25 Sunday May 2014
Consider this dialogue:
A: “All fish breathe through gills rather than lungs.”
B: “But whales are fish, and they breathe through their lungs.”
A: “Whales may look and seem like fish, but they aren’t truly fish because they breathe through their lungs.”
To anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of biology, A’s reasoning here must seem sound. Yet among some philosophers with a scientific bent, the structure of the reasoning A employs is often criticized as a logical fallacy. Continue reading
05 Sunday May 2013
Posted in Dialectic, Metaphilosophy, Natural Science, Philosophy of Science
≈ Comments Off on How dialectic transcends and includes
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
14 Sunday Apr 2013
Posted in Foundations of Ethics, French Tradition, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Morality
≈ Comments Off on Genealogy (and encyclopedia and tradition) of ethics
Tags
Alasdair MacIntyre, Cicero, early writings, Encyclopædia Britannica, Friedrich Nietzsche, Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Michel Foucault
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
28 Sunday Oct 2012
Tags
Alasdair MacIntyre, Dustin DiPerna, Ken Wilber, Mark Schmanko, modernism, modernity, mystical experience, Robert Sharf, Romanticism, Wilhelm Halbfass
I have not yet had a chance to hear a response from Dustin DiPerna on my post replying to his. However, his friend Mark Schmanko emailed me a response which I found utterly fascinating – one which takes up the arguments of my article as well. (I am posting these remarks with Mark’s permission.)
I had argued, following current work in religious studies like that of Robert Sharf and Wilhelm Halbfass, that replicable mystical experience is more of a modern construction than we make it out to be, certainly not something at the core of premodern traditions. The conclusion in my article argued that, if my claims were true, a Wilberian could take two legitimate options: either rethink Wilber’s model heavily so as to incorporate the non-mystical elements of traditions, or “bite the bullet” and admit that it is accepting only the mystical elements and not other elements that would be closer to the tradition’s cores. Continue reading
08 Sunday Jul 2012
Posted in Epistemology, Metaphilosophy
A week or two ago, my friend Momin Malik responded on Facebook* to my first post on Leah Libresco’s conversion. He took issue in particular with my very brief negative reference to relativism. I have argued against relativism at some length before, in response to Peimin Ni, and also to postmodernism. But in those posts I argued against relativism on pragmatic and performative grounds, because it was mainly being defended in pragmatic and performative terms. I’m interested in Momin’s position because, as far as I can tell, he argues for relativism on rational terms, tries to convince us of relativism because it is in some sense true, not just effective.
According to Momin, relativism says (his emphasis and brackets): “there is no universal or neutral perspective from which we can [rationally] arbitrate between competing viewpoints. So, it’s not that we can’t say Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were wrong and horrible, it’s that such a statement is made from within our own values, and not a universal or neutral perspective.” Continue reading
20 Sunday May 2012
Tags
Alasdair MacIntyre, conservatism, Front Porch Republic, Japan, Ken Wilber, modernism, modernity, postmodernism, Randall Collins, Romanticism, Śaṅkara, Thomas P. Kasulis, Upaniṣads
I noted two weeks ago how Ken Wilber’s recent post/modern turn (“Wilber-5”) is right in important respects, but suggested important problems with it. Last week I noted empirical problems: sociological data on Christianity show a very different picture from his. This week I want to turn to a deeper philosophical problem, which I suspect underlies last week’s sociological picture.
We cannot go back to premodernity. This much is true and important. Our options going forward must take account of the post/modern world, be developed within it. On all of this I agree with Wilber. But what I don’t think Wilber makes room for is this: one can take account of the post/modern world, understand it, know it, and still reject it. Continue reading
12 Sunday Feb 2012
Posted in Analytic Tradition, Confucianism, Foundations of Ethics, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Psychology, Self
Tags
Alan Gewirth, Alasdair MacIntyre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Piaget, John Rawls, John Stuart Mill, Ken Wilber, Lawrence Kohlberg, modernism, modernity, Thomas Aquinas, Zhu Xi
While recently poring over Ken Wilber‘s works, I’ve thought repeatedly about his ideas in relation to Alasdair MacIntyre‘s. Wilber, ever since he identified the pre-trans fallacy, has been an arch-modernist: the world from the Enlightenment onwards has been far better than the traditional world that preceded it. His most recent phase has taken a more postmodern, relativistic turn, but even as a postmodernist he is still a modernist: for Wilber the pluralism of a postmodern worldview is a clear advance, a development, and a pretty unambiguous one.
This is not the worldview one finds in MacIntyre. Continue reading
11 Sunday Dec 2011
Posted in East Asia, Metaphilosophy, Modernized Buddhism, Social Science, South Asia
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Alasdair MacIntyre, ascent/descent, intimacy/integrity, Ken Wilber, Max Weber, modernity, Parimal Patil, skholiast (blogger), Thomas P. Kasulis
I have repeatedly returned to the categories of ascent and descent, and intimacy and integrity, to classify philosophies; and I have found that the two intersect in important ways. When I discussed that intersection the first time, skholiast asked the important question: “What is the itch in us to make such schematisms?” What is the purpose of trying to classify philosophies in this way?
My first response was that these two are perennial questions, questions that recur throughout the history of philosophy around the world. While I continue to think more or less that that’s the case, I don’t think it did enough to say what’s important about these particular two categories. As I noted later, there are plenty of perennial questions beyond these two. But at the same time, I do see something special about these two classification schemes that merits particular attention to them. Continue reading
16 Sunday Oct 2011
Posted in Deity, Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, Karma, Mahāyāna, Self
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Alasdair MacIntyre, Andrew Skilton, atheism, autobiography, Damien Keown, Friedrich Nietzsche, G.E. Moore, John Stuart Mill, Kate Crosby, Paul Williams, Penelope Trunk, Sam Harris, Śāntideva
Today’s post follows up on those from two and three weeks ago, and there’ll be another one next week. I intend the four posts, taken together, to make a statement about the continuing importance of the idea of God: why, in the face of the very real problem of suffering and the scientific ability to easily do without God as an explanation of life’s apparent design, God is still hard to do away with. I mean this on an intellectual and philosophical level, not merely an emotional one; it is not just that we need to bother with God because so many people out have some neurological need for him, but that there yet remain ways in which God helps us to make sense of reality.
I’m going to begin this week not with God, but with Buddhism. Continue reading
25 Sunday Sep 2011
Posted in Analytic Tradition, Deity, Foundations of Ethics, Metaphysics
Tags
20th century, Alasdair MacIntyre, Friedrich Nietzsche, G.E. Moore, John Maynard Keynes, Kamehameha II, Ken Wilber
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I previously called the problem of good. Those who believe there is an ultimate goodness central to the universe face the problem of the universe’s imperfection and badness. The most obvious form of this problem is the Abrahamic problem of suffering; it’s also a problem for Advaita Vedānta, in which it’s hard to explain how ignorance can be possible. But for those who don’t believe in that ultimate goodness – which includes Theravāda Buddhists as well as naturalistically minded scientists – there is an alternate problem, of how we explain the existence of value in the first place.
This problem is not quite the opposite of the problem of suffering. Those who don’t believe in an ultimate value of this sort – I am here going to call them “atheists” as a shorthand, though I think that runs the risk of oversimplifying the matter – have no problem explaining the existence of particular good things, the way that theists have a problem explaining the existence of hurricanes or ALS. The problem they face, rather, is in the basic question of how things can be good (or bad) at all, of how the very ideas of goodness or badness can mean anything. Continue reading