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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: John Duns Scotus

Being yourself in the medieval era

07 Sunday May 2023

Posted by Amod Lele in Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Politics, Self, Western Thought

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

Charles Taylor, Epicurus, expressive individualism, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Gottfried Herder, John Duns Scotus, Michael Allen Gillespie, modernity, Petrarch

Along with rethinking the term for expressive individualism, I’ve also lately been rethinking the history of the phenomenon. The idea that one should be one’s own true self is part of the air we moderns breathe: we don’t think about it because we assume it. (Some of the deeper thought on the matter comes from Christian conservatives, because they need to think about expressive individualism in order to oppose it.) Very few expressive individualists do the work that they should to defend the ideal philosophically. More attention has been paid to the idea’s history – but this, too, is something that I think we often get wrong.

The big question I want to revisit today is: when does expressive individualism begin? When do people first start thinking that every person has her own unique purpose in her individuality, and that following that purpose is a proper ethical ideal? I’ve argued there are metaphysical precedents for the idea in John Duns Scotus‘s distinction between whatness and thatness, but I don’t think there’s any inkling of individualist ethics in the pious thirteenth-century monk Scotus. Expressive individualism comes later – but how much later?

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On traditional wisdom and qualitative individualism

12 Sunday Sep 2021

Posted by Sandhya Lele in Biology, Early and Theravāda, Faith, Family, Greek and Roman Tradition, Hermeneutics, Human Nature, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Monasticism, Politics, Self, Sex

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, David Meskill, expressive individualism, gender, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Hebrew Bible, identity, John Duns Scotus, Mencius, modernity, natural environment, Pure Land, Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtras, vinaya

David Meskill asked an important question in response to my coming out as gender-fluid. He asks:

I’m curious about how your personal transformation might relate to your interest in traditional wisdom. Has it affected your views of tradition? Have those views informed your transformation in any way?

I said a bit in response to his comment (and in the previous post itself), but I’d like to expand on it here. (David is correct in thinking I have addressed the question somewhat in earlier posts; I will link to many of those here in this post.) As I noted in the previous post, my conviction that gender identity does not have to correspond to biological sex is deeply informed by qualitative individualism, which is a largely modern movement, though (like nearly every modern movement) it is one with premodern roots. But I do think it’s important to understand our philosophies historically and even understand ourselves as belonging rationally to a tradition, and I think there is a great deal to be found in premodern traditions that is lacking in more modern ones (such as Marxism). I am willing to characterize my relationship to Buddhism, especially, as one of faith. So how does all of this fit together?

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The metaphysical prehistory of qualitative individualism

25 Sunday Nov 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Metaphysics, Roman Catholicism, Self

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Alexander Baumgarten, Aristotle, ascent/descent, Christian Wolff, existentialism, expressive individualism, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, identity, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Duns Scotus, Martin Heidegger, modernity, Plato, Romanticism, William of Ockham

Where does our deeply held ideal of qualitative individualism – that our differences from other individuals are of the highest significance for our living well – come from? We saw last time that it was most developed by Romantics, especially German ones. But where did they get the idea? Here as in so many cases, a characteristically modern idea has premodern roots. When German Romantics like Humboldt and Herder articulate the idea they often refer to a metaphysical “principle of individuation”, sometimes referred to by the Latin term: principium individuationis. That is, everything, in the human world at least, has a principle that makes it unique, what it is and nothing else. Where are they getting this idea? Continue reading →

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