BCC Intro Philosophy
Eric Gerlach
2/11/2010
Lecture on Heraclitus and the Beginnings of Greek Thought
We must start with the Greeks the way that we started with Egypt: with modern understandings of race and identity. This is because just like Egypt, the identity of the Greeks is a political problem that must be discussed. The Egyptians were an African people, and although they did not call themselves “black”. Likewise, the Greeks and Romans did not call themselves “white”. The terms “white” and “black” have a complicated history, as both were used by the Chinese and Muslims before Europe rose to power. Indian, Chinese, Persian and then European writers have used the term “white” to describe themselves favorably and have used the term “black” to describe other people unfavorably, but the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans did not use these terms. It is likely that the terms originated in Asia, amongst the Indians and the Chinese, where they are sometimes still used today. In fact, the Chinese portray the Buddha, who was Indian, to be Chinese and sometimes call Indian people “black”. The use of the terms passed through the middle east and the Islamic empires into Europe. Today, Europeans use the term “white” to describe themselves and “black” to describe Africans, though at times the Irish and Russians have been “blacks”. The British also used the term to describe Indians and other peoples.
As Europe rose in the wake of Islamic empire, Renaissance artists presented the Israelites, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans to look like themselves. This is very much like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean people presenting the Buddha and other Indian figures to look like themselves and not Indian. The Europeans began to refer to themselves, as well as the Greeks and Romans, as “white”. We can see from this complicated history that it is more accurate to describe the Greeks, Romans, and Germanic Europeans as interrelated but distinct ethnicities. The word “white” does not cover the differences. The Greeks and the Romans presented themselves as a bronzed and olive-skinned Mediterranean people, and neither the Greeks nor the Romans identified with the Germanic tribes to the North and West.
During the Renaissance, the Italians in each warring city state (Florence, Venice, and Rome) were convinced that they were each the original Roman Catholic Christian people though they often did not identify with each other. They also read Greek to read the Christian New Testament of the Bible (written in Greek and often translated into and read in Latin). Thus, the Greeks and Romans have been portrayed by Western Germanic Europeans (like myself) as European “white” people from the Renaissance up until the present time.
However, the Greeks were not always considered to be the birth of reason, politics, or science as they often are today, even by the Germanic peoples themselves. Renaissance thinkers, like Ficino and Pico, believed that Greek thinking originated in Egypt and Persia, speaking proudly of standing in the same tradition of philosophy with Zarathustra and Hermes (known to be the Greek version of Thoth, the Egyptian god of knowledge and scribes).
In Germany during the protestant Reformation there was a rejection of Rome and the Catholic Church and intellectuals of the time turned to Greek sources such as the original Greek New Testament. The Protestant scholars took Greek texts and made leaps in Biblical studies, philosophy, history, science and mathematics. This was not a rediscovery of their own people, as it was often misrepresented, but a rediscovery of the wider Christian tradition that included people of many different ethnicities such as the Greeks and the Romans. This situation rose along with Europe’s wealth and power, such that in the late 1700s, in the time of Hegel and the rise of German thought (archeology, philosophy and theory of history) the Greeks were called the birthplace of civilization. Many scholars even theorized that the Greeks were descended from the North (the Germanic slave peoples who the Greeks called uncivilized and stupid). While many of these scholars’ theories have been debunked, the impact of this theorizing remains with us today. This is the theory that we can disprove but we still believe and enshrine in museums, textbooks and most importantly, fictional and nonfictional cinema.
In this process, the Greeks ceased to be part of Christian heritage and became the birth of secular society, philosophy and science. They became the origin of the modern European nation state as these states ceased to be officially part of Christian empires. After WWII and the horrors of the Holocaust, the ‘’European Race’’ that was spoken of by scholars openly became an eyesore. In academic speak, ancient Greece, ancient Rome and modern Europe ceased to be “the European Race” and became “The West”. This is the story of our identity today. Notice that there is still the understanding of a European race underneath the new vocabulary, but today it is most often spoken of as “Western Culture” and also “the Western Mind”. These terms hide all of the differences between cultures and ethnicities. Notice also that Germanic people, like myself, are in fact the ancestors of the Celts and Germanic tribes, but these cultures are not celebrated as the origins of anything modern or European. The Germanic people, like the Arabs, came to inherit civilization from more ancient peoples and then wrote up the history books as if they themselves were civilization’s origins.
The Beginnings of Greek Philosophy: The Pre-Socratics
Now that we have talked about race, identity and “Western” history, it is time to talk about Heraclitus and the beginnings of Greek thinking which starts in modern day Turkey, the Eastern half of ancient Greece, the half that is not known as Greece today. Like Italy during the Renaissance, Greece was a set of city-states which did not often identify with each other, territories circling the Aegean sea in what is today Greece and Turkey. Athens, the birthplace of Socrates and home to Plato and Aristotle was one of these city-states, and Ephesus, the birthplace of Heraclitus and other thinkers active before Socrates, was another.
We only have fragments of the pre-Socratic (before Socrates) thinkers’ thought and writings. These thinkers were believed to have been active between 600 and 400 BCE. We have no writings of Socrates and only some of the writings of Plato and Aristotle. As best as we know, Greek thought began with Thales, the first thinker/philosopher/scientist of whom we have fragments from other ancient authors who write about him and his theories. Thales and several other early Greek thinkers lived in the ancient city-state of Miletus (in modern day Turkey). Thales believed that the cosmos and all things are made of water. Miletus is quite close to Ephesus, where Heraclitus, who was born just before 500 BCE and shortly after Thales, believed that all things are made of fire. Both cities had been provinces of the Persian empire, and so it was under the influence of Zoroastrianism (developed about 1000 BCE) and the cultures of the Persian empire.
The Skepticism of Heraclitus
Heraclitus’ most famous idea is a memorable image: you can never step in the same river twice. Just as a river is always flowing and changing, so is reality always flowing and changing, such that nothing stays exactly the same for any two moments. You step in a river, then step out, then step back in the same river, but it is no longer ‘the same river’. Heraclitus says this is also true of himself.
According to one source, Heraclitus was a king who abandoned the title to become a philosopher. This has been identified as a close resemblance to the story of the Buddha in India, and some scholars have argued that Heraclitus was in fact the Buddha from India while others have argued that the Buddha was in fact Heraclitus from Greece. Both thinkers were mythologized as a king who left powerful king position and became a sage, and both believe in the enlightening sun rising above the watery chaos of reality and human perception, but it is quite likely the two were not the same individual.
Heraclitus is a very skeptical thinker. This does not mean he saw all things as negative. He was convinced that wisdom and inquiring within show us that all is one big cosmic fire, and things that unify the community and the individual bring wholeness and true happiness. However, he believed that humans are often foolish and let their minds divide themselves from the whole and from each other such that their understandings are disjointed and ignorant.
This is very typical thinking of skeptics the world over. A positivist would say that there are specific truths that are certain and must be separated from the uncertain, specific goods that must be separated from the evil. A skeptic would say, like Heraclitus and the Daoists from China, that the truth and the good is the whole and the great One, and the tendency of the mind to divide the good and the true from the rest is the opposite of true understanding and wisdom.
Heraclitus was not a fan of experts and specialists, and he ridiculed the cultural leaders of his time. He says that the common people are completely asleep, but far more dangerous are the experts who have a small piece of the puzzle and say that they know the entire truth. He calls the poets (Hesiod and Homer) and the Pythagoreans frauds, and says that there are no permanent truths or laws other than the constant formation of watery chaos by the sun and cosmic fire. Notice that this does not question the set up of the cosmos as we have studied it everywhere (and what the Persians gave to the Eastern Greek city states). Many often ask, “Why, then, should I listen to Heraclitus, since he is simply an expert?”. Heraclitus replies as most skeptics do: don’t take my word for it, but look into the world and within yourself and you will find that it is true.
This is a psychological skepticism that is criticizing the human ability to know particular things as permanent that are able to be separated from the One and All (the cosmic fire). Only the All is permanent. All the other things are wandering temporal forms. The many beings arise from the energy of Being, and then they fall back into the fire and disappear. The cosmos resembles the chaos yet order of the human community centered on authority by spoken word. The LOGOS, the word/plan/order/command, is the formative force in the cosmos, the force of fire and light in the watery chaotic world. The cosmic fire speaks with its ever-present Logos (fire over air) and this brings about the firmament in the chaos (the earth rising out of the water). This process, however, does not bring about eternal or stable beings, but chains of beings that are in flux and interdependent.
This goes also for laws, which Heraclitus says have to be defended as if they were city walls. This is sometimes read that Heraclitus thought human law was important and had to be defended, which he did, but in fact he is also telling us that human laws are impermanent like walls made out of earth. They may seem eternal and permanent, but as any former citizen or city of the Persian empire knows, empires fall and impressive city states are overthrown and change hands. The eternal word of the fire forever forms the cosmos, but human speech and walls are temporary, and therefore take force and effort to maintain. As a skeptic, Heraclitus believes that the divisions made by the mind are mortal, not eternal, like the human body. Our knowledge and laws are impermanent like mounds of dirt.
Heraclitus was one of the most famous thinkers of the Greek and Roman world. He was a big influence on Plato, though Plato is very much opposed to his thinking as we will see next week. Both Heraclitus and Plato were big influences on Christianity which initially flourished not in Israel but in Greece and Syria. If a primal speaking of the Word or Logos sounds familiar, Heraclitus was a central influence on the Greek and Roman stoics, and the author of the Gospel of John was almost certainly a Greek stoic writing in Roman times. The opening of the Gospel of John famously reads: the Logos/Word/Order was with God (Fire/Cosmos), and God spoke (“let there be light”) and light was separated from darkness.
It was only in the late 1700s and 1800s that German scholars rediscovered the presocratics and gave them attention and study. Before this time, Greek Philosophy was considered to have originated with Socrates (hence, “presocratics”) and most scholars were only versed in the surviving writings of Plato and Aristotle. Schleiermacher, one of the most famous and central protestant theologians and an opponent of Hegel, was a major force in bringing popularity to Heraclitus and a major translator of Plato. The philosopher Hegel, who we will study later, saw Heraclitus as a skeptic who is put in balance with Plato and other positivists by the course of history itself. Nietzsche, the great skeptical philosopher who we will also study, wrote that he felt closer to Heraclitus than any other thinker. Nietzsche believed, like Heraclitus, that we are proud of our learning and achievement but we are in fact little better than apes.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Logic Assignment: Indian Logic, Kanada & Gautama
BCC Logic NAME__________________________
Eric Gerlach
2/10/2010
Indian Logic Assignment
1) According to Modus Tollens, if we know “If p then q”, we also know:
2) According to Modus Tollens, if we know “If there is rain there are clouds”, we also know:
3) Give the form of Nyaya debate (both sides) using x and y as variables.
4) Give an example of a Nyaya debate (both sides).
5) Give the four sources of knowledge according to the Nyaya Sutra, with an example for each.
6) Give an example of a Nyaya proof (rule, example, reason, conclusion).
7) What is the difference between a fallacy and quibbling? Give an example of each.
Eric Gerlach
2/10/2010
Indian Logic Assignment
1) According to Modus Tollens, if we know “If p then q”, we also know:
2) According to Modus Tollens, if we know “If there is rain there are clouds”, we also know:
3) Give the form of Nyaya debate (both sides) using x and y as variables.
4) Give an example of a Nyaya debate (both sides).
5) Give the four sources of knowledge according to the Nyaya Sutra, with an example for each.
6) Give an example of a Nyaya proof (rule, example, reason, conclusion).
7) What is the difference between a fallacy and quibbling? Give an example of each.
First Philosophy Club Meeting for Spring on the 19th
The first meeting of the Berkeley City College Philosophy Club will be on Friday February 19th at noon in room 315. We will be meeting every Friday from noon to 1pm.
Monday, February 8, 2010
BCC Philosophy Club Spring 2010
Hey Everybody,
Last semester, we started a philosophy club at Berkeley City College. This semester, I have decided we should meet from 12-1 pm every Friday (rather than 2 hours every other Friday) as this seems to fit the schedules and the needs of everyone much better. We will be meeting every Friday at noon in room 315. Come to discuss issues and hang out with your fellow students. The theme for this year is Ethics and Institutions.
Eric
Last semester, we started a philosophy club at Berkeley City College. This semester, I have decided we should meet from 12-1 pm every Friday (rather than 2 hours every other Friday) as this seems to fit the schedules and the needs of everyone much better. We will be meeting every Friday at noon in room 315. Come to discuss issues and hang out with your fellow students. The theme for this year is Ethics and Institutions.
Eric
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Logic Lecture Feb 8: Gautama and the Nyaya Sutra
BCC Logic
Eric Gerlach
2/7/2010
Lecture on Gautama and the Nyaya Sutra
Gautama and the Nyaya School of Debate
Medhatithi Gautama, who lived sometime about 550 BCE, is considered the founder of the Nyaya school and the author of the Nyaya Sutra, a textbook and manual on logical debate. The Nyaya Sutra was not the first Indian text concerned with logical argument and analysis, but it became one of the most popular and thus foundational for the Nyaya school. It is believed that the Jains and Buddhists, who are more skeptical thinkers about logic but very involved in debate, later took much from the Nyaya Sutra and school. Nyaya means “right”, “just”, “justified” or “justifiable”, the same way we use ‘logical’ to mean ‘right debate or speech’. The school reached its height in 150 CE, but it traces itself back to Gautama and his teachings.
Gautama is also called ‘Akshapada’, ‘Eyes in the Feet’, from a legend that he was so deeply absorbed in thought one day on a walk that he fell into a well, and God (Brahma) gave him eyes in his feet to prevent this from happening again. Notice that, like the Vaisheshika ‘particular’ school, Nyaya is concerned with putting particular things into categories and relationships. Objects and substances can be called the ‘feet’ of things, and their families or causes (generalities) the head or mind of things.
The Buddha, who also lived sometime around 550 BCE is also called Gautama or Gotama. Some scholars used to argue that Gautama may have been the Buddha himself, but in fact they were two different founders of two different schools who were both from the Gautama region in Northern India which is how they share the name. Gautama, Buddha and Mahavira (the founder of Jainism), were also of the warrior caste, the second class in the Indian caste system beneath the first class Brahmins, the Vedic priests and scholars. This shows that the period produced new thinkers with new ideas that were questioning the established Vedic tradition, and the schools of this period are known to have become very popular because they were open to people of all castes including the lowest. A story from the period says that a scholar who gave up on the Vedas and turned entirely to logic turned into a Jackal. This story was obviously told by Vedic scholars and priests who found the new systems a threat to the old established traditions. Like science in Europe, however, the new ways were gradually added to the old ways, until the new system was an old standard alongside the Vedic traditions.
The Nyaya Sutra is one of many debate manuals that was written for Indian philosophical or cosmological debates. Questions asked included: “Is the self/soul/mind eternal or temporary?”, “Is the world and its laws eternal or temporary?”, “Is it better to renounce or indulge in luxuries?”, “Are there particular things which are sacred or is everything equally sacred?”, and, a question seen last week in Kanada’s text, “Is sound (and thus the oral tradition of the Vedas) eternal or temporary?”. This last question is central to the Nyaya text and Gautama’s form of proof that we will study.
It is noticeable that many of these debates are concerned with distinguishing the eternal from the temporary. In ancient world cosmology, the eternal was the sacred and the object of true knowledge. If one could determine which things and laws are eternal, one would grasp the ways of the cosmos.
Notice that these debates (vadas) are also all of the form: Is object X in group Y or group not Y? We will call this the Form of Nyaya Debate or Nyaya Vada. If one could justifiably claim that all Xs are Ys, one could then argue for further truths based on the established truths. Jains and Buddhists also took this form as fundamental. For instance, the Vedic priests argued that the self/soul/mind was eternal, while the Jains and Buddhists argued that it is temporary. In Greek thought, particularly with Plato and Aristotle, this arguing back and forth between opposite positions is called “Dialectic”.
Later, in Buddhist debates about 200 BCE, just after Nyaya hits its height, three areas of debate for a proposition were conducted in order: “Is X always Y?”, “Is X everywhere Y?” and “Is X Y in everything?”.
In ancient India, a king, authority or rich patron would organize a debate and banquet, invite participants from various schools of thought to debate (often the teachers of competing rival schools, like a competition in a Kung Fu movie). Women were not unheard of as debate participants, but not nearly as common as male debaters (one can unfortunately say this of American and British philosophical departments today).
Debate manuals like the Nyaya Sutra were designed to introduce students and scholars to typical forms of argument as well as methods of attack and defense. They also listed fallacies, types of false arguments that sound solid but have flaws. The Nyaya Sutra tells us that the best debater will not take cheap moves, ‘quibbles’ or ‘clinchers’, but one is free to make them at one’s own risk. The text is surprisingly honest and insightful on this point. By using deceptive reasoning, you could win the debate but you could also could lose if your opponent points out your errors or shortcuts. This is still true of argument today even in the most casual setting, and a good reason that looking into old Logic texts like the Nyaya Sutra is still useful today. Aristotle’s Organon, his ‘Tool’, are six books that cover different areas of debate and knowledge, similarly dealing with construction of argument and fallacies. Aristotle also must straddle the sometimes contrary goals of arguing truth and winning the debate.
