The story of Buddhism’s Descent

04 Sunday Sep 2011

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, East Asia, Jainism, Mahāyāna, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This week I did a new podcast interview with David McMahan, about his book The Making of Buddhist Modernism. The “Buddhist modernism” of the title is what I have typically called Yavanayāna: the new forms of Buddhism that have emerged in the past two centuries, which sometimes portray themselves as if they’re what Buddhism always was. (In what follows I will use the terms “Yavanayāna” and “Buddhist modernism” interchangeably.)

McMahan’s chapters are topical rather than chronological, so that he can examine the various features of the transition to Buddhist modernism. Naturally, he rounds up the most common topics: the asserted compatibility between Buddhism and science, and the idea of meditation as the most central Buddhist practice. He takes a genuinely balanced perspective on these topics that’s a welcome antidote to others. But he also touches on a few less widely noticed topics: interdependence, nature, and ordinary life. During the interview, I began to think about how closely these topics are connected with each other – and how they share a history in Buddhism that goes back long before the rise of Yavanayāna. Continue reading →

Love is better than anger: Jack Layton (1950-2011)

28 Sunday Aug 2011

Posted by in Anger, Buddhism, Fear, Flourishing, Gentleness, Happiness, Hope, Patient Endurance, Politics, Protestantism

≈ 48 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Jack LaytonIt will not do my readers much of a service to announce that Jack Layton has died. To non-Canadian readers, the name will probably mean little or nothing; Canadian readers in the past week will have heard of little else.

Jack Layton was the leader of the left-wing New Democratic Party, the only political party whose candidates I have ever voted for. He died of cancer on 22 August, at the relatively young age of 61 – at the peak of his career. Until Layton took over the NDP, the party had never received more than 44 of the roughly 300 seats in the Canadian Parliament. Earlier this year, under his leadership, the party earned over 100, most of those in Québec – where the party had never held more than a single seat before. It received more than twice as many seats as the third-place Liberals, a party which had governed Canada so often that it viewed itself as the “natural governing party.” And a great deal of this rapid rise derived from Layton’s personal popularity. His funeral has now been receiving coverage in Canada comparable to that of Princess Diana’s – at a time when it is held as a commonplace that people hate politicians and are fed up with them. His life and death moved a great many. My American wife, who a year ago didn’t know who Jack Layton was, was moved to tears watching the coverage of his memorials.

Now why am I going on about Jack Layton on a philosophy blog? Continue reading →

Internalism and externalism, in epistemology and ethics

21 Sunday Aug 2011

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, Judaism, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, Sophists, Truth

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

Is man the measure of all things? Or at least, are creatures with subjective internal consciousness the measure of all things? In ancient Greece, the Sophists answered yes. In so doing, they inaugurated Western reflection on a perennial question that stretches throughout both theoretical and practical philosophy, epistemology and ethics.

I’ve briefly discussed this question before, with a focus on ethics. Afterwards, following James Doull, I examined how it gets works out in the history of Western philosophy after the Sophists – in ethics. But as Doull knew, there is an epistemological story that parallels the ethical. Continue reading →

Multiple perennial questions

07 Sunday Aug 2011

Posted by in Confucianism, East Asia, Eastern Orthodoxy, Epistemology, Flourishing, Free Will, Human Nature, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Politics, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, South Asia

≈ 115 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

I’m returning today to the idea of perennial questions: questions that recur throughout the history of philosophy, where both sides of a debate keep getting articulated in many different places. The key feature of these perennial questions, to my mind, is that they are large: they cannot be narrowed down to a single precisely defined question within a single philosophical subfield, of the sort that analytic philosophers aim to ask, but extend their ramifications across multiple fields of theoretical and practical inquiry.

So far I’ve explored two major perennial questions: ascent versus descent and intimacy versus integrity. I have taken these as two different axes along which philosophies can be classified – in their ethics and soteriology as well as their metaphysics and epistemology.

But why should we treat these as exhausting the perennial questions? Continue reading →

Of real and imaginary evils and goods

31 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by in Aesthetics, Daoism, Epics, Flourishing, Greek and Roman Tradition, Happiness, Serenity

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

A week ago today, the talented young British R&B/pop singer Amy Winehouse died. I think I can sum up the popular reaction thus: everybody was sad; nobody was surprised. The chorus to Winehouse’s most popular and famous song went: “They tried to make me go to rehab; I said no, no, no.” The lifestyle she lived matched her lyrics exactly – as when she was hospitalized for an overdose of heroin, ecstasy, cocaine, ketamine and alcohol.

It’s a shame that the world lost such a great singer so early. And yet, the same louche excess that killed Winehouse was part of the appeal of her songs. Nobody wants to hear a soulful voice sing “I ate all my vegetables and flossed daily,” even if this idea is put in more poetic cadences.

Since her death I’ve been thinking about the 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil – who was not much older than Winehouse when she died herself. Continue reading →

How may we tell true from false?

