Resources for Philosophy

John D. Caputo

• Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, Fordham 1997

  This is probably the only book where I've managed to read more than a page of Derrida's writing. The first 24 pages are the transcript of a Q&A with Derrida. The rest is a commentary by Caputo. It sure does seem like there is some resonance here with Buddhism, which other have also noted. Anyway, try the following mapping:

  • khora = emptiness
  • differance = interdependence
  • Messiah = Buddha nature
  Perhaps a significant difference with Buddhism is that the Messiah is always projected into the future, whereas Buddha nature is always already present though obscure.

Fred Dallmayr

• Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter, (SUNY 1996)

  from p. 195:

  The conception of democratic staging as an empty place resonates deeply with the Buddhist notion of sunyata (as outlined above). As in the case of Buddhism, democratic emptiness does not denote nihilism or sheer negativity but rather a kind of inner lining or hidden foil allowing democratic politics to emerge in its suchness. If sunyata is seen as a core ingredient of Buddhism (at least in its Mahayana version), then contemporary politics offers the spectacle of a curious East-West encounter: just at the time when Western-style democracy is experiencing a worldwide affirmation allowing us to speak of a process of global democratization, democratic politics discovers in itself a non-actuality or hidden hollow, a hollow whose understanding can be greatly assisted by the rich Buddhist legacy of sunyata.

John Dewey

• The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action (Putnam 1929)

  from pp. 104-105

  Only when the older theory of knowledge and epistemology is retained, is science thought to inform us that nature in its true reality is but an interplay of masses in motion, without sound, color, or any quality of enjoyment and use. What science actually does is to show that any natural object we please may be treated in terms of relations upon which its occurence depends, or as an event, and that by so treating it we are enabled to get behind, as it were, the immediate qualities the object of direct experience presents, and to regulate their happening, instead of having to wait for conditions beyond our control to bring it about. Reduction of experienced objects to the form of relations, which are neutral as respects qualitative traits, is a prerequisite of ability to regulate the course of change, so that it may terminate in the occurence of an object having desired qualities.

  from p. 215:

  Intelligence within nature means liberation and expansion, as reason outside nature means fixation and restriction.

Richard King

• Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and 'The Mystic East' (Routledge 1999)

  from p. 28:

  It has become commonplace in the modern era to consider mystics, their writings and the phenomenon of mysticism in general as being in some sense antithetical to rationality. Specifically the characterization of Indian religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism as mystical has also tended to support the exclusion of Hindus and Buddhists from the realm of rationality.

David Michael Levin

• The Body's Recollection of Being: Phenomenolgical Psychology and the Deconstruction of Nihilism, (Routledge Kegan Paul 1985)

  from p. 230:

  Our traditional way of teaching morality is, I think, an inherently mechanizing, technologically willfull way: it attempts to teach a morality of autonomy, but does so by implicitly heteronomous means, i.e., by imposing precepts and principles not derived from the child's own body of morally perceptive feeling, and by addressing moral education to the child's tool-like nature, rather than to a creative reserve of sensibility which is not reducible to its being as an instrument of moral culture, and which may suffer very seriously from the instrumental strategy. When precepts are imposed and not derived, it is not only that we betray our own principles by treating the child as a tool, but that, since we are giving him no understanding of moral evaluation as a process of articulating a body of implicitly moral feeling, we are actually encouraging and rewarding a tool-like nature, rigid, constant, reliable, fixed, docile, and essectially reactive, rather than thoughtful and responsive. This educational method is therefore implicitly technological, and tends to reproduce itself in a character which is easily manipulated, and which knows by example only those kinds of relationship that involve the manipulation of others. We desparately need a method of moral education which will avoid the chains of calculative ratiocination and subvert the technological reduction of human nature and comportment.

• The Listening Self: Personal Growth, Social Change and the Closure of Metaphysics
• The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation

David Loy

• Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psy
• Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy

Robert Magliola

• Derrida on the Mend, (1984 Purdue)

  from pp. 87-88:

  At the very outset of this discussion, however, I wish to dispel two vitiating suspicions - one suspicion which is rooted in a covert bigotry but is nonetheless commonplace among Western intellectuals who are not Orientalists,... The first suspicion would have it that the principles of Buddhist throught in general are too 'escapist', too 'other worldly' in the perjerotive sense of the term, too preposterously removed from the real, to be worthy of attention, and consequently, that any comparison of Derrida and Nagarjuna can only result in miscarriage; or, in a variation which is a little more generous, that Buddhist thought is too alien to Western sensibilities, and on this count well nigh irrecuperable, so that a putative comparison of these two thinkers is de facto meaningless. Let me assure such supicious ones that Buddhist thought, and the Hindu thought which chronologically precedes and accompanies it, are as spectacularly diverse and profound and rigorous and challenging and indeed relevant as European thought; that the activity of Greek pre-Socratic schools found their counterpart in the intense metaphysical debates of the early and middle Upanishadic periods - that Indian philosophy divided into materialist, evolutionist, atomistic, idealist, and other schools; that Aristotelian and scholastic logic were matched by the elaborate Indian Nyaya and he Chinese "canons of Mo Tzu"; and that the Western medieval and renaissance periods were also tenures of breathtaking esthetic, philosophic, and religious activity in the East. What is more, traditional Oriental thought is experiencing revived and new growth in contemporary times, especially in the non-Marxist Orient and in large part through fertile dialogue with Western specialists: Chinese logicians with Gernman logicians, Indian philosophers with American philosophers, Buddhist monks with Catholic monks, Japanese poets with Brazilian poets, and so on.