The Nyaya Sutra and System
The Four Sources of Knowledge are Perception, Inference, Comparison, and Testimony. All of these can potentially give valid knowledge, but there are problems with each. Perception is seeing or experiencing something for oneself.
Perception can only be valid if it tells you something determinate that doesn’t vary or change. Two examples of false perception given in the text are confusing smoke and dust, and thinking that the hot earth is wet when in fact this is a mirage.
Inference is knowledge of an object produced by perception. This shows Induction of perception passing into Deduction of inference which is still held in Philosophy and Psychology today. There are two kinds of inference that one can have based on perception of associations (like rain always falling from clouds).
First, there is inference from perception of cause the knowledge of possible and potential effect. For example, if one sees dark rain clouds, one can infer that it may possibly rain. According to Kanada, Gautama and Modus Tollens (a basic form of Logic we saw first last week with Kanada), this is knowledge of a possibility, a potential, but not a certainty. If one sees clouds, it is wise to get ready for rain but it is not certain that it will rain.
Second, there is inference from perception of effect to knowledge of cause. For example, if one sees rain one knows there are clouds or if one sees a swollen river one knows that it must have rained. According to Kanada, Gautama and Modus Tollens this sort of knowledge is certain provided that one is not deceived. For example, if one sees smoke and it is not in fact dust then one knows that there is fire.
Comparison is knowledge of a thing by comparing it to something else that is similar or different. For example, if one knows that cows are mortal and temporary, one is quite justified in believing that horses, quite similar to cows in many ways, are mortal and temporary. Comparisons can often lead to valid beliefs, but there is the possibility of error. An example is believing wrongly that a horse has four stomachs because one knows this is true of a cow.
Testimony is instructive words from a reliable person or authority. There are two types, testimony of the perceived and testimony of the unperceived. The text gives the example of a physician saying butter makes you stronger as perceived and a priest saying you win over heaven with horse sacrifices as unperceived. Notice that, like Kanada’s text, this is a subtle attack on the older Vedic ways and suggests that they are uncertain compared to inferences drawn from perception. The Nyaya school is founded on the idea that valid deductive inferences must be based on regular and invariable perception, quite comparable to the modern scientific method.
The Form of Nyaya Proof
Some authors have claimed that Aristotle’s syllogisms are deductively valid but the Nyaya proof is not and based on induction. Actually, Aristotle has many syllogisms he admits are not deductively valid on their own and he also believes that one can only argue based on what one perceives and one can be mistaken exactly like the Nyaya School and Gautama. We can see induction and deduction working together in both Aristotle’s syllogisms and Gautama’s form of proof. As can see in the text, there are five steps but as the Buddhists correctly perceived the first and second are identical to the fifth and the fourth.
To make it easier, I have boiled it down to two steps. The first is a general rule backed by an example. The second step is a reason which leads to a conclusion. The text gives us an example:
Wherever there is smoke there is fire (rule), as in a kitchen (example).
Because there is smoke on the hill (reason), there is fire on the hill (conclusion).
For each of these parts, there are particular sorts of questions or doubts one can raise. If one is in a debate against an opponent, it is critical to know the sorts of doubts that one can raise against the opponent’s argument as well as the doubts one’s opponent can raise against one’s own argument.
The text gives us examples that can be used against its own example of proof. One can argue that an iron ball is on fire, but there is no smoke as a counter example to the rule “Wherever there is smoke, there is fire”, or one can argue that dust can be confused with smoke, so “There is smoke on the hill” may be misperception.
There is also two types of proof, positive homogeneous (proof by sameness) and negative heterogeneous (proof by difference).
Example of Proof By Sameness:
Whatever is produced is not eternal, as a pot.
Because it is produced, sound is not eternal.
Notice we saw this in Kanada’s text, and scholars have suggested it attacks the older Vedic tradition. The example above concerning fire on the hill is also a proof by sameness. This is quite similar to the structure of Aristotle’s most famous and basic syllogism:
If B, then C (plus example D), (If smoke then fire)
If A then B, then (if hill has smoke)
A then C (hill has fire)
Example of Proof By Difference:
Whatever is eternal is not produced, as in the soul.
Because it is produced, sound is not eternal.
Doubts, Fallacies and Quibbling
Doubt comes from five sources. There is doubt by sameness (ex: seeing in twilight, can’t tell bush or man), by difference (ex: seeing two men in twilight, and thinking still one is a tree), by conflicting testimony (ex: Hinduism says there is an eternal soul or self, while Buddhism says there is no eternal self or soul), by irregular perception (ex: one sees a horse with horns attached to its head and questions whether horses can have horns), and by irregular non-perception (ex: one sees a cow with its horns removed and questions whether cows can have no horns).
Fallacies are false arguments. Examples include changing the thesis, contradicting the thesis, meaningless utterance, incoherent speech (‘colorless sleep furiously green’ is a famous example by Noam Chomsky), repetition, silence, ignorance (failing to understand typically), evasion (‘I am called by nature’, ‘I have another appointment’), sharing the fault (problem with both sides), overlooking fallacies, pointing out false fallacies.
Quibbling is objecting to an argument as a fallacy when it is not actually a fallacy. Quibbling can lose a debate just as surely as giving a fallacious argument. The text gives three types: Term (ex: Someone claims to have a new (“nava”) blanket, but this is confused with the claim of nine (also “nava”) blankets), Genus (ex: Someone claims Brahmins are educated but the opponent objects that some Brahmins are two years old), Metaphor (ex: Someone claims poetically, “The scaffolds cry out”, and the opponent objects, “Impossible, they are inanimate objects”).
Eric Gerlach
2/7/2010
Lecture on Gautama and the Nyaya Sutra
Gautama and the Nyaya School of Debate
Medhatithi Gautama, who lived sometime about 550 BCE, is considered the founder of the Nyaya school and the author of the Nyaya Sutra, a textbook and manual on logical debate. The Nyaya Sutra was not the first Indian text concerned with logical argument and analysis, but it became one of the most popular and thus foundational for the Nyaya school. It is believed that the Jains and Buddhists, who are more skeptical thinkers about logic but very involved in debate, later took much from the Nyaya Sutra and school. Nyaya means “right”, “just”, “justified” or “justifiable”, the same way we use ‘logical’ to mean ‘right debate or speech’. The school reached its height in 150 CE, but it traces itself back to Gautama and his teachings.
Gautama is also called ‘Akshapada’, ‘Eyes in the Feet’, from a legend that he was so deeply absorbed in thought one day on a walk that he fell into a well, and God (Brahma) gave him eyes in his feet to prevent this from happening again. Notice that, like the Vaisheshika ‘particular’ school, Nyaya is concerned with putting particular things into categories and relationships. Objects and substances can be called the ‘feet’ of things, and their families or causes (generalities) the head or mind of things.
The Buddha, who also lived sometime around 550 BCE is also called Gautama or Gotama. Some scholars used to argue that Gautama may have been the Buddha himself, but in fact they were two different founders of two different schools who were both from the Gautama region in Northern India which is how they share the name. Gautama, Buddha and Mahavira (the founder of Jainism), were also of the warrior caste, the second class in the Indian caste system beneath the first class Brahmins, the Vedic priests and scholars. This shows that the period produced new thinkers with new ideas that were questioning the established Vedic tradition, and the schools of this period are known to have become very popular because they were open to people of all castes including the lowest. A story from the period says that a scholar who gave up on the Vedas and turned entirely to logic turned into a Jackal. This story was obviously told by Vedic scholars and priests who found the new systems a threat to the old established traditions. Like science in Europe, however, the new ways were gradually added to the old ways, until the new system was an old standard alongside the Vedic traditions.
The Nyaya Sutra is one of many debate manuals that was written for Indian philosophical or cosmological debates. Questions asked included: “Is the self/soul/mind eternal or temporary?”, “Is the world and its laws eternal or temporary?”, “Is it better to renounce or indulge in luxuries?”, “Are there particular things which are sacred or is everything equally sacred?”, and, a question seen last week in Kanada’s text, “Is sound (and thus the oral tradition of the Vedas) eternal or temporary?”. This last question is central to the Nyaya text and Gautama’s form of proof that we will study.
It is noticeable that many of these debates are concerned with distinguishing the eternal from the temporary. In ancient world cosmology, the eternal was the sacred and the object of true knowledge. If one could determine which things and laws are eternal, one would grasp the ways of the cosmos.
Notice that these debates (vadas) are also all of the form: Is object X in group Y or group not Y? We will call this the Form of Nyaya Debate or Nyaya Vada. If one could justifiably claim that all Xs are Ys, one could then argue for further truths based on the established truths. Jains and Buddhists also took this form as fundamental. For instance, the Vedic priests argued that the self/soul/mind was eternal, while the Jains and Buddhists argued that it is temporary. In Greek thought, particularly with Plato and Aristotle, this arguing back and forth between opposite positions is called “Dialectic”.
Later, in Buddhist debates about 200 BCE, just after Nyaya hits its height, three areas of debate for a proposition were conducted in order: “Is X always Y?”, “Is X everywhere Y?” and “Is X Y in everything?”.
In ancient India, a king, authority or rich patron would organize a debate and banquet, invite participants from various schools of thought to debate (often the teachers of competing rival schools, like a competition in a Kung Fu movie). Women were not unheard of as debate participants, but not nearly as common as male debaters (one can unfortunately say this of American and British philosophical departments today).
Debate manuals like the Nyaya Sutra were designed to introduce students and scholars to typical forms of argument as well as methods of attack and defense. They also listed fallacies, types of false arguments that sound solid but have flaws. The Nyaya Sutra tells us that the best debater will not take cheap moves, ‘quibbles’ or ‘clinchers’, but one is free to make them at one’s own risk. The text is surprisingly honest and insightful on this point. By using deceptive reasoning, you could win the debate but you could also could lose if your opponent points out your errors or shortcuts. This is still true of argument today even in the most casual setting, and a good reason that looking into old Logic texts like the Nyaya Sutra is still useful today. Aristotle’s Organon, his ‘Tool’, are six books that cover different areas of debate and knowledge, similarly dealing with construction of argument and fallacies. Aristotle also must straddle the sometimes contrary goals of arguing truth and winning the debate.
The Nyaya Sutra and System
The Four Sources of Knowledge are Perception, Inference, Comparison, and Testimony. All of these can potentially give valid knowledge, but there are problems with each. Perception is seeing or experiencing something for oneself.
Perception can only be valid if it tells you something determinate that doesn’t vary or change. Two examples of false perception given in the text are confusing smoke and dust, and thinking that the hot earth is wet when in fact this is a mirage.
Inference is knowledge of an object produced by perception. This shows Induction of perception passing into Deduction of inference which is still held in Philosophy and Psychology today. There are two kinds of inference that one can have based on perception of associations (like rain always falling from clouds).
First, there is inference from perception of cause the knowledge of possible and potential effect. For example, if one sees dark rain clouds, one can infer that it may possibly rain. According to Kanada, Gautama and Modus Tollens (a basic form of Logic we saw first last week with Kanada), this is knowledge of a possibility, a potential, but not a certainty. If one sees clouds, it is wise to get ready for rain but it is not certain that it will rain.
Second, there is inference from perception of effect to knowledge of cause. For example, if one sees rain one knows there are clouds or if one sees a swollen river one knows that it must have rained. According to Kanada, Gautama and Modus Tollens this sort of knowledge is certain provided that one is not deceived. For example, if one sees smoke and it is not in fact dust then one knows that there is fire.
Comparison is knowledge of a thing by comparing it to something else that is similar or different. For example, if one knows that cows are mortal and temporary, one is quite justified in believing that horses, quite similar to cows in many ways, are mortal and temporary. Comparisons can often lead to valid beliefs, but there is the possibility of error. An example is believing wrongly that a horse has four stomachs because one knows this is true of a cow.
Testimony is instructive words from a reliable person or authority. There are two types, testimony of the perceived and testimony of the unperceived. The text gives the example of a physician saying butter makes you stronger as perceived and a priest saying you win over heaven with horse sacrifices as unperceived. Notice that, like Kanada’s text, this is a subtle attack on the older Vedic ways and suggests that they are uncertain compared to inferences drawn from perception. The Nyaya school is founded on the idea that valid deductive inferences must be based on regular and invariable perception, quite comparable to the modern scientific method.
The Form of Nyaya Proof
Some authors have claimed that Aristotle’s syllogisms are deductively valid but the Nyaya proof is not and based on induction. Actually, Aristotle has many syllogisms he admits are not deductively valid on their own and he also believes that one can only argue based on what one perceives and one can be mistaken exactly like the Nyaya School and Gautama. We can see induction and deduction working together in both Aristotle’s syllogisms and Gautama’s form of proof. As can see in the text, there are five steps but as the Buddhists correctly perceived the first and second are identical to the fifth and the fourth.
To make it easier, I have boiled it down to two steps. The first is a general rule backed by an example. The second step is a reason which leads to a conclusion. The text gives us an example:
Wherever there is smoke there is fire (rule), as in a kitchen (example).
Because there is smoke on the hill (reason), there is fire on the hill (conclusion).
For each of these parts, there are particular sorts of questions or doubts one can raise. If one is in a debate against an opponent, it is critical to know the sorts of doubts that one can raise against the opponent’s argument as well as the doubts one’s opponent can raise against one’s own argument.
The text gives us examples that can be used against its own example of proof. One can argue that an iron ball is on fire, but there is no smoke as a counter example to the rule “Wherever there is smoke, there is fire”, or one can argue that dust can be confused with smoke, so “There is smoke on the hill” may be misperception.
There is also two types of proof, positive homogeneous (proof by sameness) and negative heterogeneous (proof by difference).
Example of Proof By Sameness:
Whatever is produced is not eternal, as a pot.
Because it is produced, sound is not eternal.
Notice we saw this in Kanada’s text, and scholars have suggested it attacks the older Vedic tradition. The example above concerning fire on the hill is also a proof by sameness. This is quite similar to the structure of Aristotle’s most famous and basic syllogism:
If B, then C (plus example D), (If smoke then fire)
If A then B, then (if hill has smoke)
A then C (hill has fire)
Example of Proof By Difference:
Whatever is eternal is not produced, as in the soul.
Because it is produced, sound is not eternal.
Doubts, Fallacies and Quibbling
Doubt comes from five sources. There is doubt by sameness (ex: seeing in twilight, can’t tell bush or man), by difference (ex: seeing two men in twilight, and thinking still one is a tree), by conflicting testimony (ex: Hinduism says there is an eternal soul or self, while Buddhism says there is no eternal self or soul), by irregular perception (ex: one sees a horse with horns attached to its head and questions whether horses can have horns), and by irregular non-perception (ex: one sees a cow with its horns removed and questions whether cows can have no horns).
Fallacies are false arguments. Examples include changing the thesis, contradicting the thesis, meaningless utterance, incoherent speech (‘colorless sleep furiously green’ is a famous example by Noam Chomsky), repetition, silence, ignorance (failing to understand typically), evasion (‘I am called by nature’, ‘I have another appointment’), sharing the fault (problem with both sides), overlooking fallacies, pointing out false fallacies.
Quibbling is objecting to an argument as a fallacy when it is not actually a fallacy. Quibbling can lose a debate just as surely as giving a fallacious argument. The text gives three types: Term (ex: Someone claims to have a new (“nava”) blanket, but this is confused with the claim of nine (also “nava”) blankets), Genus (ex: Someone claims Brahmins are educated but the opponent objects that some Brahmins are two years old), Metaphor (ex: Someone claims poetically, “The scaffolds cry out”, and the opponent objects, “Impossible, they are inanimate objects”).
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Ethics Lecture Feb 4: Aristotle, Virtue and Merit
BCC Ethics
Eric Gerlach
2/4/2010
Lecture on Aristotle, Virtue and Merit
Basics of Ancient World Cosmology:
Before getting into Aristotle and his understanding of the virtuous person, it is important to understand the world view of the ancient world. Many ancient cultures (including the Babylonians, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, and even the Hawaiians) have a very similar cosmology. Cosmology is the term used to cover the ancient study of the world, which included physics, psychology, biology, medicine, philosophy, religion and most areas of study all together as a single study by the educated and the wise.
The world was thought to be like a big person (making the individual person a microcosm or mini-cosmos within the larger cosmos or world). The elements, including fire, air, earth and water stacked from lightest on the top (fire and air) to heaviest on the bottom (earth and water). This was not only observed in nature (star fire above, winds next, then earth above water) but also in humans (the mind is fire and visions of light, which heats and activates the breath in speech like orders and commands, and the water in the lower regions and functions of the body which often was identified with chaos). Order and reason were identified with the higher elements (fire and air, mind and breath) and chaos and desire were identified with the lower elements (earth and water, flesh and fluid). When the stack of elements is in order the cosmos and the individual are in order, and when the stack of elements are out of order the cosmos and individual are out of order. The higher elements were believed to be eternal just as the cosmos itself and Being are eternal, and the lower elements were believed to be temporary like the individuals and beings are temporary.
