25 Sunday May 2014
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
29 Sunday Sep 2013
Posted in Flourishing, Metaphilosophy, Natural Science, Philosophy of Science, Truth
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After I had my first epiphany in Thailand, being changed by Buddhist ideas, I thought for a while that philosophy was the key to a good and happy life – that what we really needed to live well was to understand and think about the big questions of life. I see that attitude now as a young man’s naïve enthusiasm. As I read more Hegel, I’m particularly struck by how little guidance there is in there for living well. Living well requires reflection, yes, but above all the kind of reflection that comes out of practice. And I don’t primarily mean the meditation and meditation-like practices to which Yavanayāna Buddhists so often reduce the idea of “practice”, but the likes of therapy, exercise, and the very fact of going through daily life and learning from one’s experience and mistakes.
So what, one may well ask, is the point of philosophy? Continue reading
19 Sunday May 2013
Posted in Daoism, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion
≈ Comments Off on No apologies for studying Laozi and Zhuangzi
I’ve lately been trying to get a better understanding of Daoist thought, as I believe Daoism to be the major philosophical tradition I have so far understood the least. I have done this by turning to the two texts most widely read in the tradition: the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching), attributed to Laozi (Lao Tzu), and the Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) – the latter the name of both text and author. (I use the modern Pinyin spellings which are now most accepted by contemporary scholars, but older Wade-Giles spellings like “Taoism” and “Lao Tzu” may be more familiar to a general audience.) Were I to have free rein to teach a course that involved a component on Daoism, I would almost certainly focus on Laozi and Zhuangzi there as well.
To focus one’s study of Daoism on Laozi and Zhuangzi is very common. It is also controversial. Continue reading
17 Sunday Feb 2013
Posted in Biology, Epicureanism, German Tradition, Natural Science, Pre-Socratics
≈ Comments Off on The very young Marx
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atheism, Charles Darwin, Democritus, Epicurus, G.W.F. Hegel, John Rawls, Karl Marx, Paul Schafer, religion
In scholarship on Karl Marx it is a commonplace to draw a distinction between the “early Marx” or “young Marx” on one hand, and the “late Marx” (or “mature Marx”) on the other. There is considerable debate about whether Marx changed his opinions from the early phase or the late phase; many argue that they were constant. But there is little doubt that he changed his emphasis. The young Marx – the Marx of the Paris Manuscripts and Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – writes a great deal about Hegelian philosophy and the criticism of “religion”. For whatever reason, the late Marx – the Marx of Capital – largely leaves that topic behind, at least in what he says explicitly. He turns his attention instead to economics and politics, to the details of capitalism’s functioning.
Readers of this blog will not be surprised to find that I much prefer the writings of the young Marx. (It is humbling to realize that I am now older than he was.) And indeed I recently had a chance to go further: to the works of the very young Marx. Continue reading
07 Sunday Oct 2012
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Confucius, Dustin DiPerna, Gerard Bruitzman, Huston Smith, Ken Wilber, mystical experience, perennialism, religion
My recent article, which I summarized last week, appears in the issue of Journal of Integral Theory and Practice devoted to integral religious studies. Fellow blogger Dustin DiPerna also contributed an article to the journal, which takes an approach very different from mine. As I understand it, DiPerna discusses the history of religious studies in order to explain how it might be done from an Integral (i.e. Wilberian) perspective. Recently, Gerard Bruitzman critiqued DiPerna’s article online, and DiPerna offered a response. Happily, DiPerna’s article is available as a free PDF, and the responses are freely available online as well.
I’m excited by the conversation between DiPerna and Bruitzman because I think it opens up an opportunity for online dialogue about Wilber’s approach and its merits and flaws. Continue reading
30 Sunday Sep 2012
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Candrakīrti, Jesus, Ken Wilber, mystical experience, New Testament, perennialism, religion, Robert Sharf, Wilhelm Halbfass
I’ve been wanting to refer on the blog to the article I recently wrote for the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice. Out of respect for the journal’s hardworking editors (and the law!), I will not post the article or its text on the site. But I’d like to give a summary of what I said there, so that blog readers without access to JITP will know what I’m talking about. The argument here is not as precise or careful as that in the article, and readers will need to find a copy of JITP 7(2) to get those details.
The article is above all a critique of Ken Wilber’s method in cross-cultural philosophy, a method that Wilber himself describes as a form of empiricism. Continue reading
01 Sunday Jul 2012
One of the reasons I’ve enjoyed reading about Leah Libresco‘s conversion is it’s such a clear, current and vivid illustration of a phenomenon whose existence many would fervently like to wish away, would like to declare impossible. Namely, Libresco is demonstrably intelligent, with an actively questioning mind, and young; and she once actively declared herself belonging to the atheism that she has now rejected in favour of Catholicism. Many people find the existence of such a person really hard to take.
