Posts Tagged Buddhism
Now Taking Questions for Owen Flanagan on Buddhism and Science
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on December 26, 2011
We are currently scheduled to talk with Owen Flanagan about his book The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized. I’ll put up the formal “topic announcement” when I have a better idea what the discussion will focus on (i.e. after we actually interview him). For now, anyone who is already familiar with the book, or his work, or this topic in general is welcome to weigh in here and try to steer us through this. If you post some questions for him that strike us as particularly cogent, we’ll try to bring them up with him.
Read Seth’s earlier post about this. I highly encourage you to listen to the episode of The Secular Buddhist podcast that Flanagan is on; that will likely give you enough material to post some questions here.
Buddhism Naturalized?
Posted by Seth Paskin in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts, Reviewage on November 7, 2011
Sweater vests increase rigor
Given our recent exploration of moral theory, the excitement around our announcement of a Euthyphro episode and my own current interest in Buddhist thought, I guess it was inevitable that I would stumble across and then buy this book. Or perhaps it was that Mark mentioned it in an email which I had overlooked. In any case, the author, Owen Flanagan (pictured to the right), is a philosopher at Duke University. Pat Churchland also thinks highly of him and I guess that’s good enough endorsement for me.
As a self-proclaimed analytic philosopher, Flanagan is a fan of science. And he’s a fan of being a moral person. He’s just published a book called The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized in which he argues that all of the major ‘wisdom traditions’ (read: religions) are incompatible with science. Since the traditions are where we get ‘being a moral person’ stuff, it’d be great if we could find one (or find a way to make one) that was compatible with science so that people who prioritize the scientific world view could also have a moral system to lean against. [This is my characterization, I don't think he'd put it that way]
Two Books about Zero
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Reviewage on October 30, 2010
Following up on yesterday’s post about nothingness, here are two books, one by a scientist and another by a mathematician, about the origination and subsequent history of the mathematical notion of zero: Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea,
I’ve not read either of these, but they’re both well rated, though ten years old now, so they won’t include the recent developments in the history of zero, such as when Cheney’s approval rating went to zero after he blocked out the sun with his evil globally warming cosmic hate rays.
The only specifically Buddhist account of this I can find is The Logic of Unity: The Discovery of Zero and Emptiness in Prajnaparamita Thought,
-Mark Linsenmayer
Alan Watts on Nothingness
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Things to Watch on October 29, 2010
I got a call for some Alan Watts in our Buddhism discussion, so here’s one of many clips of his from youtube that touches on a theme discussed on the episode (i.e. nothingness and the interdependence of opposite, plus a quick statement without much explanation of Big Self) and which has some good background music that makes the whole thing fairly mesmerizing.
I’m going to withhold judgment at this point, as there’s not a lot of meat to this clip. I suspect that this kind of philosophy seems cooler the less you analyze it; that’s at least my vague memory from reading The Book
-Mark Linsenmayer
B.S. about Jesus and Buddhism
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Things to Watch on October 28, 2010
Could Jesus have been taken to India as a child and taught Buddhism? Hmmm? Hmmm? Here’s something that apparently showed on the BBC at some point:
OK, some silly speculation here (and more amusingly told in Christoper Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal),
Read the rest of this entry »
Nagarjuna on Ultimate Truth (Yet More Westerhoff)
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on October 27, 2010
I will end my Westerhoff/Nagarjuna coverage with one more selection from right at the end of Westerhoff’s book:
According to the Madhyamaka view of truth, there can be no such thing as ultimate truth, a theory describing how things really are, independent of our interests and conceptual resources employed in describing it. All one is left with is conventional truth, truth that consists in agreement with commonly accepted practices and conventions. These are the truths that are arrived at when we view the world through our linguistically formed conceptual framework. But we should be wary of denigrating these conventions as a distorting device which incorporates our specific interests and concerns. The very notion of “distortion” presupposes that there is a world untainted by conceptuality out there (even if our minds can never reach it) which is crooked and bent to fit our cognitive grasp. But precisely this notion of a “way things really are” is argued by the Mādhyamika to be incoherent. There is no way of investigating the world apart from our linguistic and conceptual practices, if only because these practices generate the notion of the “world” and of the “objects” in it in the first place. To speak of conventional reality as distorted is therefore highly misleading, unless all we want to say is that our way of investigating the world is inextricably bound up with the linguistic and conceptual framework we happen to employ.