One can find in religion and philosophy in ancient cultures (including Christianity, Buddhism, Indian Philosophy, Greek Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy) the same message repeated again and again: reason and the mind must be placed above and in charge of desire and the body. The eternal way of things is to be placed above the temporary ways and wants. This gains the individual wisdom, reason and insight into the workings of the cosmos. When the lower elements are in charge, there is ignorance and destruction. This framework is important for understanding each individual system of ancient thought as well as their overall similarities and differences.
Aristotle (384-322 BCE)
Plato’s student and the tutor of Alexander the Great and Ptolemy, Aristotle is one of the most famous and influential of Greek philosophers. He was primarily interested in biology and speciation, but his works on the soul (mind, self), Logic, Ethics and politics became more important than his works on the animal kingdom. He was a central influence on the origins of Christianity, Islamic thought and European thought in the middle ages. While he is sometimes called the first scientist and the first logician, his views on these subjects expanded ancient world cosmology and were not the birth of these subjects. Aristotle has been claimed by the West as a founder, but the Islamic world also considers him one of their own and he is depicted in different ways depending on who does the illustrating (see the beautiful Islamic image in the Wikipedia article that portrays him as a very dark skinned holy sage for an interesting counter to Renaissance paintings).
Aristotle’s conception of virtue and human purpose is entirely in line with ancient world cosmology. He believes that everything has a single purpose for which it is intended. It is as if the cosmos, Being itself, is a big mind that creates things for particular uses, and individual beings thrive if they are serving their purposes (ergon in the Greek, or “work”, “job”). We are reasonable to the degree that we see the purposes of things, serve our own natural purpose and use things in accord with their natural purposes. This is known as the teleological view, as the study of purpose is called teleology. Notice that teleology is very big with more traditional people today (including evangelical Christians) but modern Philosophy and Science have broken from this view and find it quite antiquated.
For Aristotle, having oneself in the proper stack and order is being in accord with one’s nature, and this means putting theory and soul/intellect on top and putting each lower element of our minds and bodies in the service of the highest part of the mind, the intellect, which corresponds to the highest good of the cosmos itself. Just as the intellect should be pursued because it is the best and highest part, the good itself should be pursued simply in itself and for no other purpose. This is similar to Kant and Moral theory, but absolutely at odds with Mill and consequentialism which believe that good is the end of things but would not say that intellect should be pursued in itself without regards to the consequences and practical ends. Aristotle does believe that the human individual will naturally flourish and be happy if they are stacked up right and in accord with the human purpose of intellectual activity, but this is secondary and the byproduct of serving ones purpose.
Similarly, in matters of politics, Aristotle believes that the city is not primarily a living arrangement but rather for producing the elite and the virtuous. Thus, the city is not for making people happy but having each individual do their natural job. Just like his teacher Plato argues in his Republic, Aristotle argues that each person must have one thing they do best and it is therefore best for them to do that thing and that one thing only. Unfortunately, both Plato and Aristotle argued that slaves and peasants are meant to serve the aristocracy and women are clearly meant to serve men (Mill will strongly criticize these views, one of the first and few outspoken critics of the subjugation of slaves and women).
Consider the example of lying. The moralist would say that lying is wrong in and of itself, like Kant argues that lying goes against our reason by categorical necessity. The consequentialist would say that lying has bad consequences and results in pain and unhappiness. The virtue theorist, however, would argue that the purpose of the mind and human being is truth in and of itself and so lying is not in accord with human nature (or rather, righteous and proper human nature).
Modern Virtue Theory
While Aristotle’s virtue ethics and teleological theory were popular in the middle ages in Europe, there was a decline during the 1700s and 1800s as science rose to prominence and questioned teleology. Kant’s laws and Mill’s consequences became the dueling positions of ethics. Recently, however, there has been a revival of virtue theory that rose along with increasing individualism and criticism of positivistic conceptions of science. If we become critical of the idea that there are simple laws that can be known, it opens a space for a return to the idea of the virtuous person beyond airtight moral laws or the complete calculation of consequences.
However, if we do not believe that things have simple and singular purposes just as we have grown critical of laws and calculation, virtue ethics has a problem: what virtues should the virtuous person have? Often these virtues are mental: intellect, wisdom, reason, and understanding. This has been neglectful of the physical body (the home of the physical brain, of course). Another issue that has come to light is the interpersonal aspect of virtue. Virtue has typically been described as personal, but the individual is naturally social (curiously Aristotle argues this when justifying his political views of the city and its proper organization). Confucius, one of the great moral geniuses of the world, has a very interpersonal view of ethics and thus we will consider his views next under the concept of balance (such as the balance of self and other).
As a final note, consider Jain (the ancient Indian forerunner of Buddhism) anti-merit theory:
In Hinduism and Buddhism, karma can be positive (merit and blessing) or negative (demerit and sin). Thus, karma can either help you up or drag you down. For Jains, karma is ALWAYS NEGATIVE, always weight that keeps you down, always division or blockage between you and the ALL. Thus, one tries best to avoid accumulating karma and to destroy the karma one has already accumulated. Jains are famous for their doctrine of the negativity of karma and the radical nonviolence that follows from this principle. Jains wear masks to prevent insects from flying in their mouths, sweep the ground to avoid killing insects (even though the killing would be unintentional, it would still be an accumulation of karma), influenced other Indian thought in promoting vegetarianism, and even don’t eat root vegetables as it kills (up-roots) the whole plant rather than that plucked from the plant. Thus, any accumulation of virtue or merit is distinguishing and distancing oneself from the whole. Sharing much with ancient cosmology and Aristotle, Jains would argue that the purpose of the individual is to join the whole without distinction and therefore we should work to LOSE merit and karma, not gain it.
Eric Gerlach
2/4/2010
Lecture on Aristotle, Virtue and Merit
Basics of Ancient World Cosmology:
Before getting into Aristotle and his understanding of the virtuous person, it is important to understand the world view of the ancient world. Many ancient cultures (including the Babylonians, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, and even the Hawaiians) have a very similar cosmology. Cosmology is the term used to cover the ancient study of the world, which included physics, psychology, biology, medicine, philosophy, religion and most areas of study all together as a single study by the educated and the wise.
The world was thought to be like a big person (making the individual person a microcosm or mini-cosmos within the larger cosmos or world). The elements, including fire, air, earth and water stacked from lightest on the top (fire and air) to heaviest on the bottom (earth and water). This was not only observed in nature (star fire above, winds next, then earth above water) but also in humans (the mind is fire and visions of light, which heats and activates the breath in speech like orders and commands, and the water in the lower regions and functions of the body which often was identified with chaos). Order and reason were identified with the higher elements (fire and air, mind and breath) and chaos and desire were identified with the lower elements (earth and water, flesh and fluid). When the stack of elements is in order the cosmos and the individual are in order, and when the stack of elements are out of order the cosmos and individual are out of order. The higher elements were believed to be eternal just as the cosmos itself and Being are eternal, and the lower elements were believed to be temporary like the individuals and beings are temporary.
One can find in religion and philosophy in ancient cultures (including Christianity, Buddhism, Indian Philosophy, Greek Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy) the same message repeated again and again: reason and the mind must be placed above and in charge of desire and the body. The eternal way of things is to be placed above the temporary ways and wants. This gains the individual wisdom, reason and insight into the workings of the cosmos. When the lower elements are in charge, there is ignorance and destruction. This framework is important for understanding each individual system of ancient thought as well as their overall similarities and differences.
Aristotle (384-322 BCE)
Plato’s student and the tutor of Alexander the Great and Ptolemy, Aristotle is one of the most famous and influential of Greek philosophers. He was primarily interested in biology and speciation, but his works on the soul (mind, self), Logic, Ethics and politics became more important than his works on the animal kingdom. He was a central influence on the origins of Christianity, Islamic thought and European thought in the middle ages. While he is sometimes called the first scientist and the first logician, his views on these subjects expanded ancient world cosmology and were not the birth of these subjects. Aristotle has been claimed by the West as a founder, but the Islamic world also considers him one of their own and he is depicted in different ways depending on who does the illustrating (see the beautiful Islamic image in the Wikipedia article that portrays him as a very dark skinned holy sage for an interesting counter to Renaissance paintings).
Aristotle’s conception of virtue and human purpose is entirely in line with ancient world cosmology. He believes that everything has a single purpose for which it is intended. It is as if the cosmos, Being itself, is a big mind that creates things for particular uses, and individual beings thrive if they are serving their purposes (ergon in the Greek, or “work”, “job”). We are reasonable to the degree that we see the purposes of things, serve our own natural purpose and use things in accord with their natural purposes. This is known as the teleological view, as the study of purpose is called teleology. Notice that teleology is very big with more traditional people today (including evangelical Christians) but modern Philosophy and Science have broken from this view and find it quite antiquated.
For Aristotle, having oneself in the proper stack and order is being in accord with one’s nature, and this means putting theory and soul/intellect on top and putting each lower element of our minds and bodies in the service of the highest part of the mind, the intellect, which corresponds to the highest good of the cosmos itself. Just as the intellect should be pursued because it is the best and highest part, the good itself should be pursued simply in itself and for no other purpose. This is similar to Kant and Moral theory, but absolutely at odds with Mill and consequentialism which believe that good is the end of things but would not say that intellect should be pursued in itself without regards to the consequences and practical ends. Aristotle does believe that the human individual will naturally flourish and be happy if they are stacked up right and in accord with the human purpose of intellectual activity, but this is secondary and the byproduct of serving ones purpose.
Similarly, in matters of politics, Aristotle believes that the city is not primarily a living arrangement but rather for producing the elite and the virtuous. Thus, the city is not for making people happy but having each individual do their natural job. Just like his teacher Plato argues in his Republic, Aristotle argues that each person must have one thing they do best and it is therefore best for them to do that thing and that one thing only. Unfortunately, both Plato and Aristotle argued that slaves and peasants are meant to serve the aristocracy and women are clearly meant to serve men (Mill will strongly criticize these views, one of the first and few outspoken critics of the subjugation of slaves and women).
Consider the example of lying. The moralist would say that lying is wrong in and of itself, like Kant argues that lying goes against our reason by categorical necessity. The consequentialist would say that lying has bad consequences and results in pain and unhappiness. The virtue theorist, however, would argue that the purpose of the mind and human being is truth in and of itself and so lying is not in accord with human nature (or rather, righteous and proper human nature).
Modern Virtue Theory
While Aristotle’s virtue ethics and teleological theory were popular in the middle ages in Europe, there was a decline during the 1700s and 1800s as science rose to prominence and questioned teleology. Kant’s laws and Mill’s consequences became the dueling positions of ethics. Recently, however, there has been a revival of virtue theory that rose along with increasing individualism and criticism of positivistic conceptions of science. If we become critical of the idea that there are simple laws that can be known, it opens a space for a return to the idea of the virtuous person beyond airtight moral laws or the complete calculation of consequences.
However, if we do not believe that things have simple and singular purposes just as we have grown critical of laws and calculation, virtue ethics has a problem: what virtues should the virtuous person have? Often these virtues are mental: intellect, wisdom, reason, and understanding. This has been neglectful of the physical body (the home of the physical brain, of course). Another issue that has come to light is the interpersonal aspect of virtue. Virtue has typically been described as personal, but the individual is naturally social (curiously Aristotle argues this when justifying his political views of the city and its proper organization). Confucius, one of the great moral geniuses of the world, has a very interpersonal view of ethics and thus we will consider his views next under the concept of balance (such as the balance of self and other).
As a final note, consider Jain (the ancient Indian forerunner of Buddhism) anti-merit theory:
In Hinduism and Buddhism, karma can be positive (merit and blessing) or negative (demerit and sin). Thus, karma can either help you up or drag you down. For Jains, karma is ALWAYS NEGATIVE, always weight that keeps you down, always division or blockage between you and the ALL. Thus, one tries best to avoid accumulating karma and to destroy the karma one has already accumulated. Jains are famous for their doctrine of the negativity of karma and the radical nonviolence that follows from this principle. Jains wear masks to prevent insects from flying in their mouths, sweep the ground to avoid killing insects (even though the killing would be unintentional, it would still be an accumulation of karma), influenced other Indian thought in promoting vegetarianism, and even don’t eat root vegetables as it kills (up-roots) the whole plant rather than that plucked from the plant. Thus, any accumulation of virtue or merit is distinguishing and distancing oneself from the whole. Sharing much with ancient cosmology and Aristotle, Jains would argue that the purpose of the individual is to join the whole without distinction and therefore we should work to LOSE merit and karma, not gain it.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Intro Philosophy Lecture Feb 4: Indian Thought
BCC Intro Philosophy
Eric Gerlach
2/3/2010
Lecture on Indian Thought:
The Upanishads, Jainism and Buddhism
The Basics of Ancient World Cosmology
Many ancient cultures (including the Babylonians, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, and even the Hawaiians) have a very similar cosmology. Cosmology is the term used to cover the ancient study of the world, which included physics, psychology, biology, medicine, philosophy, religion and most areas of study all together as a single study by the educated and the wise.
The world was thought to be like a big person (making the individual person a microcosm or mini-cosmos within the larger cosmos or world). The elements, including fire, air, earth and water stacked from lightest on the top (fire and air) to heaviest on the bottom (earth and water). This was not only observed in nature (star fire above, winds next, then earth above water) but also in humans (the mind is fire and visions of light, which heats and activates the breath in speech like orders and commands, and the water in the lower regions and functions of the body which often was identified with chaos). Order and reason were identified with the higher elements (fire and air, mind and breath) and chaos and desire were identified with the lower elements (earth and water, flesh and fluid). When the stack of elements is in order the cosmos and the individual are in order, and when the stack of elements are out of order the cosmos and individual are out of order. The higher elements were believed to be eternal just as the cosmos itself and Being are eternal, and the lower elements were believed to be temporary like the individuals and beings are temporary.
One can find in religion and philosophy in ancient cultures (including Christianity, Buddhism, Indian Philosophy, Greek Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy) the same message repeated again and again: reason and the mind must be placed above and in charge of desire and the body. The eternal way of things is to be placed above the temporary ways and wants. This gains the individual wisdom, reason and insight into the workings of the cosmos. When the lower elements are in charge, there is ignorance and destruction. This framework is important for understanding each individual system of ancient thought as well as their overall similarities and differences.
Early India and Hinduism: The Vedas and Upanishads
‘Hindu’ is the Persian name for India (Persia and India are next door to each other and have traded for thousands of years). Our society borrows the term from the British, who get the term from the Persians. Hinduism may have many gods but there is an understanding that each god is one aspect of the great father and creator God, named by most traditions Brahma. Thus, even though there are many forms of worship that focus on specific gods, there is an understanding that it is all one interrelated tradition.
There are three paths of worship in Hinduism.
First, there is devotional worship, known as Bhakti Yoga (‘Yoga’ means ‘discipline’, or practice). In Bhakti devotional worship, the devotee prays, sings hymns, lights incense, and performs rituals to gain favor with the gods and heavens. It is impossible not to notice that most of what we call ‘religion’ the world over is in fact forms of Bhakti practice, devotion to particular gods and ancestral spirits. The two most populous forms of Bhakti Hinduism are Shaivism, the worship of Shiva (the transformer and destroyer) and his incarnations such as Ganesh (the elephant headed god), and Vaishnavism, the worship of Vishnu (the savior or preserver) and his incarnations (such as Krishna).
Raja yoga, the second path, is worship by meditation and asceticism (living in isolation, standing in place for days, chanting the names of God for hours, sitting on spikes, and other means of hard activity meant to gain a meditative state of insight). Notice that Christian monks could easily be seen as adhering to this ascetic path. If you enjoy jogging, and find it ‘spiritual’, this could be seen as a form of Raja yoga.
Jnana yoga (“zshna-na”), the third path and my personal favorite, is worship by acquiring knowledge and understanding the order of things through study and philosophizing. Notice that Greek philosophers and Christian/deist scientists of Europe like Newton can be seen as following this route. Indeed, Hinduism is so diverse and inter-accepting that it is hard to not see all of the forms of other cultures somewhere in one of its parts. This class itself could be seen as a form of Jnana yoga, designed to bring you closer to the core by studying the ways of the world (namely the religious traditions in their sameness and difference).
All are understood to work towards the same goal: liberation from the bonds of attachment and desire and rising into enlightenment and release.
First, there is hope for a better next life. Many are familiar already with the Hindu idea of reincarnation. This is not, as we learned in Shamanism, a form of afterlife particular to India, but in fact there is evidence that many tribal cultures and early Egypt believed that one’s present life will be reincarnated in another life on earth based on one’s actions and intentions. This interconnection is called ‘Karma’, which simply means ‘action’ in Sanskrit. Interestingly, physical causation is ‘karma’, just as metaphysical causation (next life physics) is ‘karma’, same word and understanding of cause and effect applied to a different sphere of existence. If you punch someone in the head, it is karma that makes their head reel backward, and karma that also weighs down your chance for a favorable life after death in the Hindu tradition.
