Seventy-three years ago, I entered Harvard as a 16-year-old freshman, graduating three years later with a BA in philosophy. During each of those three years, the tuition at Harvard was $600. It was $600 for my father and mother, who were a high school principal and a secretary, and it was $600 for rich Joe Kennedy, whose youngest son, Teddy, was my classmate. It was also $600 for the fabulously wealthy Aga Khan whose grandson, Sadrudin was also my classmate. I got a spectacular education. Harvard still offers a spectacular education, or so I am willing to concede, but the sticker price is now $54,269. Harvard uses some of its enormous endowment to reduce or even eliminate the charge it imposes on some parents but the rich ones pay the total price.
Six hundred dollars in 1950 is the equivalent of $7,517
today, so a little long division tells me that Harvard is charging 7.2 times as
much for a great education today as it charged in 1950 for an equally great
education. Why does Harvard do that? The simple answer is, because it can. A
more detailed explanation would require a complete analysis of the
socioeconomic structure of the United States today.
61 comments:
A long time ago I heard a speech about the major educational differences between an institution like the University of Hawaii & a institution like Yale or Harvard. The lecturer said that the greatest educational difference was that at Yale or Harvard a guest speaker may be someone like General Norman Schwarzkopf or Secretary of State Colin Powell while a student at U.H. may listen to a Lt. Col. who works at Tripler Army Hospital. Otherwise the student workload is the same for all three colleges. (And I believe at Yale or Harvard they expect you to be smarter & faster & a harder worker to boot.) I recently saw a video in which His Holiness the Dalai Lama was giving a personal audience to two Harvard undergraduate students in South Asia. I guess that was just one of the extra advantages of being a student at Harvard.
ML, I doubt the Harvard undergraduate part qua Harvard undergraduate was relevant. Based on personal experience, I'd assume other factors were dispositive, e.g. contacts that may have been but didn't have to be Harvard connected.
'Traditionally', University of Hawaii would have been vastly superior to Harvard for the study of East Asian philosophy. Likewise for issues in the study of translation to and from Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages: the folks at Manoa no doubt marveled that the Harvard professor Quine's kindergarten tale of 'Gavagai' was treated as a philosophically important thought experiment. As a high school student I gained a life-long benefit from UH's free concerts, where I first heard Debussy's piano music, from film screenings, where I first saw Kurosawa's Red Beard and Fellini's The Clowns, and from public lectures, where I first heard Kenneth Burke and Leslie Fiedler.--And all this and more without the fear of running into Harvard's prominent war criminals!
Then there's this:
https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/pew/
J.R.
For my History degree I never had the opportunity to take any East Asian philosophy classes. All the philosophy classes I took were about Western philosophers. I did take one class on East Asian Humanities. And two classes on East Asian History. Plus, two classes on Hawaiian studies. My sociology classes were all about the effects of colonialism and I studied about the people of Africa & the Hmong of Asia, & advertising symbology etc.
John Rapko,
Why would philosophers at the University of Hawaii have marveled at Quine?
The closest I got to learning any Asian Philosophy was when I had to read Asian philosophy, like the Analects of Confucius, for my East Asian Humanities class I took under Dr. Khan at U.H. West Oahu. Dr. Khan of L.C.C. was filling in for a professor who left at the end of the previous semester who relocated on the mainland. I believe the latter's name was Dr. Han.
An analysis:
https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-fall-semester-is-upon-us.html
Michael Llenos,
Do you remember if they had courses on Asian philosophy in the philosophy department?
S.W.
I believe I took 2 or 3 philosophy classes at L.C.C. and 2 or 3 philosophy classes at U.H. West Oahu. I can't exactly remember. But I do remember studying mostly Plato, some Descartes, and superficially the modern philosophers that came after Descartes. I took a logic class once. But no Asian philosophy.
Michael Llenos,
Thanks.
