Tag Archives: Alasdair MacIntyre

The middle ground in philosophy of science

24 Sunday Jun 2018

Posted by in Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science, Social Science

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Last time I looked to find a middle ground in philosophy of science, between Francis Bacon’s historically untenable inductivism and Paul Feyerabend’s irrationalism. I noted then that I think Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos all attempt to stake out a position somewhere in this ground, with varying degrees of sucess. I turn to them now.

Karl Popper rightly acknowledges the scientific importance of fallibilism and uncertainty: science is powerful not because its conclusions can be proved right, but because it can acknowledge when they are proved wrong. Popper notes that science in practice advances more by falsification than by induction: the role of empirical data is not to ground generalizations, but rather to disconfirm them. One can legitimately formulate a theory in abstraction that says all swans must be white; the important thing is that one reject it when one observes a black swan.

But Popper’s critique of inductivism does not go far enough. Continue reading →

Beyond the removal of suffering

01 Sunday Oct 2017

Posted by in Death, Early and Theravāda, Flourishing, Happiness, Karma, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism, Natural Science, Supernatural

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Last time I discussed Jan Westerhoff’s potent objection to naturalized Buddhism: if there is no rebirth then we can end our suffering simply by committing suicide. Westerhoff takes this objection as a reason to accept rebirth. I do not. Rather, I take it as pointing to a deeper problem with some core Buddhist teachings as they are usually understood. Continue reading →

Incompleteness in knowledge and existence

28 Sunday May 2017

Posted by in Deity, Early and Theravāda, Islam, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Self

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Cross-posted at the Indian Philosophy Blog.

A friend read the previous post on ibn Sīnā and Śāntideva and asked (on Google+) what exactly I meant by “incompleteness”. It was a great question and made me realize there was a bit of confusion in my own thinking.

The point of connection I saw between the two different thinkers was above all at the level of understanding the world. Continue reading →

ibn Sīnā and Śāntideva on the incompleteness of the world

14 Sunday May 2017

Posted by in Deity, Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, Islam, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Self

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Cross-posted at the Indian Philosophy Blog.

I’ve been thinking lately about MacIntyre’s explanation of the Muslim philosopher ibn Sīnā and the ways in which ibn Sīnā’s concept of God requires us to rethink the entire world around us if we accept it:

From [atheists’] standpoint a theist is someone who believes in just one more being than they do and who therefore has the responsibility for justifying her or his belief in this extra entity. But from the standpoint of the theist this is already to have misconceived both God and theistic belief in God. To believe in God is not to believe that in addition to nature, about which atheists and theists can agree, there is something else, about which they disagree. It is rather that theists and atheists disagree about nature as well as about God. For theists believe that nature presents itself as radically incomplete, as requiring a ground beyond itself, if it is to be intelligible, and so their disagreement with atheists involves everything. (God, Philosophy, Universities p. 47)

What’s drawing my attention is that you could write a very similar passage to characterize Buddhism. Continue reading →

The methodological MacIntyre and the substantive MacIntyre

30 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Politics, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Roman Catholicism

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I’ve devoted a lot of attention lately to a writing project focused on Alasdair MacIntyre‘s thought, one I first mentioned in my interview with Skholiast. It began critical of MacIntyre and then turned more sympathetic to him, but has become much bigger than that – because it has become a project articulating my own method for cross-cultural philosophy. The idea started off as a potential blog post (I was going to call it “MacIntyre vs. MacIntyre”) and then grew to the size of an article, but it may well become multiple articles, a book, or even multiple books. I’ve articulated some elements of this methodological position in previous posts and given my current thoughts in a paper for the Prosblogion’s virtual colloquium, but there’s a lot more to say beyond that.

