American Buddhist Net

BEIJING - At a time when the thoughts of Chinese philosopher Confucius are enjoying a revival both inside China and outside the country in the form of Confucian Institutes, the first complete English translation of the work of Confucius' earliest philosophical enemy, Mozi, has been published in Hong Kong [1].

Confucius and Mozi [2] engaged in fierce debates in the fourth and third centuries BC and Mozi was possibly more popular, but by the 19th century he was all but forgotten.

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Aliens may be “staring us in the face” in a form humans are unable to recognise, the Queen’s astronomer has said.

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Are the ideas of the conservative political philosopher Leo Strauss a shaping influence on the Bush administration’s world outlook? Danny Postel interviews Shadia Drury – a leading scholarly critic of Strauss – and asks her about the connection between Plato’s dialogues, secrets and lies, and the United States-led war in Iraq.

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This piece came out in '03, and by now, we all know that the answer to the question above is yes, yes, yes, and yes. I am reposting this short piece because it is absolutely essential that we all have a full understanding of neocon philosophy. You cannot understand recent American and world politics without understanding neocons. And this brings us to today and the very important question--Is Obama a crypto-neocon? If not, why has he continued - and even furthered - so many neocon policies? And why has he appointed so many neocons and crypto-neocons to posts within his administration? To me Obama looks like a neocon "good cop" who is following the Bush-era neocon "bad cop" and not much else. ABN

This anthology of 19 well-researched articles examines the concept of dharma from semantic, cultural, and religious points of view. ‘Dharma’ is considered the fulcrum of Indian civilisation, since it is not affected by any linguistic, sectarian, or regional differences. The term itself is “untranslatable” for it has several connotations. Paul Horsch, in his article, attempts to examine the evolution of the term ‘dharma(n)’ from its Indo-Aryan origin to the position it occupies in the intellectual history of India, tracing the various phases it has gone through.

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Roger Scruton, 65, urged "lunatic fundamentalists who have set their heart on giving Islam a bad name" to imbibe, although it is considered against their religion, claiming it would help them to a more moderate view.

Dr Scruton's statement is part of an article in the latest issue of Decanter, the international wine magazine, in which he argues for the Latin maxim 'in vino veritas', or from wine comes truth.

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Truth is contradictory; if it is not contradictory, then it is not truth! The Bhagavad Gita is full of contradictions. You can understand it only if you see it in totality.

At one point, Krishna tells Arjuna that action is the most important thing and without action one will be nowhere. But after that, He tells him that action is all right but knowledge is better! Then Krishna says, "You must become a yogi and drop everything around you."

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Nick Bostrom

The Matrix got many otherwise not-so-philosophical minds ruminating on the nature of reality. But the scenario depicted in the movie is ridiculous: human brains being kept in tanks by intelligent machines just to produce power.

There is, however, a related scenario that is more plausible and a serious line of reasoning that leads from the possibility of this scenario to a striking conclusion about the world we live in. I call this the simulation argument. Perhaps its most startling lesson is that there is a significant probability that you are living in computer simulation. I mean this literally: if the simulation hypothesis is true, you exist in a virtual reality simulated in a computer built by some advanced civilisation. Your brain, too, is merely a part of that simulation. What grounds could we have for taking this hypothesis seriously? Before getting to the gist of the simulation argument, let us consider some of its preliminaries. One of these is the assumption of “substrate independence”. This is the idea that conscious minds could in principle be implemented not only on carbon-based biological neurons (such as those inside your head) but also on some other computational substrate such as silicon-based processors.

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You are depriving yourself a of a lot of fun if you ignore this simple, yet elegant, argument. ABN

John Edwin Smith, a prominent philosopher and author whose work tackled large questions about the nature of truth from a pragmatic, pluralistic and specifically American perspective, died on Dec. 7 in Arlington, Va. He was 88 and lived in New Haven.

...Throughout his career, Professor Smith was known for championing, and often resuscitating, unfashionable branches of his field. Chief among them was the philosophy of religion, a subject that had fallen out of favor in the Rationalist climate of the mid-to-late 20th century.

During those years, when American philosophy was dominated by an aloof, ivory-tower approach, Professor Smith argued for a more democratic stance: the search for truth, he argued, was an inherently social, communitarian enterprise.