24 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by in Aesthetics, Analytic Tradition, Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, Truth, Vedānta, Virtue

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

How can we, or should we, learn what is true and what is false? This is one of the most enduring and basic questions in philosophy – “basic” because it is fundamental to so many others, not because the answers are in any way easy or simple.

The question, or some form of it, came up a number of times in recent discussions of “common sense”: if common sense isn’t reliable, I was asked, what is? I’m going to try to avoid the word “reliable” as I think its different uses became confusing in the previous debate; I have little stake in its use as a term. But the basic question of determining truth from falsehood is a crucial one and worth asking.

That’s not to say, however, that it admits easy answers, for I don’t think we should expect easy answers on the most basic philosophical questions. Continue reading →

Of the plausibility or reliability of “common sense”

17 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by in Cārvāka-Lokāyata, Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science, Prejudices and "Intuitions", South Asia, Truth

≈ 92 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

This week, another foray into the debate over “common sense.” Apologies in advance to those readers who are not interested in this particular topic, or who will find this post’s precision rough going. Common-sense advocate Thill has been by far this blog’s most prolific commenter, and I think advancing the debates in the comments requires taking his views on directly and systematically. Moreover, I think the topic is an important one in its own right. The claims made by Thill, Jabali108, Neocarvaka and Ramachandra1008 in their comments, if they were true, would rule out the vast majority of South Asian philosophical thought (and a great more besides): probably all the philosophy originating in the subcontinent except for the shadowy Cārvāka-Lokāyata school of thought. Only the Cārvākas can be thought to completely exclude “religious” ideas from their worldview; but there is little if anything left to be learned from this school now, since all we have from them is the scantest of fragments. (The only surviving complete text attributed to a Cārvāka is Jayarāśi’s Tattvopaplavasiṃha, which these commenters have already dismissed as not really a Cārvāka text.) If South Asian thought is worth bothering with at all, then we’ll need to defend those conceptions of the world that are in some respects at odds with various elements of “common sense” – which, according to Thill, excludes all “religion.” Continue reading →

Is common sense merely plausible?

10 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by in Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Truth

≈ 98 Comments

Tags

,

This week I’m going to continue the discussion of “common sense” from two weeks ago. I think it’s an important discussion because an overreliance on the concept of “common sense” can be (and seems to have been repeatedly) used to challenge the value and viability not merely of “religion” but of philosophy itself. I’m going to assume that readers of this current post have read that previous post – but not that they have read the comments on it, which have been the most numerous of any post on this blog so far (a full hundred!)

In those comments I challenged Thill to define the term “reliable,” which he had previously introduced to the discussion. I structured the post around the term “reliable” because in Thill’s previous comment, it had been at the centre of his only serious response to the point that “common sense” can be wrong (as in the case of sunrise and sunset). He said: “The fact that it is not infallible does not support the conclusion that it is not reliable!” No doubt I should have probed the definition of “reliable” further in the post – examining what Thill could have meant by it; I did not. I tried to make up for that lack in a later comment, where I asked Thill to define “reliable.” Thill responded that the onus was on me to define “reliable” since I had advanced a thesis relating to it; but my supposed thesis was intended as a response to his own thesis about the reliability of common sense, a word which, again, he introduced to the discussion. So I noted that I am happy to drop the term from the discussion as long as he, too, is willing to refrain from using the term “reliable” to refer to the epistemological status of so-called common sense. (That also applies to the others, Jabali108 and Neocarvaka, who have been exalting “common sense” in recent discussions.)

If we drop “reliable,” where are we left? Continue reading →

The good life, present and future

03 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by in Aesthetics, Buddhism, Death, Epicureanism, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Human Nature

≈ 24 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

Every human life ends in death. A long time ago I noted that we often forget this fact; and we shouldn’t. But granted that we acknowledge that we are all going to die, just how significant is the fact of our deaths? A little while ago I treated it as a significant problem, whether for an egoist or for one seeking the good in politics: whatever we achieve comes tumbling down in the end.

There’s a strong philosophical allure to consequentialism, the view that the best actions are those that produced the best consequences (of whatever sort). But a problem with consequentialism is that consequences, by definition, happen in the future – and eventually there will be no future. Continue reading →

Lack of training is not reliable

26 Sunday Jun 2011

Posted by in Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Truth

≈ 103 Comments

Tags

Several of this blog’s frequent commenters find significant philosophical value in the concept of “common sense,” and find it helpful to refute a claim on the grounds that the claim contradicts “common sense.” These commenters include not only Thill, whom I challenged on the topic several times before, but Jabali108 and Neocarvaka. (See the comments on this post for examples.) So the concept is worth revisiting if those debates are to get anywhere.

Let me start out by noting that I see some philosophical value in appeals to common sense defined in a certain way. This is the sense that I outlined in my first post on the topic: the prejudgements one brings to a given inquiry, especially as they come out of shared assumptions of one’s own society. My commenters seem to have something quite different in mind, however. Continue reading →