Anonymous notes that for years ago I posted a lengthier discussion of the same subject. I get the impression, if this is the same anonymous, that he considers this a criticism. Let me quote well-known passage from the Gorgias:
CALLICLES: How you go on, always talking in the same way, Socrates!
SOCRATES: Yes, Callicles, and also about the same things.
I love the Gorgias but to me it's almost as difficult to understand as the Euthyphro. I believe Socrates hit it right on the mark when he called eloquence flattery. Your main objective in oratory is to flatter one's audience. However I don't look at oratory as trivial like Socrates does. Cicero's On the Ideal Orator, or what I call the Anti-Gorgias, I find a great supplement and successor to the Gorgias written by Plato.
s.w., UH has courses on Asian philosophy:
https://www.sis.hawaii.edu/uhdad/avail.classes?i=MAN&t=202330&s=PHIL
and UH Press publishes a journal that deals with the topic (sample):
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/903371
aaall,
thanks.
To TJ re John Rapko on Hawaii and Quine:
John Rapko's point, as I read it was that the linguistic scholars on Hawaii would have "marvelled at," i.e. been mightily amused at the simplistic nature of Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of radical translation, which employs the imaginary word"gavagai."
Quine's point was that the anthropologist's translation of "gavagai" as (say) "rabbit" would be underdetermined by anything that the gavagai-speakers might say in response to the prompting "gavagai????" (supposing that both native speaker and would-be translator had a mutual grasp of the interrogative employed in the prompt). Quine suggests that, given the elements of the exchange, "rabbit phase" and "undetached rabbit part" (and even some others) would provide just as accurate translations of the target word, by virtue of the fact (inter alia) that sufficient auxiliary hypotheses would always be available to preserve the alternative translations.
The thesis of the indeterminacy of radical translation occurs in an early chapter of Quine's Word and Object (I think the first)--- the main thesis of the book is that there is no room for or need for mentalistic posits in psychology. Quine was a methodological, and probably an ontological, behaviourist about mental states.
I take John Rapko to be putting down Harvard musings about translation.... in favour of the more solid knowledge of linguists at the University of Manoa.
I think that I have this right.
What you're seeing here is the Baumol Effect.
CARDIFF GARCIA: Alex Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason University, is the co-author of a new book called "Why Are The Prices So Damn High?" And the answer, he says, starts with an economist named William Baumol.
ALEX TABARROK: He says think about a string quartet in 1826. It takes four people 40 minutes to play this string quartet. Now, let's think about the same string quartet in 2019 - live performance, same four people. It still takes them 40 minutes to produce the music.
DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN: But the price you pay to see that live string quartet has gone up way more than the price of everything else in the economy. The reason why is the Baumol effect.
-----
GARCIA: The costs of health care and education would still rise faster than the costs in other parts the economy simply because productivity growth in health care and education is slower. That is the mechanical relationship explained by the Baumol effect. Cardiff Garcia.
source: The Baumol Effect And Rising Health Care And Education Costs
Also, this from Wikipedia:
The American economists William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen proposed that wages in sectors with stagnant productivity rise out of the need to compete for workers with sectors that experience higher productivity growth, which can afford to raise wages without raising prices. With higher labor costs, but little increase in productivity, sectors with low productivity growth see their costs of production rise. As summarized by Baumol in a 1967 paper:
If productivity per man hour rises cumulatively in one sector relative to its rate of growth elsewhere in the economy, while wages rise commensurately in all areas, then relative costs in the nonprogressive sectors must inevitably rise, and these costs will rise cumulatively and without limit...Thus, the very progress of the technologically progressive sectors inevitably adds to the costs of the technologically unchanging sectors of the economy, unless somehow the labor markets in these areas can be sealed off and wages held absolutely constant, a most unlikely possibility.
"The American economists William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen proposed that wages in sectors with stagnant productivity rise out of the need to compete for workers with sectors that experience higher productivity growth, which can afford to raise wages without raising prices."
