Philosophy and Method in the West & India

Sarukkai, Sundar. “Philosophy and Method,” in Mapping Scientific Method: Disciplinary Narrations, edited by Gita Chadha and Renny Thomas (London; New York: Routledge, 2023), pp. 85-103.

This is an interesting essay which I nonetheless consider to be an elementary introduction to the question. Sarukkai broadens the usual terms of debate in the anglophone world (characterized as a restrictive focus on Western philosophy) to include Indian philosophy in the mix, which resonates with the phenomenological tradition in the West. Sarukkai suggests the complementary nature of focusing on the subject-object relation by addressing the approaches of phenomenology and science respectively. Of interest in particular is the Nyāya 16-step process as a model for philosophical method.

The narrowness Sarukkai confronts is most characteristic of analytical philosophy. Sarukkai’s broadening of the base of discussion is welcome, but his pluralism has limitations. He accepts the now-conventional categories of analytical and continental philosophy as givens. He mentions Marxism and Critical Theory in passing, but his entire discussion bypasses Hegel, Marx, and the Frankfurt School, which would lend themselves to an overview of disparate methods and schools of thought from a decidedly different perspective.

And there is the question of the nature of method and the manner of its applicability, an issue that applies also to critical thinking in general. Interpretation is not algorithmic or formalistic; it requires non-mechanical judgment of specific content even with the cognizance of general principles.

See also my bibliographies:

Indian Logic & Argumentation: Selected Bibliography

Argumentation & Controversies: Selected Bibliography

Thinking Critically About Critical Thinking: A Guide

Philosophical Style: Selected Bibliography

Philosophy of History of Philosophy & Historiography of Philosophy: Selected Bibliography

Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya: A Centenary Salute

"Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya: A Centenary Salute to Multifaceted Philosopher" by SK Pande, NewsClick, 05 Nov 2018

"A humanist, Marxist, staunch lover of reason, scientific temper and secularist to the core, Chattopadhyaya’s absence is greatly felt as secular India faces threats from Hindutva forces that strive to take the country back to the dark ages."

I have been familiar with the work of Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya (19 November 1918 – 8 May 1993) for many years. Here are a couple items on my web site:

Chattopadhyaya, Debiprasad. Indian Philosophy: A Popular Introduction (Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1972 [orig. 1964]), chapter 28: Lokayata, pp. 184-199; notes, pp. 221-223.

Chattopadhyaya, Debiprasad. “Science and Philosophy in Ancient India,” in Marxism and Indology, edited by Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya (Calcutta; New Delhi: K. P. Bagchi & Company, 1981), pp. 231-262.

And see:

Ramakrishna, G. "Some Loud Thinking About the Bhagavadgita," in Marxism and Indology, edited by Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya (Calcutta; New Delhi: K. P. Bagchi & Company, 1981), pp. 216-221.

Globalization of obscurantism (2)

I have alternated posts on this topic on this blog and on my Studies in a Dying Culture blog.  The latest post on the latter blog is:

Globalization of obscurantist philosophy

There I lay out the underlying logic of this trend, with specific current examples.

Two other principle general entry points into this topic are:

Ethnoepistemology (Studies in a Dying Culture)

Globalization of obscurantism (this blog)

The most generic keywords on which to search this topic are ‘globalization’, ‘ethnophilosophy’, ‘postmodernism’, and ‘liberalism’ or ‘neoliberalism’. But any post on non-western philosophy is likely to be relevant, the most numerous being ‘Asian philosophy’ or ‘Chinese philosophy’, but also any philosophy related to India, but see also ‘American philosophy’ and ‘Native American philosophy’. Also 'Eurocentrism' and 'pluralism' are relevant keywords.

Tribute to Indian Atheists- Part II

Here it is. Most of these names are new to me. I recognize Ambedkar, Rushdie, A. Roy, and B. Singh.

Howard L. Parsons: East meets West = New Age + Stalinism (1)

The 20th century was replete with the literature of the meeting of the East and West, in respectable philosophical literature, in pop philosophy, New Age thought, and popular culture. As the ideological trend of postmodernism gained ascendancy in the 1980s, the older literature gave way to a whole new basis for combining the most obscurantist currents in Western and Asian thought. Under the postmodern dispensation, it is easy to forget what the older literature looked like.

The entire East-West paradigm formed the basis for the suppression of Marxism as an analytical approach, and Marxism gave the lie to the ahistorical metaphysics underlying the concepts of East and West. While individuals might embrace elements of both, disciplined intellectual inquiry never did so. As bad an influence as Soviet Marxism was, it was not ethnocentric in limiting its purview to Western philosophy. Marxism has a long history of engagement with Indian and Chinese philosophy, for example, and from an entirely different perspective than East-meets-West literature.

