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What do you think prevents people from engaging is modern philosophy-of-mind research by building on Nagarjuna or Candrakirti?

jmagoon 11y ago
There are many neuroscience departments that actively perform meditation research (UCSB, Yale, UW-Madison), but my personal experience is that eastern philosophers who were experts in meditation, logic, or observation are sorely understudied in Philosophy departments, despite the extraordinarily clear parallels between modern neuroscience research and their philosophical propositions.
- jessriedel 11y ago
  I don't necessarily dispute this, but it's a hard sell if you can't identify some sort of institutional reason these ideas are ignored. There are thousands of young philosophy researchers, and they could make a name for themselves applying this stuff if it was well received. And it's not clear to why it would be unjustly discriminated against.
wfn 11y ago
I wonder... [Generic speculation follows] Assuming the query was not rhetorical, I would wager that at least as far as analytic philosophy is concerned, it's the vast differences in vocabularies (linguistic/conceptual). Take any pair of contemporary analytic philosophy papers wherein the first argues for some position (by way of e.g. distancing the position from specific others etc etc.), and the second is mostly a critique of some point or another of the first one. Both are sound contributions. The vocabulary becomes really particular and peculiar, however, with arguments sometimes built as rebuttals / solutions to previous arguments, some specific nuance being argued; particular terms are used everywhere. There could be quite a bit of formal language involved, but usually linguistic terms will be heavily relied upon, too. Then, if you wished to be able to understand the two papers, you would have to trace back to previous arguments etc., and most certainly the understanding of the second would come after being able to absorb the first one. This in itself is of course not a unique thing at all, but I think what with philosophers not purely relying on formal logic, the terms constructed/used become very specific and numerous; these terms are words in a language and so a specific linguistic framework is heavily relied upon (this is the crucial point).. if that makes sense. An eclectic parallel could be Mochizuki's (Japanese mathematician) (proposed) proof of the abc conjecture[1]. It's quite massive, with multiple papers of his establishing a specific theory[2] used for the proof. The proof has been presented in 2012 and it's still being evaluated. His way was very custom, and this poses a practical problem. What I meant to say is that it's probably not at all easy to present some new ideas in (say) analytic philosophy which employ a number of new notions (or just notions under new names). This is of course not ideal at all, but it's a tricky thing. [edit expanded some words] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abc_conjecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abc_conjecture [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-universal_Teichm%C3%BCller_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-universal_Teichm%C3%BCll...

jmagoon 11y ago

There are many neuroscience departments that actively perform meditation research (UCSB, Yale, UW-Madison), but my personal experience is that eastern philosophers who were experts in meditation, logic, or observation are sorely understudied in Philosophy departments, despite the extraordinarily clear parallels between modern neuroscience research and their philosophical propositions.

jessriedel 11y ago
I don't necessarily dispute this, but it's a hard sell if you can't identify some sort of institutional reason these ideas are ignored. There are thousands of young philosophy researchers, and they could make a name for themselves applying this stuff if it was well received. And it's not clear to why it would be unjustly discriminated against.

wfn 11y ago

I wonder... [Generic speculation follows] Assuming the query was not rhetorical, I would wager that at least as far as analytic philosophy is concerned, it's the vast differences in vocabularies (linguistic/conceptual). Take any pair of contemporary analytic philosophy papers wherein the first argues for some position (by way of e.g. distancing the position from specific others etc etc.), and the second is mostly a critique of some point or another of the first one. Both are sound contributions. The vocabulary becomes really particular and peculiar, however, with arguments sometimes built as rebuttals / solutions to previous arguments, some specific nuance being argued; particular terms are used everywhere. There could be quite a bit of formal language involved, but usually linguistic terms will be heavily relied upon, too. Then, if you wished to be able to understand the two papers, you would have to trace back to previous arguments etc., and most certainly the understanding of the second would come after being able to absorb the first one. This in itself is of course not a unique thing at all, but I think what with philosophers not purely relying on formal logic, the terms constructed/used become very specific and numerous; these terms are words in a language and so a specific linguistic framework is heavily relied upon (this is the crucial point).. if that makes sense. An eclectic parallel could be Mochizuki's (Japanese mathematician) (proposed) proof of the abc conjecture[1]. It's quite massive, with multiple papers of his establishing a specific theory[2] used for the proof. The proof has been presented in 2012 and it's still being evaluated. His way was very custom, and this poses a practical problem. What I meant to say is that it's probably not at all easy to present some new ideas in (say) analytic philosophy which employ a number of new notions (or just notions under new names). This is of course not ideal at all, but it's a tricky thing. [edit expanded some words] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abc_conjecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abc_conjecture [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-universal_Teichm%C3%BCller_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-universal_Teichm%C3%BCll...