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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: autobiography

In memoriam: Alasdair MacIntyre

25 Sunday May 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Politics, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Roman Catholicism

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, Aristotle, autobiography, Friedrich Nietzsche, ISME, Karl Marx, Martha Nussbaum, obituary, relativism, Scotland, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Kuhn

My photo of an elderly MacIntyre speaking in 2019 at “To What End?”

Alasdair MacIntyre is dead. He had a very good run, better than many could dream of: he was 95 years old, and produced an output significant enough to be in competition for the title of “greatest philosopher of his age”. Few indeed are the 20th- or 21st-century philosophers who have an entire learned society – in his case the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry (ISME) – devoted to pursuing the implications of their work. It seems that MacIntyre himself was a little uncomfortable with that society’s existence. The one time I ever saw MacIntyre in the flesh was at the society’s 2019 conference, held on the University of Notre Dame campus near his home, in honour of his 90th birthday – but, I was told, he only participated on condition that his name not appear anywhere in the conference title. (Thus, given his focus on teleology and the aims of human life, the conference was called “To What End?”)

Even now, MacIntyre still sits outside what is usually considered the philosophical mainstream. Though he was trained in the English-language mainstream of analytic philosophy and taught in analytic departments, he refused to confine himself to the analytic mode of philosophizing, always writing in a way broader and less precise than analytic departments were usually willing to count as good philosophy. That experience surely shaped one of MacIntyre’s more powerful philosophical insights: the recognition that philosophy itself always operates within the context of historical tradition – the conception of tradition at issue being close to Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigms. Kuhn and MacIntyre recognized that different paradigms differed not just on what claims they believed to be true and false, but on the standards by which one judged them true and false; MacIntyre knew that within philosophy, analytic philosophy’s standards were never the only ones available.

Thus MacIntyre is the sort of philosopher whom one often first encounters in unusual ways, outside being taught him in a classroom. Thus one colleague at “To What End?” helpfully started conversations with “What’s your MacIntyre story?” – imagining, rightly, that everyone had their own personal story of encountering his ideas, more interesting than being simply taught him in an Intro to Ethics class. (Now that I think of it, the one place I remember being asked a similar question was on a long tour around the Laphroaig whisky distillery in Scotland, which also began with the guide asking “What’s your Laphroaig story?” – a comparison that would likely have pleased MacIntyre, as he always took his philosophy to be deeply informed by his Scottishness.)

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Why I’m staying in the USA

06 Sunday Apr 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Family, Flourishing, Friends, Place, Politics, Social Science

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, autobiography, Canada, identity, J.D. Vance, Jason Stanley, LARP, Mark Granovetter, United States

Canadians have always had a love-hate relationship with the USA; for obvious reasons, the hate side is stronger right at the moment. The US government is doing everything it can to make the country hateable – and harder to live in. When lawful permanent residents are detained without trial for exercising their free speech, this becomes a scary place indeed. So it’s quite understandable that many of those who can leave the US for Canada are planning on doing so – like the philosopher Jason Stanley making a high-profile announcement that he’s leaving Yale for Toronto.

It’s tempting to try to do something similar myself. But I’m not going to. And I want to talk about why.

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The philosopher takes the same psych meds as his dog

09 Sunday Feb 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Action, Biology, Emotion, Health, Human Nature, Psychology, Unconscious Mind

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

Amy Sutherland, anxiety, autobiography, drugs, insomnia, nonhuman animals, Sigmund Freud

Over the years I’ve managed to treat my insomnia in various ways, to the point that nowadays I can get a reasonably good sleep most nights. Mindfulness meditation – prescribed to me medically before I called myself a Buddhist – has been one big help with that. But just as big has been a medication called trazodone: primarily used as an antidepressant, trazodone in smaller doses helps one stay asleep and avoid the typical insomniac anxiety spiral where you wake up and worry that you can’t get to sleep and find that the worry makes it harder to get to sleep so you worry more. It does a great deal to take the edge off.

Meanwhile my dog, Christmas Belle (so named because we got her in a snowstorm on December 22), faced various anxiety issues that made her resistant and fearful to getting in the car and going to the vet. To help her cope with those situations the vet recommended… trazodone.

Christmas Belle Feeley-Lele, when not feeling anxiety. Photo by author.
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The return of Justice

27 Sunday Oct 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Morality, Politics, Prejudices and "Intuitions"

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

academia, autobiography, Harvard University, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, John Rawls, justice, Michael Sandel, pedagogy, trolley problem, utilitarianism

I was delighted to hear that this fall Michael Sandel has returned to teaching his Justice course at Harvard. He’d gone many years without teaching it, which I think was a shame, because that course does a better job than just about anything else I can think of at introducing people to philosophy. So it’s great to hear that it’s back.