I have always been averse to Marxist philosophers who were part of or gravitated to the Soviet camp. In the 1970s and 1980s the Amsterdam publisher B.R. Grüner was a major outlet for their writings. Examination of their output reveals both highs and abysmal lows. Over the years I largely passed by the American philosopher Howard L. Parsons, both in print and in person. Recently, however, picking up one of those old Grüner volumes I had perused several times before, I found something by Parsons I found worthwhile:

"Theories of Knowledge: A Dialectical, Historical Critique" by Howard L. Parsons

I wrote the following on 23 October:

I was surprised to find Berkeley getting credit for something, not to say that pleases me much, but Parsons is dealing with philosophical reactions to the inadequacies of contemporaneous thought, not just for the obscurantism of the alternatives. I find especially interesting his take on mysticism, which he probably polished in his other writings on Eastern philosophies (e.g. Man East and West), which I've passed over until now, but now I think I'll return to them. The weaknesses of bootlickers of the USSR are all too evident to me (and I used to see several of them in action in person), but this essay showed that in certain respects, some of them do have something to offer. B.R. Grüner published all these people, and their offerings were mighty uneven, but still there is some salvageable material. I should also say that material like this provides a perspective that the American atheist/humanist movement has entirely excluded, and which Marxist literature such as this implicitly criticizes.

Then I came across this book, which had been lying about for years, unread:

Parsons, Howard L. Man East and West: Essays in East-West Philosophy. Amsterdam: B.R.Grüner, 1975. xi, 211 pp. (Philosophical Currents; v. 8)

While this took me back in time, I don't recall reading anything on this theme quite like this book. Neither New Age literature nor various Marxist analyses of religion produced this sort of thing in my experience. It reads like a fusion of historical materialism and metaphysical typology, or Stalinism and New Age.

Actually, Parsons' writing style is quite vivid, and this is a plus. There are a number of oddities in the book, though. For example, Parsons deploys Sheldon's physiognomic typology (ectomorph-mesomorph-endomorph, certebrotic-somatotonic-viscerotonic), a peculiar scheme I've not seen promoted since the days of Aldous Huxley. Mao is alleged to possession feminine facial features. Socialism is victorious in the East, which presumably is a plus for the Eastern mindset.

Parsons is not an unqualified partisan of Eastern philosophy; his perspective is congruent with the popular notion of the complementarity of East and West, akin to that of female and male, that both supply qualities the other lacks. Unlike New Agers or other advocates of East-Meets-West, Parsons is critical of the authoritarian, hierarchical, feudal social institutional and ideological dimension of Eastern thought. This deficiency is incorporated into his complementarity model. In other ways, Parsons fails to be critical of the metaphysical conceptions of Indian and Chinese thought he incorporates into his framework.

Parsons provides some detailed analyses of the development of Indian religion and Chinese thought. Oddly, he relates Lao Tzu to social class and revolution (95-97), in contrast to the patriarchal, hierarchical disposition of Confucianism. Incredibly, Parsons relates Sheldon's body typology to differentials between Eastern and Western civilizations (98). (Mesomorphy is Western?) The book is like this, painting a vivid picture in which sociohistorical analysis is fused with pseudoscience and metaphysical fragments.

Tribute to Indian Atheists- Part I

Here it is:





This video includes contemporary and historical figures. For a better view, see this video on YouTube.

Edgar Saltus: The Anatomy of Negation (1)

Saltus, Edgar. The Anatomy of Negation. Rev. ed. London: Brentano's, 1889. (First ed., 1886.) Other copies of the 1886 edition are downloadable from Google books, including this one. Plain text file downloadable from Ebooks.

Edgar Saltus (1855-1921) was an acclaimed writer in his day who has dropped out of history. Still, there are those who wish to rehabilitate his reputations. See, e.g. Edgar Saltus: Forgotten Genius of American Letters? by Jason DeBoer. Several works by Edgar Saltus are available at Project Gutenberg. For another take on the type of writer Saltus was, see Edgar Saltus’s Imperial Orgy. You can also get a substantial preview of Edgar Saltus: The Man
By Marie Saltus.