But why can sectors that experience higher productivity growth afford to raise wages without raising prices? Presumably because, as output per person-hour rises, they don't need as many workers to produce whatever they're producing, so they can fire or otherwise get rid of some workers and pay the remaining ones more.
However, this whole explanation as it pertains to education assumes that the notion of productivity and its measurement can be applied readily to education, which seems to be a fallacy. How does one measure output per person-hour in education? There doesn't seem to be a v. good measurement, though doubtless there are some technical papers that may attempt it.
Another problem is the notion that high- and low-productivity sectors compete for the same workers, which seems very dubious. The theory behind the quoted passages from Wikipedia is that the members of the string quartet have to be paid wages commensurate with, say, the electrician that fixes electrical problems in their houses -- otherwise they'll stop being musicians and become electricians or take some other occupation where they can make more money bc wages are higher. But musicians want to be musicians for reasons that don't have much to do w exactly how much they earn. So the explanation, at least as presented by Wiki, seems problematic. I'll give Baumol and Bowen the benefit of the doubt and assume that their own account in their own words might not be so obviously weak.
David Zimmerman,
I understood that much, but I don't understand what about Quine is supposed to be simplistic or naive.
AF, I don't believe any increase in faculty salaries is the reason for the numbers in Prof. Wolff's post. How does non-teaching rent seeking figure in B&B's account?
I also don't understand what the people in Hawaii knew that Quine didn't.
To TJ and Asgeir:
Perhaps John Rapko will explain what he meant.
One problem with Quine's indeterminacy argument (i Think) is that he just asserts, without arguing in any detail, that alternative translations of "gavagai" as "undetached rabbit parts" or "rabbit phases" (as opposed simply to "rabbit") can be defended on behavioural grounds by shifting the translation of other words in the target language... so that all of the alternatives match up with the native speakers' behaviour. However (as I recall), he says little about how this would work in detail.... and why the alternative translations are all equally plausible. Perhaps John Rapko meant that more sophisticated linguists (say, at the U of Manoa) would have translation resources to rebut an argument like Quine's.
Ask him.
A minor point, but it's not the Univ of Manoa. It's the Univ of Hawaii, which as I understand it has several different branches (i.e. geographical locations), just as some other state universities do.
Correction noted--- That would be like saying the University of Ann Arbor or the University of East Lansing.
I may have read John's comment too quickly. My initial read was that the UH scholars of East Asian philosophy would've marveled at the general response to Quine, because the theme of inscrutability of reference or indeterminacy of translation had been explored long before Quine in that part of the world. (But maybe John's point had more to do with linguistics or translation than with philosophy per se.)
I've hardly done more than dip my toes into Asian philosophy (or non-Western philosophy in general), but after getting a few chapters into a book on the history of Indian thought, I remember seeing a good number of philosophical themes (especially in the neighborhood of idealism, and probably also pantheism, I want to say) in the treatment of which the great minds of the West were a bit "late to the party," apparently...? Maybe that's an understatement.
If it's correct that "gavagai" and the like have distant forerunners in Asian or other traditions, maybe someone could fill me in on the specifics. The best I could find after a quick Google search was this paragraph from here -
Tom J. F. Tillemans, in "Count Nouns, Mass Nouns, and Translatability: The Case of Tibetan Buddhist Logical Literature", provides a compelling analysis of the use of mass nouns in the Tibetan Buddhist philosophical literature. He links the relevant Buddhist concerns to the Quinean idea of the inscrutability of reference. The discussion somewhat corrects Quine who, in Tilleman's telling, had denied the distinctive usage of mass and count nouns in some Asian languages. These ideas motivate a discussion of whether languages have inherent ontologies and are thus untranslatable or whether natural languages must share a conceptual scheme thereby making them in principle intertranslatable. Along with Quine, Davidson and Whorf are engaged in the Western side of the argument.
