Love of All Wisdom

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…)

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…)

I’ve been delighted to take up my new full-time job as educational technologist at Boston University. It’s been great to use my background in scholarship and teaching in a way that, unlike faculty work, actually makes a living.

My specialty as a technologist has been to help faculty adopt ePortfolios – electronic collections of student and faculty work, typically with the intent of making student learning visible to an outside audience. There are a variety of purposes to ePortfolios, but one of the most common is assessment – figuring out whether students are really learning what they’re supposed to be learning.

Educational institutions have come to emphasize assessment more and more in the past decade. Assessment is sometimes resisted in the humanities because of an emphasis on quantification – often with good reason, as in the case of the UK’s catastrophic RAE and its relentless insistence on quantity over quality of scholarship. But there’s no reason for humanists to be opposed to assessment in principle. We always claim that our students come out of our classes better than they were when they began – better writers, more careful readers, more thoughtful, more critical, more knowledgeable, more engaged citizens, whatever. If they didn’t improve in some such ways, there would be no point in our teaching them. And surely at least some such improvements can be observed, even if we resist attaching numbers to that improvement beyond the grades we give. Moreover, some of those who have tried to observe whether students do indeed improve in these ways in their college classes – notably Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa – have found that in many cases, in the US at least, they don’t. This fact, if true, would be disastrous, considering that US students typically go tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt for their educations. Surely we cannot merely assume that this is money well spent. And so assessment of some sort seems to me quite a valuable task.

Working professionally with assessment has led me to think more about the question: how do we assess philosophy? It is this question, I think, that may have contributed the most to the notorious divide between analytic and “continental” philosophy. (continue reading…)

In each of the three great classical traditions of philosophy – the West, South Asia and East Asia (or Greece, India and China) – there appears early on a school of thought that is taken as that tradition’s target of attack. This school dies out after a few hundred years or so, so that in modern times we know them above all as the object of the mainstream tradition’s attacks. And yet, to the extent that we can date the philosophy in this period, the philosophical reflection arising before this school tends to be far less sophisticated than that coming after.

The three schools in question are the Sophists in Greece, the Cārvāka or Lokāyata in India, and the Mohists in China. They are of crucial importance to any cross-cultural philosopher, because by running against the grain of the later tradition they break most of our stereotypes about that culture’s philosophy as a whole. In most general attempts to characterize the nature of Indian philosophy, for example, the words “except the Cārvākas” come up a lot. (continue reading…)

As Christmas approaches, I return to the theme I took up two years ago of the meaning of Christmas to a non-Christian – spurred on in part by my recent reflections on single-mindedness. Ben, commenting on that previous post, noted:

Christmas appears to have a dual message in our culture. ‘Rampant consumerism’ is one half, and ‘The True Meaning Of Christmas ™’ is the second. While there are exceptions that focus more on family and loved ones and generosity, references to TTMOC largely also include references to the birth of Jesus.

I think Ben is on to something important: an unreflective understanding of Christmas can turn into a simple consumerism. So, many who do reflect on Christmas either refuse to celebrate it at all or try to make it entirely about Jesus. I think both reactions, but especially the latter, are examples of single-mindedness as a problem: an attempt to pick out one single meaning that’s most important and ignore the details. But for those of us who genuinely enjoy Christmas, the details can be the most important part. (continue reading…)

I have repeatedly returned to the categories of ascent and descent, and intimacy and integrity, to classify philosophies; and I have found that the two intersect in important ways. When I discussed that intersection the first time, skholiast asked the important question: “What is the itch in us to make such schematisms?” What is the purpose of trying to classify philosophies in this way?

My first response was that these two are perennial questions, questions that recur throughout the history of philosophy around the world. While I continue to think more or less that that’s the case, I don’t think it did enough to say what’s important about these particular two categories. As I noted later, there are plenty of perennial questions beyond these two. But at the same time, I do see something special about these two classification schemes that merits particular attention to them. (continue reading…)

A decade or so ago, in David Hall‘s graduate class on method and theory in the study of religion, Hall asked the class why the study of religion in recent years had focused so much on particular historical details in individual places rather than larger issues that characterized or crossed traditions. I responded that the competitive job market and publish-or-perish tenure system require that people take an ever narrower focus, in order to carve out a niche for themselves. Hall replied, “Er, well, yes, that’s the cynical explanation.”

And I thought: cynical? Hall made his name studying the material conditions that gave rise to American “religion,” the economics of printing and text production. Much of his career was about the (often wise) materialist advice to explain the popularity of certain ideas by following the money. And yet suddenly, when that same mirror was turned on his own intellectual environment, of the 21st-century North American university – somehow it became “cynical”? Somehow, unlike all those thinkers we study, we have magically managed to escape the pressures of money-making and live in a world of pure ideas? (continue reading…)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the seventh chapter in a splendid book called The Ancients and the Moderns, by a fascinating Boston University professor named Stanley Rosen. I read the book over two years ago, but the ideas of this chapter have since continued to percolate in my brain.

Rosen argues that we need to see a much closer association between two fields of study often thought separate: logic and psychology. At first glance, the two might seem to have little in particular to do with one another. Logic concerns itself with the proper formal relationships between statements in arguments; psychology, with the empirical investigation of mind and behaviour.

But more basically, what are logic and psychology? Both, really, are the study of thought. (continue reading…)

It’s often said that philosophy is about questions rather than answers. Yet it is in the nature of a question that one who asks it at least wishes to find an answer, even if that answer remains elusive. Even rhetorical questions are rhetorical because they imply an assumed answer.

And so with the perennial questions, to which I regularly return on this blog. Central to the idea of a perennial question, as I have expressed it, is that the answers have never come easily. People across cultures, in different places and times, have asked the question – but in each place, people have come up with opposing answers.

To observe this diversity of opinion is humbling. Here are some of the greatest minds in human history, people smarter than I will ever be, reading each other’s work and still coming to opposite conclusions. Can an answer then ever be found? (continue reading…)

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…)