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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Randall Collins

Asian historicism before Protestantism

18 Sunday Aug 2019

Posted by Amod Lele in Confucianism, Early and Theravāda, Hermeneutics, M.T.S.R., Modernized Buddhism, Protestantism, Reading and Recitation

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Bryan Van Norden, Confucius, Dai Zhen, Dīpavaṃsa, Heinz Bechert, Justin Tiwald, Mahāvaṃsa, Mencius, Randall Collins, Sri Lanka, Steven Collins

We are surely familiar with the pattern by now: members of an Asian tradition are concerned about supposed corruptions in their tradition which depart from the intentions of the tradition’s historic founders, so they turn with renewed focus to the historical texts that they take to be at the tradition’s centre. We, with our historical hindsight, now know that this Asian concern with texts and founders is an alien importation, the work of colonial subjects aping their Protestant missionary rulers’ search for textual historicity.

Except for one thing: it isn’t.

Continue reading →

Strange bedfellows to save the humanities

19 Sunday Jul 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Politics

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

academia, Andrew Hartman, conservatism, Patrick McCrory, Randall Collins, Republican Party, Scott Walker, United States

The assault on the academic humanities in the United States continues apace, and not only the humanities. North Carolina governor Pat McCrory is putting into practice his previous assertion that the government should only subsidize those fields useful to capitalism: the North Carolina government is eliminating 46 degree programs in the state, including even human biology at its flagship institution.

McCrory is far from isolated in this. Continue reading →

In which I am interviewed

09 Saturday May 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Christianity, Dialectic, Early and Theravāda, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Sex

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, ascent/descent, Augustine, Ayn Rand, Canada, conservatism, Damon Linker, Disengaged Buddhism, G.W.F. Hegel, George Grant, Heinrich Zimmer, interview, James Doull, Ken Wilber, Martha Nussbaum, Nicholas Thorne, Randall Collins, skholiast (blogger)

The always interesting skholiast, whose ideas have figured strongly in quite a few of my posts here over the years, took what I consider the enormously flattering step of interviewing me about my philosophy, in both oral and written form. He is posting the interview on his blog in two parts; the first of these is up now. I think the dialogue form is helpful for philosophical thought, and if you’re interested in my ideas I would highly encourage you to read it.

Digital philosophy

16 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Friends, Metaphilosophy, Social Science

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

academia, Aristotle, Elisa Freschi, lokatakki (commenter), Matt Wilkens, Mencius, Pune, Randall Collins, skholiast (blogger), technology

The term digital humanities has quickly become trendy over the past couple years. The term has often excited me, since digital technology in the humanities is both a part of what I do for a living, and what makes my humanistic scholarship on this blog possible. So I’ve followed discussions of digital humanities, such as the HUMANIST mailing list, with interest.

I remain deeply interested in the field, but I’ve also begun to acquire some skepticism toward it. Continue reading →

On innovation through conservatism

20 Sunday May 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Confucianism, Hermeneutics, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Modern Hinduism, Roman Catholicism, Shinto, Social Science, Vedānta

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, conservatism, Front Porch Republic, Japan, Ken Wilber, modernism, modernity, postmodernism, Randall Collins, Romanticism, Śaṅkara, Thomas P. Kasulis, Upaniṣads

I noted two weeks ago how Ken Wilber’s recent post/modern turn (“Wilber-5”) is right in important respects, but suggested important problems with it. Last week I noted empirical problems: sociological data on Christianity show a very different picture from his. This week I want to turn to a deeper philosophical problem, which I suspect underlies last week’s sociological picture.

