If Philosophy as a discipline is stumbling

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  Savitri Era

  Sri Aurobindo freed the Veda - Savitri Era Party ‏@SavitriEraParty 3h @vikramjit_b @prasannavishy @sarkar_swati Sri Aurobindo freed the Veda from senseless rituals & Havan stipulations... 39 minutes ago
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  Footnotes 2 Plato

  On the need for mediating concepts… - I posted this on FaceBook in a thread about humanities departments needing to get over Aristotle’s biology and was told to stop spamming, so I suppose I’d ... 8 hours ago
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  Savitri Era Learning Forum

  Critical thinking, sensitivity, empathy and moral consciousness - With the increasing emphasis on the pragmatism of life and survival, it is but natural to ask if Philosophy as a discipline is stumbling. The irony, howeve... 23 hours ago
• Love of All Wisdom

  The atomized Buddhist individual - I have frequently discussed how early Indian Buddhism, like Jainism, takes an integrity perspective in an ethical or practical sense. I’ve said less about ... 1 day ago
• The Pinocchio Theory

  Notes on Sensation - In his fine new book Levinas Unhinged, Tom Sparrow writes about how Alphonso Lingis both radicalizes Levinas in the direction of materiality, and goes beyo... 1 day ago
• ~C4Chaos

  #Restorethe4th EPIC Thread - Here’s my EPIC thread contribution to the #Restorethe4th protest. I’ve been following the EPIC NSA leak story since it broke out. I have woven three EPIC... 4 days ago
• The Memory Bank

  Waiting for emancipation: prospects for an African liberal revolution - I went to Accra in 1965 to do anthropological field research on the politics of independence for a PhD. My plan was to study how migrants from the interio... 6 days ago
• The Immanent Frame

  Is absolute secularity conceivable? - Is absolute secularity conceivable? The question arises from the paradoxical intuition that the secularization thesis is simultaneously both right and mu...

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  Larval Subjects .

  Object-Oriented Ontology, Lacan, and the Subject - Often I hear people ask “where is the place of the subject in object-oriented ontology”? The first thing to note is that object-oriented ontology (OOO) is... 3 weeks ago

Savitri Era of those who adore, Om Sri Aurobindo and The Mother.

Friday, February 15, 2013 Fiery intensity may look like fundamentalism

What’s at Stake in Hermetic Reterritorialization? from An und für sich by Jacob Sherman, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Joshua Ramey’s The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal is such a rich, provocative, and deliciously inconclusive book

Update: October 7, 2013 Why care about philosophy? by Amod Lele on Sep.29, 2013

Philosophy is an intellectual pleasure for most of us who study it, of course, and it would be transparently false to deny that that’s a main reason for doing so. But it’s not the only one. For me, the continuing value of philosophy is that it alone is able to find truth at the highest and widest level – truth about the basic and fundamental questions which we usually take as settled, but about which we may turn out to be wrong. For truth about many of these questions, people typically turn – rightly – either to natural science or to the traditions we call “religious”, sometimes separately but often enough in some combination.

It is in that combination, I submit, that philosophy really becomes necessary. The traditions we label “religious” have a hard time understanding each other; it is often even harder for natural science to reach any sort of understanding with them. When scientists try to speak with those from traditions we call “religious”, they typically end up talking past each other. But philosophy, at least, is something that both have reason to respect; it is the common ground on which truth can be established between them. So too, “interreligious dialogue” too often winds up in the mode ofmere conflict resolution without getting close to truth: it might stop people from killing each other (certainly a worthy goal), but they remain as convinced as ever that the other is entirely wrong. It is philosophy, especially with a dialectical method, is able to find a deeper understanding that comes closer to the truth.

Philosophy, then, is the way that we can find a truth broader and more universal than the ones from narrower traditions. And yes, that list of “narrower traditions” does include natural science, which must necessarily do a miserable job of explaining value, and likewise cannot answer the epistemological questions about how we can trust empirical evidence and establish natural laws in the first place.