Second, there is hope for release, for freedom from rounds of rebirth on earth. This can be thought of as dwelling in a heaven with one’s personal or family god, but also as a dwelling with the order of things without residing in any particular place. Bhakti yoga tends to favor the dwelling with a lord, while Raja and Jnana tends to favor the dwelling with the universe as a whole, however it is important to remember that some Hindus believe that both amount to the same exact thing (while others will insist that their school’s truth is ‘more true’, the same variation one finds in any religion and in our own culture). This release is also called Moksha and Samadhi, but in America we know this first and foremost by the same name as the famous grunge band, Nirvana.
The Vedas were oral traditions, huge memorized lengths of stories and doctrines that were spoken and repeated. There are four Vedas, and these form the most ancient and respected source of Hinduism. Our scholars believe the Vedas to have been formed sometime before 1200 BCE, but many Hindu devotees believe that the Vedas are far older. The Rig (or ‘Rg’) Veda is the oldest and most central. The Vedas, compared to the Upanishads, are largely stories of creation and the tales of the gods, explaining how the universe was created and how things got to be the way they are.
The Upanishads (800 BCE) were a later development. These were more ‘philosophical’, teachings about the soul and how to release the soul from desire and merge with the great One and All. The Upanishads frequently interpret the stories of the Vedas as metaphoric teachings, instructions for the truly wise on how to develop the mind or soul. ‘Upanishad’ means “sitting down near and beside”, as these are believed to be the close teachings of the priest, philosopher or master who has taught the Vedas for a long time and thus knows something of their secret ‘inner’ meaning. Greek philosophy, particularly the pre-Socratic thinkers (philosophers before Socrates, of whom we have only fragments), shares an uncanny resemblance to many of the discussions in the Upanishads (all the more reason to see less of a strict separation between ‘West’ and ‘East’).
One of the most famous sayings from the Upanishads is Tat Tvam Asi, “That is you”. No matter what “that” you are looking at, it is in fact your own self because all is one and there are no complete or permanent separations between any two things.
As the Upanishads continued to gain teachers and followers, there was a new flowering of many schools of thought between 700 and 400 BCE that took much from the Vedas and Upanishads but developed the teachings in new directions. These new schools often rejected the caste system (still in place today in spite of these ancient rebellions) and thus gained massive followings among all classes and castes of India. Jainism was one of the first, but it was quickly developed and transformed itself into a religion that is possibly the most popular system of thought in history, Buddhism (Christianity, Islam and Science are contenders for first, second, third and fourth place depending on how and who one counts).
Some scholars today argue that Jainism and Buddhism helped develop Hinduism in response such that Hinduism looks as it does today (with an emphasis on total liberation AS WELL AS the goal of merit and reincarnation). However, Buddhism (which I have personally heard some Hindus describe as ‘Hinduism for Export’) flourished outside of India and thus became a much more international religion for dominating diverse empires, whereas Hinduism and Jainism largely remain confined to India even today (with significant minority populations in Canada, America, South Africa and many other places). Also, of course, Hindu gurus (teachers, sages) have become quite popular in giving religious insight to people in the ‘West’ in recent decades, particularly after the 1960s and the cultural revolution (it could be argued, even more popular than Buddhist or Jain teachers).
Jainism (650 BCE)
Jainism, or “Jain Dharma” (dharma means “teaching/law/order of the universe”) was and is practiced by Jains (not Jainists as some mistakenly say). There are currently 4 Million in India today, with many others in communities around the world including New York and Toronto. Jainism rose just before Buddhism, as Mahavira (650 BCE), the main teacher and founder of Jainism, lived just before the Buddha (550 BCE), though all of these dates are still in debate.
Jainism advocates two principles that are shared with Indian thought but credited to Jain innovation: Anekantavada, the multiplicity of reality or “non-one-ended-ness” and Syadvada, the hypothetical and imperfect nature of perspective and judgment. According to these two principles, all human beliefs and judgments are temporary and partial views of the greater whole.
Jains were also early proponents of the idea that the cosmos works in cycles: like the physical rising and setting of the sun, consciousness rises, then sets. People start to become awakened teachers and develop religion in the rising era, and people lose religion in the setting era. This is endless, like the cosmos. The cosmos becomes enlightened to its own self through us, and then loses consciousness of itself through us. Unfortunately, we currently live in an era of dimming religion and consciousness according to most Jain and Hindu teachers (the Hindus following the Jains in this picture).
Jain teachers and saints are known as Tirthankaras, “one who makes a ford” (cutting through water as order over chaos, as land becoming firmament in the chaotic waters). Mahavira (also Mahavir), the founder of Jainism, is understood by Jains to be the 24th Tirthankara. Like others of his time, Mahavira was a practitioner of austerities that are aimed at detachment from desire and multiplicity of the world: fasting, standing in jungles, going without food or luxuries for extended periods of time. Statues of Mahavira and other Tirthankaras show vines growing up their legs and bodies, as vines grow several feet in the jungle a day and so would grow up your body if you practice standing austerities for days at a time. Jains believe that these practices purify the self/soul/mind.
Here, we come to THE critical difference between Jainism and the other schools of Indian thought. In Hinduism and Buddhism, karma can be positive (merit and blessing) or negative (demerit and sin). Thus, karma can either help you up or drag you down. For Jains, karma is ALWAYS NEGATIVE, always weight that keeps you down, always division or blockage between you and the ALL. Thus, one tries best to avoid accumulating karma and to destroy the karma one has already accumulated.
Jains are famous for their doctrine of the negativity of karma and the radical nonviolence that follows from this principle. Jains wear masks to prevent insects from flying in their mouths, sweep the ground to avoid killing insects (even though the killing would be unintentional, it would still be an accumulation of karma), influenced other Indian thought in promoting vegetarianism, and even don’t eat root vegetables as it kills (up-roots) the whole plant rather than that plucked from the plant.
The best way to understand the dual practice of avoiding karma AND shredding karma is the Metaphor of the Leaky Boat: You ride in a boat across water to a distant shore (Nirvana). Notice that water represents chaos and desire, and the land represents the firm and the enlightened. The boat is leaky, and water is pouring in. You have to BOTH plug the leaks (preventative principles like vegetarianism that prevent bad karma from getting IN you) and bail out the water that has already inside the boat (shredding karma, practicing austerities like fasting or standing in postures to get the karma you already have in this life OUT of you). Jains believe that it is only by this two-pronged strategy that the individual can be fully liberated and join back together with the cosmos and thus gain eternal life rather than round after round of rebirth.
Buddhism (550 BCE)
According to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha, the “awakened one”, practiced austerities like Mahavira, but found that this way was not enough. Buddhism is famous for long periods of meditation, and this is quite like Jain austerities of standing in postures, but Buddhism suggests that it is through balance and not extremes that one will be liberated. The Buddha found Jain asceticism to be one sided and promoting of self hatred which is still attachment and duality.
According to the tradition and legend, Buddha’s father was the king of a kingdom in Northern India. When the Buddha was born, the king’s wise men told him that his son would be EITHER a great king OR a great holy man. The king did not want his son to be a holy man, but rather the next king, so to control his son he hid his son away in his palace and gave him all the luxuries in the world, hiding death and pain from him, surrounding him with dancing girls and servants and only healthy, happy, obedient people. At 29, the Buddha had become bored of this, and snuck out to see the city, taking along his trusted servant. In succession, the Buddha the Four Sights (an old man, a sick man, a dead man, and a holy man). When he saw the first three, his servant each time told him that this was unfortunately inevitable for everyone, but when he got to the fourth, the holy man (likely a Jain or proto-Jain), his servant told him that the monk was working on the first three (age, sickness, and death).
The Buddha was immediately envious of something more wonderful than he had ever possessed in the palace, and so he escaped into the jungle where he found sages practicing austerities. The Buddha did these Jain (or proto-Jain, depending on the scholar) austere practices in the jungle for six years, but he found that this brought no great enlightenment and in fact brought him self-hatred and self-denial (notice here that this is where Buddhism breaks away from Jainism as a direct criticism of Jain practice, taking much of Jainism with it in the process but seeking a middle way between denial and indulgence, attached to neither). The Buddha left the jungle disappointed. He decided to sit beneath a large tree, the Bodhi Tree (which one can go see in India today, a tree supposed to have been grown from the original in the original spot), and he vowed not to rise until he found complete and total truth or he would give up his life. After 49 days, at the age of 35, he realized complete enlightenment, Nirvana. This is defined in the tradition as the total extinction of greed (raga), hate (dosa), and delusion (moha), obtainable in this life by any being by overcoming duality and desire.
Major philosophical ideas of Buddhism
The Doctrine of the Middle Way:
In all things, as the mind splits things into opposites and prefers one while rejecting the other, one should always practice moderation between the extremes. As a criticism of Jainism, this means that one should balance pain and pleasure, being attached to neither, rather than chase pain and difficulty to liberate the self. The Buddha found Jain practice to be immoderate: too much de-emphasis of self is attachment to self hate, not detachment from particular things (as self-hate is particular and bound up with particular things just as much as self-love or pride is). One must love and hate the self, bringing the two together, to find detachment from many and complete identity in the One, the All.
Doctrine of Impermanence:
The Buddha taught that all things are impermanent. Thus, everything is constantly evolving, never the same twice. Only the great All is eternal, the One to which we all belong, but as soon as you say this it becomes a conception, a particular being separated from other particular beings, and then is simply a temporary being in your mind.
Codependent Arising (Pratityasamutpada):
Another major teaching of Buddhism is codependent arising of all phenomena. While this is a hard thing to grasp or discuss, it means that all things are themselves in so far as they are connected to every other thing. Opposites, such as heat and cold or self and other, do not anchor things in themselves or give things their true meaning, but rather all things exist dependent on all other things. While this may frustrate some, and they would say ‘this tells me nothing’, Buddhists believe that all things are impermanent, and so you should not expect to have final knowledge of any particular thing. Instead, you must investigate each thing you want to describe as best as you can, connected to the things to which you want to connect it.
Eric Gerlach
2/3/2010
Lecture on Indian Thought:
The Upanishads, Jainism and Buddhism
The Basics of Ancient World Cosmology
Many ancient cultures (including the Babylonians, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, and even the Hawaiians) have a very similar cosmology. Cosmology is the term used to cover the ancient study of the world, which included physics, psychology, biology, medicine, philosophy, religion and most areas of study all together as a single study by the educated and the wise.
The world was thought to be like a big person (making the individual person a microcosm or mini-cosmos within the larger cosmos or world). The elements, including fire, air, earth and water stacked from lightest on the top (fire and air) to heaviest on the bottom (earth and water). This was not only observed in nature (star fire above, winds next, then earth above water) but also in humans (the mind is fire and visions of light, which heats and activates the breath in speech like orders and commands, and the water in the lower regions and functions of the body which often was identified with chaos). Order and reason were identified with the higher elements (fire and air, mind and breath) and chaos and desire were identified with the lower elements (earth and water, flesh and fluid). When the stack of elements is in order the cosmos and the individual are in order, and when the stack of elements are out of order the cosmos and individual are out of order. The higher elements were believed to be eternal just as the cosmos itself and Being are eternal, and the lower elements were believed to be temporary like the individuals and beings are temporary.
One can find in religion and philosophy in ancient cultures (including Christianity, Buddhism, Indian Philosophy, Greek Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy) the same message repeated again and again: reason and the mind must be placed above and in charge of desire and the body. The eternal way of things is to be placed above the temporary ways and wants. This gains the individual wisdom, reason and insight into the workings of the cosmos. When the lower elements are in charge, there is ignorance and destruction. This framework is important for understanding each individual system of ancient thought as well as their overall similarities and differences.
Early India and Hinduism: The Vedas and Upanishads
‘Hindu’ is the Persian name for India (Persia and India are next door to each other and have traded for thousands of years). Our society borrows the term from the British, who get the term from the Persians. Hinduism may have many gods but there is an understanding that each god is one aspect of the great father and creator God, named by most traditions Brahma. Thus, even though there are many forms of worship that focus on specific gods, there is an understanding that it is all one interrelated tradition.
There are three paths of worship in Hinduism.
First, there is devotional worship, known as Bhakti Yoga (‘Yoga’ means ‘discipline’, or practice). In Bhakti devotional worship, the devotee prays, sings hymns, lights incense, and performs rituals to gain favor with the gods and heavens. It is impossible not to notice that most of what we call ‘religion’ the world over is in fact forms of Bhakti practice, devotion to particular gods and ancestral spirits. The two most populous forms of Bhakti Hinduism are Shaivism, the worship of Shiva (the transformer and destroyer) and his incarnations such as Ganesh (the elephant headed god), and Vaishnavism, the worship of Vishnu (the savior or preserver) and his incarnations (such as Krishna).
Raja yoga, the second path, is worship by meditation and asceticism (living in isolation, standing in place for days, chanting the names of God for hours, sitting on spikes, and other means of hard activity meant to gain a meditative state of insight). Notice that Christian monks could easily be seen as adhering to this ascetic path. If you enjoy jogging, and find it ‘spiritual’, this could be seen as a form of Raja yoga.
Jnana yoga (“zshna-na”), the third path and my personal favorite, is worship by acquiring knowledge and understanding the order of things through study and philosophizing. Notice that Greek philosophers and Christian/deist scientists of Europe like Newton can be seen as following this route. Indeed, Hinduism is so diverse and inter-accepting that it is hard to not see all of the forms of other cultures somewhere in one of its parts. This class itself could be seen as a form of Jnana yoga, designed to bring you closer to the core by studying the ways of the world (namely the religious traditions in their sameness and difference).
All are understood to work towards the same goal: liberation from the bonds of attachment and desire and rising into enlightenment and release.
First, there is hope for a better next life. Many are familiar already with the Hindu idea of reincarnation. This is not, as we learned in Shamanism, a form of afterlife particular to India, but in fact there is evidence that many tribal cultures and early Egypt believed that one’s present life will be reincarnated in another life on earth based on one’s actions and intentions. This interconnection is called ‘Karma’, which simply means ‘action’ in Sanskrit. Interestingly, physical causation is ‘karma’, just as metaphysical causation (next life physics) is ‘karma’, same word and understanding of cause and effect applied to a different sphere of existence. If you punch someone in the head, it is karma that makes their head reel backward, and karma that also weighs down your chance for a favorable life after death in the Hindu tradition.
Second, there is hope for release, for freedom from rounds of rebirth on earth. This can be thought of as dwelling in a heaven with one’s personal or family god, but also as a dwelling with the order of things without residing in any particular place. Bhakti yoga tends to favor the dwelling with a lord, while Raja and Jnana tends to favor the dwelling with the universe as a whole, however it is important to remember that some Hindus believe that both amount to the same exact thing (while others will insist that their school’s truth is ‘more true’, the same variation one finds in any religion and in our own culture). This release is also called Moksha and Samadhi, but in America we know this first and foremost by the same name as the famous grunge band, Nirvana.
The Vedas were oral traditions, huge memorized lengths of stories and doctrines that were spoken and repeated. There are four Vedas, and these form the most ancient and respected source of Hinduism. Our scholars believe the Vedas to have been formed sometime before 1200 BCE, but many Hindu devotees believe that the Vedas are far older. The Rig (or ‘Rg’) Veda is the oldest and most central. The Vedas, compared to the Upanishads, are largely stories of creation and the tales of the gods, explaining how the universe was created and how things got to be the way they are.
The Upanishads (800 BCE) were a later development. These were more ‘philosophical’, teachings about the soul and how to release the soul from desire and merge with the great One and All. The Upanishads frequently interpret the stories of the Vedas as metaphoric teachings, instructions for the truly wise on how to develop the mind or soul. ‘Upanishad’ means “sitting down near and beside”, as these are believed to be the close teachings of the priest, philosopher or master who has taught the Vedas for a long time and thus knows something of their secret ‘inner’ meaning. Greek philosophy, particularly the pre-Socratic thinkers (philosophers before Socrates, of whom we have only fragments), shares an uncanny resemblance to many of the discussions in the Upanishads (all the more reason to see less of a strict separation between ‘West’ and ‘East’).
One of the most famous sayings from the Upanishads is Tat Tvam Asi, “That is you”. No matter what “that” you are looking at, it is in fact your own self because all is one and there are no complete or permanent separations between any two things.
As the Upanishads continued to gain teachers and followers, there was a new flowering of many schools of thought between 700 and 400 BCE that took much from the Vedas and Upanishads but developed the teachings in new directions. These new schools often rejected the caste system (still in place today in spite of these ancient rebellions) and thus gained massive followings among all classes and castes of India. Jainism was one of the first, but it was quickly developed and transformed itself into a religion that is possibly the most popular system of thought in history, Buddhism (Christianity, Islam and Science are contenders for first, second, third and fourth place depending on how and who one counts).
