An aesthetic of extremes

27 Sunday Mar 2016

Posted by in Aesthetics, Emotion, Food, South Asia, Virtue

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Vikram Chandra’s Geek Sublime might be the most popular book in a Western language ever to deal with Indian aesthetic theory. The book’s official subject is the aesthetics of computer science. Though I am getting a degree in computer science myself, I found myself more interested in Chandra’s lucid comments about the medieval Indian philosophers Ānandavardhana and Abhinavagupta and their theory of rasa, the emotional “tastes” that an artistic audience can savour.

What is important about Chandra’s work is that he applies the rasa theory. He draws from the best English-language works I know of on Ānandavardhana and Abhinavagupta: the writings of Daniel Ingalls, Jeffrey Masson and M.V. Patwardhan, especially their translation of Ānandavardhana’s Dhvanyāloka with Abhinavagupta’s locana commentary. But Chandra does what Ingalls, Masson and Patwardhan do not: he asks how the theories of Ānandavardhana and Abhinavagupta could apply to us. Continue reading →

Rights are instrumental

28 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, Metaphilosophy, Modernized Buddhism, Politics

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The key reason I have turned to MacIntyrean tradition-based inquiry is to make progress on the ethical inquiries that have proved very difficult to resolve. So far, too many of those inquiries have turned out to be cliffhangers. But by taking the approach I have, of identifying the collection of Aristotle, Buddha, Hume and perhaps historicism as at some level the best story so far, it is now possible for me to move closer to concrete conclusions of at least an early and preliminary kind.

I see this point as I reexamine a particular cliffhanger from last year. I posted a four–post series on human rights, and yet by the final post I had still not advanced a substantive theory about them. I said we need reasons for rights, but was not willing to say anything about what those reasons are. Continue reading →

Belonging rationally to a tradition

14 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by in Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Rites, Roman Catholicism

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I ended last year pointing out that while one can love all wisdom, it is almost certainly too hard to be able to sift through all the wisdom out there and put it together in the space of a single lifetime. What one can do is get to know a small number of traditions in great detail and attempt to bring them together.

But which? While I think the previous post gave a good account of the process, I have already come to regret its title, “Choosing a few traditions”. The term “choosing” suggests that the process can happen arbitrarily, or at least on the simplest sort of aesthetic grounds – the traditions you happen to like. (“Hmm, I think Ayn Rand, Zhuangzi and Gnosticism are kinda cool. Let me put those together.”) I didn’t mean it that way when I wrote it, but even so, as I’ve been thinking through the issues since then, I find myself noticing that even just thinking of the process in terms of “choice” makes it seem less rational than it is. Continue reading →

Of mindfulness meditation, Buddhist and otherwise

31 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by in Health, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Psychology, Serenity, Therapy

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Until I began my 9-to-5 job in 2011, I had only rarely had to get up before 8 or 9 in the morning on a regular basis, which suited me fine since I am a night person. Now I need get up at 6:45, and it is a struggle to get enough sleep – and so I started worrying ever more about how little sleep I was getting, which gave me insomnia.

Fortunately the job has a good health plan (essential in the USA), and I was able to seek treatment for my insomnia at the highly regarded Boston Medical Center. They suggested a number of interventions to deal with the insomnia, several of which slowly came to prove helpful. The most striking moment among these interventions, though, was when they prescribed – mindfulness meditation. Continue reading →

On the very idea of Buddhist ethics

17 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by in Action, Analytic Tradition, Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, Free Will, Greek and Roman Tradition, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modernized Buddhism, Morality, Self

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I’ve recently been reading Christopher Gowans’s Buddhist Moral Philosophy: An Introduction. It is an introductory textbook of a sort that has not previously been attempted, and one that becomes particularly interesting in the light of David Chapman’s critiques of Buddhist ethics. While Gowans and Chapman would surely disagree about the value and usefulness of Buddhist ethics, they actually show remarkable agreement on a proposition that could still be quite controversial: namely, that the term “Buddhist ethics” or “Buddhist moral philosophy” names above all a Yavanayāna phenomenon. That is: the way that Gowans and Chapman use the terms “Buddhist ethics” and “Buddhist moral philosophy”, what they name is a contemporary Western (and primarily academic) activity, even if it is one conducted primarily by professed Buddhists. Continue reading →

Why give Cthulhu a happy ending?

03 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by in Aesthetics, Biology, Christianity, Deity, Metaphysics, Natural Science

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A few years ago, Skholiast wrote a lovely post on the philosophical significance of J.R.R. Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft, two early 20th-century writers who shaped the genres we now call fantasy and horror, respectively. I was reminded of it this year at an enjoyable AAR panel entitled “Cthulhu’s Many Tentacles”.

Cthulhu Cthulhu, of course, is the best-known character (if that is the word) from Lovecraft’s stories, enough that the fictional pantheon he created has become known as the “Cthulhu Mythos”. Cthulhu is one of a set of “Elder Gods”: horrifying, vaguely amorphous, often tentacled monstrosities that have lain dormant for millennia and will soon devour humanity; their horror is such that the mere knowledge of them could drive one mad. The AAR panel gave recognition to many aspects of Lovecraft’s work: starting with a presentation on the man and his work itself, the presenters proceeded to examine the varied dimensions of the fandom that has grown up around Lovecraft (noting, in particular, that fan creativity has been greatly enabled by Lovecraft’s work rising into the public domain).

The most interesting point I took away from the panel came from a talk by David McConeghy (who also, coincidentally, was the respondent to my paper on teaching with technology). McConeghy noted that while a great deal of modern speculative fiction (he cited Mike Mignola’s comic-book series Hellboy) is clearly inspired by Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and makes references to it, these works also typically have happy endings. Continue reading →

Choosing a few traditions

06 Sunday Dec 2015

Posted by in Dialectic, Early and Theravāda, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Hermeneutics, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion

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I have long had an ambition which, I am slowly realizing, is unlikely to be fulfilled. It is an ambition suggested in this blog’s title: the idea of putting together all the major philosophical traditions of the world into a full synthesis. Ken Wilber’s work has to date been the most valiant attempt anyone has made to fulfill that ambition. But I have argued in many ways that this attempt has failed. It must fail, in the perennialist form Wilber’s work takes: to claim that all the world’s wisdom (or “religious”) traditions are basically saying the same thing. That claim makes the attempt at putting the traditions together much easier. It is also false. Continue reading →

The need for substantive standards of rationality

22 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, Logic, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion

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I ended the last post with the question of how to put together the insights I have found from Western philosophies like Hegel’s, on one hand, and Buddhism on the other. That question is the twenty-year project that animated my dissertation, though it could not be the dissertation. There it was Martha Nussbaum rather than Hegel whom I juxtaposed with Buddhist thought, because she had engaged with key Buddhist ethical questions and taken opposed answers. (Engaging with Hegel at any length, on the other hand, would have required a whole ‘nother dissertation.)

But the dissertation, as noted before, ends on a “cliffhanger”: Continue reading →

Bibliography and podcast

10 Tuesday Nov 2015

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, South Asia

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Taking a brief break from the posts on MacIntyre to let you know about two other things I’ve published recently. I now have an online bibliography on ethics available with Oxford Bibliographies Online, as part of their bibliography series on “Hinduism”. Most of the bibliography is behind a pay wall; I have less objection to this than in some other cases because Oxford Bibliographies actually pays its writers.

I’ve also finally restarted the podcast interviews I have done for the New Books in Buddhist Studies series. The first interview I’ve done there in years is up with Maria Heim, about her recent book on Buddhaghosa. It’s free, so check it out!