As I come to engage more deeply with MacIntyre, though, I find myself faced with an important distinction: the methodological MacIntyre is not the substantive MacIntyre. I draw a great deal of inspiration from the former, with some modifications; I am more in agreement with him than not. But in the latter I find a great deal to reject – and to reject, moreover, on methodologically MacIntyrean grounds. Continue reading →

Paper on methodology up at Prosblogion

28 Friday Apr 2017

Posted by in Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion

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The philosophy-of-religion blog Prosblogion asked me if I would contribute a paper in progress to their “virtual colloquium”. I obliged, and sent them a draft paper that I recently presented at the Metaphysical Society of America (MSA) conference in March. It is on methodology in cross-cultural philosophy – how we might responsibly resolve disagreements across philosophical traditions, whether in metaphysics, ethics or otherwise. It draws heavily from Alasdair MacIntyre’s methodological views, expanding on some of the points I have made about MacIntyre’s thought in recent years. (In this Sunday’s post I will say something about where I disagree with MacIntyre most.) You could describe significant parts of the paper as an attempt to “reverse-engineer” MacIntyre’s proposed methodology – to go to his sources (especially Aristotle and the historicist philosophers of science, Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos) in order to expand on those parts of his methodology that he leaves unstated, and hopefully improves on weaknesses in that methodology.

This paper is very much a work in progress; I am not entirely happy with its position and expect that it will be heavily revised before it ever hits publication (which I don’t expect to be for a while). But it is a current and fleshed-out statement of a project I’ve now been working on for over two years, so I thought it deserved to see the light of day somewhere. I’ll probably blog about elements of it in the coming months.

The paper’s abstract is posted directly at the Prosblogion, and you can download the full paper there at the bottom. I would be happy to hear your thoughts.

Why philosophy departments have focused on the West

22 Sunday May 2016

Posted by in Asian Thought, Health, Hermeneutics, Islam, Metaphilosophy, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Western Thought

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Jay Garfield and Bryan Van Norden have a widely circulated article in a recent New York Times, chastising American philosophy departments for paying insufficient attention to non-Western traditions of thought. It will surprise nobody that I sympathize with them, since I’ve been trying to get non-Western thought a hearing for years. But in part for that reason, I’ve also been thinking a lot about why it hasn’t got that hearing so far. The reasons for this are not all bad ones, and anyone working to change the situation needs to understand what those reasons are. Perhaps most importantly, they need to ask a vital question that I don’t see asked in Garfield and Van Norden’s article: why should we study philosophy? Continue reading →

Belonging rationally to a tradition

14 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by in Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Rites, Roman Catholicism

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I ended last year pointing out that while one can love all wisdom, it is almost certainly too hard to be able to sift through all the wisdom out there and put it together in the space of a single lifetime. What one can do is get to know a small number of traditions in great detail and attempt to bring them together.

But which? While I think the previous post gave a good account of the process, I have already come to regret its title, “Choosing a few traditions”. The term “choosing” suggests that the process can happen arbitrarily, or at least on the simplest sort of aesthetic grounds – the traditions you happen to like. (“Hmm, I think Ayn Rand, Zhuangzi and Gnosticism are kinda cool. Let me put those together.”) I didn’t mean it that way when I wrote it, but even so, as I’ve been thinking through the issues since then, I find myself noticing that even just thinking of the process in terms of “choice” makes it seem less rational than it is. Continue reading →

Choosing a few traditions

06 Sunday Dec 2015

Posted by in Dialectic, Early and Theravāda, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Hermeneutics, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion

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I have long had an ambition which, I am slowly realizing, is unlikely to be fulfilled. It is an ambition suggested in this blog’s title: the idea of putting together all the major philosophical traditions of the world into a full synthesis. Ken Wilber’s work has to date been the most valiant attempt anyone has made to fulfill that ambition. But I have argued in many ways that this attempt has failed. It must fail, in the perennialist form Wilber’s work takes: to claim that all the world’s wisdom (or “religious”) traditions are basically saying the same thing. That claim makes the attempt at putting the traditions together much easier. It is also false. Continue reading →

The need for substantive standards of rationality

22 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, Logic, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion

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I ended the last post with the question of how to put together the insights I have found from Western philosophies like Hegel’s, on one hand, and Buddhism on the other. That question is the twenty-year project that animated my dissertation, though it could not be the dissertation. There it was Martha Nussbaum rather than Hegel whom I juxtaposed with Buddhist thought, because she had engaged with key Buddhist ethical questions and taken opposed answers. (Engaging with Hegel at any length, on the other hand, would have required a whole ‘nother dissertation.)

But the dissertation, as noted before, ends on a “cliffhanger”: Continue reading →