Some scholars today argue that Jainism and Buddhism helped develop Hinduism in response such that Hinduism looks as it does today (with an emphasis on total liberation AS WELL AS the goal of merit and reincarnation). However, Buddhism (which I have personally heard some Hindus describe as ‘Hinduism for Export’) flourished outside of India and thus became a much more international religion for dominating diverse empires, whereas Hinduism and Jainism largely remain confined to India even today (with significant minority populations in Canada, America, South Africa and many other places). Also, of course, Hindu gurus (teachers, sages) have become quite popular in giving religious insight to people in the ‘West’ in recent decades, particularly after the 1960s and the cultural revolution (it could be argued, even more popular than Buddhist or Jain teachers).
Jainism (650 BCE)
Jainism, or “Jain Dharma” (dharma means “teaching/law/order of the universe”) was and is practiced by Jains (not Jainists as some mistakenly say). There are currently 4 Million in India today, with many others in communities around the world including New York and Toronto. Jainism rose just before Buddhism, as Mahavira (650 BCE), the main teacher and founder of Jainism, lived just before the Buddha (550 BCE), though all of these dates are still in debate.
Jainism advocates two principles that are shared with Indian thought but credited to Jain innovation: Anekantavada, the multiplicity of reality or “non-one-ended-ness” and Syadvada, the hypothetical and imperfect nature of perspective and judgment. According to these two principles, all human beliefs and judgments are temporary and partial views of the greater whole.
Jains were also early proponents of the idea that the cosmos works in cycles: like the physical rising and setting of the sun, consciousness rises, then sets. People start to become awakened teachers and develop religion in the rising era, and people lose religion in the setting era. This is endless, like the cosmos. The cosmos becomes enlightened to its own self through us, and then loses consciousness of itself through us. Unfortunately, we currently live in an era of dimming religion and consciousness according to most Jain and Hindu teachers (the Hindus following the Jains in this picture).
Jain teachers and saints are known as Tirthankaras, “one who makes a ford” (cutting through water as order over chaos, as land becoming firmament in the chaotic waters). Mahavira (also Mahavir), the founder of Jainism, is understood by Jains to be the 24th Tirthankara. Like others of his time, Mahavira was a practitioner of austerities that are aimed at detachment from desire and multiplicity of the world: fasting, standing in jungles, going without food or luxuries for extended periods of time. Statues of Mahavira and other Tirthankaras show vines growing up their legs and bodies, as vines grow several feet in the jungle a day and so would grow up your body if you practice standing austerities for days at a time. Jains believe that these practices purify the self/soul/mind.
Here, we come to THE critical difference between Jainism and the other schools of Indian thought. In Hinduism and Buddhism, karma can be positive (merit and blessing) or negative (demerit and sin). Thus, karma can either help you up or drag you down. For Jains, karma is ALWAYS NEGATIVE, always weight that keeps you down, always division or blockage between you and the ALL. Thus, one tries best to avoid accumulating karma and to destroy the karma one has already accumulated.
Jains are famous for their doctrine of the negativity of karma and the radical nonviolence that follows from this principle. Jains wear masks to prevent insects from flying in their mouths, sweep the ground to avoid killing insects (even though the killing would be unintentional, it would still be an accumulation of karma), influenced other Indian thought in promoting vegetarianism, and even don’t eat root vegetables as it kills (up-roots) the whole plant rather than that plucked from the plant.
The best way to understand the dual practice of avoiding karma AND shredding karma is the Metaphor of the Leaky Boat: You ride in a boat across water to a distant shore (Nirvana). Notice that water represents chaos and desire, and the land represents the firm and the enlightened. The boat is leaky, and water is pouring in. You have to BOTH plug the leaks (preventative principles like vegetarianism that prevent bad karma from getting IN you) and bail out the water that has already inside the boat (shredding karma, practicing austerities like fasting or standing in postures to get the karma you already have in this life OUT of you). Jains believe that it is only by this two-pronged strategy that the individual can be fully liberated and join back together with the cosmos and thus gain eternal life rather than round after round of rebirth.
Buddhism (550 BCE)
According to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha, the “awakened one”, practiced austerities like Mahavira, but found that this way was not enough. Buddhism is famous for long periods of meditation, and this is quite like Jain austerities of standing in postures, but Buddhism suggests that it is through balance and not extremes that one will be liberated. The Buddha found Jain asceticism to be one sided and promoting of self hatred which is still attachment and duality.
According to the tradition and legend, Buddha’s father was the king of a kingdom in Northern India. When the Buddha was born, the king’s wise men told him that his son would be EITHER a great king OR a great holy man. The king did not want his son to be a holy man, but rather the next king, so to control his son he hid his son away in his palace and gave him all the luxuries in the world, hiding death and pain from him, surrounding him with dancing girls and servants and only healthy, happy, obedient people. At 29, the Buddha had become bored of this, and snuck out to see the city, taking along his trusted servant. In succession, the Buddha the Four Sights (an old man, a sick man, a dead man, and a holy man). When he saw the first three, his servant each time told him that this was unfortunately inevitable for everyone, but when he got to the fourth, the holy man (likely a Jain or proto-Jain), his servant told him that the monk was working on the first three (age, sickness, and death).
The Buddha was immediately envious of something more wonderful than he had ever possessed in the palace, and so he escaped into the jungle where he found sages practicing austerities. The Buddha did these Jain (or proto-Jain, depending on the scholar) austere practices in the jungle for six years, but he found that this brought no great enlightenment and in fact brought him self-hatred and self-denial (notice here that this is where Buddhism breaks away from Jainism as a direct criticism of Jain practice, taking much of Jainism with it in the process but seeking a middle way between denial and indulgence, attached to neither). The Buddha left the jungle disappointed. He decided to sit beneath a large tree, the Bodhi Tree (which one can go see in India today, a tree supposed to have been grown from the original in the original spot), and he vowed not to rise until he found complete and total truth or he would give up his life. After 49 days, at the age of 35, he realized complete enlightenment, Nirvana. This is defined in the tradition as the total extinction of greed (raga), hate (dosa), and delusion (moha), obtainable in this life by any being by overcoming duality and desire.
Major philosophical ideas of Buddhism
The Doctrine of the Middle Way:
In all things, as the mind splits things into opposites and prefers one while rejecting the other, one should always practice moderation between the extremes. As a criticism of Jainism, this means that one should balance pain and pleasure, being attached to neither, rather than chase pain and difficulty to liberate the self. The Buddha found Jain practice to be immoderate: too much de-emphasis of self is attachment to self hate, not detachment from particular things (as self-hate is particular and bound up with particular things just as much as self-love or pride is). One must love and hate the self, bringing the two together, to find detachment from many and complete identity in the One, the All.
Doctrine of Impermanence:
The Buddha taught that all things are impermanent. Thus, everything is constantly evolving, never the same twice. Only the great All is eternal, the One to which we all belong, but as soon as you say this it becomes a conception, a particular being separated from other particular beings, and then is simply a temporary being in your mind.
Codependent Arising (Pratityasamutpada):
Another major teaching of Buddhism is codependent arising of all phenomena. While this is a hard thing to grasp or discuss, it means that all things are themselves in so far as they are connected to every other thing. Opposites, such as heat and cold or self and other, do not anchor things in themselves or give things their true meaning, but rather all things exist dependent on all other things. While this may frustrate some, and they would say ‘this tells me nothing’, Buddhists believe that all things are impermanent, and so you should not expect to have final knowledge of any particular thing. Instead, you must investigate each thing you want to describe as best as you can, connected to the things to which you want to connect it.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Logic Lecture Feb 3: Kanada and the Beginnings of Indian Logic
BCC Logic
Eric Gerlach
2/2/2010
Kanada and the Beginnings of Indian Logic
You may notice that Kanada’s text, the Vaisheshika Sutra, is very hard to read. The introduction says that this is the first translation of this important text into English, and this was done and published in New Delhi, Northern India, in 2003. There is no British or American publication of this text. As you read Aristotle in the next weeks, consider how well Aristotle speaks in English when there is support and funding for the publication. If you compare this to the translator’s edition of Aristotle, you find that Aristotle speaks in fragmented words and the translators polish it and interpret it to get Aristotle to sound that good. This is unfortunate, for Kanada may have been the first atomist and one of the first logicians.
The Vedas are India’s earliest texts and traditions, consisting of many stories of gods and cosmic origins. Much philosophy and cosmology are contained in these texts. It is believed today that they were formed from earlier oral traditions into the standard written texts around 1200 BCE. Four hundred years later, around 800 BCE, the Upanishad texts taught the ‘inner meanings’ of the Vedas, drawing philosophical lessons from the tales of the gods. ‘Philosophy’ is darshana, ‘seeing’. The Upanishads preach liberation by knowledge. The most famous quote is “Tat tvam asi”, or “That is you”. Whatever is other to you is in fact your own self.
200 years later, around 600 BCE (Kanada’s time), India was experiencing a third wave of philosophy including the logicians, atomists, Jains and Buddhists. This is the time when Kanada, Gotama (next week), and the Buddha were supposed to have lived and taught, and schools of their followers flowered in the next several hundred years (the same time as philosophy and logic were flourishing in ancient Greece).
At this time, India was producing superior steel (wootz) that the Chinese, Romans and Egyptians highly prized. The Chinese tried for centuries to reproduce it at home but without success (until they invented cast iron which is the material of the medieval European blacksmith). The Romans sold German tribes people (like me) as slaves in India in trade for this steel, dies, spices and other goods. Alexander tried to conquer India, and failed, because of these goods. This means that Kanada, Gotama and Buddha were living in the inter-connected and international ancient world.
Kanada’s Life and Legend
Kanada’s dates are debated. Chinese scholars sometimes put his texts at 1000 BCE, while our scholars often put them at 200 BCE or even 100 CE. This is quite political, because the Chinese tradition comes very much from India and the European tradition comes very much from Greece. The publisher of this texts says it is safe to say that Kanada lived and taught by 600 BCE at the latest.
Kanada’s name means, ‘One who eats grain’, but it could also mean, ‘One who gathers particulars. We will see how this is central to logic and Kanada’s teachings. He is also known as ‘The Owl’, or Uluka. Legend has it that he was so ugly in appearance that he frightened young women, so he only ventured out at night, sneaking into granaries to eat corn and rice grains/particles. Another story is Shiva taught him in the form of an owl. Notice that there are many traditions and versions, some mixed with the stories of the Vedic gods.
Kanada began what is known as the Vaisheshika school, and thus his text is the Vaisheshika sutra. Vaisheshika means particular, but also particle, atom, particular, special, specific, and distinction. Kanada may have been the first logician and atomist in recorded history, but as we have seen this is still a debate that can be quite political. Gotama’s Nyaya (Logic/Debate) school borrowed much from Kanada in forming rules and manuals of debate. It is believed that Jainism and Buddhism took both of these systems and developed them in a skeptical and relativist direction. Thus, Kanada and Gotama are positivistic logicians who are seeking atomic truths (universal, necessary and certain), and the Jains and Buddhists are skeptical logicians who criticize positivistic thinking with relativity and skepticism.
The two schools of Kanada (Vaisheshika) and Gotama (Nyaya) focus on inherence (how the particular individual is a member of the general group) and inference (conclusions that can be drawn about the particular individual when one knows the general group). Two types of inherence which allow us to make valid inferences include speciation (groups that have typical qualities) and causation (events in time that lead from one to another).
Kanada set out his Vaisheshika system and its seven objects of knowledge to understand the world (cosmology or physics, but in the ancient world this extended to biology and psychology). Gotama, who we will study next, was concerned with debate and logical argument.
The Vaisheshika System
First, we will go over Kanada’s seven objects of knowledge, and then interesting points in the following chapters Kanada makes that are important for logic and physics.
1) Substance (dravya): nine in number (air, water, fire, earth, ether, time, space, self and mind). These are composed of particles or atoms that are eternal and uncreated (thus they can’t be created or destroyed). Newton, like medieval alchemists before him but unlike modern physics and chemistry, believed in ether, the glue element that sticks the others together in combinations.
2) Attribute (guna): quality (color, texture, odor, taste) and quantity (number, measure, distinction, conjunction, disjunction). Kanada argues in the text that attributes are not substances, but reside in substances and can cause substances, other attributes and actions.
3) Action (karma): note that karma is the physical energy and motion that makes kicking someone cause pain and also gets the kicker reborn as a cockroach (most only know of the second as a religious concept, but like Chinese Chi it is equivalent to physical energy and is often identified with the element fire in ancient systems). Kanada argues that substances and attributes can cause actions but actions themselves cannot produce other actions. He also argues action belongs to one substance, not many (note that the Buddhist “sound of one hand clapping” is a counter argument to this point, and that Gotama differs from Kanada on this also).
4) General (samanya): the universal or group, such as the general group (speciation) of all cows or the general event (causation) of a rainstorm (in which clouds cause rain).
5) Particular (vishesha): the individual or specific, such as the individual cow or the individual event of a cloud causing rain.
6) Inherence (samavaya): the particular being included and conforming to the general. We can make inferences based on inherences. If we know that the general group of cows have horns, then we know that this particular cow must have horns. Likewise, if we know that generally rainclouds cause rain, then we can infer that this particular rain must have been caused by clouds.
7) Non-existence or Emptiness (abhava): non-being, nothingness and void. Nuf said.
Kanada tries to give a systematic account of the many types of each object and the relationships between each object (ex: substances and qualities can produce actions, but actions cannot).
In the second chapter, Kanada gives us an early understanding of what would later be called Modus Tollens in European Logic following Aristotle. Kanada writes “in the absence of cause is the absence of effect but in the absence of effect there is no absence of cause”. This means that if you know “If P then Q”, then you also know and can infer “If not Q then not P” but you do not know and cannot infer “If not P then not Q”. This is very important to understand for basic logic, and many people make the mistake of thinking that one can infer “not P then not Q”.
Kanada discusses fire as energy. It is interesting that fire was the most common form of energy seen and used in the ancient world, whereas electricity is the most common form seen and used in the modern world. Thus, the Egyptians, Greeks, Indians and Chinese thought of energy as fire whereas we think of energy as electricity.
In the third Chapter, Kanada describes types of proofs and fallacies. Gotama and the Nyaya school try to give an entire encyclopedia, and disagree with Kanada on many points. Kanada like Aristotle argues that you can disprove arguments by finding contradictions and that you cannot infer the general from the particular (you cannot infer that all cows have spots from the individual cow that has spots).
Kanada argues that sound is caused and therefore it is impermanent. Some have argued this seems to be a subtle critique of the earlier Vedic tradition (like arguing “paper is perishable” as a safe and subtle way of suggesting that the Bible must be temporary, not eternal).
Kanada argues that things move downward naturally, so things must have additional causes/forces to move sideways or upward (thus, smoke shows additional force or energy, namely that it has fire in it and fire moves upward. He also argues thus that water moves upward by sun/fire in it, then comes downward in cycles. Then, when the water collects in clouds, it causes the fire to be released as lightning. He argues that the arrow flies first from cause and then from inherent tendency to remain in motion, similar if not identical to the modern concept of ‘inertia’.
Kanada says there are many organs in the body, but each has its own particularity as they have different causes/purposes. We believe this today, but consider the ancient world understanding that Aristotle shared called the teleological view: every individual thing has a particular purpose as if the whole is conscious. There is a Roman stoic writer who speaks of the horrible mystery of underground caverns that seem to exist in spite of no animals or humans being present. This is a horrifying mystery because without conscious use, the ancient mind would be baffled by its existence.
Eric Gerlach
2/2/2010
Kanada and the Beginnings of Indian Logic
You may notice that Kanada’s text, the Vaisheshika Sutra, is very hard to read. The introduction says that this is the first translation of this important text into English, and this was done and published in New Delhi, Northern India, in 2003. There is no British or American publication of this text. As you read Aristotle in the next weeks, consider how well Aristotle speaks in English when there is support and funding for the publication. If you compare this to the translator’s edition of Aristotle, you find that Aristotle speaks in fragmented words and the translators polish it and interpret it to get Aristotle to sound that good. This is unfortunate, for Kanada may have been the first atomist and one of the first logicians.
The Vedas are India’s earliest texts and traditions, consisting of many stories of gods and cosmic origins. Much philosophy and cosmology are contained in these texts. It is believed today that they were formed from earlier oral traditions into the standard written texts around 1200 BCE. Four hundred years later, around 800 BCE, the Upanishad texts taught the ‘inner meanings’ of the Vedas, drawing philosophical lessons from the tales of the gods. ‘Philosophy’ is darshana, ‘seeing’. The Upanishads preach liberation by knowledge. The most famous quote is “Tat tvam asi”, or “That is you”. Whatever is other to you is in fact your own self.
200 years later, around 600 BCE (Kanada’s time), India was experiencing a third wave of philosophy including the logicians, atomists, Jains and Buddhists. This is the time when Kanada, Gotama (next week), and the Buddha were supposed to have lived and taught, and schools of their followers flowered in the next several hundred years (the same time as philosophy and logic were flourishing in ancient Greece).
