Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

As with western philosophy, there has been in the classical Indian tradition (and in the subgenre of that known as Vedic) a lot of attention to the relationship between emotion, or vedana, on the one hand and cognition, or vijnana, on the other. Popular western impressions of India and its literature may convey the idea that the latter teaches escape, liberation, from the feelings, which presumably tie one to this earthly realm, the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, and all of that. Isn't detachment the way to nirvana?  Well, yes, to some. And of course that idea is not unique to India. The above paragraph might put one in mind of Plato, who located the passions at the bottom of his tripartite division of the soul, and specified that the top part, reason, must be firmly in command. In India, a close analog to Plato's thought is provided by the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika scholars. Individual emotions, whether likings or aversions, are regarded as defects ( dosas ).  T...

My personal view of the field, in ten questions. I'll work in traditional order, from Being through Knowledge, to Value. 1. Does the world consist of substances with attributes (that is, enduring things with various properties), or is that a misleading way of thinking? 2. If one accepts the substance/attributes dichotomy, what COUNTS as a substance? How many of them are there in the world? Are there an infinite number of substances, or could it all be boiled down to a smaller number? Three, as Descartes thought (mind, matter, God), or maybe just one? 3. In terms of the nature of a human being, are we each one substance with various attributes? Or are we two different substances that somehow interact? Or is a person an attribute of a trans-personal Substance? 4. If we end up with a view of the world in which humans consist of both mind and body: how DO they interact? 5. What do we mean by "truth" as a matter of common language. also, what SHOULD we take the ...

In yesterday's entry I discussed the idea of substance in early-modern European philosophy, with especial emphasis on Descartes. I made no criticisms of the views under discussion: simply presented the connections of ideas as I understood and understand them. Today, I'll make four quick critical observations: 1)  The search for what counts as a "substance" seems misguided. Remember, Aristotle used the word roughly as we would use the word "thing." There is no real call for anguished meditation on what counts as a "thing." It depends upon the context in which one uses the word. Indeed, the vagueness of the word adds to, rather than detracts from, its value within a natural language. 2) As everyone knows, Descartes' first solid premise was "I think" and his first inference from that was "I exist." This seems to presume a certain notion of a thinking substance, and to call it "I." If we're going to pursu...

I'm offering a free history-of-philosophy lesson today. One of the key questions of the early modern era in the western metaphysical tradition was: what is substance? The word "substance" literally means "standing under." Think of it, in the simplest sense, as a thing about which other things are said, the subject of a sentence rather than the predicate or object. Thus, we say "the ball is red." We don't typically say, "redness includes the surface of this ball." The ball is the subject of the sentence because we think of IT as the substance, and various properties or relations attach to it. But early modern philosophy involved a search for what is a true substance, the suspicion that the ordinary language idea of a subject (I just evoked) is not enough. In Descartes' view, there are only three real substances in the world. There is God, there is matter, and there is mind. Each of these is defined by one attribute. Go...