Wednesday, December 28, 2016

From the reading table

Can you think of a saner piece of advice to anybody, rather than this? I find it hard to word it in a better way.
"To be clear-headed rather than confused; lucid rather than obscure; rational rather than otherwise; and to be neither more, nor less, sure of things than is justifiable by argument or evidence. That is worth trying for." -- Geoffrey Warnock

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Reading Jeffrey R Timm's essay 'Scriptural Realism in Pure Nondualistic Vedanta'.
A very good point about the perceptual change that happens in the research circles is instantiated by contrasting the remarks of Eliot Deutsch in his work, Advaita Vedanta: A Philosophical Reconstruction, in 1969 with that of his own thoughts some twenty years later.
'The exegetical dimension of Vedanta is ..........of very little interest to Western students of philosophy. We do not accept the authority of the Veda (or, for the most part, the authority of any other scripture); consequently, we are not concerned whether one system or another best interprets certain obscure passages in it.'(p 5)
Jeffrey R Timm's comments over this:
'The question, of course, was never whether or not Western scholars could accept the authority of the Veda. The question was whether or not something akin to a Bultmannian demythologization could be invoked to isolate "kerygmatic" philosophical issues from the exegetical concerns that traditional thinkers had with the text.'
Twenty years later in 1988, in his essay, 'Knowledge and the Tradition Text in Indian Philosophy' which appeared in Interpreting across Boundaries, Eliot Deutsch obseves, (as commented by Jeffrey R Timm - 'marking not only a shift in his own thinking but the maturation of a field as well')
'Something important and essential is lost when we study (and teach) philosophy - as has unfortunately become typical in many contemporary analytic circles - as if it were made up of a series or set of alternative arguments, ideas, or isms capable of being abstracted from the concrete forms in which these arguments, ideas, and theories were presented and shaped.'(p 166)
The shift in the perspective does not only concern the primary Text as it were but also the commentorial traditions inherent to the subsequent and continued receptions of the Text by the engaged and involved community. This is very aptly marked by Jeffrey R Timm in his comments, paraphrasing Eliot Deutsch's words in the article (p 170): 'This effort includes not just a "primary" scriptural canon; the myriad commentaries, subcommentaries, glosses, and so on must be taken seriously because they "form, hermeneutically, integral parts of a continuing text" '
Reading Jeffrey R Timm reading Eliot Deutsch is interesting in its own ways. The field of research is so absorbing just for this reason that it is able to be self-critical as an ongoing process.
Is it just for fun that I like to say 'Reading is itself a unique yoga'?

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Though everybody nowadays seems to know the x y z of everything nobody knows the a b c of anything.
-- Bernard Shaw
How true !
Any way to alter or give it a lie?
I don't hope so.
But who cares..! 



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The concentration and fusion into the
whole being can never happen through me
nor can it happen without me. I become in
relation to the Thou, becoming I, I say Thou.
All actual life is encounter.
—Martin Buber, Ich und Du
What a pregnant statement ! An Upanishad in itself ! Mind is addicted to this statement now.

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I thought of Dr Richard Dawkins while reading these beautiful and clear pieces of the great Darwin -
"Thus we can understand how it has come to pass that man
and all other vertebrate animals have been constructed on the
same general model, why they pass through the same early
stages of development, and why they retain certain rudiments
in common. Consequently we ought frankly to admit their
community of descent. .

It is only our natural prejudice, and that arrogance which made our forefathers declare that they were descended from demi-gods, which leads us to demur to this conclusion. But the time will before long come, when it will be thought wonderful that naturalists, who were well acquainted with the comparative structure and development of man, and other mammals, should have believed that each was the work of a separate act of creation
Some of the most distinctive characters of man have in all
probability been acquired, whether directly or more commonly
indirectly through natural selection
The difference in mind between man and the higher animals,
great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. We have
seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and
faculties, . . . of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient,
or over some time in a well-developed condition, in the lower
animals."
(The Descent of Man)
Really a spectacular thinker, Darwin is !

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Really Gadamer is highly interesting ! I could not have expected such a bouncer on 'prejudice' -
" Prejudices are not necessarily unjustified and erroneous, so that
they inevitably distort the truth. In fact, the historicity of our
existence entails that prejudices, in the literal sense of the word,
constitute the initial directedness of our whole ability to experience.

Prejudices are biases of our openness to the world. They are
simply conditions whereby we experience something-whereby
what we encounter says something to us. "

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It is customary to talk of seven sages of Greece, like Solon and others. But Richard Schacht talks of seven great philosophers who characterize the classical modern period in philosophy. He expresses beautifully how pivotal their contributions are, in his book Classical modern philosophers Descartes to Kant.
"Philosophy had a two-thousand-year history prior to Descartes, and has had a career of nearly two centuries since Kant; but these seven men had so profound an impact upon its course that it is almost impossible to conceive of the very existence of the various forms of inquiry which collectively constitute the enterprise of philosophy today—as well as the diverse issues debated and positions taken by contemporary philosophers of all persuasions—had they not made their different contributions to it."
How nicely he divides the whole time of philosophy as 2000 years before Descartes and 200 years from Kant.! This stream has received a definite and unalterable impetus of change in more than one aspect by the seven philosophers' inputs.!
Really a clear way to meditate on the course of philosophy's history !

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Umberto Eco, an author of many thought provoking novels like The name of the Rose', Foucault's pendulum and more so, of a theory of semiotics, is no more. I feel sad even though fully aware of our common existential predicament. But few authors have ventured on theories and employed novel as means of articulating them. U Eco is one such.
A sentence I like very much in his 'Semiotics and the philosophy of language' is --
"The ability of the textual manifestations to empty, destroy, or reconstruct pre-existing sign-functions depends on the presence within the sign-function (that is, in the network of content figures) of a set of instructions oriented toward the (potential) production of different texts."
As a reader I do feel the bereavement.

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Sometimes academic philosophers do describe some interesting pictures of abstract ideas. Here is one, on virtue, by Simone Weil, resorting to a quote from the ancient Book of the Dead -
"There has never been a more moving definition of virtue than the
words, spoken in The Book of the Dead by the soul on the way to salvation:
Lord of Truth . . I have brought truth to thee, and I have destroyed wickedness for thee . . I have not thought scorn of God . . I have not brought forward my name for honors . . I have not caused harm to be done to the servant by his master . . I have made no one weep . . I have not struck fear into any man . . I have not spoken haughtily . . . I have not made myself deaf to the words of right and truth. "
(while reading a quote in - Pragmatrism and non-scientific knowledge, by Hilary Putnam)

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Putnam seems to conceive of Pragmatism as containing some characteristic features like anti-scepticism, fallibilism and the like. Not only beliefs need justification but also doubts, which is what he terms as anti-scepticism. And one can never say that a given belief will never need revision, which is what he terms as fallibilism. Yea it is interesting like tying the mammoth, which anyway needs some bindings. (while reading Richard Warner)

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