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

Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Mao Zedong

The West within the rest

05 Sunday Jun 2016

Posted by Amod Lele in Death, Metaphilosophy, Modern Hinduism, Politics, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Vedas and Mīmāṃsā, Western Thought

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Edward Said, Jawaharlal Nehru, justice, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, modernity, Rammohun Roy, Śāntideva

In the previous post I discussed why academic philosophers have usually focused on the West, and pointed out reasons why some amount of Western focus remains valuable. Above all, I noted: “we are always already formed by some sort of philosophical tradition, whether we like it or not and whether we know it or not. And a great deal of what forms us is Western.” So exploring Western philosophy is important to understand our own thought better, where we are coming from.

There are at least two important objections to be made to that claim as I have phrased it. Continue reading →

What I learned teaching Abrahamic monotheism

19 Sunday Jun 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Christianity, God, Judaism, Rites, Supernatural

≈ 65 Comments

Tags

A.J. Jacobs, academia, autobiography, Christopher Hitchens, Hebrew Bible, Mao Zedong, pedagogy, Richard Dawkins, Richard Swinburne, Stonehill College, theodicy

I started writing this blog while I was teaching at Stonehill College, which hired me for a one-year visiting position and took me on shortly after that. A Catholic school, Stonehill requires all its students to take an introductory course in religion, and a third-year course in “moral inquiry”; faculty learn rapidly that these are the bread and butter of their teaching. In my time at Stonehill I taught one elective in Hindu tradition; the other eleven course sections were all the religion requirements.

Teaching students who did not want to be there was not always a joy. The wonderful advantage of teaching Stonehill’s required courses, though, was that there was almost no restriction on content. My love of big cross-cultural questions does not play well with the specialization taught in grad school and encouraged in academic publishing, where one must learn one thing and nothing else. But I could design these courses the way I wanted. The religion department had decided it wanted one common reference point that upper-year students could turn back to, and it had decided on the book of Exodus. But as long as you taught Exodus, the rest of the course was all up to you.

And so one semester I decided I wanted to learn more about Western monotheisms, and entitled my intro religion course “God in the West.” All that Buddhism and “Hinduism” I’d studied in grad school – never mind that. Because that was stuff I already knew pretty well. One of the things I hoped to impart to my students was a love of learning; and so I decided I would teach them a subject I wanted to learn about myself.

And learn I did. Continue reading →

Truth and contradiction beyond propositions

14 Sunday Feb 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in African Thought, Analytic Tradition, Christianity, East Asia, German Tradition, God, Greek and Roman Tradition, Logic, Metaphysics, Modern Hinduism, Philosophy of Language, Truth, Vedānta

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Advaita Vedānta, Alasdair MacIntyre, Augustine, G.W.F. Hegel, Graham Priest, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Plato, Śaṅkara, Wilfred Cantwell Smith

What do Augustine, Gandhi, Śaṅkara, Marx and Mao all have in common? Something quite important. But before answering this question, a brief excursus on Marx’s inspiration, G.W.F. Hegel.

In reading Graham Priest’s work, I was particularly struck by a point Priest makes at length in his Stanford Encyclopedia article: that Hegel believes there can be true contradictions, and is in that sense a dialetheist. I think Priest is technically right, but the point can be a bit misleading.

First, Hegel accepts the normative force of non-contradiction, in a way that Priest also does but tends to push to the sidelines. That is: while it’s possible for contradictions to be true, there’s also something about them that is epistemologically bad. As I noted last time, Priest accepts this point himself, so that when he says “What is so bad about contradictions? Maybe nothing,” he is effectively being disingenuous for rhetorical effect. For Priest, contradictions are epistemologically bad only in that the probability of a contradiction being true is generally low. For Hegel the problem with contradictions is something significantly bigger: a true contradiction eventually and inevitably becomes false.

This point leads into a bigger difference that goes well beyond Hegel’s and Priest’s work, which is what I really want to address today. Priest generally imagines contradictions as existing between linguistic truth-bearers of some description. He says at the beginning of the SEP entry that “we shall talk of sentences throughout this entry; but one could run the definition in terms of propositions, statements, or whatever one takes as her favourite truth-bearer: this would make little difference in the context.” But some objects taken to bear truth could, I think, change the nature of the claim significantly. Priest’s truth-bearers are statements, beliefs, propositions – all mere linguistic mental or verbal objects. But not everyone has taken truth-bearers to be of this kind. The most vivid exception may be Saint Augustine, about whom Alasdair MacIntyre put the matter beautifully:

for Augustine it is in terms of the relationships neither of statements nor of minds that truth is to be primarily characterized and understood. “Veritas,” a noun naming a substance, is a more fundamental expression than “verum,” an attribute of things, and the truth or falsity of statements is a tertiary matter. To speak truly is to speak of things as they really and truly are; and things really and truly are in virtue only of their relationship to veritas. So where Aristotle locates truth in the relationship of the mind to its objects, Augustine locates it in the source of the relationship of finite objects to that truth which is God. (Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, p. 110)

Here not merely statements or beliefs but things are true – by virtue, I think, of their genuineness, their closeness to a Platonic Form of goodness which, for Augustine, turns out to be God himself. Continue reading →

Marx on religion and suffering

10 Wednesday Feb 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, East Asia, Flourishing, German Tradition, M.T.S.R., Politics, Social Science

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

20th century, Aśvaghoṣa, Christopher Hitchens, Communism, drugs, Friedrich Engels, Geoff Waite, Joseph Martin, Karl Marx, Ludwig Feuerbach, Mao Zedong, Pali suttas, religion, Richard Dawkins, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Terry Eagleton

Skholiast’s blog pointed me to an excellent review of a collection of Marx’s and Engels’s writings on “religion.” (The author goes by “pomonomo2003” in his review; his own very interesting website reveals his name to be Joseph Martin.) The topic is notable today, at a time when the militant atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens grab the headlines – and those whom one might expect to be their staunchest allies, Marxists like Terry Eagleton, have instead been among their sharpest critics.