Nagarjuna on the Thing-in-Itself (More Westerhoff)
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on October 26, 2010
Our Nagarjuna episode seemed to conclude that ultimate reality is beyond our ability to speak about it. The objects of our experience are a shared fiction, and the most we can do with language is to show that they’re fictional; even the terms we use to accomplish this (like emptiness) are themselves constructs, serving only this negative, critical function.
So, is there for Nagarjuna a Kantian thing-in-itself beyond our power to describe? A Tao, perhaps, an underlying God beyond human understanding? “The Void?” Westerhoff says no. Not only are knowable interdependently existing substances incoherent, but unknowable ones are too:
A key element… is denying that it makes any sense to speak of objects lying beyond our conceptual frameworks… These frameworks are all we have, and if we can show that some notion is not to be subsumed under them, we must not conclude that it therefore has some shadowy existence outside of the framework. To this extent our conceptual framework is to be thought of not so much as a map of a country, but as a set of rules for a game. If a traveler brings us news from a city in some far-off land which we cannot find on our map, we conclude… that it must be located somewhere outside of the area covered by our map.
Read the rest of this entry »
Westerhoff on Nagarjuna on Metaphysically Basic Entities
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on October 25, 2010
One of the topics we didn’t really get into on the podcast, and which in our Buddhism reading I actually found the most interesting, is the metaphysics of basic elements of the world.
Nagarjuna argues that reality has no ultimate foundation, and in the episode we discussed that in terms of the possibility of Cartesian “substance” being basic or Spinoza’s solution of making God the single, basic substance. But what about atoms, either physical, or logical (as in Russell/Wittgenstein) or something else (as in Leibniz)? In all of these cases, the elements are supposed to be basic, i.e. not defined necessarily in terms of something else; this is what Nagarjuna is arguing against as svabhāva, or substance. Here’s what Westerhoff (in the summary section of his book:
Another difficulty arising if we assume there are substances is the relationship between such substances and their properties. We cannot just conceive of some substance as an individual instantiating properties. …Suppose that water-atoms are substances and that their only intrinsic property is wetness. Now what is the individual in which wetness inheres? Since it is not characterized by any other properties, it must be some kind of propertyless bare particular. What makes it a bare particular? Given that we are dealing with substances here, it had better not depend on some other object. But if it is a bare particular by svabhāva and being a bare particular is therefore its intrinsic nature we are in the same situation as we were with the water-atoms and their wetness. For now we can ask what the individual is in which being a bare particular inheres, and then we are well on our way to an infinite regress. Note that this problem does not go away if we feel uneasy about the property “being a bare particular” and do not want to admit it. For we have to assume that the individual has some determinate nature due to which it is a bearer of its properties and the difficulty will just reappear with whatever we take such a nature to be.
Read the rest of this entry »
Buddhism and the “Ecological Self”
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on October 19, 2010
Alan Sponberg, in this article from the Western Buddhist Review, gives a nuanced picture of the Buddhist view of self, affirming the no-self view described on the podcast while arguing that the unity of sentient life under samsara provides a foundation for environmental ethics:
Rather than reifying the prevailing sense of an autonomous self-interested individual with its complement of rights, Buddhism seeks to transform the very way which the individual conceives of himself. Traditionally, Buddhist “environmental ethics” has thus been less a matter identifying and securing rights. Rather it has been much more a matter of undertaking a practice of affirming and eventually realizing the trans-human potential for enlightenment. Based as it is in cultivating an ever deeper insight into the trans-species mutuality of sentience and hence potential for enlightenment, Buddhist practice can only express itself as a compassionate, environmental sustaining altruism.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Dig that Funky Lotus Sutra!
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Things to Watch, Web Detritus on October 12, 2010
I referred on the podcast to the over-the-top theatrics of the Lotus Sutra, and also that Nagarjuna’s “verses” were just that: verses meant to be memorized and sung.
Well, here on youtube we have a recording of the Lotus Sutra (I have no idea how much of it; surely not the whole thing) memorized and chanted in a simultaneously monotonous and hypnotically cool way by “some Western Buddhist monks.”
