Arbitrary Marks

The UU blogosphere is an interesting place. Throughout the past three to four years since I’ve been active within Unitarian Universalism (hence “UU” for those unfamiliar), I’ve watched a couple of bloggers leave the movement for Christianity (United Church of Christ and Brethren in Christ). There’s been quite a bit of debate about how unfriendly [...]

I’ve left Nagarjuna aside for long enough; let’s return to the Vigrahavyavartani to look at some of the problems with his skeptical position. The Paideia Project has collected some papers from the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, and one of those is “Illocution, No-Theory and Practice in Nagarjuna’s Skepticism: Reflections on the Vigrahavyavartani” by Douglas [...]

This post by MoxieLife may explain why I haven’t been regularly attending Unitarian Universalist services in nearly a year. True, I’ve been busy, but when I find myself in hard times I tend to lean upon Buddhist teachings and praxis. That doesn’t exclude being a member of a Unitarian Universalist church, but I think I [...]

I have an instinct that (theistic) theological studies are far less useful than philosophy. As an atheist and non-Christian, to me it is like spending years studying the properties of phlogiston.

However, there are fellow philosophers spending years working on problems I think are wrong-headed. So is there any larger distinction to make between theology and philosophy, or, as human exercises in reflection, are they equally valuable?

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 [...]

[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:

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), [...]

As I write this, an article on Buddhism, atheism and neuroscience is the top emailed article on the NY Times website.
In it, he makes a couple of interesting claims about the so-called “New Atheism” debates and where they’re probably headed. First, he thinks that “The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith [...]

The Center for Buddhist Studies at Columbia University has posted a podcast by Mark Blum that should be interesting for Unitarian Universalists and Buddhist practitioners (and especially those who consider themselves in both camps).
I’m about three-quarters through the lecture, which I listened to during my delay at the Austin airport yesterday. Blum’s main thesis is that [...]

As a former Reformed Presbyterian, I knew the work of Jonathan Edwards pretty well, or so I thought. I had read his Banner of Truth publications and knew more about him than just “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Not so: in the past month, I’ve come across his thought in two different [...]