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"Anything goes": Feyerabend and Method

"The three aims of the tyrant are, one, the humiliation of his subjects; he knows that a mean-spirited man will not conspire against anybody; two, the creation of mistrust among them; for a tyrant is not to be overthrown until men begin to have confidence in one another -- and this is the reason why tyrants are at war with the good; they are under the idea that their power is endangered by them, not only because they will not be ruled despotically, but also because they are too loyal to one another and to other men, and do not inform against one another or against other men -- three, the tyrant desires that all his subjects shall be incapable of action, for no one attempts what is impossible and they will not attempt to overthrow a tyranny if they are powerless."

-- Aristotle. Source: Politics, Book V Chapter 11.

The PhilPapers Survey was a survey of professional philosophers and others on their philosophical views, carried out in November 2009. The Survey was taken by 3226 respondents, including 1803 philosophy faculty members and/or PhDs and 829 philosophy graduate students.

The PhilPapers Metasurvey was a concurrent survey of professional philosophers and other concerning their predictions of the results of the Survey. The Metasurvey was taken by 727 respondents including 438 professional philosophers and PhDs and 210 philosophy graduate students.

Preliminary results and discussion are included below. Further results and analysis will be made available in coming months.

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Faced with choosing a prominent figure for his Science and Society Masters dissertation, Phillip Stevens avoided the obvious. Instead of Kepler, Newton, or Darwin, Stevens chose controversial British biologist, and Perrott-Warrick Scholar, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. “I’d known about Rupert Sheldrake and I found him very interesting”, Phillips said.

Although skeptical of Sheldrake’s theories, Phillips focused on how Sheldrake was being judged, “I wanted to be impartial as to whether he was right or wrong and instead go on and look at whether he’d been treated fairly.”

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Rupert Sheldrake and the wider scientific community

Link contains a good audio, worth listening to. ABN

Dear Doctor Rude,

I think I understand what a "platonic kiss" is, but could you explain to me the difference between the following kisses?

1. Aristotelian kiss
2. Hegelian kiss
3. Wittgensteinian kiss
4. Godelian kiss

Signed,
Flummoxed in Florida

Dear Flummoxed,

That's a very good question; nowadays most sex education courses focus on secondary and tertiary sources, so much so that few people really get exposed to the classics in this field any more. I'll try to make a brief but clear summary of some of these important types of kisses:

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Hempel's Dilemma is a question first asked (at least on record) by the philosopher Carl Hempel[1]. It has relevance to naturalism and physicalism in philosophy, and to philosophy of mind.

Naturalism, in at least one rough sense, is the claim that the entire world may be described and explained using the laws of nature, in other words, that all phenomena are natural phenomena. This leaves open the question of what is 'natural', but one common understanding of the claim is that everything in the world is ultimately explicable in the terms of physics. This is known as physicalism.

However, physicalism in its turn leaves open the question of what we are to consider as the proper terms of physics. There seem to be two options here, and these options form the horns of Hempel's dilemma, because neither seems satisfactory.

On the one hand, we may define the physical as whatever is currently explained by our best physical theories, e.g., quantum mechanics, general relativity. Though many would find this definition unsatisfactory, some would accept that we have at least a general understanding of the physical based on these theories, and can use them to assess what is physical and what is not. And therein lies the rub, as a worked-out explanation of mentality currently lies outside the scope of such theories. On the other hand, if we say that some future, 'ideal' physics is what is meant, then the claim is rather empty, for we have no idea of what this means. The 'ideal' physics may even come to define what we think of as mental as part of the physical world. In effect, physicalism by this second account becomes the circular claim that all phenomena are explicable in terms of physics because physics properly defined is whatever explains all phenomena.

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...“There have been various different attempts [to codify the scientific method], none of which have been terribly successful. They’ve all pointed to some correct understanding of what science does, but no one has succeeded in coming up with a even plausible codification of what it is that scientists do, and philosophers of science are the first to admit it. So I guess you’re right that I’m sceptical that there can ever be a complete over-arching theory simply because science is about rationality; rationality is always adaptation to unforeseen circumstances – how can you possibly codify that?

“But that doesn’t mean philosophy of science is useless, because all of these attempts that have failed as final codifications of scientific method nevertheless contributed something. For example I hope to write an article about Nick Maxwell’s approach. I think he’s put his finger on something very important too, which, again, is not the end of the story but adds something. So I don’t think philosophy of science is a failure."

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Modal realism is the view, notably propounded by David Lewis, that all possible worlds are as real as the actual world. It is based on the following tenets: possible worlds exist; possible worlds are not different in kind from the actual world; possible worlds are irreducible entities; the term actual in actual world is indexical.

