Category Archives: Western Thought

How not to conduct interreligious dialogue

03 Sunday Apr 2011

Posted by in Christianity, Deity, Islam, Judaism, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modern Hinduism, Politics, Truth, Vedānta

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When I taught an introductory religion class at Stonehill, one of my favourite texts to teach was Jon Levenson’s Commentary article, “How not to conduct Jewish-Christian dialogue.” Levenson’s article is a critique of Dabru Emet, a brief statement made by four professors of Jewish studies. Dabru Emet emphasizes the commonalities between Jews and Christians: they worship the same God, seek authority from the same Hebrew Bible, and accept the moral principles of that text.

Levenson responds: wait a minute. For Trinitarian Christians (the vast majority today and for most of Christianity’s history), Jesus is God in a fundamental sense; but for a Jew (or Muslim), to say that a man is God is an idolatry that drastically compromises God’s fundamental oneness and uniqueness. While the content of the Tanakh – the Hebrew Bible as understood by Jews – may be mostly the same as that of the Old Testament, they are read in a very different light. To understand the Tanakh, Jews turn to Mishnah and Talmud; to understand the Old Testament, Christians turn to the New. As a result, the stories of the Hebrew Bible unfold very differently in each – they are even placed in a different order, so that the Tanakh culminates with the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, while the Old Testament ends with a prophesy heralding the “coming of the Lord.” And this isn’t just a matter of arcane scriptural study: it affects one’s ethics, one’s idea of the good life. Jewish ethics have been traditionally focused on following God’s laws and commandments as revealed in Torah, Christian ethics on following Jesus’s example – or even more so on faith in him and his saving grace.

Now my interest in Levenson is not in the particulars of Jewish and Christian traditions, since I identify with neither tradition. Rather, what I deeply appreciate is his criticism of Dabru Emet‘s method. Such documents, Levenson argues, “avoid any candid discussion of fundamental beliefs,” and “adopt instead the model of conflict resolution or diplomatic negotiation.” Continue reading →

Marx, Augustine and early Buddhism: diagnosis vs. prognosis

27 Sunday Mar 2011

Posted by in African Thought, Christianity, Early and Theravāda, Economics, German Tradition, Health, Hope, Human Nature, Politics, Work

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The past couple weeks in the United States have been very congenial to a Marxist worldview. I don’t remember any time when the bourgeoisie has so clearly been waging war on the proletariat – or when that kind of language seemed an accurate description of contemporary society. The best known example of this is the ongoing conflict in Wisconsin, where the newly elected Republican governor, Scott Walker, attempted to strip public-sector workers of both their generous benefits and their rights to collective bargaining. With a limited grasp of the local situation (such as Margaret Wente demonstrates in this breathtakingly ignorant column), one might imagine that this is primarily a matter of shared sacrifice in a time of burgeoning government debt. That view is plausible, and entirely wrong. For not only did Walker recently enact corporate tax cuts in a volume comparable to the workers’ benefits, the unions agreed to let their costly benefits be cut if they could keep their right to collective bargaining. This action isn’t about reasonable budget cuts, but about union-busting, plain and simple.

Meanwhile, a couple of related recent American events you might not have heard of. In Maine, newly elected Republican governor Paul LePage has ordered the removal of a mural in the state Department of Labour depicting the state’s labour history, along with the renaming of conference rooms named after César Chávez and other labour organizers. The governor’s spokesman proclaimed that these symbols are “not in keeping with the department’s pro-business goals.” At the symbolic level too, the government has explicitly picked a side in a class struggle. Continue reading →

Is compassion a virtue?

20 Sunday Mar 2011

Posted by in Christianity, Compassion, Confucianism, Greek and Roman Tradition, Mahāyāna, Pleasure, Virtue

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Thill makes an important point in response to my recent post on virtue and pleasure (as well as to a commenter named Bob). The post articulated the view, attributed to Aristotle via Julia Annas and Lorraine Besser-Jones, that the fully virtuous person will take pleasure in virtuous action. Against this position, Thill claims: “Even if you want to kill a dog or a horse in order to put it out of misery and you do it skillfully, it would still be a gross distortion to describe this act as one which gives pleasure to the agent.”

Thill is, I think, getting at an important philosophical debate here: over the value of compassion. Most of us, were we to be faced with the necessity of euthanizing a horse, would feel a painful emotion occasioned by its suffering – that is, compassion. The same would happen if we needed to discipline a child – even if, in either case, we had all the best reasons to believe that this action was the best action to take. But there is still a question: is this feeling a good thing? Continue reading →

The problem with the trolley

27 Sunday Feb 2011

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

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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 →

The pleasures of virtue

20 Sunday Feb 2011

Posted by in Confucianism, Greek and Roman Tradition, Pleasure, Psychology, Virtue

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What is the connection between virtue and pleasure? The question came up in my discussion with Elisa Freschi on the previous post, and is in some respects a central question in the early history of Western ethics. At December’s Eastern APA conference, Lorraine Besser-Jones gave a really interesting talk on Aristotle’s approach to this connection, informed by some discussions in contemporary psychology. For Aristotle, she claimed, pleasure is an intrinsic part of virtue: nobody would call a man generous who does not enjoy acting generously. Besser-Jones wished to dispute this claim, on the grounds that virtuous activity is often not pleasurable. Continue reading →

Is happiness the purpose of life?

