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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: United States

King’s improvement on Gandhi

15 Sunday Jan 2023

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Jainism, Modern Hinduism, Politics, Protestantism

≈ 6 Comments

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Bhagavad Gītā, Boston University, James Doull, Karl Marx, Martin Luther King Jr., Mohandas K. Gandhi, race, Reinhold Niebuhr, United States, Vinoba Bhave

Tomorrow the United States celebrates a holiday in honour of Martin Luther King, Jr. Boston University, where I work, is always eager to remind everyone that King got his doctorate there. They are not always as eager to remind you that King studied at the School of Theology – and clearly learned his lessons there well, for he was not merely a great activist but a great philosopher.

I have come to know King’s thought through the courses I have taught in BU’s philosophy department – even though the courses were on Indian philosophy. I have nevertheless included King on the syllabus for that class, with guest speakers introducing him to the students, because I wanted to show students the contemporary relevance of Indian philosophy. Specifically, King drew a great deal of his ideas from Gandhi – who was a philosopher-activist like King, and in turn drew on earlier Indian thought like Jainism and the Bhagavad Gītā. It seems to me on reflection, though, that the student surpassed the pupil: that what King said and wrote with Gandhi’s influence was profounder and more valuable than Gandhi’s own thought was in itself.

Martin Luther King Jr.
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Introducing Canadian Hegelianism

04 Sunday Dec 2022

Posted by Amod Lele in German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Politics

≈ 11 Comments

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20th century, autobiography, Canada, Charles Taylor, Douglas Adams, G.W.F. Hegel, George Grant, James Doull, John Watson, José Enrique Rodó, Queen's University, Robert Sibley, United States

Hegel wrote about Canada just once, in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, and what he said comes down to: mostly harmless. His main concern in that passage is the future power of the United States; having noted that the poor organization of the American colonies prevented them from conquering Canada, he then adds that Canada and Mexico “present no serious threat” to the US, and then moves on. It is scarcely more consideration than Voltaire’s dismissal of Canada as “a few acres of snow”; like the fictional Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy discussing Earth, Hegel pauses on Canada only long enough to say “you don’t need to worry about it.”

And yet, as Robert Sibley notes in beginning his fascinating Northern Spirits, English Canadian philosophers have had a deep, abiding and continuing interest in Hegel, unrequited as it may be – an interest not generally shared by other countries in the anglophone West. Canadian Hegelianism turns out to be its own philosophical tradition – one that’s played a significant role in my own philosophical formation. It is only in the 21st century that people like Sibley have started writing about this Canadian Hegelianism, but it’s been around for longer.

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On getting a religious exemption

11 Sunday Sep 2022

Posted by Amod Lele in Indigenous American Thought, M.T.S.R., Politics

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

drugs, law, religion, United States

Longtime readers will know I don’t have much patience for the concept of “religion”. I continue to endorse the various critiques I’ve made in the past: the concept of “religion” confuses more than it clarifies. And yet as it turns out, I owe the concept of “religion” a favour.

What do I mean by that? I mean that I recently got a valuable and important opportunity which I don’t think I could have undertaken if the concept of “religion” didn’t exist.

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The 1502 project

03 Sunday Jul 2022

Posted by Amod Lele in Place, Politics

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Aztec, identity, Juan Garrido, Mexico, Nikole Hannah-Jones, race, United States

Who was the first person of African descent – the first black person – to set foot in the Americas? In what capacity did that person come, and when?

If you have been in the United States or otherwise following American debates in the past few years, you might call to mind the 1619 Project, led by Nikole Hannah-Jones at the New York Times, which aims to tell an “alternate origin story” for the United States, focused on African-Americans. That story begins in 1619 with the arrival of African-descended slaves in the colony of Virginia. So you might think that the first black people in the Americas, or at least in the United States, were these slaves who arrived in 1619.

You would be wrong.

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Whither blogging?

27 Sunday Feb 2022

Posted by Amod Lele in Blog Admin, Politics

≈ 4 Comments

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21st century, Bari Weiss, Facebook, Glenn Greenwald, John McWhorter, Matthew Yglesias, Substack, technology, Twitter, United States, WordPress

At the beginning of Love of All Wisdom’s tenth-anniversary post, I wrote: “In the span of the history of philosophy, ten years is the blink of an eye. In the span of the blogosphere, however, ten years is an eternity.” Immediately after the post went up, a thought occurred to me, which would probably have made that point even more effectively. Namely: does anyone even say “blogosphere” anymore?

