-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of BklynMagus
> But you don't have to be a practicing Buddhist to understand or explain
Buddhism. Perhaps this is where we disagree? I don't think experience leads
to epistemology.
I guess to me experience is a source of knowledge. You can read whatever anybody says about something, but until you actually experience it yourself, it is just a story you have been told. I guess you then have to decide if the teller is believable or not.
** What kind of knowledge? Do I have to be tortured in order to understand torture? Do I have to bomb someone into oblivion in order to understand what it means to win a war? Do I have to steal to understand theft? Do I have to meditate in order to understand stillness? Do I have to be mugged in order to comprehend statistics about urban crime? I don't think so. Knowledge is about arguments, concepts, validity claims... its link with experience is through communicative action.... not the experience of the data. Naturally some experiences MIGHT help you understand some of these things... but there is no essential link. Knowledge is abstract... I wouldn't use the term "knowledge" to describe embodiment (siding more with Habermas here).
> Actually, quarks didn't exist until someone invented the concept "quark."
Ok, I'm lost again. There was gold in the ground before people mined it. Jupiter orbited the sun before Gallileo observed it. How can something not exist until someone invents a term? Things exist before human beings name them.
** Oddly enough... gold didn't exist before the concept "gold" came into existence. I would have thought this to be similar to a good many Buddhist ideas. Let's say there is no word "gold" and you come across this yellow stuff in a stream. You pick it up, never seen it before, and you call it "gold." The term "gold" is first and foremost a concept, it points to the object. But the object and the concept are not identical. What exists "for us" is the concept. What exists as such is the object. But we don't know about the object as such until we have a concept, a name. That which is undifferentiated has no name, and does not exist "for us." So... things doesn't exist before human beings name them... I acknowledge that there are objects without names... but I wouldn't say they exist. That's not a stupid as it sounds. E.g. Olympus Mons didn't "exist" until we named it. Someone saw it, named it, now it exists. But what is Olympus Mons really? Where does it begin, end... the name is just that... it is the way that we relate to the location... but when it comes down to it there is little relation between the name, the meaning of the name for us, and the actual location...
> Existence is "for us" - that's what I learned from Hegel's philosophy of
mind. If something doesn't exist "for us" then it doesn't exist.
Guess I just disagree. Seems to be an very selfish way to live. It is what Radical Christians do -- they believe homosexuality is a sin and homosexuals are perverts. We do not exist as human beings. Well, surprise we do exist as human beings. The more I learn about Hegel the less I like him LOL.
** I think it happens to be a handy way to think about the relation between subject, concept, and object.
> "Buddhism is a religious tradition that worships the Christ" is a bad
theory.
Not a theory -- a false statement of fact.
** A conclusion arrived at because of a bad theoretical framework.
> Queers have been defined all sorts of way, each way pretending to the fact
of "homosexuality." But each presentation of the fact of "homosexuality"
has a moral component.
** Moral in the sense of "we should hold people accountable for what they say and how they define things?" Yes, I agree.
> All facts are interpretations, see my remark about quarks above. There is
this thing call the universality of hermeneutics (Gadamer, Truth and
Method).
Well, the universality of hermeneutics may exist (see and I did not even know about it, yet it existed), but I don't have to agree to it LOL. I googled on it and I found that Habermas (I don't get him either) disagrees, so tell Gadamer it must not be so universal. LOL
** Heh. Habermas changed his mind in the late 80s or in the 90s. Habermas has acknowledged that the science cannot proceed monologically (his argument in the late 60s and early 70s) and now holds the position that both humanistic interpretation and science are interpretive activities... he still holds out a division of labour between the two, siding with the notion that science can uncover / disclose aspects of reality that humanistic interpretation cannot (because of its dependence upon tradition). He has also backed off (recently) from his stronger criticisms of postmodernism, esp. Foucault, recognising that Foucault's conception of power is not necessarily incongruent with his own.
cheers, ken