13 Sunday Feb 2011

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, East Asia, Epicureanism, Flourishing, Greek and Roman Tradition, Happiness, Pleasure, Serenity

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Blogger Penelope Trunk describes herself as having Asperger’s Syndrome. Her obsessive Aspergian interest seems to be in the nature of her own life – which makes her a dedicated follower of Socrates’s maxim that the unexamined life is not worth living. So while her blog is supposedly about career advice, it often winds up being highly philosophical. Recently, she’s said a fair bit about one of the most enduring philosophical questions: happiness.

Aristotle tells us everyone agrees the purpose of life is eudaimonia. It was once the standard to translate this term as “happiness.” This translation has started to fall out of favour, to be replaced by “flourishing” – and rightly so. For it’s pretty clear that whatever eudaimonia is – and I think Aristotle deliberately makes it hard to pin down – it is not what we usually understand by “happiness.”

Consider: near the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle tells us that everyone agrees that eudaimonia is the ultimate purpose of human life; we just don’t agree what constitutes it. But if this eudaimonia were happiness, how would we explain someone like Trunk, who has spent a great deal of time thinking about happiness – only to reject it? “I don’t want to be happy,” she says. “I want idle time to let my mind wander because the unhappy result is so interesting.” Continue reading →

Is there certainty beyond logic?

15 Wednesday Dec 2010

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Greek and Roman Tradition, Humility, Logic, Meditation, Philosophy of Science, Reading and Recitation, Truth

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Responding to my post on doubt, Jim Wilton agreed that “truth established through thought and logic is always subject to doubt.” But he suggested that not all knowledge or truth is a product of logic – and, he claimed, perhaps this non-logical knowledge can be certain, indubitable.

I agree that not all knowledge is a product of logic. This is one of the reasons I have spent a great deal of time discussing what Thomas Kasulis calls intimacy worldviews, background approaches to philosophy that are not derived from direct argument. I agree with the thinkers in such traditions that truth is not merely something expressed in linguistic propositions.

Where I disagree strongly, however, is on the view that such non-logical knowledge can be a source of genuine certainty. Continue reading →

Beyond agreeing to disagree

12 Sunday Dec 2010

Posted by in French Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Roman Catholicism, Truth

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The online Journal of Buddhist Ethics has recently begun an online conference on an interesting pair of articles dealing with Buddhism and the natural environment, by David Loy and my former grad-school colleague Grace Kao. (Both articles were originally presented at the 2010 AAR conference in Atlanta.) While the conference is oriented toward comments on the JBE website, I’m posting my response here because my thoughts are long enough to be a full blog post of their own.

The different backgrounds of the two writers are evident from their pieces – but that itself makes the dialogue between them more interesting and fruitful. Loy is writing as a Buddhist. In a sense Loy’s arguments come in two pieces: first a dialectical argument to a certain conception of Buddhist first principles, especially based on the idea of non-self, and then a demonstrative argument from those principles to a sense of environmental concern. The first section makes the article more than a piece of “Buddhist theology”; unlike Glenn Wallis’s manifesto, Loy’s article is written as if it is intended to persuade non-Buddhists to a Buddhist point of view.

The substance of Loy’s demonstrative argument is similar to one that I have criticized in the past: that Buddhism is environment-friendly because it tells us to acknowledge our interdependence with other life on the planet. Loy’s argument is a bit more sophisticated than the view I criticized, and might arguably stand up to some of those criticisms. But I’m not going to focus on that point here. Rather, I’m more interested in the dialogue between Loy and Kao, and its implications.

Kao is not a Buddhist nor a Buddhologist, but a scholar of cultural diversity and the issues it poses for global politics. Partially for that reason, Kao’s article does relatively little to engage Loy’s Buddhist claims directly. Instead, she raises interesting and important questions about the proper connection between cross-cultural philosophy and global politics. Continue reading →

Certainty requires omniscience

08 Wednesday Dec 2010

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Christianity, Deity, Early and Theravāda, Human Nature, Jainism, Modern Hinduism, Truth

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Under what circumstances can one be absolutely certain of anything? I had intended my previous post to be on that question, but the preliminary inquiries to it were significant enough that I thought they deserved their own post. I end that post, like the earlier “Certain knowledge” post, on a note of uncertainty; I don’t discuss any circumstances under which certainty is possible. So is it possible at all?

I generally lean toward saying no – and an uncertain no. I leave the possibility open that something will be revealed to me that I can be absolutely certain of; but I don’t think one exists. The happy thing about this kind of uncertainty is there’s no contradiction in it. While “there is no truth” is a contradiction because it asserts that the truth is there is no truth, and “we cannot know anything” is a contradiction because it implies that it can be known that nothing can be known, the same is not true about “we cannot be certain about anything.” The last can be asserted as a statement that is merely highly probable; it doesn’t need to be certain to be true, and therefore can be true without contradicting itself.

Still, I do think there’s one circumstance where real certainty is possible – though it is merely a hypothetical circumstance. 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

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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 →