21 Sunday Nov 2010
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
15 Sunday Aug 2010
Tags
AAR, academia, APA, Graham Priest, Karl Popper, religion, William Wainwright
Since my post on Pierre Hadot, I’ve come to realize that genuinely philosophical thought today must include elements of the domains usually called “religion” and “science” (and that those two domains must overlap to some degree). Having done a degree in religious studies, I’ve thought through the concept of “religion” a lot – mostly to identify what a misleading category it is, though of course the phenomena it typically points to matter a lot.
But what about science? It’s intriguing to me that for one of the most highly regarded philosophers of science, Karl Popper, the central problem in philosophy of science is demarcation. That is to say, for Popper, the most important thing philosophy of science needs to do is to distinguish science from non-science.
At first this seems an oddly defensive position to take. Compare “philosophy of science” in this regard to “philosophy of religion.” Continue reading
23 Sunday May 2010
Posted in Buddhism, Christianity, Family, German Tradition, Hope, Social Science, Work
Tags
academia, autobiography, Bart D. Ehrman, Friedrich Engels, gender, generations, Jayant Lele, Jesus, Karl Marx
I grew up exposed to a great deal of Marxist thought, and thought I had mostly left it behind. But in the past year or so I’ve been at something of a crossroads, reconsidering my work life as I teeter between academic and non-academic work, and I have repeatedly returned to one insight of Marx’s that now strikes me as completely true: the theory of alienation. The work we do for pay is not our own. It is never our own, by definition; it is the work we do for someone else (whether employer or customer) and it is done on that someone else’s terms.
It would be nice to think that the academy was some sort of exception to this rule; but it’s anything but. Continue reading
19 Wednesday May 2010
Posted in Greek and Roman Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Monasticism, Work
In a happy and somewhat surprising move, the New York Times has introduced The Stone, a column in philosophy. Happier still, it’s written by someone other than regular NYT writer Stanley Fish, who too often seems to be a hater of wisdom. The inaugural column is instead written by New School philosopher Simon Critchley, who gives us a thoughtful and interesting meditation on what a philosopher is.
Riffing on a “digression” in Plato’s Theaetetus, Critchley comes up with a creative definition: the philosopher is one who takes time. Plato’s Socrates contrasts such a philosopher to the lawyer, the “pettifogger,” the specialist – for whom time is money, for whom a result must be reached quickly. It is likely not a coincidence that Socrates made his living from stonecutting, not from philosophy. The “digression” is introduced when Socrates’s interlocutor asks “Aren’t we at leisure?” and Socrates replies “It appears we are.” The pettifogger asks “What do I need to know right now, for this practical purpose?” The philosopher explores the bigger picture, takes the leisure to explore at length.
This picture of the philosopher seems to describe Socrates very well – or the monastic philosophers like Buddhaghosa or Śāntideva or Aquinas, who were charged to spend their lives in contemplation, and were fed and clothed and housed for doing so. It might even describe the tenured research-university philosophy professors of the 20th century, who had a guaranteed income for life as long as they showed up to teach a few classes and refrained from having sex with their students.
But what a different world faces the young man or woman who dreams of being a philosopher today! Continue reading
10 Wednesday Mar 2010
Posted in Work
Teaching and learning in the humanities, including philosophy, are changing rapidly as technology advances; that’s pretty much a truism when every faculty member has an email address. Now, general discussions of technology often begin with the point that pretty much every object in our lives is a technology: the pencil, the staircase, the chair. (And similarly, books are information technology.) But this is usually just said to get the point out of the way before they get to Web 2.0 and cloud computing and all the fancy new stuff people are excited about. But the most important thing I realized at this week’s NERCOMP conference is that the point has really significant implications for the way we think about technology in the humanities and academia, and about generational differences more generally.
At lunch I talked to a professor who was surprised to find that students had a hard time using a wiki; other attenders tweeted their surprise that most students had never used blogs before, when the students text and tweet and use other technologies so regularly. How could the students have a hard time with these technologies when they’re so tech-savvy?
Here’s the trick: undergraduate students are not “tech-savvy,” not in the sense that previous generations think of that term. Continue reading
17 Wednesday Feb 2010
Posted in French Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Social Science, Work
As much as I love philosophy, I’ve never been an entirely comfortable fit with academic philosophy or religion departments. But until recently they were more or less the only game in town, the only way to get philosophical ideas heard by the world – unless one tried to be a freelance philosophy writer like Ken Wilber, an even more excruciating path to follow. Randall Collins in The Sociology of Philosophies argued that the great periods of philosophical creativity in the past have come with particular institutional settings – the monastery, the Greek agora – and that in the recent past it has come above all with the research university and the popular-press book, two institutions with whom philosophy’s future may now be in is in some doubt.
Blogs, however, excite me as a new way to do philosophy, one not available to previous generations. What might it mean to do philosophy primarily in this new format? It’s probably too early to tell. But there’s one towering figure in the history of philosophy who gives us a clue as to what it might look like, and his name is Baruch (or Benedictus de) Spinoza.
