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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Talcott Parsons

An outsider who sees the whole

16 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Confucianism, Family, German Tradition, Gratitude, Modern Hinduism, Social Science

≈ Comments Off on An outsider who sees the whole

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academia, autobiography, Axel van den Berg, James Doull, Jayant Lele, Karl Marx, Ken Wilber, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Talcott Parsons, Warwick Armstrong

Continuing to honour my parents, I would like to turn this week to my father, Jayant Lele, who has been central to my intellectual development throughout my lifetime. No doubt he has influencrd me in many ways I’m not even aware of; here I will discuss what I do know about.

My father bequeathed to me two intellectual drives: to understand wider context, and to stand outside consensus as an intellectual outsider. Continue reading →

What it means to have a reason for action

29 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Action, Analytic Tradition, Biology, Foundations of Ethics, Free Will, God, Greek and Roman Tradition, Morality, Philosophy of Science, Social Science, South Asia

≈ 67 Comments

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Aristotle, Charles Darwin, Drew Schroeder, Friedrich Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant, Talcott Parsons

One of the most fundamental things a philosopher does is to ask why. When someone says “you should do x” or “y is good,” it seems to me, the true lover of wisdom needs to ask why this is the case. If someone tells me I should do something and can’t provide a reason, I see this as grounds for questioning whether it really is something I should do at all. Nietzsche, if he does nothing else, shows us that the things we take as obvious may well not be so.

So what happens when we try to take our reasons all the way down? When we continue asking why we should do anything? We begin to get to a complex meta-ethical question: what constitutes a reason for action? What is it to have a reason to do something? (Warning: this will be an abstract and theoretical post, but it is important to fundamental questions like why we should do anything at all.) Continue reading →

A disrespectful performance

28 Wednesday Oct 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in M.T.S.R., Natural Science, Social Science, South Asia, Truth

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Edward Conze, Edward Said, J.L. Austin, Robin Horton, Saul Alinsky, Talcott Parsons, Vedas

What does it mean to respect another culture, or the people and ideas within that culture? In the prevailing climate of contemporary academic religious studies, it seems taken as a given that one should refrain from criticizing other cultures and their beliefs and ideas. Older Buddhologists like Edward Conze are viewed as an embarrassment, with their strong opinions, positive and negative, about Buddhism and India. We are told not to judge other cultures the way Conze did. Sometimes the refusal of judgement derives from a positivistic desire to ape natural science, with an “objectivity” that denies reference to value; but more often, making judgements about other cultures seems imperialist and disrespectful, a form of Orientalism or even racism.

This refusal to make judgements seems to me to underlie the currently fashionable “performance theory” in studies of ritual, and religious studies more generally. The approach here (usually drawing on the speech-act theory of J.L. Austin) is to remove attention from ideas and truth claims and direct it instead toward social functions: don’t look at what people’s claims say, look at what the claims do in their social context. (As a former sociologist it’s curious to me that the hot and trendy methodology in religious studies – look at functions rather than ideas – looks very similar to the sociological functionalism of Talcott Parsons, an approach that sociologists now discuss only to explain how discredited it is.) One former colleague of mine, describing his studies of Vedic texts, explained his approach as follows: “What do these texts mean when they say ‘gold causes jaundice’? They can’t really believe that gold causes jaundice! There must be something else going on here, something that it does to say such a thing.” As far as I understand it, much of this performance theory is motivated by a desire to respect other cultures. Surely people can’t be so stupid as to mean these bizarrely unscientific things they say; they must be saying it for another reason.

It seems to me, though, that this view gets it exactly backwards. Continue reading →

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