• About me
  • About this blog
  • Comment rules
  • Other writings

Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: caste

How to reach a colour-blind society

02 Sunday May 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Politics, Psychology, Unconscious Mind

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

caste, Implicit Association Test, Jawaharlal Nehru, Jay Garfield, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., Prince Ea, race, Ronald Reagan, Śāntideva, United States

Perhaps the best-known quote from Martin Luther King Jr. is: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” The kind of society that King dreams of in this sentence is often called “colour-blind” – in a meaning referring not literally to the disability, but to skin colour being irrelevant to people’s lives and the way society judges them. Prince Ea’s wonderful “I am not black, you are not white” video, which I cited as an exemplar of qualitative individualism, further expresses the ideal of colour-blindness: race is just a label that diminishes who we really are. For my own qualitative individualist reasons, it is an ideal I endorse.

In recent years, though, the concept of racial colour-blindness has come under attack. And I do believe that one strand of this attack is entirely justified.

Continue reading →

The No True Fish fallacy

25 Sunday May 2014

Posted by Amod Lele in Biology, Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, Logic, M.T.S.R., Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Science, Prejudices and "Intuitions"

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, Antony Flew, caste, Confucius, Dhammapāda, RationalWiki, religion, Scotland

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 →

Indian heritage?

02 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, South Asia

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

autobiography, caste, dharmaśāstra, identity, intimacy/integrity, Jeffery Long, Laws of Manu, Louis Dumont, race, Stephanie W. Jamison

As my doctoral studies were in Indian philosophy and my ethnic background is part Indian, I was often asked whether my studies had to do with exploring my own heritage. The answer is basically no.

As I noted in telling my story, I came to the study of Asian philosophy through Thai Buddhism, which is not at all part of my ethnic background. I learned Sanskrit and Pali because it seemed to me that most of what was philosophically interesting in Thai Buddhism had come from its Indian heritage – even though Buddhism in India had all but died out.

If I ever thought my heritage would play a major role in the process, such thoughts stopped in my first-year Sanskrit class. My teacher, Stephanie Jamison, was explaining the rules of caste in traditional dharmaśāstra (ethical-legal texts), and how the brahmins were the ones expected to do all the thinking. I wondered whether I counted as a brahmin by this standard, so I asked: how would they count the offspring of a brahmin and an outsider, a yavana?

She answered: caste mixing is always viewed as an evil, so the offspring of any mix would be counted as the lower of the two – at the very best. In other words, according to the Laws of Manu, I’m a white boy. (If not an outright abomination.) Continue reading →

Welcome to Love of All Wisdom.

I invite you to leave comments on my blog, even - or especially - if I have no idea who you are. Philosophy is a conversation, and I invite you to join it with me; I welcome all comers (provided they follow a few basic rules). I typically make a new post every other Sunday. If you'd like to be notified when a new post is posted, you can get email notifications whenever I add something new via the link further down in this sidebar. You can also follow this blog on Facebook. Or if you use RSS, you can get updates through the RSS feed.

Recent Comments

  • Amod Lele on How to learn from indigenous North American philosophy
  • Nathan on How to learn from indigenous North American philosophy
  • Amod Lele on The Confucian obligations of a manager
  • Nathan on The Confucian obligations of a manager
  • Amod Lele on Defending half-elves and half-Asians

Subscribe by Email

Post Tags

20th century academia Alasdair MacIntyre Aristotle ascent/descent Augustine autobiography Buddhaghosa Canada conferences Confucius conservatism Disengaged Buddhism Engaged Buddhism Evan Thompson expressive individualism Four Noble Truths Friedrich Nietzsche G.W.F. Hegel gender Hebrew Bible identity Immanuel Kant intimacy/integrity justice Karl Marx Ken Wilber law Martha Nussbaum modernity mystical experience Pali suttas pedagogy Plato race rebirth religion Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha) technology theodicy Thomas Kuhn United States utilitarianism Śaṅkara Śāntideva