I was twice a TA – or “TF”, for Teaching Fellow, as Harvard calls them – for Justice, now twenty years ago during my PhD. When Sandel interviewed me for the position, it was my favourite job interview I’ve ever had: the only interview where I was grilled on the finer points of Kant and Rawls. It was a proud moment for me because Sandel was skeptical about whether, as a religionist, I’d have the competence to teach the course, but I showed him how much moral and political philosophy I knew.

In those days at least, Justice was the most popular course at Harvard. It was held in the beautiful Sanders Theatre, Harvard’s largest audience space, and was so popular that the students who wanted to take it wouldn’t even fit in that space. That occasionally put us TFs in the position, not exactly standard for graduate students, of being bouncers: I told one student “I’m sorry, you’re not allowed in at the moment”, and she tried to go in anyway so I had to physically block her. Its popularity often made it a target for funny student pranks (see the picture).

A still from a video of Sandel teaching Justice twenty years ago. That’s me in the blue shirt in the back. (But I’m not the prank).
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Is it a racial crime for me to be myself?

13 Sunday Oct 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Fear, Politics

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

academia, autobiography, Ibram X. Kendi, identity, race, United States

The prominence of Ibram X. Kendi in American institutions takes a further harmful turn with his ignorance of, and indifference to, the complex lives of people who are neither black nor white. The most egregious example is this passage, asserted with his book’s characteristic absence of argument: “It is a racial crime to be yourself if you are not White in America. It is a racial crime to look like yourself or empower yourself if you are not White.” (38)

I read those lines over multiple times and all I could think was:

What?

There’s no footnote, no further explanation. All Kendi gives you as reason to believe these statements is his say-so, as someone who is not “White”.

So, as someone who is also not “White” (by any standard actually in use), I am just as qualified as he is when I respond, from my own lived experience: these generalizations have no grounding in reality. They make no sense. They read like a fever dream.

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Breaking my silence on Ibram X. Kendi

22 Sunday Sep 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Fear, Politics, Work

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

academia, autobiography, Boston University, David Decosimo, Ibram X. Kendi, Northeastern University, pedagogy, race, United States

Advertisement for BU’s Day of Engagement.

Four years ago, Ibram X. Kendi was the academic star of the moment, topping the bestseller lists, receiving a MacArthur Genius Grant, and being handed a plum position at Boston University (BU) with a research centre given more than $30 million. And BU, where I worked at the time, didn’t stop there. After the murder of George Floyd, BU cancelled classes and events for a virtual “Day of Collective Engagement” where Kendi took a starring role as presenter. The message was clear that the star hire would be the one telling BU what we were supposed to do from now on: not only were there no presenters expressing alternate views of race that challenged Kendi’s, such views were actively discouraged. My friend and former colleague David Decosimo recalls how he pointed out in a Zoom meeting that Kendi’s definitions were controversial and asked if the university was officially endorsing Kendi’s views. The response:

Immediately, several deans came after me in the chat. I was clearly uninformed and confused; now wasn’t the time for “intellectual debate.” They implied I might not actually oppose racism.

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So we can all agree Obama is white, right?

15 Sunday Sep 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Family, Politics, South Asia

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

autobiography, Barack Obama, caste, dharmaśāstra, Donald Trump, identity, Kamala Harris, law, Laws of Manu, Madison Grant, Meghan Markle, race, United States

Not long ago, Donald Trump exercised his usual penchant for making headlines by offending people, with comments about Kamala Harris “happening to turn black” and asking “Is she Indian or is she black?” In the latter question, Trump was doing what racial questionnaires have asked us racially mixed people to do for our whole lives: “Are you [ ] Black [ ] Asian [ ] White? Pick one.” (Wizards of the Coast, meanwhile, is now proud to newly erase mixed people from a game that actually represented us back in the ’80s.)

Nothing in Trump’s remarks is welcoming to racially mixed people, of course. Most news outlets and commenters predictably responded to them with righteous indignation. And that indignation might feel affirming to me… if I thought that those outlets really were trying to acknowledge racially mixed people as racially mixed. But they don’t actually do that.

News outlets regularly describe Harris simply as black, simply as Asian, or simply as both, depending on context. In the context of Trump’s remarks, nearly every story reporting on or replying to Trump’s comments will present some variant of this claim, embedded in a subordinate clause as an obvious matter of fact: “Harris, who is both Black and Asian American…”

To which I cheerfully respond: “Yes! Like Barack Obama, who is both black and white! Right?