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There's a schism alright, and I seem to find myself on the unfashionable side of it

As a professional philosopher my first question naturally is: "What or who is an atheist?" If you mean someone who absolutely and utterly does not believe there is any God or meaning then I doubt there are many in this group.

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In the majority of Nietzsche`s work, Buddhism is praised as a more worthwhile religion system than others. In La Gaya Scienza Nietzsche uses Buddhism to explain his philosophy of Gods and men: After the Buddha died his shadow was still visible in a cave for hundreds of years "an enormous gruesome shadow. God is dead; "(La Gaya Scienza p. 463) In the Will to Power, Nietzsche`s unpublished notebooks, Buddhism is compared to Christianity, and considered colder and more realistic ". Yet, Buddhism is also classified as a passive nihilism. Unfortunately this passive nihilism charge is not fleshed out. The Will to Power was an unfinished work, and this concept went to the presses unfinished as well. Through my research in Buddhism and Asian Religions, I have found a possible reason for this charge. It is the Neo-Confucian criticism of Buddhism. This short article will logically explain how the Neo-Confucian critique of Buddhism, describes what Nietzsche possibly meant by passive nihilism ".

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Buddhism is not nihilism. Yet, Buddhism can be interpreted as nihilism and it can be practiced in a way that ignores social responsibilities. Buddhists of every age must think about the Dharma and use it within the conditions that prevail in their time. In the Buddha's day, politics was the province of kings. In our day, most political systems depend on an informed citizenry. I think it is fine for some monks to completely ignore politics, but I also believe that most of us should spend a decent amount of time trying to understand the social and historical conditions in which we find ourselves. What you choose to do with that understanding is up to you. Maybe you will want to become a monk and ignore it. That would probably make you a good monk. The rest of us will be left with the task of figuring out how to have some sort of positive influence on the mess we are in (always are in). ABN

B. Alan Wallace

ALL THE GREAT REVO LU T I O N S in science have been catalyzed by sophisticated observations of natural phenomena. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, decades of empirical studies of celestial and terrestrial physical phenomena by Tycho Brahe and Galileo laid the foundation for Newton’s discovery of the laws of classical mechanics. In the nineteenth century, Darwin’s decades of painstaking empirical observations of biological phenomena enabled him to formulate his theory of evolution. In the early twentieth century, physics underwent a second revolution in quantum mechanics and relativity theory that was also based on increasingly precise and sophisticated observations of physical phenomena.

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...EW: You write a lot about how positive thinking is in all aspects of life. Do you think this is the most insidious about it -- this idea of a disease being your fault?

BE: I look at it with a little bit of sociological detachment. It's a brilliant system of social control. When bad things happen to people you say, "Well, it's really your attitude that has to change."

The second big place where I encountered all this was in the kind of motivational services that are offered to laid-off white-collar workers, where every networking event or seminar you get the same message about how it's really your attitude that is going to determine if you're going to get a job and probably has something to do with why you lost that last one.

You take people who have been really victimized, and I use that word advisedly, with cancer and with lay-offs from unaccountable corporations. And then you tell them, "Well, you just have to change the way you think." And that's very clever.

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This is a directory of 5200 free online papers on consciousness in philosophy and in science, and of related topics in the philosophy of mind.

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“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
--Aristotle

Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never traveled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.

--Bertrand Russell, from The Problems of Philosophy

On Language: Understanding the wisdom of the great Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna with the help of three pivotal Western thinkers

By David Loy

THE FUNDAMENTAL INSIGHT of what is known as the "linguistic turn" in twentieth-century Western thought is that language shapes our experience. Some of the most influential modern thinkers challenge our usual assumption that using language is merely a matter of attaching names to things that already exist in the world. In a very important sense, language creates the world as we know it.

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...“One reason it can seem so hard to see how philosophy relates to life is that we have often already decided that philosophy is thinking, not living,” he once wrote me. Explaining why philosophy matters, in other words, requires doing philosophy — the very thing the questioner wants explained.

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Literary critic Terry Eagleton discusses his new book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, which argues that “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens “buy their rejection of religion on the cheap.” He believes that, in these controversies, politics has been an unacknowledged elephant in the room.

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No ego, no soul, no self: brain research is coming up with findings that confound our very notion of what it means to be human, giving rise to heated controversy. A discussion with neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger.

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