehistory of qualitative individualism

25 Sunday Nov 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Metaphysics, Roman Catholicism, Self

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Alexander Baumgarten, Aristotle, ascent/descent, Christian Wolff, existentialism, expressive individualism, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, identity, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Duns Scotus, Martin Heidegger, modernity, Plato, Romanticism, William of Ockham

Where does our deeply held ideal of qualitative individualism – that our differences from other individuals are of the highest significance for our living well – come from? We saw last time that it was most developed by Romantics, especially German ones. But where did they get the idea? Here as in so many cases, a characteristically modern idea has premodern roots. When German Romantics like Humboldt and Herder articulate the idea they often refer to a metaphysical “principle of individuation”, sometimes referred to by the Latin term: principium individuationis. That is, everything, in the human world at least, has a principle that makes it unique, what it is and nothing else. Where are they getting this idea? Continue reading →

The saksit of Notre-Dame

03 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Early and Theravāda, Emotion, Natural Science, Place, Psychology, Roman Catholicism, Supernatural

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Abhidhamma, architecture, autobiography, Canada, Hebrew Bible, music, Pali suttas, rasa, religion, saksit, Thailand, Thomas Aquinas, Vannapa Pimviriyakul

Basilique Notre-Dame. Photo by David Iliff. Licence: [CC-BY-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)

Basilique Notre-Dame. Photo by David Iliff. Licence: CC-BY-SA 3.0

Basilique Notre-Dame – one of the most magnificent cathedrals in North America – was the first work of architecture to leave a real impact on me, as an undergraduate in Montréal. I visited it again recently for the first time in a long time, and this time it made me think: saksit. Continue reading →

← Older posts

Welcome to Love of All Wisdom.

I invite you to leave comments on my blog, even - or especially - if I have no idea who you are. Philosophy is a conversation, and I invite you to join it with me; I welcome all comers (provided they follow a few basic rules). I typically make a new post every other Sunday. If you'd like to be notified when a new post is posted, you can get email notifications whenever I add something new via the link further down in this sidebar. You can also follow this blog on Facebook. Or if you use RSS, you can get updates through the RSS feed.

Recent Comments

  • Amod Lele on The Confucian obligations of a manager
  • Nathan on The Confucian obligations of a manager
  • Amod Lele on Defending half-elves and half-Asians
  • Amod Lele on Defending half-elves and half-Asians
  • Paul D. Van Pelt on Defending half-elves and half-Asians

Subscribe by Email

Post Tags

20th century academia Alasdair MacIntyre Aristotle ascent/descent Augustine autobiography Buddhaghosa Canada conferences Confucius conservatism Disengaged Buddhism Engaged Buddhism Evan Thompson expressive individualism Four Noble Truths Friedrich Nietzsche G.W.F. Hegel gender Hebrew Bible identity Immanuel Kant intimacy/integrity justice Karl Marx Ken Wilber law Martha Nussbaum modernity mystical experience Pali suttas pedagogy Plato race rebirth religion Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha) technology theodicy Thomas Kuhn United States utilitarianism Śaṅkara Śāntideva

Categories

  • African Thought (13)
  • Applied Phil (294)
    • Death (38)
    • Family (44)
    • Food (18)
    • Friends (15)
    • Health (23)
    • Place (29)
    • Play (15)
    • Politics (169)
    • Sex (20)
    • Work (40)
  • Asian Thought (407)
    • Buddhism (292)
      • Early and Theravāda (126)
      • Mahāyāna (119)
      • Modernized Buddhism (89)
    • East Asia (85)
      • Confucianism (55)
      • Daoism (13)
      • Shinto (1)
    • South Asia (133)
      • Bhakti Poets (3)
      • Cārvāka-Lokāyata (5)
      • Epics (16)
      • Jainism (24)
      • Modern Hinduism (38)
      • Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika (6)
      • Sāṃkhya-Yoga (14)
      • Vedānta (38)
      • Vedas and Mīmāṃsā (7)
  • Blog Admin (27)
  • Indigenous American Thought (6)
  • Method (247)
    • M.T.S.R. (139)
    • Metaphilosophy (162)
  • Practical Philosophy (367)
    • Action (11)
    • Aesthetics (46)
    • Emotion (158)
      • Anger (32)
      • Attachment and Craving (26)
      • Compassion (7)
      • Despair (3)
      • Disgust (3)
      • Faith (19)
      • Fear (8)
      • Grief (6)
      • Happiness (48)
      • Hope (15)
      • Pleasure (33)
      • Shame and Guilt (7)
    • External Goods (51)
    • Flourishing (88)
    • Foundations of Ethics (111)
    • Karma (43)
    • Morality (66)
    • Virtue (153)
      • Courage (5)
      • Generosity (13)
      • Gentleness (6)
      • Gratitude (10)
      • Honesty (14)
      • Humility (22)
      • Leadership (5)
      • Mindfulness (15)
      • Patient Endurance (29)
      • Self-Discipline (9)
      • Serenity (28)
      • Zest (6)
  • Practice (123)
    • Karmic Redirection (5)
    • Meditation (33)
    • Monasticism (45)
    • Physical Exercise (3)
    • Prayer (14)
    • Reading and Recitation (12)
    • Rites (20)
    • Therapy (10)
  • Theoretical Philosophy (343)
    • Consciousness (17)
    • Epistemology (109)
      • Certainty and Doubt (15)
      • Prejudices and "Intuitions" (28)
    • Free Will (17)
    • God (66)
    • Hermeneutics (57)
    • Human Nature (31)
    • Logic (28)
      • Dialectic (16)
    • Metaphysics (94)
    • Philosophy of Language (20)
    • Self (66)
    • Supernatural (49)
    • Truth (59)
    • Unconscious Mind (14)
  • Western Thought (436)
    • Analytic Tradition (91)
    • Christianity (145)
      • Early Factions (8)
      • Protestantism (24)
      • Roman Catholicism (51)
    • French Tradition (48)
    • German Tradition (86)
    • Greek and Roman Tradition (112)
      • Epicureanism (24)
      • Neoplatonism (2)
      • Pre-Socratics (6)
      • Skepticism (2)
      • Sophists (7)
      • Stoicism (20)
    • Islam (38)
      • Mu'tazila (2)
      • Salafi (3)
      • Sufism (9)
    • Judaism (34)
    • Natural Science (88)
      • Biology (24)
      • Philosophy of Science (47)
    • Social Science (152)
      • Economics (33)
      • Psychology (62)

Recent Posts

  • How to learn from indigenous North American philosophy
  • The Confucian obligations of a manager
  • On knowing how hard BIPOC faculty have it
  • Defending half-elves and half-Asians
  • On AIs’ creativity

Popular posts

  • One and a half noble truths?
  • Wishing George W. Bush well
  • Do Speculative Realists want us to be Chinese?
  • Why I am not a right-winger
  • On faith in tooth relics

Basic concepts

  • Ascent and Descent
  • Intimacy and integrity
  • Ascent-descent and intimacy-integrity together
  • Perennial questions?
  • Virtuous and vicious means
  • Dialectical and demonstrative argument
  • Chastened intellectualism and practice
  • Yavanayāna Buddhism: what it is
  • Why worry about contradictions?
  • The first philosophy blogger

Personal favourites

  • Can philosophy be a way of life? Pierre Hadot (1922-2010)
  • James Doull and the history of ethical motivation
  • Praying to something you don't believe in
  • What does postmodernism perform?
  • Why I'm getting married

Archives

Search this site

All posts, pages and metadata copyright 2020 Amod Lele. Comments copyright 2020 their comment authors. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA) licence.

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.