Category Archives: Western Thought

How money corrupts the university’s values

30 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by in Economics, Politics, Work

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This April, during an ELI online conference on massive open online courses, I had an interesting exchange on Twitter with fellow educational technologist Edward O’Neill. (It was through my professional Twitter account rather than my philosophical one.) The exchange began when one of the conference presenters claimed that “the core purpose of the university, what it gets paid for,” is to provide certification for credit.

That equation – that “the core purpose” and “what it gets paid for” were assumed to be the same thing – raised my hackles. I responded in two tweets: “Since when is ‘the core purpose’ of something the same as ‘what it gets paid for’? Core mission of a university is to educate people. BUSINESS MODEL of a university is to certify for pay. Don’t confuse the two.”

The conversation that ensued was provocative and edifying, and probably best cited here in the form of the dialogue it was:

EO: Industries change.
AL: Often for the worse. Especially when something that was not previously regarded as an “industry” becomes so. Continue reading →

The justifiable conservatism of the humanities

23 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by in Economics, Work

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For those of us who think at length about universities and the changes they may undergo, it’s a commonplace to refer to the medieval origins of the modern university system. These origins are typically taken to be a bad thing. For example, lecture-based pedagogy is said to date to a time before printing, when that was the only way students would have access to a text. So, the argument goes, it’s an obsolete atavism; there is no reason to keep it around.

I have become increasingly nervous around this line of argument. For it seems to me that a fully modernized university will be one that has no place for the humanities. Continue reading →

Digital philosophy

16 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by in Friends, Metaphilosophy, Social Science

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The term digital humanities has quickly become trendy over the past couple years. The term has often excited me, since digital technology in the humanities is both a part of what I do for a living, and what makes my humanistic scholarship on this blog possible. So I’ve followed discussions of digital humanities, such as the HUMANIST mailing list, with interest.

I remain deeply interested in the field, but I’ve also begun to acquire some skepticism toward it. Continue reading →

Zhuangzi’s middle ground

26 Sunday May 2013

Posted by in Daoism, Emotion, External Goods, Serenity, Stoicism

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On Stephen Walker’s recommendation, I’ve been turning to the articles of Chris Fraser in order to understand the difficult Daoist thinker Zhuangzi. (Happily, Fraser makes most of his articles available free online.) The Zhuangzi is an intimidating text to attempt to understand for a number of reasons, and it’s helpful to have the guidance of someone like Fraser who has spent a lot more time with it than I have. Continue reading →

How dialectic transcends and includes

05 Sunday May 2013

Posted by in Dialectic, Metaphilosophy, Natural Science, Philosophy of Science

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This week I’d like to continue to think through the topic of dialectic, which I began to explore last week in the terms of a double movement transcending and including. In my most detailed previous post on dialectic so far, I got at the transcend-include distinction much more obliquely. I distinguished between dialectical thinking in a broad sense, as a progress through inadequate conceptions which are incorporated and leave their mark on the inquiry, and dialectical argument more strictly, as beginning from the opponent’s point of view and pointing out its inadequacies from within. I would say now that this dialectical argument in a strict sense is the transcending moment of dialectic, whereas the broader progress is the including moment.

In expanding on this point, let me leave aside the including moment for now and start with the transcending. Continue reading →

Synthesis via dialectic

28 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by in Dialectic, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy

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In my view, one of the most important, and often unrecognized, distinctions philosophy is between compromise and synthesis. A compromise merely finds a middle ground between two other positions; it can easily be a bad middle ground, one that takes the worst from each of the two extremes. But a synthesis, by definition, takes the best. I’d like to take the next couple weeks clarifying how synthesis is possible.

Compromise is not necessarily bad. It is essential in practical politics – in attempting to achieve positive outcomes when genuine agreement is not possible. But, I would argue, it has no role to play in philosophy, where the goal is truth.

By contrast, I find synthesis crucial to the work of cross-cultural philosophy. There are countless philosophical positions that have been taken, and contrary to perennialist views, they do not all agree. There are many perennial questions that recur throughout the history of human thought. But not only do humans continue to produce different answers to them, those different answers each get revered and enshrined. The immortal soul so essential to Christianity is denied by the Buddhists. I have always been struck by the truths to be found in radically different traditions.

But truth cannot contradict truth. If there is truth to be found everywhere – a controversial premise, I admit – then I submit that some sort of synthesis is necessary. And how may we go about finding it? Continue reading →

A book about everything

21 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by in Dialectic, Epics, Epistemology, German Tradition, Logic, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, Philosophy of Language, Physics and Astronomy

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Recently I’ve been carrying around and reading a copy of G.W.F. Hegel’s masterwork, the Phenomenology of Spirit. Carrying a book with such a strange and obscure title, and no cover art, sometimes makes me think: what would I say to a curious onlooker, whether friend or stranger, who asked the deceptively simple question, “What’s that book about?”

To a simple question one wishes to give a simple answer. In the case of the Phenomenology of Spirit I think there is only one good simple answer that one can give to the question “What’s that book about?” It is a one-word answer: everything. Continue reading →

Genealogy (and encyclopedia and tradition) of ethics

14 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by in Foundations of Ethics, French Tradition, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Morality

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This week’s post is eleven years old; I wrote it as a short assignment for David Hall‘s course on method and theory in the study of religion in 2002. The assignment was to write a “genealogy” of a key term in religious studies; I chose “ethics”. I like the paper for its historical awareness, its self-aware methodology and its general optimism for the methods of religious studies. As with many older papers, I would not write it quite the same way now, but I post it because I think it stands up well. I have posted two other posts based on course papers before. Unlike those – which were abridged – I post this one in its entirety.

The term “ethics” comes from the Greek ethike, roughly denoting a virtue, and derived from ethos, the general term for “habit” or “custom.” (Aristotle 1947: 1103a) “Moral,” derived from the Latin moralis, initially meant the same thing — Cicero, it is said, invented the term “moralis” to translate the Greek ethikos (MacIntyre 1984: 38). At some point since then — I haven’t been able to pin down the first instance of this increasingly standard usage — “ethics” came to be seen as the “science” of morals (or morality), as the discipline of moral philosophy, so that ethics was the theory and morality the practice.

We find this distinction articulated in many 20th-century encyclopedia entries. Continue reading →

Must we come to terms with postmodernity?

07 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by in French Tradition, Politics, Social Science

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This post is a followup to last week’s, and is best read in tandem with it. I argued that the difference between modernity and modernism (which is to say, the difference between modern and modernist) really matters. The question for this week: can the same be said of a difference between postmodernity and postmodernism?

It is not disputed that there is a set of ideas, however vaguely specified it may be, which became popular sometime after the mid-1970s and has regularly been referred to by the label of postmodernism. Postmodernism has some points of agreement with modernism, but generally tends to define itself in terms of its differences from modernism. But is there such a thing as postmodernity? Continue reading →

Modernity and modernism

31 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by in Metaphilosophy, Politics, Social Science

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It can feel pedantic to insist on the distinction between modernity and modernism (as I do in my tag cloud). I’ve seen eyes roll when I do it, and understandably so. Two nouns both deriving from the word modern: surely between them is the ultimate example of a trivial distinction, a hair-splitting, a difference that does not make a difference?

In fact the difference between modernity and modernism can make all the difference in the world. The importance of the distinction may become a little bit clearer when we move from the nouns to their corresponding adjectives. Modernity is simply the noun form of “modern”, as we might expect. But modernism is not. Modernity is merely the state of being modern. Modernism is the state of being modernist. And that is a difference that makes a huge difference. Continue reading →