At this time, India was producing superior steel (wootz) that the Chinese, Romans and Egyptians highly prized. The Chinese tried for centuries to reproduce it at home but without success (until they invented cast iron which is the material of the medieval European blacksmith). The Romans sold German tribes people (like me) as slaves in India in trade for this steel, dies, spices and other goods. Alexander tried to conquer India, and failed, because of these goods. This means that Kanada, Gotama and Buddha were living in the inter-connected and international ancient world.
Kanada’s Life and Legend
Kanada’s dates are debated. Chinese scholars sometimes put his texts at 1000 BCE, while our scholars often put them at 200 BCE or even 100 CE. This is quite political, because the Chinese tradition comes very much from India and the European tradition comes very much from Greece. The publisher of this texts says it is safe to say that Kanada lived and taught by 600 BCE at the latest.
Kanada’s name means, ‘One who eats grain’, but it could also mean, ‘One who gathers particulars. We will see how this is central to logic and Kanada’s teachings. He is also known as ‘The Owl’, or Uluka. Legend has it that he was so ugly in appearance that he frightened young women, so he only ventured out at night, sneaking into granaries to eat corn and rice grains/particles. Another story is Shiva taught him in the form of an owl. Notice that there are many traditions and versions, some mixed with the stories of the Vedic gods.
Kanada began what is known as the Vaisheshika school, and thus his text is the Vaisheshika sutra. Vaisheshika means particular, but also particle, atom, particular, special, specific, and distinction. Kanada may have been the first logician and atomist in recorded history, but as we have seen this is still a debate that can be quite political. Gotama’s Nyaya (Logic/Debate) school borrowed much from Kanada in forming rules and manuals of debate. It is believed that Jainism and Buddhism took both of these systems and developed them in a skeptical and relativist direction. Thus, Kanada and Gotama are positivistic logicians who are seeking atomic truths (universal, necessary and certain), and the Jains and Buddhists are skeptical logicians who criticize positivistic thinking with relativity and skepticism.
The two schools of Kanada (Vaisheshika) and Gotama (Nyaya) focus on inherence (how the particular individual is a member of the general group) and inference (conclusions that can be drawn about the particular individual when one knows the general group). Two types of inherence which allow us to make valid inferences include speciation (groups that have typical qualities) and causation (events in time that lead from one to another).
Kanada set out his Vaisheshika system and its seven objects of knowledge to understand the world (cosmology or physics, but in the ancient world this extended to biology and psychology). Gotama, who we will study next, was concerned with debate and logical argument.
The Vaisheshika System
First, we will go over Kanada’s seven objects of knowledge, and then interesting points in the following chapters Kanada makes that are important for logic and physics.
1) Substance (dravya): nine in number (air, water, fire, earth, ether, time, space, self and mind). These are composed of particles or atoms that are eternal and uncreated (thus they can’t be created or destroyed). Newton, like medieval alchemists before him but unlike modern physics and chemistry, believed in ether, the glue element that sticks the others together in combinations.
2) Attribute (guna): quality (color, texture, odor, taste) and quantity (number, measure, distinction, conjunction, disjunction). Kanada argues in the text that attributes are not substances, but reside in substances and can cause substances, other attributes and actions.
3) Action (karma): note that karma is the physical energy and motion that makes kicking someone cause pain and also gets the kicker reborn as a cockroach (most only know of the second as a religious concept, but like Chinese Chi it is equivalent to physical energy and is often identified with the element fire in ancient systems). Kanada argues that substances and attributes can cause actions but actions themselves cannot produce other actions. He also argues action belongs to one substance, not many (note that the Buddhist “sound of one hand clapping” is a counter argument to this point, and that Gotama differs from Kanada on this also).
4) General (samanya): the universal or group, such as the general group (speciation) of all cows or the general event (causation) of a rainstorm (in which clouds cause rain).
5) Particular (vishesha): the individual or specific, such as the individual cow or the individual event of a cloud causing rain.
6) Inherence (samavaya): the particular being included and conforming to the general. We can make inferences based on inherences. If we know that the general group of cows have horns, then we know that this particular cow must have horns. Likewise, if we know that generally rainclouds cause rain, then we can infer that this particular rain must have been caused by clouds.
7) Non-existence or Emptiness (abhava): non-being, nothingness and void. Nuf said.
Kanada tries to give a systematic account of the many types of each object and the relationships between each object (ex: substances and qualities can produce actions, but actions cannot).
In the second chapter, Kanada gives us an early understanding of what would later be called Modus Tollens in European Logic following Aristotle. Kanada writes “in the absence of cause is the absence of effect but in the absence of effect there is no absence of cause”. This means that if you know “If P then Q”, then you also know and can infer “If not Q then not P” but you do not know and cannot infer “If not P then not Q”. This is very important to understand for basic logic, and many people make the mistake of thinking that one can infer “not P then not Q”.
Kanada discusses fire as energy. It is interesting that fire was the most common form of energy seen and used in the ancient world, whereas electricity is the most common form seen and used in the modern world. Thus, the Egyptians, Greeks, Indians and Chinese thought of energy as fire whereas we think of energy as electricity.
In the third Chapter, Kanada describes types of proofs and fallacies. Gotama and the Nyaya school try to give an entire encyclopedia, and disagree with Kanada on many points. Kanada like Aristotle argues that you can disprove arguments by finding contradictions and that you cannot infer the general from the particular (you cannot infer that all cows have spots from the individual cow that has spots).
Kanada argues that sound is caused and therefore it is impermanent. Some have argued this seems to be a subtle critique of the earlier Vedic tradition (like arguing “paper is perishable” as a safe and subtle way of suggesting that the Bible must be temporary, not eternal).
Kanada argues that things move downward naturally, so things must have additional causes/forces to move sideways or upward (thus, smoke shows additional force or energy, namely that it has fire in it and fire moves upward. He also argues thus that water moves upward by sun/fire in it, then comes downward in cycles. Then, when the water collects in clouds, it causes the fire to be released as lightning. He argues that the arrow flies first from cause and then from inherent tendency to remain in motion, similar if not identical to the modern concept of ‘inertia’.
Kanada says there are many organs in the body, but each has its own particularity as they have different causes/purposes. We believe this today, but consider the ancient world understanding that Aristotle shared called the teleological view: every individual thing has a particular purpose as if the whole is conscious. There is a Roman stoic writer who speaks of the horrible mystery of underground caverns that seem to exist in spite of no animals or humans being present. This is a horrifying mystery because without conscious use, the ancient mind would be baffled by its existence.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Logic Lecture Feb 1: Logic, Wisdom and Riddles
BCC Logic
Eric Gerlach
2/1/2010
Logic, Wisdom and Riddling Tales
What is wisdom? Believing and doubting are basic to the human mind. The human mind, like logicians in India (Kanada and Gotama) and Greece (Aristotle) we will be covering in the next few weeks, seeks basic constant truths (or atomic truths) about its world in order to know things that are certain and constant (like “Fire is always hot” or “Water is always wet”). However, the human mind can both believe and doubt its truths. Wisdom is the ability to see beyond knowledge, to know when to question truths that are often true but not always true. Hegel tells us that we start with categorical truths (“Fire is simply hot so it is not cold at all”) and grow in wisdom to understand the relativity and context of our truths (“Fire is quite hot for the human being, but fire is cold relative to a star”).
Consider the story of the man who goes to his rabbi and complains that his house is too noisy. The rabbi is wise, and tells the man to bring his livestock into his house. After the man is at his wits end, the rabbi tells him to remove the livestock, and the man is pleased with how quiet his house has become. The house is just as noisy as it was before, but the rabbi has shown the man how relatively quiet his house is compared to a barnyard.
In myths and riddles from around the world (many often traded between many cultures) we see an appreciation of wisdom and questioning knowledge, assumptions and intuitive understandings. While positivistic thinking seeks constant and necessary truths, skeptical thinking seeks to overturn and find counter examples. We will see this in the skeptical thinkers of India (Jainism and Buddhism), Greece (Heraclitus and Pyrrho) and China (Zhuan Zi and Gong Zi).
Questioning truths is not simply for mysticism or skeptical philosophy. Wisdom and skepticism have real and practical value in science and technology. Consider that a refrigerator cools by heating. The back of a refrigerator heats up, and this draws the heat from the inside of the refrigerator. If you believe that heat does not cool, you would not be able to invent the refrigerator. Consider that the Wright Brothers wrote to the US Army and told them of their glider, but it took the Army three years and the accounts of others to believe it because it was understood that humans could not fly like birds (and the US now has air superiority in the world).
In early human tales, there are often trickster characters who steal, cheat, lie and deceive, and through this bring about the necessary sustenance of life. Crow and Coyote are examples from Native American tales. Lot’s daughters are examples from the Torah or Old Testament of the Bible: by committing incest with their father they keep the Israelites’ line and covenant alive, though the covenant explicitly prohibits incest as a crime.
In the readings from Riddling Tales from Around the World, we have several stories that show us the human and global appreciation of wisdom and seeing the relative rather than the categorical.
Eric Gerlach
2/1/2010
Logic, Wisdom and Riddling Tales
What is wisdom? Believing and doubting are basic to the human mind. The human mind, like logicians in India (Kanada and Gotama) and Greece (Aristotle) we will be covering in the next few weeks, seeks basic constant truths (or atomic truths) about its world in order to know things that are certain and constant (like “Fire is always hot” or “Water is always wet”). However, the human mind can both believe and doubt its truths. Wisdom is the ability to see beyond knowledge, to know when to question truths that are often true but not always true. Hegel tells us that we start with categorical truths (“Fire is simply hot so it is not cold at all”) and grow in wisdom to understand the relativity and context of our truths (“Fire is quite hot for the human being, but fire is cold relative to a star”).
Consider the story of the man who goes to his rabbi and complains that his house is too noisy. The rabbi is wise, and tells the man to bring his livestock into his house. After the man is at his wits end, the rabbi tells him to remove the livestock, and the man is pleased with how quiet his house has become. The house is just as noisy as it was before, but the rabbi has shown the man how relatively quiet his house is compared to a barnyard.
In myths and riddles from around the world (many often traded between many cultures) we see an appreciation of wisdom and questioning knowledge, assumptions and intuitive understandings. While positivistic thinking seeks constant and necessary truths, skeptical thinking seeks to overturn and find counter examples. We will see this in the skeptical thinkers of India (Jainism and Buddhism), Greece (Heraclitus and Pyrrho) and China (Zhuan Zi and Gong Zi).
Questioning truths is not simply for mysticism or skeptical philosophy. Wisdom and skepticism have real and practical value in science and technology. Consider that a refrigerator cools by heating. The back of a refrigerator heats up, and this draws the heat from the inside of the refrigerator. If you believe that heat does not cool, you would not be able to invent the refrigerator. Consider that the Wright Brothers wrote to the US Army and told them of their glider, but it took the Army three years and the accounts of others to believe it because it was understood that humans could not fly like birds (and the US now has air superiority in the world).
In early human tales, there are often trickster characters who steal, cheat, lie and deceive, and through this bring about the necessary sustenance of life. Crow and Coyote are examples from Native American tales. Lot’s daughters are examples from the Torah or Old Testament of the Bible: by committing incest with their father they keep the Israelites’ line and covenant alive, though the covenant explicitly prohibits incest as a crime.
In the readings from Riddling Tales from Around the World, we have several stories that show us the human and global appreciation of wisdom and seeing the relative rather than the categorical.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Ethics Lecture Jan 29: Kant, Principles and Morals
BCC Ethics
Eric Gerlach
1/29/10
Kant, Principles and Morals
Kant (1724-1804) was the European philosopher who argued for always following morals and laws universally. His position is opposed by Mill, who believed that morals are only in the service of getting good consequences. This is one of the biggest oppositions of perspectives in ethics. Should we create morals and laws and always stick to them, or should we do whatever results in the best consequences?
As Europe rose in the 1600s and 1700s, science had begun discovering many new truths about the world. This created an opposition between rationalists who believed that the world has absolute laws that we can know certainly by reason and empiricists who believed that we can only assume what we know and that the rules our reason finds could be wrong. One of the most famous empiricists was Hume, who argued that one can only assume that one billiard ball causes the other billiard ball to move.
Kant was "awoken from his dogmatic slumbers" by Hume. Kant wanted to balance empiricism with rationalism, but he comes down on the rationalist side. In all knowledge, including ethics, Kant believed we must use our reason to figure out the universal laws of our rational and ordered universe. Notice that Kant, as a rationalist, trusts that the world and the mind are reasonable and that there are universal laws out there for us to grasp.
The central example we will consider is the moral "Do Not Lie". Kant believed that one should never lie, and our reason can show us this with certainty. He argued that one is seeking unconditional and universal laws in ethics (as well as every area of human knowledge), which Kant also calls categorical imperatives, and so one should only act in a way that one could expect everyone to always act everywhere at any time. If everyone lied all the time, then society would collapse. Therefore, Kant argued, it is one's duty to not lie and hold to this moral and law.
Consider the "guy with the butcher knife" thought experiment. Let us say you are at home, and the doorbell rings. You answer it, and your friend runs in looking afraid. A minute later the doorbell rings again, you answer it, and a scary guy with a butcher knife asks you where your friend is. Kant would allow one to shut the door and say nothing, but Kant would argue that it is wrong to lie to the scary guy and say you don't know or that your friend took off down the street the other way. Even though we can assume that if you lie it would improve your friend's chances of living, Kant would argue that this would be wrong. We can contrast this with the position of Mill and utilitarianism, which would argue that in some circumstances the lie is the lesser of two evils and one should behave in accord with the ends of ones actions rather than stick rigidly to morals and laws.
An interesting issue here is that rationalists and positivists like Kant believe that one should anchor ethics in good beginnings while empiricists and skeptics believe one should anchor ethics in good ends. Kant believes that one must start with good intentions and principles no matter the consequences, while Mill believes that one should aim at the best consequences no matter the principles or intentions one has. As usual, both sides agree that one should have good intentions, principles and consequences, but they come down on opposite sides when arguing for what is really the essence or importance of the matter.
We will come to Mill's position in the coming weeks. Another contrary position to both Kant and Mill is Nietzsche, who we will also hear from soon. Nietzsche does not trust human reason, so he trusts neither Kant nor Mill. Nietzsche argues that people who believe they know the true morals and people who say they know what led to the best consequences for everyone are capable of deceiving themselves and thinking they know what is best for everyone.
Eric Gerlach
1/29/10
Kant, Principles and Morals
Kant (1724-1804) was the European philosopher who argued for always following morals and laws universally. His position is opposed by Mill, who believed that morals are only in the service of getting good consequences. This is one of the biggest oppositions of perspectives in ethics. Should we create morals and laws and always stick to them, or should we do whatever results in the best consequences?
As Europe rose in the 1600s and 1700s, science had begun discovering many new truths about the world. This created an opposition between rationalists who believed that the world has absolute laws that we can know certainly by reason and empiricists who believed that we can only assume what we know and that the rules our reason finds could be wrong. One of the most famous empiricists was Hume, who argued that one can only assume that one billiard ball causes the other billiard ball to move.
Kant was "awoken from his dogmatic slumbers" by Hume. Kant wanted to balance empiricism with rationalism, but he comes down on the rationalist side. In all knowledge, including ethics, Kant believed we must use our reason to figure out the universal laws of our rational and ordered universe. Notice that Kant, as a rationalist, trusts that the world and the mind are reasonable and that there are universal laws out there for us to grasp.
The central example we will consider is the moral "Do Not Lie". Kant believed that one should never lie, and our reason can show us this with certainty. He argued that one is seeking unconditional and universal laws in ethics (as well as every area of human knowledge), which Kant also calls categorical imperatives, and so one should only act in a way that one could expect everyone to always act everywhere at any time. If everyone lied all the time, then society would collapse. Therefore, Kant argued, it is one's duty to not lie and hold to this moral and law.
Consider the "guy with the butcher knife" thought experiment. Let us say you are at home, and the doorbell rings. You answer it, and your friend runs in looking afraid. A minute later the doorbell rings again, you answer it, and a scary guy with a butcher knife asks you where your friend is. Kant would allow one to shut the door and say nothing, but Kant would argue that it is wrong to lie to the scary guy and say you don't know or that your friend took off down the street the other way. Even though we can assume that if you lie it would improve your friend's chances of living, Kant would argue that this would be wrong. We can contrast this with the position of Mill and utilitarianism, which would argue that in some circumstances the lie is the lesser of two evils and one should behave in accord with the ends of ones actions rather than stick rigidly to morals and laws.
An interesting issue here is that rationalists and positivists like Kant believe that one should anchor ethics in good beginnings while empiricists and skeptics believe one should anchor ethics in good ends. Kant believes that one must start with good intentions and principles no matter the consequences, while Mill believes that one should aim at the best consequences no matter the principles or intentions one has. As usual, both sides agree that one should have good intentions, principles and consequences, but they come down on opposite sides when arguing for what is really the essence or importance of the matter.
