Translating puṇya and pāpa

01 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Karma, Mahāyāna, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Roman Catholicism

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Classical Indian Buddhist texts rely a great deal on two concepts: puṇya (Pali puñña) and pāpa. The former is good, something to pursue; the latter is bad, something to avoid. They have something to do with our actions and their results: punya comes out of our good actions and brings good results for us, pāpa comes out of our bad actions and brings bad results. We find these concepts all over the place in pretty much any Indian Buddhist text we might pick up. Next week I’ll explore in more detail what they are and how we might best think about them. This week I want to start with something more basic: how should we translate them into English? Absolutely not, I would argue, with the two words that Buddhism scholars most commonly use for them: namely “merit” and “sin” respectively. Continue reading →

On trying

25 Sunday Mar 2012

Posted by in Family, Flourishing, Honesty, Work

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This morning LinkedIn pointed me to an article in a business magazine entitled 3 Words That Guarantee Failure, written by one Geoffrey James. What are the words that, according to this article, guarantee failure? They are “I will try”:

People who say “I will try” have given themselves permission to fail. No matter what happens, they can always claim that they “tried.”

People who hear “I will try” and don’t realize what it really means are fooling themselves, by thinking there’s a chance that the speaker will actually succeed. Continue reading →

The problems with ineffable ethics

04 Sunday Mar 2012

Posted by in Confucianism, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Philosophy of Language, Politics

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I think it’s fair to say that in my recent post on Wittgenstein and Heidegger, I got Wittgenstein wrong. (And one of the things I love about doing philosophy as a blogger is the ability to be wrong in writing, and then simply retract it. If one is seeking an academic career as a philosopher, that sort of thing could easily bring said career to an ignominious end. Here, I can simply offer my apologies and move on with a revised position.)

I characterized Wittgenstein there as having “an indifference to ethics and concerns about the good life…” Given the concerns that occupy the bulk of his writing, it’s very easy to get that impression; compared to his voluminous prose about epistemology and philosophy of language, the amount of published or unpublished writing that he devotes to ethics and the good life is almost negligible.

But as several respondents to the post pointed out – both in the comments and in private emails – it’s really not fair to characterize that lack of ink as indifference. (And though I am by no means well versed in Wittgenstein’s thought, I did know enough about him that I should have remembered that.) The things Wittgenstein said about ethics were certainly limited; but they did exist. And those relatively few remarks tell us in his own words why he said so little. Continue reading →

Monkhood as technique

26 Sunday Feb 2012

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Happiness, Meditation, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism

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My former grad-school colleague Justin McDaniel recently ran into an interesting bout of media attention and controversy over a course he teaches at Penn, and an Associated Press article written about it. It is a comparative course on monasticism, entitled “Living Deliberately”. Nothing unusual so far; but what makes this course innovative is it contains a practicum. A practicum is relatively standard fare these days for many university courses on meditation, in which students are encouraged to meditate and thereby get a firsthand grasp on the course content. But McDaniel’s course is the first one I’ve heard of in which students attempt to get firsthand experience of being a monk.

What does that mean? As part of the class, students are required to live for various periods of time according to various restrictions, each one followed by an actual monastic order of some tradition or other. No technology beyond electric lights; no reading news from the outside world; no eating after dark; no caffeine or alcohol; no vegetables that grow underground (a nod to Jainism). Breaking the rules requires confession. Continue reading →

Overthrowing Indo-European tradition

19 Sunday Feb 2012

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Daoism, East Asia, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Modernized Buddhism, Self

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I have often found myself somewhat bewildered by the philosophy of the early- to mid-20th century, associated above all with the names of Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein. These two thinkers cast their shadow widely over the traditions of philosophy that followed – Heidegger over “continental” philosophy, Wittgenstein over analytic. (The split between the two traditions was not nearly as pronounced in their day; in many respects they helped create it.) They are far apart in many respects, but they do share at least two tendencies I have strongly disliked – an indifference to ethics and concerns about the good life, on one hand, and a rejection of the bulk of philosophy that came before them on the other. I have tended to view these two tendencies as going hand in hand – but do they?

I’ve been thinking anew about Heidegger and Wittgenstein from perhaps an unusual angle: Chad Hansen’s fascinating A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought. I don’t yet know early Chinese thought well enough to assess whether Hansen’s account of it is accurate. But I can at least say that Hansen, like Nietzsche, is more interesting and thought-provoking even when he’s wrong than most people are when they’re right. Continue reading →

MacIntyre against Wilber’s worldcentrism

12 Sunday Feb 2012

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Confucianism, Foundations of Ethics, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Psychology, Self

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While recently poring over Ken Wilber‘s works, I’ve thought repeatedly about his ideas in relation to Alasdair MacIntyre‘s. Wilber, ever since he identified the pre-trans fallacy, has been an arch-modernist: the world from the Enlightenment onwards has been far better than the traditional world that preceded it. His most recent phase has taken a more postmodern, relativistic turn, but even as a postmodernist he is still a modernist: for Wilber the pluralism of a postmodern worldview is a clear advance, a development, and a pretty unambiguous one.

This is not the worldview one finds in MacIntyre. Continue reading →

Comment rules posted

12 Sunday Feb 2012

Posted by in Blog Admin

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Recent discussion about the rules for commenting on this blog has reminded me that I really should state those rules formally. So I’ve now posted the rules on the site for all to see. I hope that they will allow Love of All Wisdom to continue being an open, welcoming community of people interested in cross-cultural philosophy.

Ken Wilber’s breadth and its importance

05 Sunday Feb 2012

Posted by in German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Natural Science

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For the past couple months I’ve been busy writing a critique of Ken Wilber‘s thought on “religion”, to be submitted to the journal devoted to his thought. I’ve been critical of Wilber before, and that article will be no different. In the next week or two I expect to post about some further criticisms that the article didn’t have room for.

But I don’t want all these criticisms to make it sound like I think Wilber’s thought is silly, fruitless or otherwise wrong-headed. Quite the opposite. I engage with Wilber’s ideas this much precisely because his project is so important and valuable. Granted, his writings don’t stand up well to either analytic or continental assessment: his arguments are sometimes maddeningly imprecise, and his readings of other thinkers tend strongly to the superficial. But what Wilber lacks in precision and depth, he makes up for in breadth. Continue reading →

What it means to have a reason for action

29 Sunday Jan 2012

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

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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 →

The importance of assumptions

22 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, German Tradition, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Roman Catholicism

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Michael Reidy and the recently returned Thill raise an important point in response to last week’s post, on the assessment of philosophy from analytic and “continental” perspectives. I argued that analytic philosophy judges philosophical on argument and continental philosophy on the depth of interpretation – interpretation “that could explain not merely what Kant [for example] said, but why he said it.”

Michael responded that the two were not likely to be so far apart in practice: “You can hardly develop a credible problematique without knowing some details.” Thill responded that this depth of interpretation necessarily “involves also an explanation of Kant’s argument for his views or claims!!!… What else could ‘why he said it’ mean or refer to?”

Thill’s question appears to be intended as rhetorical (especially given the laughs that precede and follow it in his comment). But it shouldn’t be. Continue reading →