Saltus prefaces The Anatomy of Negation by claiming it to be a historical compendium of anti-theism. It is not really a thorough history nor is it limited to atheism, but it could best be considered an historical narrative of skeptical and heterodox thinking, told from a rather equianimous point of view. Saltus considers the first thinker to break from religious thinking to be Kapila in ancient India. There is also an extensive account of the Buddha, and Lao Tzu to round out chapter 1. Saltus moves from China and India to ancient Greece and Rome. Lucretius is the star of the Roman saga.

Chapter 3 gives us a history of Christianity. Deep into this chapter, the skeptic Montaigne makes his appearance (103ff).

Chapter 4 takes off with the saintly Spinoza, who gets a good 10 1/2 pages. Then there is a lengthy treatment of Voltaire, followed by LaMettrie, Maupertuis, d'Holbach, Diderot, and d'Alembert.

With chapter 5 we encounter German idealism--Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and a passing mention of some of the Young Hegelians. Clearly Saltus does not understand Hegel. He gives far more attention to Arthur Schopenhauer.

Asian Philosophy & Critical Thinking

Asian Philosophy and Critical Thinking: Divergence or Convergence? by Soraj Hongladarom

The author poses the question as to whether critical thinking culture-specific (e.g. Western). His project is summarized as follows:

In this paper, I attempt to argue that critical thinking is not necessarily incompatible with Asian traditional belief systems. In fact I will show that both India and China do have their own indigenous traditions of logical and argumentative thinking. Since the logical traditions within both Indian and Chinese cultures were perceived to be not conducive to their respective ideals, they were eventually supplanted by the more dominant traditions which did not emphasize criticism or argumentation as much as social harmony or intuitive insights. I will further try to show that, since the logical traditions are already there in the major Asian cultural traditions, they can and should be reexamined, reinterpreted and adapted to the contemporary situation. This would be an answer to the Western educators who have found no such tradition in the East.

This immediately raises the question as to the relationship between logic and critical thinking. There are now various schools in the study of critical thinking, not all limited to the baseline enumeration and analysis of logical fallacies. (Note the bibliography.) However, the history of logic is rather peculiar in its ties to metaphysics and theology, and thus there is no need to suppose that logic automatically engenders critical thinking; to the point, critical thinking that challenges a presupposed dogmatic viewpoint. Training in logical argumentation has historically been proven to be good training ground for the production of heretics, an unintentional by-product of fairly rigid institutionalization.

This article responds to this question only indirectly, by adumbrating the reasons for the decline of logical traditions in China and India. In India, the limitation of expertise in logic to a priestly caste rendered it vulnerable to political occlusion under changed conditions. There are different schools of thought as to what happened in China. (Here are summaries of some theories: The Rise of the West.) Given China's high level of development prior to European scientific revolution and age of exploration (conquest), there is no reason to suppose an inherent inferiority of Chinese capabilities. China's ultimate stagnation can be seen as conjunctural, but there are "underdeterminationist" and "overdeterminationist" explanations for divergences between Chinese and European civilizations. Steve Fuller adheres to the underdeterminationist model, according to which progress in science was prevented from occurring by special circumstances.

A word on Joseph Needham, who in this article represents the other viewpoint on Chinese science. Needham became the major Western authority on the history of science and technology in China, and he contributed to addressing the historical addressing of how China, once the scientifically most advanced civilization in the world, fell behind Europe. Needham offered specific historical information about China's scientific achievements and its relation to China's overall development, but he also held philosophical views that overstressed China's organicist philosophical and cultural base, that somehow provides a superior model even though the Chinese blew it. (See for example Needham's multiply reprinted "History and Human Values: a Chinese Perspective for World Science and Technology".) Needham has often been criticized for violating his own empirical research with ideological justificationism. In the 1930s he was a Marxist, part of the British social relations of science movement. His orientalism, a recurrent temptation for Westerners seeking to escape their own alienation, eventually got the better of him. Elsewhere I will take up Needham's fall into philosophical obscurantism.

If scientific progress is associated with critical thinking, then one must look at the cultural paths adopted in the development of various civilizations, including what might have been different had not different philosophies prevailed, had not Confucianism in China and mysticism in India not succeeded in their ascendancy. The dominance of "social harmony" (scare quotes supplied by me) over a culture of argumentation may be an historical route taken, but trajectories can be altered. The author wishes to steer Thailand into the camp of critical thinking.

The author's own historical analytical perspective is weak. General comments taking "culture" and "tradition" as fundamental categories are always suspect, as is the notion that somehow cultures have to develop their potentials from "within" even while radically deviating from or developing against tradition. Critical thinking is going to be developed or not from where people are at now, whether reacting to their own cultural tradition or assimilating a knowledge base and methodology from elsewhere.