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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Wilfrid Sellars

The need for subjectivity

25 Sunday Oct 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Death, Epistemology, Metaphysics, Natural Science, Self

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Augustine, conventional/ultimate, G.W.F. Hegel, Graham Harman, Kyoto School, Nishida Kitarō, nondualism, Quentin Meillassoux, Śaṅkara, Speculative Realism, Wilfrid Sellars

I first read Quentin Meillassoux in a local reading group in summer 2016, and thought at first that I was largely in agreement with him. That changed in 2019 when the same group read the Kyoto School‘s Nishida Kitarō.

Nishida reminded me of the importance of subjectivity in our thought about the world – something which Meillassoux is at pains to deny. It was particularly striking to hear this from Nishida since he was a self-proclaimed Buddhist – a tradition so often thought to deny subjectivity. Nishida says:

Continue reading →

A Sellarsian solution for the self?

09 Sunday Jun 2019

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, Karma, Metaphysics, Self, Truth

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Buddhaghosa, Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, conventional/ultimate, G.W.F. Hegel, Jay Garfield, Madhyamaka, Maria Heim, Pudgalavāda, qualitative individualism, Śāntideva, Wilfrid Sellars

The conflict between Buddhism and qualitative individualism is a major difficulty for my own philosophy. In addressing that conflict, there is one approach that has repeatedly stuck out at me. I don’t think it actually solves the problem, but it may be a step towards a solution.

That step is to build on the similarities between the Buddhist conventional/ultimate distinction and Wilfrid Sellars’s distinction between the manifest and the scientific image. Both of these dichotomies are focused on the human person or self: at the conventional (sammuti/vohāra) or manifest level, selves and their differences are real and important, and stories can be told; at the ultimate (paramattha) or scientific level, selves disappear, reduced to smaller particles that form a more fundamental level of explanation.

We may note here a key way that Sellars departs from at least Buddhaghosa’s Buddhism. He agrees with Buddhaghosa’s view that the ultimate/scientific level is an important respect truer than the conventional/manifest. But the further difference is very important: for Sellars, the manifest image is necessary for ethics (and probably aesthetics and politics.) Continue reading →

Ultimate and conventional truth in Wilfrid Sellars

21 Sunday Jan 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Early and Theravāda, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Science, Self, Truth

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Abhidhamma, conventional/ultimate, Democritus, Epicurus, Karl Marx, Madhyamaka, Milindapañhā, Wilfrid Sellars

Let me begin with a guessing game, for those readers who consider themselves relatively widely read in philosophy. I am thinking of a text that examines two different views of human beings. It examines on one hand the view that humans are entities that act on the world of the sort that one can tell stories about, using language, living in communities, giving and taking. It juxtaposes this view on the other hand with the view that humans are collections of smaller imperceptible particles that operate strictly according to universal laws of causation. The texts comes to the conclusion that the latter view is the one that corresponds to reality, with the former simply an appearance or convenient way of speaking. Which text is this? Continue reading →

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