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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: pramāṇa

The reasons for nondualism

21 Sunday Mar 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Psychology, Reading and Recitation, Sufism, Vedānta

≈ 10 Comments

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Advaita Vedānta, Alasdair MacIntyre, Aristotle, conventional/ultimate, drugs, G.W.F. Hegel, Gārgī Vācaknavī, Muhyiddin ibn 'Arabī, mystical experience, Nathan (commenter), nondualism, pramāṇa, Roland Griffiths, Śaṅkara, Thales, Upaniṣads, Zhiyi

I said previously of nondualism, “I’m not sure I can think of any other major philosophical idea that flowered so much in so many different places, more or less independently. I think that gives us prima facie reason to think the nondualists were on to something important.” Nathan reasonably took me to task for this claim in a comment: “Amod seems to overlook that ideas can be successful without being true.”

I don’t think it’s fair to say I overlooked that point: I said the pervasiveness gave us reason prima facie – at first glance – to say think the nondualists were on to something. That doesn’t mean nondualism is true, and I didn’t say that it was. Second glances might reveal something different. And where I think Nathan is right is in asking us to take those second glances. Is nondualism widespread for a reason other than its being true?

Continue reading →

On translating out of order

07 Sunday Apr 2019

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Hermeneutics, Logic, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, Self

≈ Comments Off on On translating out of order

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Matthew Dasti, Mrinalkanti Gangopadhyaya, Nyāya Bhāṣya, Nyāya Sūtra, pedagogy, pramāṇa, Stephen Phillips

Last time I expressed my gratitude and praise for Matthew Dasti and Stephen Phillips’s much-needed recent selective translation of the Nyāya Sūtras and commentaries. I stand by all of it – and also noted that the book drives me crazy.

Why? Dasti and Phillips made two decisions that I think are characteristic of an analytic approach to Indian texts. One was to publish selections and excerpts  – probably the right choice, as discussed last time. The second one, however, was to publish those selections entirely out of order. Continue reading →

The spectrum of philosophy of science

10 Sunday Jun 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science, Social Science

≈ 2 Comments

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Francis Bacon, Imre Lakatos, Karl Popper, Paul Feyerabend, pramāṇa, RationalWiki, Thomas Kuhn

I have found myself thinking more and more lately about the philosophy of science, and finding it increasingly important for the rest of philosophy. There are multiple reasons for this. Perhaps the most important is simply the prestige (or normative weight) we attach to scientific knowledge, a prestige I take to be deserved. I would agree that to the extent that it is fair to say that “science has established” that human consciousness is not reborn after death, then it is true that human consciousness is not reborn after death. Science, in that respect, is what classical Indian philosophers would have called a pramāṇa, a reliable means of knowledge.

A second, related, reason is that it turns out that that very nature of something’s being scientifically established turns out on closer glance to be quite complex, itself its own kind of philosophical question – and one with bearing on philosophical questions well outside the natural sciences. Studies of the history of science – what science has actually been in practice, not what it is supposed to be in theory – show us a process much messier than an account in the standard mold of “build your theory by generalizing from the empirical evidence”. Often the theoretical insight comes first and the observations supporting it come only later. So Copernicus built his heliocentric model mathematically and only later would Galileo demonstrate it with a telescope, just as Einstein began with an “intuition” of the theory of relativity that was only later empirically verified. The way actual science – including the science of our greatest scientific heroes – has proceeded, turns out to be considerably messier than the standard account tells us it is supposed to be.

How then might we think about what science and scientific knowledge are? Continue reading →

On tradition and observation in Tibetan medicine

02 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Biology, Epistemology, Health, Hermeneutics, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Natural Science, Philosophy of Science

≈ 2 Comments

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ascent/descent, Francesco Sizzi, G.V. Coyne, Galileo Galilei, Janet Gyatso, Phyllis Chiasson, pramāṇa, Richard Westfall, tantra, Thomas Kuhn, Tibet, Yutok Yönten Gönpo, Zurkharwa Lodrö Gyelpo

Two disclaimers are required for this week’s post. First, Janet Gyatso was on my dissertation committee and before that served as my doctoral advisor. Second, Columbia University Press offered to send me a free copy of her new book if I would review it on Love of All Wisdom, and I accepted on condition that the review could be critical. This is that review. Take it as you will.

Sometime during my doctoral studies I recall a student asking Prof. Janet Gyatso what she was currently researching, and she mentioned Tibetan medical literature. That couldn’t have been any later than 2007, when I graduated, and was probably before. Only now, at least eight years later, has Gyatso’s book on Tibetan medicine come out – and one can see why it took so long.

Being Human in a Buddhist World cannot have been an easy book to write. It is a detailed study of several different Tibetan works on medicine, none of which have been translated into a Western language, and all of which deal with highly technical questions of biology using a set of concepts very different from those familiar in the modern West – some in the form of “a dark, incomplete, and frequently illegible third-generation photocopy of a manuscript that is itself rife with spelling mistakes and smudges.” One does not find oneself eager to replicate such a study.

The title of this book is well chosen. Most Buddhism tends to be what I have called an ascent tradition; it is about transcending the condition of our everyday particular humanity, detaching oneself from what the texts Gyatso studies call “the horrible world”. But even if we were to grant that its most advanced practitioners have become in some sense superhuman (say Thich Quang Duc, who, eyewitnesses say, was able to remain perfectly at peace while setting himself on fire), the fact remains that everybody else is still human, all too human. Continue reading →

Śabda and the sciences

12 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by Amod Lele in Cārvāka-Lokāyata, Epistemology, Faith, Foundations of Ethics, Hermeneutics, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Science, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Sāṃkhya-Yoga

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

David Hume, Dignāga, pramāṇa, René Descartes

One of the key debates in Indian philosophy is what counts as a pramāṇa: an instrument of knowledge, a “reliable warrant”, a means of knowledge reliable enough that one can be reasonably confident to take its conclusions as true. What counts as a pramāṇa? Many Indian philosophers will provide a numbered list of them.

In the empiricist tradition that remains popular in the West, boosted by the discoveries of natural science, only experience is admitted as a pramāṇa: to a full-blown empiricist, nothing counts as knowledge if it doesn’t ultimately have its roots in experience, based in some sort of direct perception. (Ken Wilber’s thought has come to take this position more and more over the years, to its detriment.) The debate over pramāṇas in modern Western philosophy is often framed as one between empiricism and rationalism. That is, where empiricists admit only experience as a pramāṇa, rationalists also allow reasoning an independent validity: some things can be rationally known a priori, independently of sense experience.

Some Indian philosophers have agreed with these views. Continue reading →

How may we tell true from false?

24 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Analytic Tradition, Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, Sex, Truth, Vedānta, Virtue

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

Benjamin C. Kinney, pramāṇa, T.R. (Thill) Raghunath, virtue epistemology

How can we, or should we, learn what is true and what is false? This is one of the most enduring and basic questions in philosophy – “basic” because it is fundamental to so many others, not because the answers are in any way easy or simple.

The question, or some form of it, came up a number of times in recent discussions of “common sense”: if common sense isn’t reliable, I was asked, what is? I’m going to try to avoid the word “reliable” as I think its different uses became confusing in the previous debate; I have little stake in its use as a term. But the basic question of determining truth from falsehood is a crucial one and worth asking.

That’s not to say, however, that it admits easy answers, for I don’t think we should expect easy answers on the most basic philosophical questions. Continue reading →

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