• On Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, Culture, (Scholars Press 1997)

Mary Midgley

• Wisdom, Information and Wonder: What is Knowledge for? (Routledge 1989)

  from p. 135

  The metaphor of foundations has got quite out of hand here. It expresses the notion that the items we can know can be arranged in a single, one-dimensional series in order of their certainty. In this case, what we would have to do would be to get them piled up in that order, resting the less certain always upon the more certain to make the whole set form a pyramid. In order to manage this, we would have first to find something intrinsically undoubtable to put at the bottom, something both immovable and large enough to support the whole pyramid. Philosophers have long noticed that Descartes's Cogito cannot really fill this place, and no other likely candidate has ever been found. Indeed, it seems implicit in the gravitational metaphor that none ever can be found, since there is no end to the progress that is possible downwards.

  from pp. 157-158

  This mention of how the facts sometimes seem to vary with the values does not tip us into helpless scepticism. It simply calls attention to the unity of the moral enterprise, to the web of conceptual links between all its various facets. The process of change could, of course, be described just as well the other way round, in the form in which it often appeared to those who underwent it, as a recognition of the fats which entailed a rejection of slavery. What was happening was a single complex process with three conceptually linked aspects: a changing view of the facts, a change of feeling, and a change in action, arising out of a changed sense of what action could be decently contemplated. It has been a real misfortune, not just for philosophy but for our civilization itself, that philosophers in the tradition we are discussing have tended to concentrate entirely on separating these factors and putting them in competition with each other, rather than on investigating the relations between them.

Barbara Herrnstein Smith

• B elief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy, (Harvard 1997)

  from p. 80:

  It appears (on the evidence of, among other things, alternative introspections) that ideas such as "inescapable presuppositions," "intuitive preunderstanding," and "truth absolute" are neither universal nor inescapable. On the contrary, it is possible to believe (as statements in this book testify) that such concepts and the sense of their inherent meanings and deep interconnectedness are, rather, the products and effects of rigorous instruction and routine participation in a particular conceptual tradition and its related idiom. It is also possible to believe, accordingly, that instruction (more or less rigorous) in some other conceptual tradition, and familiarity with its idiom, would yield other conceptions and descriptions of "the fundamental nature" of "thought itself" and of what is "presupposed" by "the very act of assertion." Or, one might say (in the alternative idiom of one such alternative tradition), different personal/professional histories are likely to make different descriptions and accounts of the operations of human cognition and communication appear coherent and adequate.

Joan Stambaugh

• The Finitude of Being
• Formless Self
• Impermanence is Buddha-nature: Dogen's Understanding of Temp
• The Real is Not the Rational, (SUNY 1986)

  from p. 98:

  Whereas in most Western philosophy, for example, in Descartes, the point of departure and the method to reach the nature of reality are clearly defined, i.e., to start with the res cogitans (thinking thing), prove the existence of God, and finally regain some certainty about the outside world. Given his philosophical enterprise of finding a fundamentum inconcussum (unshakeable foundation) for knowledge, Descartes could not have proceeded any other way than he did. His method is discursive, step by step, and analytical. In Buddhism, when there is a fundamental concept, for example, suffering or pain (duhkha), all the essential concepts relative to it manifest all at once. And if there is real understanding of the "access" to reality, the reality itself is present.

  Having stated these difficulties at the outset, let us attempt to see where Buddhism "starts." Descartes started with methodological doubt, and arrived at himself, at the thinking thing. Buddhism starts with the Four Noble Truths, which involve neither a self nor thinking, nor a thing. In the statement that life is suffering, the first of the Four Noble Truths, we already have the other two fundamental statements running through any form of Buddhism, be it Indian, Chinese or Japanese, that all is impermanent and that there is no self. The fundamentum inconcussum of Buddhism is unshakable, but, so to speak, unshakable the way an abyss is unshakable. You cannot "shake" what you cannot take hold of. The "foundation" here is bottomless. The only thing "foundational" about it is its absolute givenness. It is, so to speak, a foundation which envelopes us, not something on which we can reach the stability of a "stand".

Stanley Tambiah

• Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality

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