The clearest example of this is JT Eberhard, a young atheist blogger who remains a young atheist blogger. In his reaction, Eberhard proclaims: “I’m reading through all her posts and I’m floored. Leah’s really smart. I cannot believe the things she’s writing are coming from her mind.” Continue reading
17 Sunday Jul 2011
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Benjamin C. Kinney, Jabali108 (commenter), Jayarāśi, Neocarvaka (commenter), Ramachandra1008 (commenter), religion, T.R. (Thill) Raghunath
This week, another foray into the debate over “common sense.” Apologies in advance to those readers who are not interested in this particular topic, or who will find this post’s precision rough going. Common-sense advocate Thill has been by far this blog’s most prolific commenter, and I think advancing the debates in the comments requires taking his views on directly and systematically. Moreover, I think the topic is an important one in its own right. The claims made by Thill, Jabali108, Neocarvaka and Ramachandra1008 in their comments, if they were true, would rule out the vast majority of South Asian philosophical thought (and a great more besides): probably all the philosophy originating in the subcontinent except for the shadowy Cārvāka-Lokāyata school of thought. Only the Cārvākas can be thought to completely exclude “religious” ideas from their worldview; but there is little if anything left to be learned from this school now, since all we have from them is the scantest of fragments. (The only surviving complete text attributed to a Cārvāka is Jayarāśi’s Tattvopaplavasiṃha, which these commenters have already dismissed as not really a Cārvāka text.) If South Asian thought is worth bothering with at all, then we’ll need to defend those conceptions of the world that are in some respects at odds with various elements of “common sense” – which, according to Thill, excludes all “religion.” Continue reading
24 Sunday Apr 2011
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Aristotle, Benjamin C. Kinney, Carl Sagan, Jabali108 (commenter), Jim Wilton, justice, law, Margaret Thatcher, religion, T.R. (Thill) Raghunath
There’s been a great discussion going on in the comments to last week’s post on humility and science. This week I’m going to focus on only one of the themes mentioned, which takes us in a different direction from that post but is interesting in its own right.
My post recounted Carl Sagan’s claim that although “religions” claimed an ideal of humility, science was actually more humble; I argued that the two were in fact very similar. A comment from Ben acutely pointed out something I had been missing, a way in which Sagan was right that the tradition was different. Sagan, Ben points out, is defending “not the humility of individuals, but the humility of the whole tradition.” Science as a whole is able to admit when it is wrong, in a way that Christianity and Buddhism are not. In a following dialogue, Ben and I agree that science maintains an institutional humility that “religious” traditions do not, though those other traditions likely do a better job of promoting individual humility.
Other commenters took issue with this agreement, however. If you follow the comment threads on this site with any regularity, you will know that Thill and Jim Wilton do not usually agree on very much. But this time, they unanimously condemn the point shared by Ben and myself: “There is a category mistake here,” says Thill. “Traditions cannot be said to be humble or arrogant. Only individuals can be said to be humble or arrogant.”
And this is a question that well deserves further philosophical exploration. Can an institution or a tradition possess a virtue? Can a government be courageous? Can a corporation be honest? Can a tradition be humble? Continue reading
17 Sunday Apr 2011
Tags
Aaron Stalnaker, academia, André Comte-Sponville, Ann Druyan, Augustine, Carl Sagan, chastened intellectualism, religion, Xunzi
I’ve lately been reading and enjoying The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan‘s manifesto against pseudoscientifc beliefs (such as alien abductions). One of the more enjoyable and thought-provoking sections of the book is a discussion of scientists’ humility: “I maintain that science is part and parcel humility. Scientists do not seek to impose their needs and wants on Nature, but instead humbly interrogate Nature and take seriously what they find. We are aware that revered scientists have been wrong. We understand human imperfection.” (32) The ideal scientist humbles herself before the truths about the natural world that she finds in her work. He quotes his wife Ann Druyan to the effect that science “is forever whispering in our ears, ‘Remember, you’re very new at this. You might be mistaken. You’ve been wrong before.'” (34-5) I hadn’t thought of science in these terms before, but I think Sagan is quite right about this – to an extent, as I’ll discuss below. Sagan repeatedly and rightly stresses the importance of uncertainty for a scientist; to live up to the ideals of scientific research requires the ability to admit we are wrong. A scientist must never be too confident in her own rightness; what first seems obvious is often exactly what turns out to be wrong, overthrown by the evidence. I think this is excellent advice for scientists to follow – or anyone else.
After quoting Druyan, Sagan proceeds immediately to add: “Despite all the talk of humility, show me something comparable in religion.” And this is where he goes astray. Continue reading