… right?“

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Being Ezili Freda

01 Sunday Sep 2024

Posted by Sandhya Lele in Aesthetics, Attachment and Craving, Deity, Economics, M.T.S.R., Rites, Roman Catholicism, Supernatural

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

autobiography, Dykedon, Ezili Freda, gender, Haiti, Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola, race, slavery, Vodou

On a trip last year to New Orleans, I wanted to learn more about a tradition with deep roots there: the one whose West African root is called Vodún, became Vodou in Haiti, and in New Orleans is always known as voodoo. The book I read is Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola, which focuses on the Haitian version, so I’ll use the “Vodou” spelling. Any introductory discussion of this tradition always begins with an obligatory disclaimer about Hollywood stereotypes: very little of it is about zombies, and even less is about sticking pins in dolls. But the real tradition is fascinating in its own ways.

As a philosopher, I’m nearly always most intrigued by cultural traditions in their philosophical or theological aspect: what sorts of thinking and reflection they have about the universe and how to live in it. But that’s not all such traditions have to offer, and if I confined all my interest to the philosophy, I would have to have found Vodou a disappointment. Mama Lola, the Vodou priestess Brown learned from, would regularly tell her “Karen, you think too much!” or “You ask too many questions!” Brown gets excited when a discussion between Mama Lola and another Vodou expert starts to turn to the theological, but they quickly drop the subject and never return. The tradition is all about interactions with the loa or lwa, supernatural beings with the ability to possess people in ritual trances. But neither in Mama Lola nor in anything else I’ve read or heard on the tradition, do I see Vodou practitioners think much about what exactly those beings are – even though there’s a lot to wonder about, since most Vodou practitioners consider themselves Catholics, and the relationship of the loa to the saints and angels they’re identified with, let alone to any singular God (bondye), is hazy at best.

But in spite of all that, there is one element of the tradition that absolutely fascinates me and calls to me. And her name is Ezili Freda.

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Our home and native land

04 Sunday Aug 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Death, Family, French Tradition, Indigenous American Thought, Place, Politics

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Anishinaabe, autobiography, Ben Koan, Benedict Anderson, Canada, Fred Kelly, J.D. Vance, Jeff Jacoby, John Ganz, Joseph Miller, natural environment, Northeastern University, Republican Party, Ronald Reagan, United States, Viola Cordova

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending a workshop on Native American philosophy – hosted by the Northeastern Ethics Institute, which I’m now Associate Director of. One of the main presenters was Joseph (Joey) Miller, a University of Washington professor of Muscogee ancestry.

Miller’s intriguing ideas focused on the importance of land in Native American thought – specifically North American, I might add, as opposed to Mesoamerican. In my limited studies of Aztec and Maya thought so far, I’ve seen no comparable emphasis placed on land and place. Miller cited the Apache philosopher Viola Cordova to the effect that “people come out of a specific place; we’re not all one race with one story.” And he spoke of a “land-based pedagogy” for his students. That is, he would have his students reflect on land and how it’s important to them: their land of origin, its future place in the world.

Photo of Buck Lake by Wikipedia user P199, CC BY-SA 4.0

I kept thinking back to Miller’s talk a couple weeks later, when I travelled to Buck Lake in Ontario for a memorial service for a beloved aunt. Buck Lake was where my grandfather had a cottage for most of the time I was alive; my cousins scattered their mother’s ashes over the lake, which she had loved. As far back as I could remember, my parents had their own cottage on Milk Lake, the smaller lake beside it (where, because they were the first to build on it, there is now a road called Lele Lane). Everyone who knows me knows I’m a city person through and through; I didn’t particularly like going up to Milk Lake every weekend as a child. But going back there for the first time in years, I felt a powerful connection to that land and realized how much I missed it. I found myself excited to hear the distinctive call of the whippoorwill, which I’d heard so many times long ago but is missing from my adopted home of New England.

I’ve also been thinking back to Miller’s talk in watching the reaction to J.D. Vance’s nomination speech. In his remarks accepting the Republican nomination for vice-president, Vance said this:

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The reluctant techno-pessimist

16 Sunday Jun 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Politics, Work

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

21st century, Amazon, Anant Agarwal, Apple, autobiography, Boston University, Cory Doctorow, edX, Facebook, Martin Hägglund, technology, Turnitin, Zoom

I’ve loved digital technology as long as I’ve been alive. Growing up in the analog world of the 1980s, I was excited by every bright light and new world opened up by a digital display. I was so excited by what computers could do that, before my family owned a computer, I wrote out the code for a text-based computer game on an electric typewriter. Circa 2000 I would physically go to the Apple Store to watch the live-streamed Steve Jobs keynote introducing new Apple products, even when I wasn’t planning on buying one soon. At a family Christmas event in 2011, I became clear that educational technology was the right non-faculty career choice for me, when I realized everyone else had left the room while my wife’s uncle and I had a heated discussion about operating systems. After all that I doubled down and got a master’s in computer science.

That’s why it pains me deeply to say: I’ve become a techno-pessimist.

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