We will come to Mill's position in the coming weeks. Another contrary position to both Kant and Mill is Nietzsche, who we will also hear from soon. Nietzsche does not trust human reason, so he trusts neither Kant nor Mill. Nietzsche argues that people who believe they know the true morals and people who say they know what led to the best consequences for everyone are capable of deceiving themselves and thinking they know what is best for everyone.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Intro Philosophy Lecture Jan 28: Tribal Shamans and City-State Priests
BCC Intro Philosophy
Eric Gerlach
1/28/2010
Lecture on Tribal Shamans to City-State Priests
This lecture covers the passage of human culture from early tribes and shamans to city states and priests. Before we turn to the philosophers of India, Greece and China we must look at the experts and questioning of knowledge in the earliest human societies.
Tribal Shamans and Ecstatic Quests
“Shaman” is a word from an old Turkish-Siberian dialect that means “one who knows”. Consider that a “scientist” is “one who sees” from the Latin root. The Shaman is the expert of the tribe, the one who not only holds the traditions of knowledge but who seeks new answers to problems. The shaman is both the conserver of old knowledge and the seeker and questioner of the new.
It is quite amazing to consider that shamanism is the original human culture, found from Africa to Europe to the Americas to small islands in the pacific. While it is always different in each place, the similarities are quite profound.
In tribal culture, traditional knowledge is often kept and passed on in the form of stories or narratives. These stories explain the world and help people with their problems. There are, however, times when an answer must be sought for a problem. To do this, the shaman goes on a quest (both physical and mental) for the solution and new knowledge needed to solve the problem. Often the shaman is selected as a youth who has gone through a near death experience (sickness, struck by lightning, attacked but survives). The shaman is thought to have an affinity for seeking into the unknown because they are already experienced in the unknown.
To quest for knowledge, the shaman employs techniques of ecstasy known to produce an ecstatic experience. “Ecstasy” comes from the Greek and means “standing outside”. When one is in an ecstatic trance or having an ecstatic vision, one is standing outside normal reality and seeing it from a different place and context. Consider that shamans often go down into a cave or up on a mountain to go to the lower or upper “other world”. Some shamans have been known to climb trees. One gains perspective and is capable of abstraction when one removes oneself to contemplate reality. In fact, thought is itself a form of standing outside reality, so it makes sense that the shaman is regarded as the original thinker, expert and seeker, as well as the doctor, therapist, biologist, physicist, etc.
Methods of ecstasy include not only thought itself, but drugs, pain, rhythms (chanting, drumming, rattles) fasting, sleep deprivation, removing oneself from society and meditation (including contemplation and prayer).
One early philosophical puzzle was the problem of the One and the Many: this reality is one thing, but also many things. Shamans in many different cultures had visions of an All Tree or Tree of Life, the one yet many of all things. All or Being itself is the trunk, and the many things and species of the world are the branches or the fruit. One of the recurrent philosophical insights we will see in India, Greece and China is that it takes wisdom to see that the many things are all one reality and the one reality is seen from many perspectives.
City-State Priests and Specialized Knowledge
As human beings progressed and traded devices and thinking between groups, they gathered into larger groups and settled into cities. Often the city was the state (hence, “city-state”), and the city would be the single center of a region it controlled. Then, many nations with a city each would conquer each other to make the earliest empires (consider Summer was conquered by Babylon, Babylon by Assyria, Assyria by Persia). We can see that as many tribes joined together to create city states the number of experts and types of experts multiplied. The shamans of the tribe became many types of priests and scribes in many temples. This means that experts became specialized. We can see that this pattern continued until the present time. Some priests would specialize in types of math used to chart the stars, others would specialize in healing people and animals. The many hats (or masks, rather) of the shaman became the many types of priests and scribes who recorded knowledge and made new discoveries.
Cities were centers of trade, such that not only was the city a site for many groups to converge and form a new culture but this culture also traded with other convergent cultures. Many are surprised to learn that ancient Sumer and Egypt traded with India hundreds of years before the Greeks and Israel arose. From the earliest times, culture, trade and thought have been international.
Consider the Assyrians. “Assyrian” did not name one ethnicity but rather a citizen of Assyria. Many people of different ethnicities called themselves Assyrians just as many people call themselves Americans. Assyria invented all of the siege weapons that were used in feudal Europe, but the Assyrians conquered others mostly by trade and diplomacy. Princes would be sent to be educated in Assyria, the center of knowledge in its day, and then the Assyrians would make contracts with the prince’s people to put them on the throne to maintain political control. Just like today (read Confessions of an Economic Hitman), the primary method of conquest is economic and military solutions are called for only when the economic methods have failed.
Egyptian Wisdom
Before considering passages of the Egyptian wisdom texts, I want to address two common misconceptions about the Egyptians.
First, the Egyptians are rarely portrayed as an African people but rather museums and text books portray them as a semi-European/Asian people who are quite light in skin color. When we consider that the Egyptians painted all of their statues and carvings (as did the Greeks), and they always painted men as dark red and women as yellow, as well as having black braided hair (Herodotus the Greek historian describes the “wooly” hair of the Egyptians) it seems that the Egyptians were an African people and we are only slowly growing to recognize this. It is a big debate between Eurocentric and Afrocentric scholars today.
Second, another common misconception of the Egyptians is that they were a slave-driving, brutal people who were all about authority. This is then contrasted with the Greeks, who are considered to be wise and questioning and the birth of civilized politics. In fact, the Egyptians treated foreigners, slaves and women considerably better than the Greeks, and the pyramids were built not by slaves but by conscripted labor. Recently tombs for workers have been discovered, confirming what Egyptologists have thought for several decades. This misconception comes largely from the Bible and movies like the Ten Commandments.
The Egyptians had many types of texts and scribes, including fictional comedies and tragedies, lists of minerals and plants, essays on medicine, ethics and politics, and important to this class, wisdom literature. The Egyptian wisdom proverbs we read come from this last class of Egyptian texts.
As many tribes converged to live in city states, people began to see more of people than they had before. Suddenly, obvious truths became questionable. Rather than be unquestioning of authority, the Egyptians had more variety of authorities and questioning of authority than most cultures before them. We can see in the wisdom proverbs the questioning of authority, nobility, knowledge, teachers, prediction, wealth, luxury, punishment, and other fundamental aspects of civilization. The Egyptians were not just great builders and rulers, but also wisdom seekers and questioners.
One last concept that appears in the texts is the “heart guided individual”. The heart was thought to be the physical and mental center of the human individual. As Egyptian society developed, increasingly being “guided by the king” was replaced with being “guided by the heart”. The heart is the essence of the human and the intention within the action. Repeatedly in the text, individuals are called to listen to their heart rather than build luxury and maintain authority. These are issues that we all struggle with to this day, and so we can learn much about early human experience by reading these proverbs.
Next time, we will study the readings on India and look into its thought and thinkers.
Eric Gerlach
1/28/2010
Lecture on Tribal Shamans to City-State Priests
This lecture covers the passage of human culture from early tribes and shamans to city states and priests. Before we turn to the philosophers of India, Greece and China we must look at the experts and questioning of knowledge in the earliest human societies.
Tribal Shamans and Ecstatic Quests
“Shaman” is a word from an old Turkish-Siberian dialect that means “one who knows”. Consider that a “scientist” is “one who sees” from the Latin root. The Shaman is the expert of the tribe, the one who not only holds the traditions of knowledge but who seeks new answers to problems. The shaman is both the conserver of old knowledge and the seeker and questioner of the new.
It is quite amazing to consider that shamanism is the original human culture, found from Africa to Europe to the Americas to small islands in the pacific. While it is always different in each place, the similarities are quite profound.
In tribal culture, traditional knowledge is often kept and passed on in the form of stories or narratives. These stories explain the world and help people with their problems. There are, however, times when an answer must be sought for a problem. To do this, the shaman goes on a quest (both physical and mental) for the solution and new knowledge needed to solve the problem. Often the shaman is selected as a youth who has gone through a near death experience (sickness, struck by lightning, attacked but survives). The shaman is thought to have an affinity for seeking into the unknown because they are already experienced in the unknown.
To quest for knowledge, the shaman employs techniques of ecstasy known to produce an ecstatic experience. “Ecstasy” comes from the Greek and means “standing outside”. When one is in an ecstatic trance or having an ecstatic vision, one is standing outside normal reality and seeing it from a different place and context. Consider that shamans often go down into a cave or up on a mountain to go to the lower or upper “other world”. Some shamans have been known to climb trees. One gains perspective and is capable of abstraction when one removes oneself to contemplate reality. In fact, thought is itself a form of standing outside reality, so it makes sense that the shaman is regarded as the original thinker, expert and seeker, as well as the doctor, therapist, biologist, physicist, etc.
Methods of ecstasy include not only thought itself, but drugs, pain, rhythms (chanting, drumming, rattles) fasting, sleep deprivation, removing oneself from society and meditation (including contemplation and prayer).
One early philosophical puzzle was the problem of the One and the Many: this reality is one thing, but also many things. Shamans in many different cultures had visions of an All Tree or Tree of Life, the one yet many of all things. All or Being itself is the trunk, and the many things and species of the world are the branches or the fruit. One of the recurrent philosophical insights we will see in India, Greece and China is that it takes wisdom to see that the many things are all one reality and the one reality is seen from many perspectives.
City-State Priests and Specialized Knowledge
As human beings progressed and traded devices and thinking between groups, they gathered into larger groups and settled into cities. Often the city was the state (hence, “city-state”), and the city would be the single center of a region it controlled. Then, many nations with a city each would conquer each other to make the earliest empires (consider Summer was conquered by Babylon, Babylon by Assyria, Assyria by Persia). We can see that as many tribes joined together to create city states the number of experts and types of experts multiplied. The shamans of the tribe became many types of priests and scribes in many temples. This means that experts became specialized. We can see that this pattern continued until the present time. Some priests would specialize in types of math used to chart the stars, others would specialize in healing people and animals. The many hats (or masks, rather) of the shaman became the many types of priests and scribes who recorded knowledge and made new discoveries.
Cities were centers of trade, such that not only was the city a site for many groups to converge and form a new culture but this culture also traded with other convergent cultures. Many are surprised to learn that ancient Sumer and Egypt traded with India hundreds of years before the Greeks and Israel arose. From the earliest times, culture, trade and thought have been international.
Consider the Assyrians. “Assyrian” did not name one ethnicity but rather a citizen of Assyria. Many people of different ethnicities called themselves Assyrians just as many people call themselves Americans. Assyria invented all of the siege weapons that were used in feudal Europe, but the Assyrians conquered others mostly by trade and diplomacy. Princes would be sent to be educated in Assyria, the center of knowledge in its day, and then the Assyrians would make contracts with the prince’s people to put them on the throne to maintain political control. Just like today (read Confessions of an Economic Hitman), the primary method of conquest is economic and military solutions are called for only when the economic methods have failed.
Egyptian Wisdom
Before considering passages of the Egyptian wisdom texts, I want to address two common misconceptions about the Egyptians.
First, the Egyptians are rarely portrayed as an African people but rather museums and text books portray them as a semi-European/Asian people who are quite light in skin color. When we consider that the Egyptians painted all of their statues and carvings (as did the Greeks), and they always painted men as dark red and women as yellow, as well as having black braided hair (Herodotus the Greek historian describes the “wooly” hair of the Egyptians) it seems that the Egyptians were an African people and we are only slowly growing to recognize this. It is a big debate between Eurocentric and Afrocentric scholars today.
Second, another common misconception of the Egyptians is that they were a slave-driving, brutal people who were all about authority. This is then contrasted with the Greeks, who are considered to be wise and questioning and the birth of civilized politics. In fact, the Egyptians treated foreigners, slaves and women considerably better than the Greeks, and the pyramids were built not by slaves but by conscripted labor. Recently tombs for workers have been discovered, confirming what Egyptologists have thought for several decades. This misconception comes largely from the Bible and movies like the Ten Commandments.
The Egyptians had many types of texts and scribes, including fictional comedies and tragedies, lists of minerals and plants, essays on medicine, ethics and politics, and important to this class, wisdom literature. The Egyptian wisdom proverbs we read come from this last class of Egyptian texts.
As many tribes converged to live in city states, people began to see more of people than they had before. Suddenly, obvious truths became questionable. Rather than be unquestioning of authority, the Egyptians had more variety of authorities and questioning of authority than most cultures before them. We can see in the wisdom proverbs the questioning of authority, nobility, knowledge, teachers, prediction, wealth, luxury, punishment, and other fundamental aspects of civilization. The Egyptians were not just great builders and rulers, but also wisdom seekers and questioners.
One last concept that appears in the texts is the “heart guided individual”. The heart was thought to be the physical and mental center of the human individual. As Egyptian society developed, increasingly being “guided by the king” was replaced with being “guided by the heart”. The heart is the essence of the human and the intention within the action. Repeatedly in the text, individuals are called to listen to their heart rather than build luxury and maintain authority. These are issues that we all struggle with to this day, and so we can learn much about early human experience by reading these proverbs.
Next time, we will study the readings on India and look into its thought and thinkers.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Logic Lecture Jan 27: Logic as Human Thought
BCC Logic
Jan 27, 2010
Eric Gerlach
Logic and Reason in the Earliest Human Cultures
This lecture covers the three articles from the same book: Rational Mastery by Man of his Surroundings by Malinowski, Baseball Superstition, and the Shotgun Cult. The first article shows us that the earliest and most basic human cultures are logical and rational, and the next two articles build on the work of the first.
Rational Mastery by Man of his Surroundings by Malinowski
Malinowski did work among the tribes of Papua New Guinea as an anthropologist. Unfortunately, he uses the word “savages” throughout the article, but he concludes that they are rational and logical.
He asks: Is tribal life rational or irrational? Does magic saturate the lives of “primitives” and “savages” such that they are illogical? He observes two things.
First, all cultures, including the basic cultures of New Guinea tribes, have words for whole and part (being/existence and substance/attribute/quality), cause and effect, and if and then. These are the terms and concepts of ancient Greek Logic (Aristotle) and modern European Logic (Wittgenstein). This suggests that logic and reason are basic to the human mind, language and culture.
Second, there is a basic difference between the everyday, safe and known practices and the special, dangerous and unknown practices of the tribes people. This can be described as the difference between the practical and the theoretical. Malinowski uses the example of shallow and deep sea fishing. When fishing in shallow seas, no theory, ritual or magic is required, but when fishing in deep water the tribe gets theoretical and brings in a system of thought involving rituals and “magic” to influence their outcomes. When one is building a fishhook, one does not call on the gods or spirits. When one is asking for fertile crops for the year, one calls on gods and spirits with ritualized activity. In a similar way, one does not need philosophy, logic or science when one is opening a door. However, if one is designing a door no one has invented before, one needs to bring theoretical systems for understanding the unknown. “Science” literally means “seeing” in Latin (Sciencia), a culture of thought and theory that looks into the unknown from the base of the practical. Likewise, “Logic” literally means “speaking” in ancient Greek (Logia), as Logic was the art of debate, speaking and arguing well about the unknown.
If you ask what would happen if one did not use the theory and rituals, no one could tell you because they have never tried it. However, if you suggested that ritual and magic alone will grow crops without farming and practical work the tribes people would laugh at you. Thus, the theoretical is an extension of the practical into the unknown and the two are always building on each other. Tribes people do not believe in magic such that rationality is excluded. Rather, theoretical systems like magic and science are extensions of rationality and logic into the realms of the unknown that concern this life on earth.
Also, tribes people do not all share the same views and beliefs within the cultural system, but rather humans display individual as well as collective thought. Most think that we are the individualistic and earlier civilizations did not question their systems. This is true to a degree due to technology and new complexes of culture, but tribes people disagree with one another within a cultural system. The example: one person thinks their failure means they are cursed by an evil spirit, while their neighbor argues with them and says they are just stupid and clumsy. Thus, a theoretical system allows for debate and progressive understandings, including early “magical” systems and later “scientific” systems.
If all this is true and humans have always been logical and rational, why is science so successful and powerful? What makes science different from earlier systems? In early and ancient cultures, religion, physics and psychology were all one theoretical system (often referred to today as cosmology). Particularly as Islamic and European civilizations rose, technology and education meant many specialized equipment and areas of study. While the theoretical systems have always observed the natural world and this life we live, observation was increasingly supplemented and supported by experimentation. Today, we have many cultures of experimentation that are powerful at expanding and overturning our views. However, as already noted, humans have always been experimenting, changing and evolving.
Baseball Superstition
The author says he is taking Malinowski’s distinction of shallow fishing and deep sea fishing and applying it to superstitions of modern day baseball players. Baseball players are modern day human beings who are raised in a “scientific” culture, but they show the same differences in behavior as the tribes people when it comes to theorizing and the unknown.
In baseball, there is a great difference between fielding and hitting/pitching. Fielding is successful 9 times out of 10, and so it is not dangerous or risky. Hitting and pitching, however, are quite risky. There is far less chance of success, and success does not guarantee winning the game overall. What do we observe? Baseball players come up with superstitious practices that follow basic cause-effect reasoning regarding their pre-game behaviors and their performance in hitting and pitching but not in fielding. A pitcher or slugger will, for instance, eat two chili dogs the night before every big game to pitch or hit well, but fielders do not. While we may not consider these superstitions “scientific”, we can see that theory grows in the gap of the unknown and it follows the basic mechanisms of logic (hypothetical reasoning of cause to effect). Again, it seems that reason and logic are basic to human culture and language, and they extend from the observable and practical into the unknown and theoretical.
