Philosophy

[Kokuu]

Having just begun week two of the philosophy course, I can only say that quite a lot of them might have benefitted from sitting more and writing less. They make Dogen look like he had writer's block!

Gassho
Kokuu
-sattoday/lah-

[Tai Shi]

Hume, a Neo-Platonist, idealized form and support for discourse. I taught writing with directions to use details from senses to write essays from notes, brainstorming and to support a thesis deduced from senses. James Moffett, and James Britton in research of thousands of first year college essays showed expressive writing leads to form and content not unlike poetry or Plato's ideal at the center of expression. Hume's experience through senses showed an idealized approach to reality. As well, students could find a thesis from support as in Hume's approach, and Buddhist realization of only senses. Unlike Buddhism, however, student writing is based in logic; just a few ideas from one who studied content.
Gassho
sat/ lah
Tai Shi

[Kyōsen]

That bit about causality is interesting because of how it's supported by what we know from neuroscience about the brain being a "reasoning machine" that will invent reasons for why things are the way they are. This leads to "magical thinking" and that can escalate into full-blown "pseudoscience". There's a YouTube series called "Mind Field" and in one of the episodes, the phenomenon of "magical thinking" is looked at and it's been interesting to observe that behavior in myself. No one is immune to the "reasoning engine"! We all do it!

Being able to have the experience of just sitting and allowing things to be, sometimes I catch glimpses of t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶s̶ happenings but without any cause or result. Yet it all carries on perfectly.

Gassho
Kyōsen
Sat|LAH

[Tai Shi]

Oh I don't know. I have bipolar disorder type 1. and over the past six years in Treeleaf Zendo, I've been in and out of the hospital. I swing between depression and mania. These days I do not write poetry about mental illness. In my MFA much my poetry 35 years ago was either about mental illness or alcoholism. However the alcoholism as of July 22nd is 34 years sober. Mental illness is a year from my last hospitalization, depression, kicking prescription Oxycodone. I walked out from under a high dose. A short time my poetry was about Oxycodone. Not anymore. I'm off topic, and Jundo doesn't like my long rambling entries. I will say it's documented that people with bipolar are more likely to be more creative than others, the way the brain leaps through logic.
Gassho
sat/ lah
Tai Shi

[ZenHalfTimeCrock]

Alison Gopnik (a professor of psychology and philosophy) wrote an article suggesting that Hume might have actually been familiar with Buddhist philosophy. I have known about this article for ages and still haven't read it myself yet. But anyway, here's a link:

http://alisongopnik.com/Papers_Alison/Gopnik_HumeStudies_withTOC.pdf

There's also another book sitting on my shelf unread called Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia by Christopher Beckwith that namechecks Hume in accompanying online blurb for it:

'Pyrrho of Elis went with Alexander the Great to Central Asia and India during the Greek invasion and conquest of the Persian Empire in 334-324 BC. There he met with early Buddhist masters. Greek Buddha shows how their Early Buddhism shaped the philosophy of Pyrrho, the famous founder of Pyrrhonian scepticism in ancient Greece.

Christopher I. Beckwith traces the origins of a major tradition in Western philosophy to Gandhara, a country in Central Asia and northwestern India. He systematically examines the teachings and practices of Pyrrho and of Early Buddhism, including those preserved in testimonies by and about Pyrrho, in the report on Indian philosophy two decades later by the Seleucid ambassador Megasthenes, in the first-person edicts by the Indian king Devanampriya Priyadarsi referring to a popular variety of the Dharma in the early third century BC, and in Taoist echoes of Gautama's Dharma in Warring States China. Beckwith demonstrates how the teachings of Pyrrho agree closely with those of the Buddha Sakyamuni, "the Scythian Sage." In the process, he identifies eight distinct philosophical schools in ancient northwestern India and Central Asia, including Early Zoroastrianism, Early Brahmanism, and several forms of Early Buddhism. He then shows the influence that Pyrrho's brand of scepticism had on the evolution of Western thought, first in Antiquity, and later, during the Enlightenment, on the great philosopher and self-proclaimed Pyrrhonian, David Hume.

Greek Buddha demonstrates that through Pyrrho, Early Buddhist thought had a major impact on Western philosophy.'

For anyone with an interest in Western Philosophy, my favourite book on the subject is Bryan Magee's Confessions of a Philosopher: A Journey Through Western Philosophy.

Magee is wonderful writer. Just read the first chapter ('Scenes from Childhood') and I would be surprised if you don't get hooked.

https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Philosopher-Personal-Philosophy-Paperback/dp/0375750363/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Confessions+of+a+Philosopher+magee&qid=1626183568&s=books&sr=1-2

Gassho,

Martin
Sat today

[Nobodyhere]

I did dig around Heraclitus ( great western insight into impermanence ), Hegel, the Stoics and later Spinoza for self help. I am just an amateur but I think Spinoza's pretty close to eastern philosophies in general, where one connects to a bigger mind / universe ( God = all there is ) via developing intuition. However just like the Stoics he seems to want to get there through reason ( although his concept of Reason is different and complex ). The first few times I sat in meditation I realized that what I called "reason" is conditioned, subjective and rising just like any other thought. Sorry I took so many sentences here.