It is likely to the Communist regimes of the 20th century that we owe Marx’s reputation as a despiser of religion. Stalin and Mao ruthlessly persecuted Christians and Buddhists, and found scriptural support for their actions in Marx’s famous claim in his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” that religion is “the opium of the people” or “the opiate of the masses.” From there it seems a short step to Mao’s infamous claim to the Dalai Lama that “religion is poison,” as the Cultural Revolution burned so much of Tibet’s great heritage.

But hold on just a second. Martin’s review points to an important insight that blew me away when I first heard it in Geoff Waite‘s class on Marx, Nietzsche and Freud: opium, to someone of Marx’s time, was not the addictive danger that it seems to us, or to the post-Opium War Chinese. 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 Twitter. Or if you use RSS, you can get updates through the RSS feed.

Recent Comments

  • Nathan on Thoughts on MonkTok
  • Thoughts on MonkTok – The Indian Philosophy Blog on Thoughts on MonkTok
  • Amod Lele on Stoicism for boys, mindfulness for girls?
  • Amod Lele on Stoicism for boys, mindfulness for girls?
  • Amod Lele on Stoicism for boys, mindfulness for girls?

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 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 qualitative individualism race rebirth religion Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha) technology theodicy Thomas Kuhn United States utilitarianism Śaṅkara Śāntideva

Categories

  • African Thought (13)
  • Applied Phil (282)
    • Death (36)
    • Family (42)
    • Food (17)
    • Friends (14)
    • Health (23)
    • Place (27)
    • Play (14)
    • Politics (162)
    • Sex (20)
    • Work (37)
  • Asian Thought (403)
    • Buddhism (291)
      • Early and Theravāda (125)
      • Mahāyāna (118)
      • Modernized Buddhism (88)
    • East Asia (84)
      • Confucianism (54)
      • Daoism (13)
      • Shinto (1)
    • South Asia (131)
      • Bhakti Poets (3)
      • Cārvāka-Lokāyata (5)
      • Epics (16)
      • Jainism (24)
      • Modern Hinduism (37)
      • Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika (6)
      • Sāṃkhya-Yoga (14)
      • Vedānta (36)
      • Vedas and Mīmāṃsā (7)
  • Blog Admin (27)
  • Indigenous American Thought (5)
  • Method (244)
    • M.T.S.R. (137)
    • Metaphilosophy (161)
  • Practical Philosophy (358)
    • Action (11)
    • Aesthetics (43)
    • Emotion (153)
      • Anger (31)
      • Attachment and Craving (26)
      • Compassion (5)
      • Despair (3)
      • Disgust (3)
      • Faith (19)
      • Fear (7)
      • Grief (5)
      • Happiness (47)
      • Hope (15)
      • Pleasure (32)
      • Shame and Guilt (6)
    • External Goods (50)
    • Flourishing (85)
    • Foundations of Ethics (107)
    • Karma (43)
    • Morality (64)
    • Virtue (151)
      • Courage (5)
      • Generosity (13)
      • Gentleness (6)
      • Gratitude (10)
      • Honesty (13)
      • Humility (22)
      • Leadership (4)
      • 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 (334)
    • Consciousness (15)
    • Epistemology (109)
      • Certainty and Doubt (15)
      • Prejudices and "Intuitions" (28)
    • Free Will (17)
    • God (64)
    • Hermeneutics (55)
    • Human Nature (30)
    • Logic (28)
      • Dialectic (16)
    • Metaphysics (90)
    • Philosophy of Language (18)
    • Self (64)
    • Supernatural (49)
    • Truth (59)
    • Unconscious Mind (14)
  • Western Thought (427)
    • Analytic Tradition (91)
    • Christianity (142)
      • Early Factions (8)
      • Protestantism (22)
      • Roman Catholicism (49)
    • French Tradition (47)
    • German Tradition (85)
    • Greek and Roman Tradition (111)
      • Epicureanism (24)
      • Neoplatonism (2)
      • Pre-Socratics (6)
      • Skepticism (2)
      • Sophists (7)
      • Stoicism (19)
    • Islam (37)
      • Mu'tazila (2)
      • Salafi (3)
      • Sufism (9)
    • Judaism (33)
    • Natural Science (88)
      • Biology (24)
      • Philosophy of Science (47)
    • Social Science (149)
      • Economics (32)
      • Psychology (61)

Recent Posts

  • Thoughts on MonkTok
  • Stoicism for boys, mindfulness for girls?
  • A very brief survey of Latin American philosophy
  • Confucius in middle age
  • King’s improvement on Gandhi

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.