The Shotgun Cult
In the third article, we can see a new growth of theoretical culture that has practical purposes in the Shotgun cult of a tribes people given one shotgun shell at a time to hunt wild boar (guess why the Europeans give them one shell at a time). If a hunter misses a shot, the whole community comes together and they try to figure out where the social issue is in the community that caused the hunter to miss the boar. This brings the community together to solve its problems (created by individual differences of views and opinions) and it is impossible to say this has no positive effect on the hunter whatsoever. Again, we see that the practical is extended by the theoretical for figuring out the unknown as a culture.
Final Question:
Is following a cultural system more rational or logical than questioning or changing it? Both are in fact reasonable and logical. Belief and doubt, positivism and skepticism, are in constant tension in all societies. If human beings are always rational and logical because this is the way that thinking works naturally, then humans are rational and logical when they conform to their systems and when they question their systems.
The great Dada art movement’s manifesto writer Tzara said that we must have the courage to stand for and against thought. If one loves ancient culture but hates modern culture or loves modern culture and hates ancient culture, one is standing for and against human thinking and logic in either case.
Next time, we read Riddling Tales from Around the World to see that questioning logic and reason are just as ancient and human as logic and reason themselves.
Jan 27, 2010
Eric Gerlach
Logic and Reason in the Earliest Human Cultures
This lecture covers the three articles from the same book: Rational Mastery by Man of his Surroundings by Malinowski, Baseball Superstition, and the Shotgun Cult. The first article shows us that the earliest and most basic human cultures are logical and rational, and the next two articles build on the work of the first.
Rational Mastery by Man of his Surroundings by Malinowski
Malinowski did work among the tribes of Papua New Guinea as an anthropologist. Unfortunately, he uses the word “savages” throughout the article, but he concludes that they are rational and logical.
He asks: Is tribal life rational or irrational? Does magic saturate the lives of “primitives” and “savages” such that they are illogical? He observes two things.
First, all cultures, including the basic cultures of New Guinea tribes, have words for whole and part (being/existence and substance/attribute/quality), cause and effect, and if and then. These are the terms and concepts of ancient Greek Logic (Aristotle) and modern European Logic (Wittgenstein). This suggests that logic and reason are basic to the human mind, language and culture.
Second, there is a basic difference between the everyday, safe and known practices and the special, dangerous and unknown practices of the tribes people. This can be described as the difference between the practical and the theoretical. Malinowski uses the example of shallow and deep sea fishing. When fishing in shallow seas, no theory, ritual or magic is required, but when fishing in deep water the tribe gets theoretical and brings in a system of thought involving rituals and “magic” to influence their outcomes. When one is building a fishhook, one does not call on the gods or spirits. When one is asking for fertile crops for the year, one calls on gods and spirits with ritualized activity. In a similar way, one does not need philosophy, logic or science when one is opening a door. However, if one is designing a door no one has invented before, one needs to bring theoretical systems for understanding the unknown. “Science” literally means “seeing” in Latin (Sciencia), a culture of thought and theory that looks into the unknown from the base of the practical. Likewise, “Logic” literally means “speaking” in ancient Greek (Logia), as Logic was the art of debate, speaking and arguing well about the unknown.
If you ask what would happen if one did not use the theory and rituals, no one could tell you because they have never tried it. However, if you suggested that ritual and magic alone will grow crops without farming and practical work the tribes people would laugh at you. Thus, the theoretical is an extension of the practical into the unknown and the two are always building on each other. Tribes people do not believe in magic such that rationality is excluded. Rather, theoretical systems like magic and science are extensions of rationality and logic into the realms of the unknown that concern this life on earth.
Also, tribes people do not all share the same views and beliefs within the cultural system, but rather humans display individual as well as collective thought. Most think that we are the individualistic and earlier civilizations did not question their systems. This is true to a degree due to technology and new complexes of culture, but tribes people disagree with one another within a cultural system. The example: one person thinks their failure means they are cursed by an evil spirit, while their neighbor argues with them and says they are just stupid and clumsy. Thus, a theoretical system allows for debate and progressive understandings, including early “magical” systems and later “scientific” systems.
If all this is true and humans have always been logical and rational, why is science so successful and powerful? What makes science different from earlier systems? In early and ancient cultures, religion, physics and psychology were all one theoretical system (often referred to today as cosmology). Particularly as Islamic and European civilizations rose, technology and education meant many specialized equipment and areas of study. While the theoretical systems have always observed the natural world and this life we live, observation was increasingly supplemented and supported by experimentation. Today, we have many cultures of experimentation that are powerful at expanding and overturning our views. However, as already noted, humans have always been experimenting, changing and evolving.
Baseball Superstition
The author says he is taking Malinowski’s distinction of shallow fishing and deep sea fishing and applying it to superstitions of modern day baseball players. Baseball players are modern day human beings who are raised in a “scientific” culture, but they show the same differences in behavior as the tribes people when it comes to theorizing and the unknown.
In baseball, there is a great difference between fielding and hitting/pitching. Fielding is successful 9 times out of 10, and so it is not dangerous or risky. Hitting and pitching, however, are quite risky. There is far less chance of success, and success does not guarantee winning the game overall. What do we observe? Baseball players come up with superstitious practices that follow basic cause-effect reasoning regarding their pre-game behaviors and their performance in hitting and pitching but not in fielding. A pitcher or slugger will, for instance, eat two chili dogs the night before every big game to pitch or hit well, but fielders do not. While we may not consider these superstitions “scientific”, we can see that theory grows in the gap of the unknown and it follows the basic mechanisms of logic (hypothetical reasoning of cause to effect). Again, it seems that reason and logic are basic to human culture and language, and they extend from the observable and practical into the unknown and theoretical.
The Shotgun Cult
In the third article, we can see a new growth of theoretical culture that has practical purposes in the Shotgun cult of a tribes people given one shotgun shell at a time to hunt wild boar (guess why the Europeans give them one shell at a time). If a hunter misses a shot, the whole community comes together and they try to figure out where the social issue is in the community that caused the hunter to miss the boar. This brings the community together to solve its problems (created by individual differences of views and opinions) and it is impossible to say this has no positive effect on the hunter whatsoever. Again, we see that the practical is extended by the theoretical for figuring out the unknown as a culture.
Final Question:
Is following a cultural system more rational or logical than questioning or changing it? Both are in fact reasonable and logical. Belief and doubt, positivism and skepticism, are in constant tension in all societies. If human beings are always rational and logical because this is the way that thinking works naturally, then humans are rational and logical when they conform to their systems and when they question their systems.
The great Dada art movement’s manifesto writer Tzara said that we must have the courage to stand for and against thought. If one loves ancient culture but hates modern culture or loves modern culture and hates ancient culture, one is standing for and against human thinking and logic in either case.
Next time, we read Riddling Tales from Around the World to see that questioning logic and reason are just as ancient and human as logic and reason themselves.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Ethics Syllabus & Schedule Spring 2010
HUMAN 30A – ETHICS Spring 2010
Instructor: Eric Gerlach
Fri 9-11:50 AM
Office Hours: Mon 11-12 @ K’s Coffee
Class Code 22131
Room: BCC 53
Email: ericgerlach@gmail.com
Blog: ericgerlach.blogspot.com
Ethics: Syllabus and Schedule
Course Description
This course introduces students to central concepts and issues of Ethics and systems of human values. We will first study concepts such as principle, virtue, balance, utility, drive, and perspective. We will then study issues such as theft, lies, violence, environment, class, gender and race from an individual and social perspective.
Required Texts:
-The text for the class is the Course Reader, available at Lazer Image,
61 Shattuck Square, Berkeley, (510) 644-3339
-A copy of the reader will be put on reserve in the Berkeley City College Library.
Required Assignments:
- Three In-class Reading Responses (best 3 out of 4) 30%
- Midterm Exam 30%
- Final Exam 30%
- Class participation 10%
Class Schedule
Readings (in bold) are to be completed by the class date for discussion
Jan 22 Introduction to the Class
Jan 29 Principles and Morals: Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals
Feb 5 Virtue: Aristotle’s Ethics (in-class writing response)
Feb 19 Balance: Egyptian Wisdom & Confucius’ Analects
Feb 26 Use & Consequence: Mill’s Utilitarianism
Mar 5 Drive & Desire: Nietzsche’s Beyond Good & Evil (in-class writing response)
Mar 12 Perspective & Plurality: Heraclitus’ Fragments & Chuang Tzu
Mar 19 Review for Midterm
Mar 26 Midterm Exam
Apr 2 Theft: Zinn’s People’s History of Am. Empire & Andreas’ Addicted to War
Apr 9 Lies: Herman & Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent
Apr 16 Violence: Lt. Col. Grossman’s On Killing
Apr 23 Life & World: Carson’s Silent Spring & essays from BCEP (in-class response)
Apr 30 Class & Power: Karp’s Indispensable Enemies & essays from RC&G
May 7 Gender & Sex: De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (in-class writing response)
May 14 Race & Culture: Hannaford’s Race & more essays from RC&G
May 21 Review for Final Exam
May 28 Final Exam
Instructor: Eric Gerlach
Fri 9-11:50 AM
Office Hours: Mon 11-12 @ K’s Coffee
Class Code 22131
Room: BCC 53
Email: ericgerlach@gmail.com
Blog: ericgerlach.blogspot.com
Ethics: Syllabus and Schedule
Course Description
This course introduces students to central concepts and issues of Ethics and systems of human values. We will first study concepts such as principle, virtue, balance, utility, drive, and perspective. We will then study issues such as theft, lies, violence, environment, class, gender and race from an individual and social perspective.
Required Texts:
-The text for the class is the Course Reader, available at Lazer Image,
61 Shattuck Square, Berkeley, (510) 644-3339
-A copy of the reader will be put on reserve in the Berkeley City College Library.
Required Assignments:
- Three In-class Reading Responses (best 3 out of 4) 30%
- Midterm Exam 30%
- Final Exam 30%
- Class participation 10%
Class Schedule
Readings (in bold) are to be completed by the class date for discussion
Jan 22 Introduction to the Class
Jan 29 Principles and Morals: Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals
Feb 5 Virtue: Aristotle’s Ethics (in-class writing response)
Feb 19 Balance: Egyptian Wisdom & Confucius’ Analects
Feb 26 Use & Consequence: Mill’s Utilitarianism
Mar 5 Drive & Desire: Nietzsche’s Beyond Good & Evil (in-class writing response)
Mar 12 Perspective & Plurality: Heraclitus’ Fragments & Chuang Tzu
Mar 19 Review for Midterm
Mar 26 Midterm Exam
Apr 2 Theft: Zinn’s People’s History of Am. Empire & Andreas’ Addicted to War
Apr 9 Lies: Herman & Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent
Apr 16 Violence: Lt. Col. Grossman’s On Killing
Apr 23 Life & World: Carson’s Silent Spring & essays from BCEP (in-class response)
Apr 30 Class & Power: Karp’s Indispensable Enemies & essays from RC&G
May 7 Gender & Sex: De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (in-class writing response)
May 14 Race & Culture: Hannaford’s Race & more essays from RC&G
May 21 Review for Final Exam
May 28 Final Exam
Intro Philosophy Syllabus & Schedule Spring 2010
PHIL 1 – Intro to Philosophy, FALL 2010
Instructor: Eric Gerlach
Thursdays 6:30 – 9:30 pm
Office Hours: Mondays 11-12 @ K’s Coffee
Class Code: 22341
ROOM: BCC 14
Email: ericgerlach@gmail.com
Blog: ericgerlach.blogspot.com
SYLLABUS for Introduction to Philosophy
Course Description
This course introduces students to the history of Philosophy and world thought. We will study Egyptian, Indian, Greek, Chinese and modern European philosophers.
Required Texts:
-The only text for the class is the Course Reader, available at Lazer Image, 61 Shattuck Square, Berkeley, (510) 644-3339. A copy of the reader will be put on reserve in the BCC Library.
Required Assignments:
- Three In-class Reading Responses (best 3 out of 4) 30%
- MIDTERM Exam 30%
- FINAL Exam 30%
- Class participation 10%
CLASS SCHEDULE
Jan 21 Introduction to Philosophy: Positivism & Skepticism in world cultures
Jan 28 Shamanism, Early City State Priests & Egyptian Thought
Feb 4 Indian Thought (1st In-Class Response)
Feb 11 Greek Thought: Heraclitus
Feb 18 Greek Thought: Plato
Feb 25 Chinese Thought: Confucius
Mar 4 Chinese Thought: Daoism, Lao Zi & Zhuan Zi (2nd In-Class Response)
Mar 11 Review for Midterm Exam
Mar 18 MIDTERM EXAM
Apr 1 Islamic & Medieval European Thought
Apr 8 Descartes & Modern European Philosophy
Apr 15 Hume (3rd In-Class Response)
Apr 22 Hegel
Apr 29 Nietzsche
May 6 Wittgenstein
May 13 Art, Humor and Philosophy (4th In-Class Response)
May 20 Review for Final Exam
May 27 FINAL EXAM
Instructor: Eric Gerlach
Thursdays 6:30 – 9:30 pm
Office Hours: Mondays 11-12 @ K’s Coffee
Class Code: 22341
ROOM: BCC 14
Email: ericgerlach@gmail.com
Blog: ericgerlach.blogspot.com
SYLLABUS for Introduction to Philosophy
Course Description
This course introduces students to the history of Philosophy and world thought. We will study Egyptian, Indian, Greek, Chinese and modern European philosophers.
Required Texts:
-The only text for the class is the Course Reader, available at Lazer Image, 61 Shattuck Square, Berkeley, (510) 644-3339. A copy of the reader will be put on reserve in the BCC Library.
Required Assignments:
- Three In-class Reading Responses (best 3 out of 4) 30%
- MIDTERM Exam 30%
- FINAL Exam 30%
- Class participation 10%
CLASS SCHEDULE
Jan 21 Introduction to Philosophy: Positivism & Skepticism in world cultures
Jan 28 Shamanism, Early City State Priests & Egyptian Thought
Feb 4 Indian Thought (1st In-Class Response)
Feb 11 Greek Thought: Heraclitus
Feb 18 Greek Thought: Plato
Feb 25 Chinese Thought: Confucius
Mar 4 Chinese Thought: Daoism, Lao Zi & Zhuan Zi (2nd In-Class Response)
Mar 11 Review for Midterm Exam
Mar 18 MIDTERM EXAM
Apr 1 Islamic & Medieval European Thought
Apr 8 Descartes & Modern European Philosophy
Apr 15 Hume (3rd In-Class Response)
Apr 22 Hegel
Apr 29 Nietzsche
May 6 Wittgenstein
May 13 Art, Humor and Philosophy (4th In-Class Response)
May 20 Review for Final Exam
May 27 FINAL EXAM
Logic Class Syllabus & Schedule Spring 2010
PHILOSOPHY 10 - LOGIC, Spring 2010
Instructor: Eric Gerlach
Monday & Wednesday 9:30-10:50 am
Office Hours: Mon 11-12 @ K’s Coffee
Class Code 22427
Room: BCC 51 Email: ericgerlach@gmail.com
Blog: ericgerlach.blogspot.com
Logic: Syllabus and Schedule
Course Description
This course introduces students to the history and practice of Logic in ancient and modern cultures. We will study the human origins of Logic, Indian, Greek, and Chinese Logic texts, and modern European Logic including Wittgenstein’s truth table method.
Required Texts:
-The text for the class is the Course Reader, available at Lazer Image,
-A copy of the reader will be put on reserve in the Berkeley City College Library.
Required Assignments:
- In-class & Homework Assignments 30%
- Midterm Exam #1 30%
- Final Exam #2 30%
- Class participation 10%
Jan 25 Introduction: What is Logic?
Jan 27, Feb 1 The Human Origins of Logic & Reason: Magic, Witchcraft & Religion
Feb 3, 8, 10 Indian Logic: Kanada’s Vaisheshika Sutra & Gotama’s Nyaya Sutra
Feb 17, 22 Indian Logic: Jainism, Buddhism & Skepticism
Feb 24-Mar 3 Greek Logic: Aristotle’s Categories, On Interpretation, Prior & Posterior An.
Mar 8, 10 Greek Logic: Skepticism
Mar 15, 17 Chinese Logic & Paradox: Sourcebook of Chinese Philosophy
Mar 22 Review for Midterm
Mar 24 Midterm Exam
Mar 29, 31 Islamic & Medieval European Logic: Avicenna & Aquinas
Apr 5, 7 Medieval to Modern European Logic: Russell & Mill
Apr 12-19 Truth Tables & Early Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
Apr 21, 26 Contradiction, Dialectic and Hegel’s Logic
Apr 28-May 5 Late Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations
May 10, 12 Logic, Nonsense and Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books
May 17, 19 Logic, Art and Humor
May 24 Review for Final Exam
May 26 Final Exam
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