Rights are instrumental
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...
View ArticleWhy philosophy departments have focused on the West
Jay Garfield and Bryan Van Norden have a widely circulated article in a recent New York Times, chastising American philosophy departments for paying insufficient attention to non-Western traditions of...
View ArticleThe West within the rest
In the previous post I discussed why academic philosophers have usually focused on the West, and pointed out reasons why some amount of Western focus remains valuable. Above all, I noted: “we are...
View ArticleThe trouble with democracy
The present American election is worth significant attention from a philosophy blog because it is a philosophically interesting one. (This is very much the sense in which “May you live in interesting...
View ArticleThe traditional context of critique
It was sixteen years ago, in 2000, that I wrote this week’s post. It was a short paper submitted for Francis Fiorenza‘s class on hermeneutics, on the debate between Jürgen Habermas and Hans-Georg...
View ArticleClik here to view.
On al-Ghazālī and the cultural specificity of philosophy
A little while ago, responding to Garfield and Van Norden’s call for diversity in philosophy, I argued that we should fight for the inclusion of non-Western thought in philosophy programs on the...
View ArticleWhy the study of religion shouldn’t be about studying religion
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...
View ArticleDecision and capacity, philosophical and historical
Andrew Ollett has recently taken up the point I made earlier this year that Buddhist ethics, in distinction from modern analytical ethics, is not primarily concerned with decision procedure. He...
View ArticlePhilosophical and historical uses together
Last time I examined Andrew Ollett’s distinction between “decision-oriented” texts like Kant’s Grounding and “capacity-oriented” texts like Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga, and the ways in which that...
View ArticlePaper on methodology up at Prosblogion
The philosophy-of-religion blog Prosblogion asked me if I would contribute a paper in progress to their “virtual colloquium”. I obliged, and sent them a draft paper that I recently presented at the...
View ArticleThe methodological MacIntyre and the substantive MacIntyre
I’ve devoted a lot of attention lately to a writing project focused on Alasdair MacIntyre‘s thought, one I first mentioned in my interview with Skholiast. It began critical of MacIntyre and then turned...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Don’t exclude ethics from philosophy
It is commonplace today for scholars of Indian philosophy to focus their attention entirely on theoretical philosophy at the expense of the practical. I think this tendency is a mistake. I see at least...
View ArticleThe significance of ethics to Candrakīrti’s metaphysics
As I noted last time, I think the disregard of ethics by Indian-philosophy scholars like Dan Arnold is a problem in itself: it’s a misconception of what philosophy is, and one that harmfully shrinks...
View ArticleEthics of disposition, not decision
I’ve been thinking further on the decision/capacity distinction first articulated by Andrew Ollett, and I want to take a further step. So far Andrew and I have merely acknowledged the existence of this...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The philosophy of The Good Place
The Good Place, an American comedy-fantasy series created by Michael Schur and airing on NBC, is perhaps the most explicitly philosophical American television show in recent memory. I think it aims to...
View ArticleMaking the case for non-Western philosophy
If you are the sort of person who reads comparative philosophy blogs, you probably remember the widely read New York Times article that Jay Garfield and Bryan Van Norden wrote two years ago, calling...
View ArticleThe spectrum of philosophy of science
I have found myself thinking more and more lately about the philosophy of science, and finding it increasingly important for the rest of philosophy. There are multiple reasons for this. Perhaps the...
View ArticleThe middle ground in philosophy of science
Last time I looked to find a middle ground in philosophy of science, between Francis Bacon’s historically untenable inductivism and Paul Feyerabend’s irrationalism. I noted then that I think Karl...
View ArticleRoots of a project on method
How should one do philosophy across cultures? This is not an easy question, though too many people treat it as if it is. Mid-twentieth-century answers leaned to a perennialism like Ken Wilber’s, where...
View ArticleHow can traditions be commensurable?
I closed my previous post on method by noting I am getting increasingly skeptical of MacIntyre’s view that traditions are incommensurable with each other. Christian Hendriks made an excellent comment...
View Article