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Integrators and operators at the APA

24 Sunday Oct 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Asian Thought, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Politics, Prejudices and "Intuitions"

≈ 9 Comments

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APA, Aztec, Bernard Lonergan, conferences, Korea, Matthew Yglesias, Mexico, race, United States

The Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association held its 2021 annual meeting last winter. It could not meet in person, of course. I forget where it was originally scheduled to meet, but that hardly matters now. Rather: since attending philosophy conferences is usually not related to my day job, I need to use my own money and precious vacation time to travel there, so under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have attended. This year, though, since it was virtual (and spread over two weekends), I had a chance to participate and see several of the sessions.

What immediately struck me on perusing the meeting program was how drastically different the meeting’s content was from previous years. It seemed barely recognizable as the same organization. On the kinds of abstract analytical topics that are the APA’s traditional bread and butter – epistemology, philosophy of language, meta-ethics – there were surprisingly slim pickings. The sessions I’d found most valuable in past years were on interpreting and applying philosophers of the Western canon – Aristotle, Hume, Hegel – and this year, those too were in short supply. Neither kind of session was gone, their numbers were just notably smaller, at least in proportion.

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Should undergraduate classics require Latin and Greek?

04 Sunday Jul 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Greek and Roman Tradition, M.T.S.R., Work

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

academia, pedagogy, Princeton University, United States

The discipline of classics has made headlines recently with Princeton University’s decision to no longer require majors to take Greek or Latin. This is a fairly momentous decision: aren’t Greek and Latin what Classics is all about?

I have mixed feelings about the decision. I think there is a lot of value in learning Greek and Latin. Certainly for philosophers: we need to understand philosophy’s history, and in our world that history is inescapably Western even for those of us who do not focus on it. I am broadly Aristotelian and wish I knew more Greek to understand him better. As for Latin, it remains important for lawyers and biologists, and knowing the very many Latin roots of English words gives us a much deeper understanding of those words’ meaning. A world where even fewer people know Greek or Latin does not seem to me a good thing, overall.

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Health, wealth, time, and their purposes

30 Sunday May 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in External Goods, Flourishing, Health, Monasticism, Politics

≈ Comments Off on Health, wealth, time, and their purposes

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Aristotle, COVID-19, Martin Hägglund, puruṣārthas, Sandro Galea, United States

Sandro Galea, the dean of BU’s School of Public Health, recently wrote a wonderful (free) Substack post reflecting on the nature of health in the pandemic and post-pandemic era. I’m writing about Galea’s post here because the questions it raises are absolutely philosophical ones.

He closes with the important comment: “we do not live to be healthy—we aspire to be healthy so we can live.” In other circumstances this might seem a truism. But the past fourteen months have made it all too clear how much this needs to be said. For we have all become all too aware of just how much can be given up for the sake of health. Government restrictions already placed major limits on our activity. Most people I know, myself included, limited their activity considerably further than what was required by the government. And most of us also know others whose restrictions went even further than our own. A number of people effectively became voluntary shut-ins, losing all physical contact with the outside world out of fear of a dread disease.

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How to reach a colour-blind society

02 Sunday May 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Politics, Psychology, Unconscious Mind

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

caste, Implicit Association Test, Jawaharlal Nehru, Jay Garfield, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., Prince Ea, race, Ronald Reagan, Śāntideva, United States

Perhaps the best-known quote from Martin Luther King Jr. is: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” The kind of society that King dreams of in this sentence is often called “colour-blind” – in a meaning referring not literally to the disability, but to skin colour being irrelevant to people’s lives and the way society judges them. Prince Ea’s wonderful “I am not black, you are not white” video, which I cited as an exemplar of qualitative individualism, further expresses the ideal of colour-blindness: race is just a label that diminishes who we really are. For my own qualitative individualist reasons, it is an ideal I endorse.

In recent years, though, the concept of racial colour-blindness has come under attack. And I do believe that one strand of this attack is entirely justified.

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Literature as representation and rasa

21 Sunday Feb 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Emotion, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Place, Politics, Reading and Recitation, South Asia

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

academia, APA, Bryan Van Norden, Jay Garfield, Matt Wilkens, rasa, Sumana Roy, United States

Sumana Roy, a professor of literature at Ashoka University near Delhi, wrote a wonderful recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education identifying significant problems with the way Indian literature is taught, in both American and Indian universities. In American universities Indian literature is expected to represent India, to provide a moral or political message about the country and its political life – and, Roy thinks, this American understanding has then been imported into India itself. When Indian universities teach English-language Indian literature, they are asked questions like “Analyze Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines as a critique of the nation-state” and “Write a note on Velutha as a Dalit character in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things”. Yet in the same departments John Donne is studied as “a metaphysical poet”, Virginia Woolf as “a stream-of-consciousness novelist” and so on. European and American writers, Roy thinks, can be appreciated and enjoyed for their aesthetic qualities; Indian writers are supposed to send a message.

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