Be sure to get to (or jump to) 6:55 in here when they suddenly get all bass-y such that I just about choked myself laughing for a second. I also love at the end (around 8:45) when they get all slow and swooshy like they’re imitating the Doppler effect.
Read the rest of this entry »
Nagarjuna speaks!
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Things to Watch on October 11, 2010
This cheeseball video (which I refer to in the podcast as the source of my pronunciations of “Nagarjuna” and “Madhyamika”) reveals that Nagarjuna had a midwestern accent and some goofy iMovie effects at his disposal. He likes using the same font as Avatar, too. And is that a ney flute I hear? Hell, yeah!
My design in doing a Buddhism episode was really to look at contributions that specific thinkers have made to still-current debates on metaphysics and epistemology, but as we found, it’s awfully hard not to get sucked into the tenets of Buddhism more generally, and of course being churlish about a world religion is going to raise more hackles than my casting aspersions on Rousseau or Plato.
Read the rest of this entry »
Buddhist Psychotherapy?
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Web Detritus on October 9, 2010
Having recorded our discussion on Buddhism but still feeling obligated here to plumb the depths of the web further for Freud-related material, I did a search for “Buddhist Psychotherapy” and came up with this site (part of “the complementary health information service at Metta.org.uk”) that demonstrates that, as Wes said, all of your talking cures come out approximately the same (given an equally decent therapist) no matter what their theoretical basis.
Much like Alcoholics Anonymous begins with a requirement to accept your helplessness compared to a God from which you must beseech health, this kind of therapy begins by accepting the religion’s view of the world:
The Buddhist framework begins with the central acceptance of the four noble truths. These represent the reality or bedrock of human experience (and indeed universal existence) and it is perhaps the acceptance and understanding of the nature and existence of suffering which can make a Buddhist based psychotherapy so much more than “simple” cognitive psychotherapy, by going beyond pure cognitive skills and assessments which tend to go through the categorisation of client states and their diagnosis.
If I sound skeptical here, it’s about the claim that it’s “so much more” than regular cognitive psychotherapy. Rather than just treating you like a scientific subject as Freudian thereapy does, this (and many other types of) therapy claims to deal with your actual metaphysical status in the world through the four noble truths, i.e. that life is suffering (even if things seem to be going well for you now, it’ll suck eventually) but that you can detach from the sources of your suffering, your addiction to your own desires, and attain a higher state of consciousness beyond your petty problems with your mother and the fact that no one likes you and your bed wetting and all by strictly adhering controlling your actions, speech, intentions, efforts, concentration, and even your views (this is the Eightfold Path I’m paraphrasing here, which the fourth Noble Truth tells you to follow).
Read the rest of this entry »
Episode 12: Chuang Tzu’s Taoism: What Is Wisdom?
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on December 6, 2009
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:50:14 — 101.0MB)
Discussing the “Chuang Tzu,” Chapters 2, 3, 6, 18, and 19.
It’s the second-most-famous Taoist text and the most humorous, with anecdotes about people singing at funerals and jumping out of moving coaches while drunk. What could it possibly mean to “make all things equal?” and how is the Taoist sage different from our other favorite paragons of virtue (hint: magical powers)?
Featuring special guest panelist Erik Douglas, another U. Texas philosophy grad school dropout now living in England, who knows more about Eastern philosophy than we do.
The end song requires explanation: I had a “New Age” period where I investigated Eastern philosophy, tried to be cheerful all the time, and was generally insufferable. This song, “Pass Time Incorporeal,” is an artifact of that time, with lyrics from early fall 1989; the recording is from 1993. It finally slipped out on a 1996 album of similar goofiness rejected from my “real” albums called “Black Jelly Beans & Smokes.”
"I’ve never before heard my work discussed like that, and rarely as intelligently ... I listened to the whole podcast, and felt exalted afterward." -- Arthur Danto
The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don't have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we're talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion. Discuss episodes and provide feedback here or via our Facebook group. You can also e-mail comments to mark@marklint.com or wesalwan@gmail.com.
Subscribe, rate, and read reviews on iTunes. 
Five Stars after 100+ iTunes Ratings.
"Intelligent and funny -- a rare combo. The best philosophy podcast on iTunes. In fact, one of the best podcasts on iTunes." More Reviews.
If you buy anything from Amazon, get there through a PEL link to donate 6% of your purchase to us.
Recent Comments