Categories

  • African Thought (13)
  • Applied Phil (294)
    • Death (38)
    • Family (44)
    • Food (18)
    • Friends (15)
    • Health (23)
    • Place (29)
    • Play (15)
    • Politics (169)
    • Sex (20)
    • Work (40)
  • Asian Thought (407)
    • Buddhism (292)
      • Early and Theravāda (126)
      • Mahāyāna (119)
      • Modernized Buddhism (89)
    • East Asia (85)
      • Confucianism (55)
      • Daoism (13)
      • Shinto (1)
    • South Asia (133)
      • Bhakti Poets (3)
      • Cārvāka-Lokāyata (5)
      • Epics (16)
      • Jainism (24)
      • Modern Hinduism (38)
      • Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika (6)
      • Sāṃkhya-Yoga (14)
      • Vedānta (38)
      • Vedas and Mīmāṃsā (7)
  • Blog Admin (27)
  • Indigenous American Thought (6)
  • Method (247)
    • M.T.S.R. (139)
    • Metaphilosophy (162)
  • Practical Philosophy (367)
    • Action (11)
    • Aesthetics (46)
    • Emotion (158)
      • Anger (32)
      • Attachment and Craving (26)
      • Compassion (7)
      • Despair (3)
      • Disgust (3)
      • Faith (19)
      • Fear (8)
      • Grief (6)
      • Happiness (48)
      • Hope (15)
      • Pleasure (33)
      • Shame and Guilt (7)
    • External Goods (51)
    • Flourishing (88)
    • Foundations of Ethics (111)
    • Karma (43)
    • Morality (66)
    • Virtue (153)
      • Courage (5)
      • Generosity (13)
      • Gentleness (6)
      • Gratitude (10)
      • Honesty (14)
      • Humility (22)
      • Leadership (5)
      • Mindfulness (15)
      • Patient Endurance (29)
      • Self-Discipline (9)
      • Serenity (28)
      • Zest (6)
  • Practice (123)
    • Karmic Redirection (5)
    • Meditation (33)
    • Monasticism (45)
    • Physical Exercise (3)
    • Prayer (14)
    • Reading and Recitation (12)
    • Rites (20)
    • Therapy (10)
  • Theoretical Philosophy (343)
    • Consciousness (17)
    • Epistemology (109)
      • Certainty and Doubt (15)
      • Prejudices and "Intuitions" (28)
    • Free Will (17)
    • God (66)
    • Hermeneutics (57)
    • Human Nature (31)
    • Logic (28)
      • Dialectic (16)
    • Metaphysics (94)
    • Philosophy of Language (20)
    • Self (66)
    • Supernatural (49)
    • Truth (59)
    • Unconscious Mind (14)
  • Western Thought (436)
    • Analytic Tradition (91)
    • Christianity (145)
      • Early Factions (8)
      • Protestantism (24)
      • Roman Catholicism (51)
    • French Tradition (48)
    • German Tradition (86)
    • Greek and Roman Tradition (112)
      • Epicureanism (24)
      • Neoplatonism (2)
      • Pre-Socratics (6)
      • Skepticism (2)
      • Sophists (7)
      • Stoicism (20)
    • Islam (38)
      • Mu'tazila (2)
      • Salafi (3)
      • Sufism (9)
    • Judaism (34)
    • Natural Science (88)
      • Biology (24)
      • Philosophy of Science (47)
    • Social Science (152)
      • Economics (33)
      • Psychology (62)

Recent Posts

  • How to learn from indigenous North American philosophy
  • The Confucian obligations of a manager
  • On knowing how hard BIPOC faculty have it
  • Defending half-elves and half-Asians
  • On AIs’ creativity

Popular posts

  • One and a half noble truths?
  • Wishing George W. Bush well
  • Do Speculative Realists want us to be Chinese?
  • Why I am not a right-winger
  • On faith in tooth relics

Basic concepts

  • Ascent and Descent
  • Intimacy and integrity
  • Ascent-descent and intimacy-integrity together
  • Perennial questions?
  • Virtuous and vicious means
  • Dialectical and demonstrative argument
  • Chastened intellectualism and practice
  • Yavanayāna Buddhism: what it is
  • Why worry about contradictions?
  • The first philosophy blogger

Personal favourites

  • Can philosophy be a way of life? Pierre Hadot (1922-2010)
  • James Doull and the history of ethical motivation
  • Praying to something you don't believe in
  • What does postmodernism perform?
  • Why I'm getting married

Archives

Search this site

All posts, pages and metadata copyright 2020 Amod Lele. Comments copyright 2020 their comment authors. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA) licence.

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.