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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Wilfred Cantwell Smith

Right view vs. true statements

13 Sunday Sep 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Attachment and Craving, Early and Theravāda, Epistemology, Philosophy of Language, Truth

≈ 4 Comments

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Abhidhamma, Buddhaghosa, Noble Eightfold Path, Pali suttas, Paul Fuller, Wilfred Cantwell Smith

Paul Fuller’s The Notion of Diṭṭhi in Theravāda Buddhism, as its title might suggest, is a dry, abstract, technical monograph. It may also be one of the more spiritually beneficial books I have ever read.

I suppose maybe both of these things are appropriate to the book’s subject matter, the Pali Canon. One of the Canon’s “three baskets”, the abhidhamma, is notorious for its level of technical abstraction – and yet Theravāda tradition has consistently held it to be of great spiritual benefit. Erik Braun has demonstrated how the modern Burmese traditions of vipassanā meditation, now enormously popular around the world, have their origins in study of the abhidhamma.

Continue reading →

Why the study of religion shouldn’t be about studying religion

09 Sunday Oct 2016

Posted by Amod Lele in M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Place, Practice, Social Science

≈ 1 Comment

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academia, Peter Saunders, religion, Timothy Fitzgerald, Wilfred Cantwell Smith

My undergraduate degree was in sociology and geography, with a focus on urban studies. That world often seems far away from the cross-cultural philosophy that drives me now – but not always.

Since “urban sociology” existed as a subfield and seemed to be the one I was trying to study, I once did a term-paper project asking the question: what is urban sociology? The answer I found most interesting and compelling was provided by the Australian sociologist Peter Saunders, in his Social Theory and the Urban Question. Continue reading →

The bewitching Wittgenstein

21 Sunday Nov 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Epistemology, German Tradition, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Language, Play

≈ 40 Comments

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academia, G.W.F. Hegel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, religion, Thomas Kuhn, Wilfred Cantwell Smith

In the previous post I noted that I am completely unimpressed by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. What I know of the rest of his work, at least the Philosophical Investigations, has done little to impress me either. (Most of what I read serves to convince me more strongly that he is wrong.)

I suppose I’ve long been predisposed against Wittgenstein because of the unfortunate ways his thought is used in religious studies. Continue reading →

Truth and contradiction beyond propositions

14 Sunday Feb 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in African Thought, Analytic Tradition, Christianity, East Asia, German Tradition, God, Greek and Roman Tradition, Logic, Metaphysics, Modern Hinduism, Philosophy of Language, Truth, Vedānta

≈ 2 Comments

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Advaita Vedānta, Alasdair MacIntyre, Augustine, G.W.F. Hegel, Graham Priest, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Plato, Śaṅkara, Wilfred Cantwell Smith

What do Augustine, Gandhi, Śaṅkara, Marx and Mao all have in common? Something quite important. But before answering this question, a brief excursus on Marx’s inspiration, G.W.F. Hegel.

In reading Graham Priest’s work, I was particularly struck by a point Priest makes at length in his Stanford Encyclopedia article: that Hegel believes there can be true contradictions, and is in that sense a dialetheist. I think Priest is technically right, but the point can be a bit misleading.

First, Hegel accepts the normative force of non-contradiction, in a way that Priest also does but tends to push to the sidelines. That is: while it’s possible for contradictions to be true, there’s also something about them that is epistemologically bad. As I noted last time, Priest accepts this point himself, so that when he says “What is so bad about contradictions? Maybe nothing,” he is effectively being disingenuous for rhetorical effect. For Priest, contradictions are epistemologically bad only in that the probability of a contradiction being true is generally low. For Hegel the problem with contradictions is something significantly bigger: a true contradiction eventually and inevitably becomes false.

This point leads into a bigger difference that goes well beyond Hegel’s and Priest’s work, which is what I really want to address today. Priest generally imagines contradictions as existing between linguistic truth-bearers of some description. He says at the beginning of the SEP entry that “we shall talk of sentences throughout this entry; but one could run the definition in terms of propositions, statements, or whatever one takes as her favourite truth-bearer: this would make little difference in the context.” But some objects taken to bear truth could, I think, change the nature of the claim significantly. Priest’s truth-bearers are statements, beliefs, propositions – all mere linguistic mental or verbal objects. But not everyone has taken truth-bearers to be of this kind. The most vivid exception may be Saint Augustine, about whom Alasdair MacIntyre put the matter beautifully:

for Augustine it is in terms of the relationships neither of statements nor of minds that truth is to be primarily characterized and understood. “Veritas,” a noun naming a substance, is a more fundamental expression than “verum,” an attribute of things, and the truth or falsity of statements is a tertiary matter. To speak truly is to speak of things as they really and truly are; and things really and truly are in virtue only of their relationship to veritas. So where Aristotle locates truth in the relationship of the mind to its objects, Augustine locates it in the source of the relationship of finite objects to that truth which is God. (Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, p. 110)

Here not merely statements or beliefs but things are true – by virtue, I think, of their genuineness, their closeness to a Platonic Form of goodness which, for Augustine, turns out to be God himself. Continue reading →

Differences across traditions, or within them?

20 Thursday Aug 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Faith, M.T.S.R.

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Kevin Smith, religion, Wilfred Cantwell Smith

You can’t go very far in cross-cultural philosophy without quickly running into the category of “religion” – indeed it’s already come up a number of times on this blog. When I was deciding where to do a doctorate studying the questions of cross-cultural philosophy, the most appropriate places seemed to be departments of religious studies; the departments where I’ve taught after graduation were religious studies as well. (This was for a variety of reasons, but the most important and obvious is that very few philosophy departments make any room for non-Western philosophy.)

But to what extent does the category of “religion” help us think cross-culturally – especially the idea of “different religions”? My suspicion is that it hurts more than it helps, because it puts up unnecessary barriers to inquiry; it discourages conversations across the boundaries of traditions.

Now let me be clear: I don’t at all buy the view that all religions are the same – or as Kevin Smith had Chris Rock put it in Dogma, “It doesn’t matter what you have faith in; what matters is that you have faith.” This is a dangerously simplistic move; one can supply countless historical examples of people who have had faith in the wrong thing. (Wilfred Cantwell Smith took a more sophisticated version of this position, but still, to my mind, a wrong one.) The differences in people’s beliefs and practices matter, and they matter a lot.

Still, one should ask: which differences matter? We tend to focus on the differences across traditions – the boxes one checks on the census, the differences between Christianity and Buddhism, say. But the more important differences may be within traditions. It seems to me that on many of the most important questions – Should we live ascetic lives or worldly ones? Should we ever lie, or kill? Should we be politically active? Should we love our own families more, or the whole world? – most “religions” have members taking positions on both sides. The difference between a liberal Canadian Anglican and an Engaged Buddhist, for example, seems to me much smaller than the difference between that same Anglican and an anti-gay Anglican African who believes in magic.


No post this coming Sunday, as I’m moving to a new apartment then.

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