Spinoza should be an inspiration for philosophy bloggers in two different respects. First of all, he didn’t make money off his philosophy; he stands out (like Leibniz and John Stuart Mill) as a modern philosopher who did philosophy in his “spare” time. Continue reading
13 Wednesday Jan 2010
Posted in African Thought, French Tradition, Health, Patient Endurance, Psychology, Rites, Social Science, Therapy
Tags
academia, anorexia, DSM, Ethan Watters, Juli McGruder, relativism, Robin Horton, schizophrenia, Simone Weil, Sing Lee, United States, Zanzibar
Great article by Ethan Watters in the New York Times last Friday, called The Americanization of Mental Illness, which deals with questions at the heart of cross-cultural philosophy. (Watters also has a book on the subject coming out, and a blog.) The article notes how “mental illness” remains a category far more culture-bound than psychological studies are typically willing to admit. The DSM, American psychologists’ scripture, has a seven-page appendix (pp. 897-903 in the DSM-IV-TR edition) for “culture-bound disorders,” such as amok (a condition in Malaysia where men get violently aggressive and then have amnesia) or pibloktoq (an Inuit condition involving a short burst of extreme excitement followed by seizures and coma). It’s telling that few of the disorders in this section are culture-bound to the United States; and those which are, are quite telling: “ghost sickness” is “frequently observed among members of many American Indian tribes”; locura, nervios and susto are found among Latinos; sangue dormido is found among Cape Verde Islanders and their immigrants to the US; “rootwork” and “spell” are “seen among African Americans and European Americans from the southern United States.” That is, the only “culture-bound disorders” to be found among white Americans are found among those weird Southern hillbillies who live beside black people. Normal white Americans, the kind who live in Cambridge, MA or in Manhattan, don’t get “culture-bound disorders.” Their disorders are just part of the universal human condition.
Continue reading
30 Wednesday Dec 2009
Posted in Anger, Buddhism, External Goods, Gratitude, Happiness, Hope, Karmic Redirection, Meditation, Patient Endurance, Politics, Serenity
≈ Comments Off on Living through the ’00s
Tags
21st century, academia, Atrios (blogger), autobiography, Barack Obama, Canada, Disengaged Buddhism, Engaged Buddhism, George W. Bush, natural environment, S.N. Goenka, Śāntideva, United States, war
My philosophical awakening occurred in Thailand in 1997; but it has been over the past decade, “the ohs,” that I’ve really had the chance to develop my thoughts. As that decade closes, I would like to note how my thoughts were shaped by their time.
I spent almost the entire decade living in the United States, except for two three-month stints in Toronto in 2001 and India in 2005. It was not the ideal decade in which to do this, for the US of this decade was the US of George W. Bush: a man who opposed almost everything I had ever stood for, whether substantively (torture, wars of choice, gutting environmental regulations), procedurally (incompetent patronage appointments for natural disasters, governing unilaterally without respect for other branches of government) or symbolically (insisting on suits and ties in the White House). I had grown up despising Ronald Reagan, but Reagan now looked like a saint compared to W – Reagan at least was competent. And in the face of all this, Americans returned him to office in 2004.
For my many American friends – the vast majority of them left-wingers like me – this decade was a time of powerlessness and rage. But they at least could vote, could contribute to political campaigns, could do something about it. Continue reading
20 Sunday Dec 2009
Posted in Aesthetics, Cārvāka-Lokāyata, Christianity, Confucianism, Early and Theravāda, East Asia, Epics, Epicureanism, Epistemology, Family, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Jainism, Judaism, Metaphysics, Monasticism, Pleasure, Roman Catholicism, South Asia, Vedānta, Work
Tags
academia, Aristippus, Augustine, autobiography, Bhagavad Gītā, Confucius, David Hume, dharmaśāstra, Epicurus, Friedrich Nietzsche, G.W.F. Hegel, intimacy/integrity, Jeremy Bentham, Mozi, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Thomas Aquinas, Thomas P. Kasulis, utilitarianism, Yoga Sūtras
One reason I turn back to premodern philosophies so much is that they often show us questions larger than those generally asked in philosophy today. Especially important among these: “what kind of life should I live?” What sorts of major life decisions should I make? It still surprises me how rarely academic philosophers concern themselves with these questions, when we spend so much time teaching people in their late teens and early twenties – for whom these questions are in the foreground.
Lately in my mind I’ve been tossing around the hypothesis that the answers to the question “What kind of life should I live?” roughly boil down to three – and that each of the three is tied to some sort of metaphysics, a theoretical as well as a practical philosophy: Continue reading
16 Monday Nov 2009
It was a delight to attend the American Academy of Religion conference this year – and not only because it was in Montréal, possibly my favourite place in the world. There were many interesting presentations and conversations. I was particularly happy to attend a session of the Buddhist Critical-Constructive Reflection group, a group whose area of interest is quite dear to my heart. (A little while ago I published a paper on constructive Buddhist studies in a book for Deepak Heritage Press.)
I was particularly excited by Rita M. Gross‘s presentation, on the connection between academic historical work and Buddhist communities. Gross noted that in many Western “dharma centres” – centres of Yavanayāna Buddhist practice, such as monasteries and meditation centres – Buddhists uncritically accept the claims of Buddhist texts, even on historical matters. Most startlingly, they’ll accept the claim of the Mahāyāna sūtras that they were preached by the historical Buddha in his lifetime: if a sūtra says it was a discourse given by the historical Buddha in Rājagṛha, India, then it must be exactly that. Continue reading