Arbitrary Marks

Now I have to go back and read Jeremy Bentham to figure out just where he diverged from John Locke. Or I could just read Wikipedia.

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I don’t have time this morning to delve more deeply into it, but I will: an article by Francisca Cho and Richard K. Squier in the latest Journal of the American Academy of Religion is guilty of what amounts to creationist quote mining. I doubt that was their intention, but in “He Blinded Me with Science,” the [...]

There’s an article in today’s Insider Higher Ed on a professional development program for adjunct instructors at Valencia Community College, Florida. The opening paragraph of the story asks,
“Professional development programs to share the latest teaching techniques tend to be designed in ways that effectively exclude part timers, who can’t be expected to be on campus at [...]

[contemplative science] In all of these posts on the MMK (Mulamadhyamakārikā), I’m using Jay Garfield’s translation and commentary. That means that I’m not presenting all of the hermeneutic debates, but this version is what I have at a hand.

Earlier, I stated that “causation requires space-time coordinates in order to be intelligible. We need some way of distinguishing between the cause and the effect, and some way of explaining how the cause “picks out” this effect over another.” This attempt to isolate cause and effect is what motivates Nāgārjuna to posit what he calls “emptiness.” Emptiness is not “nothingness”, but rather the dependent origination of all things. At bottom, reality is–to put it using current buzzwords–relational.

In Chapter VII of the MMK, Nāgārjuna discusses the relationship between the agent and the action. We could understand this as the cause and the effect, too, since the same basic argument applies.

Dialectically, Nāgārjuna’s opponents were the Buddhists who admitted that the external world was empty, but wanted to suggest that, at the very least, agents existed. We need a subject to perceive that the world is empty, after all.

Nāgārjuna rejects this approach, claiming that everything, including agents, is empty. Here’s how the argument goes:

Still cleaning off my bookshelves, this time with a tiny studio in Austin as an aim. Help me de-clutter by taking a few books which you might use? All I ask is that you pay for shipping by USPS through PayPal. Leave your email in the comments and I’ll get in touch:

Kevin VanHoozer: Is there [...]

In the third chapter of Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, Jaegwon Kim gives an evaluation of the Cartesian argument that immaterial minds exist.
It’s a view called “ontological dualism” (contrast this with David Chalmer’s “property dualism”) and is problematic for Kim because of trouble with explaining how causation works in this view. However, it is not [...]

I think that this has a lot to do with problems in contemporary philosophy of mind regarding mental causation, reduction, etc. For now, the quote will stand on its own, but later I’ll continue with Kim and try to tie them together:
If one reifies phenomena–including such things as one’s own self, characteristics (prominently one’s own), [...]

Theme: I switched my theme over to a very simple format that I’d been working on several months ago. There will be a few changes to it to allow navigation through pages and categories, but de-cluttering is refreshing.

Content: Also, I’ll be switching gears back to Jaegwon Kim on the topic of reduction and Buddhist philosophers on that topic and a discussion of causality. The waters may get philosophically thick–at least I hope they will. Still, I’ll try to post some on liberal religion and gender as newsworthy stuff catches my eye.

Off to catch Indiana Jones with my wife, so look for something new later this weekend!

PS: A prize to the first one to catch my not-so-subtle analytic philosophy pun.

What to do with Emptiness? Step Two - Using Concepts Wisely
[Conclusion, Continued from Part 3]
Having (in my opinion at least), wrapped up the discussion of race, let’s move to a wider view in order to hone in upon the big problem: what good are concepts, then?
Let’s say that folk racial divisions as we understand them [...]

What to do with Emptiness? Step One - Figuring out Scope
[Continued from Part 3]
At this point, I’d like to return to the context of my earlier blog discussion with Shawn and his concerns. First, he seems genuinely bewildered by my assertions about race, and says, The reason people don’t have the picture of race [you] [...]