Gassho,

Silviu

SatTday

[bakera3312]

Dear all

I know very little about western philosophy. What I do know is based around the philosophy of science which I intuitively grasped through studying science, and by living with a friend who was doing a PhD in political philosophy.

Western philosophy has also seemed to me to be fundamentally less interested in the kind of things I like to think about than eastern philosophy. However, I thought that it was about time that I bit the bullet and learned a little more so subscribed to a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on the subject delivered by the University of Edinburgh.

Straight away, some ideas from philosopher David Hume reminded me of Buddhist thinking:



I like this a lot as it reminds me of Buddhist ideas of separating empirical sensations from the subsequent judgements we make about them and stories we place on top.

It is also interesting how Hume thinks of the notion of self in a similar way to Buddhism in that it is something fundamentally unfindable.

I know that philosophical questions can have a tendency to disappear down rabbit holes, and for that reason we often do not encourage them so much at Treeleaf, but I found this to be interesting in comparing aspects of eastern and western thought.

Gassho
Kokuu
-sattoday/lah-

Thank you for sharing. All to often Western Philosophy is held up as the be all end all of Philosophy, while forgetting Eastern and Buddhist Philosophical traditions.



Tony,

[Risho]

I majored in Western Philosophy in college too; I've always found philosophy interesting, and I only got a Bachelor's; I'm not an expert or anything. But after I graduated college, a friend pointed me toward Taoism; eventually I got into Zen thought and ended up here. Western philosophy was interesting, but my heart wasn't into it like it is with Eastern thought or Zen. Just a personal preference, but there's something about Eastern thought that speaks to my heart.

Gassho

Risho
-stlah

[Hoseki]

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to say that my experience with western philosophy in a lot of ways kind of blended with my practice. I think there can be value there (for our practice) and while some of it will be at odds with much of Buddhist texts there are some things that lend themselves well. In particular, I found myself drawn to a kind of anti-essentialism that can be found in various writers and I think it lines up nicely with Nagarjuna. I spent a lot of time being confused by Wittgenstein, Rorty and Austin (though less though) and I found that ordinary language philosophy and Rorty's pragmatism kind of let me off the hook for puzzling philosophical issues. So language being something like us it arises in some circumstances and then goes away. The relationship between the rest of the world and our concepts is us. So why make such a fuss. What's there to really do except chop wood and fetch water.

I will also add that there are some practical aspects to studying Philosophy. For example, we may learn how and when to use a concept e.g. freedom but without spelling out what that means or how it "cashes out" into our actual lives rather than abstraction we can often talk right past each other or we can be mislead. A classic example is freedom or liberty. There are things I'm free to do (positive freedom) which often requires resources to actually be possible and there is the ability to do something without external interference (negative freedom.) Occasionally I see people on TV say that the American people are free to buy health insurance. But its a negative freedom no one is going to stop them. But without the resources to do so (money) they aren't free to do so in a positive sense. Basically they can't but it's not the government that stops them. Regardless of how one feels about this issue I think we can all see the sophistry here.



Anywho, just thought I could chim in. My apologies for the length.

Gassho
Hoseki
Sattoday

[tclark7]

There are many similarities between western and eastern thought, regardless of what thought, like animals evolving the same traits independently.

Gassho, Tim
ST

[HERRIEH]

I did dig around Heraclitus ( great western insight into impermanence ), Hegel, the Stoics and later Spinoza for self help. I am just an amateur but I think Spinoza's pretty close to eastern philosophies in general, where one connects to a bigger mind / universe ( God = all there is ) via developing intuition. However just like the Stoics he seems to want to get there through reason ( although his concept of Reason is different and complex ). The first few times I sat in meditation I realized that what I called "reason" is conditioned, subjective and rising just like any other thought. Sorry I took so many sentences here.

Gassho,

Silviu

SatTday

I agree with you on Spinoza. My compatriot understood 'reason' as a threefold way from empiricist experiences through the senses to logic and, as a highest form of reason, he understood something he called 'intuition'. This is not intuition as we understand it, like a gut feeling about something. He meant a clear and immediate experience of the 'Truth'. An experience which could not be forced into being and which did not endure but still founded certainty. Part 5 of Ethica, his most important work, the last chapter of the book ends with this: "Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.". In Spinoza's thought God and Nature are the same thing which forms the total of al being which he called 'Substance'. He also wrote that this Substance has an infinite number of 'Attributes' from which we only can define two: Mind and Matter. He saw those as two sides of the same coin, the one never occurring without the other. Excuses for my poor English.

There was a real huge China boom in the seventeenth century on Continental Europe especially on the Netherlands and France. Chinese products where very popular and even Chinese philosophy got a lot of attention. Confucius "Analects" was kind of a bestseller in Latin and Dutch translation. Buddhist thought was criticized as 'a Chinese form of Spinozism'.

Gassho, HerrieH
Going to SIT right NOW.