We cannot go back to premodernity. This much is true and important. Our options going forward must take account of the post/modern world, be developed within it. On all of this I agree with Wilber. But what I don’t think Wilber makes room for is this: one can take account of the post/modern world, understand it, know it, and still reject it. Continue reading →

The first philosophy blogger

17 Wednesday Feb 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in French Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Social Science, Work

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

academia, Baruch Spinoza, Jacques Lacan, Ken Wilber, Randall Collins, technology

As much as I love philosophy, I’ve never been an entirely comfortable fit with academic philosophy or religion departments. But until recently they were more or less the only game in town, the only way to get philosophical ideas heard by the world – unless one tried to be a freelance philosophy writer like Ken Wilber, an even more excruciating path to follow. Randall Collins in The Sociology of Philosophies argued that the great periods of philosophical creativity in the past have come with particular institutional settings – the monastery, the Greek agora – and that in the recent past it has come above all with the research university and the popular-press book, two institutions with whom philosophy’s future may now be in is in some doubt.

Blogs, however, excite me as a new way to do philosophy, one not available to previous generations. What might it mean to do philosophy primarily in this new format? It’s probably too early to tell. But there’s one towering figure in the history of philosophy who gives us a clue as to what it might look like, and his name is Baruch (or Benedictus de) Spinoza.

Spinoza should be an inspiration for philosophy bloggers in two different respects. First of all, he didn’t make money off his philosophy; he stands out (like Leibniz and John Stuart Mill) as a modern philosopher who did philosophy in his “spare” time. Continue reading →

Following science as a layperson

13 Sunday Dec 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Certainty and Doubt, Epistemology, Faith, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Humility, Natural Science, Philosophy of Science, Politics, Social Science, South Asia

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, Edward O. Wilson, Friedrich Schelling, G.W.F. Hegel, George Monbiot, John Doris, Ken Wilber, natural environment, Randall Collins, René Descartes, Stephen Jay Gould

Perhaps the trickiest thing about trying to be a philosopher today is the explosion of information in natural science: we are in the era of “rapid-discovery science,” as Randall Collins calls it in The Sociology of Philosophies. Aristotle could write not merely a Metaphysics but a Physics, and his wide range of general knowledge was enough to make him one of the experts on the subject. Even as recently as the 19th century, Schelling and Hegel could have a decent shot at writing “philosophies of nature,” in which they tried to think philosophically through the whole scope of the way the natural world works. But today, not even a professor of natural science can know all the science that’s out there, even in relatively general terms. To some extent, we need to rely on the authority of experts we trust to know their fields well – what Indian philosophers called the śabdapramāṇa, the source of knowledge beyond inference and personal experience. And even if we somehow could know all the science for a moment, we’d lose it almost instantly as the science changes. Continue reading →

Caution towards innovation

21 Wednesday Oct 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, French Tradition, German Tradition, Modernized Buddhism, Place, Politics, Psychology

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

architecture, authenticity, Christopher Peterson, Communism, Jayant Lele, Karl Marx, Martin Seligman, modernism, Paul Ricoeur, Randall Collins, Richard Davidson, Stephen Walker, United States

Sunday’s post, on modernism and the change in values from “old-fashioned” to “old-school,” might help explain a question that I and others have pondered here: why do human beings so often prefer what is old? Stephen Walker noted the point in his comment on Yavanayāna Buddhism: people often seem unwilling to credit themselves with innovations, to accept that their ideas are new. Rather they present themselves as defending old ideas when they come up with new ones. (In his The Sociology of Philosophies, Randall Collins suggests that this is a typical pattern in human thought (especially in Japan, but elsewhere as well): “innovation through conservatism.” A while back I asked a similar question about authenticity: why do we privilege authenticity so much, when its distinguishing feature would seem to be the absence of choice?

Maybe we can start to see an answer now that we’ve had a chance to look back on the alternative. The twentieth century, in many ways, was the century of modernism – the rejection of the past as a guide to living. As I noted last time, modernism brought us Pruitt-Igoe, the grand and innovative housing project that was dynamited as unlivable. But more than that, I think, it brought us Communism, the form of government practised in the Soviet Union, China and their allies in the mid-twentieth century. Continue reading →

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