To Michael:
You report Tillemans as saying: "The discussion somewhat corrects Quine who, in Tilleman's telling, had denied the distinctive usage of mass and count nouns in some Asian languages."
This gets Quine completely wrong. He is not saying anything about the availability or unavailability of mass and count nouns in any languages. He is making a point about the underdetermination of translation by behavioural evidence (as elicited by prompts) across any two hitherto un- inter-translated languages, whether Western or Asian.
He leaves it open that the gavagai-speakers in question have certain count nouns (one rabbit, two rabbits), other non-equivalent count nouns (undetached rabbit part), still others (rabbit space-time phase) and mass nouns (rabbit stuff). His point is that the selection of one translation or another for "gavagai" is underdetermined by what he claims is) all the available evidence.
The underdetermination is in part generated by (his notion) that explanation itself is underdetermined (in part) by virtue of being holistic, in the sense that two non-equivalent explanations can be compatible with all the available evidence, if certain adjustments are made in the auxiliary hypotheses that accompany the explanations in competition. It is also generated in part by Quine's methodological and ontological behaviourism and his general hostility to mental posits in scientific explanation.
Now, whether Quine is right or wrong about the underdetermination of theory by data or about the vacuousness of mentalistic explanations is beside the point of what he was getting at in "Word and Object." He is making no claims at all about what semantic resources Asian languages do or do not contain. So, if that latter issue is what his critics were taking issue with, then they are way off base.
I posted my comment about the University of Hawaii yesterday morning, then set off to work on the philosophy of architecture, then a hike, then to see a performance of Twelfth Night, then to reflect on Northrop Frye on Malvolio as idiotes, then to sleep. Today I find that my comment, uh, generated responses, in particular to the unexplicated peevish remark about Quine. I'll try to explicate. I regularly read poetry in five languages, but have never given sustained thought to philosophical issues in translation, but here goes with a feeble attempt: What I meant by invoking a contrast between the kinds of ways of thinking about translation that one would expect from Eliot Deutsch, David Kalupahana, and Roger Ames on the one hand, and Quine on the other, was NOT that the former were part of a long prior tradition of thinking that involved 'gavagai'-type thought experiments, but rather that they might marvel that anyone would think that the sort of thinly-described philosophers' examples--'gavagai' as a instance of a type that includes the trolley problem, Arthur Danto's indiscernibles, and even Sartre's young man torn between Mother and the Resistance--were of much interest in thinking about the real difficulties of, say, rendering what Confucius meant by 'li', in other languages. What I meant to point to is so to speak the quality of imagination, the sense of seriousness and purpose, and the different institutional or social or political situations in which they different ways of thinking are embedded, sustained, and rewarded. The 'gavagai' example is part of a tradition (as Quine explicitly stated later) that stems from Frege on thoughts, propositions, and reference, and so worries inter alia about things like whether ordinary sentences can be, and in what sense, re-stated in logical propositions. In such a tradition, one that finds an institutional safe space at Harvard, perhaps it seems illuminating to write about and reflect on a kindergarten story about a clueless, monolingual Anglophone philosopher who finds him(?)self out in the bush when a rabbit runs by and some dude yells 'gavagai'. I would contrast the Quinean example and its tradition with a range of approaches, ones that I imagine the philosophers of Manoa might find sympathetic, who think such thinly-described philosophers's examples intellectually sterile. I can't go into this at any length in a blog comment, but think of Wollheim's response to Danto's indiscernibles as presenting a case that depends upon the fiction of instantaneous and blinkered judgment, or Iris Murdoch's diagnosis of Sartre as presenting the psychology of a lonely individual, or of Allen Wood's demolition of Derek Parfit's use of examples, or, with regard to translation, of Alasdair MacIntyre's diagnosis in Whose Justice? Which Rationality of the philosophical fiction (p. 384) of the distortions introduced by considering translation outside of specific contexts.--This will, of course, convince absolutely nobody, but I can only further recommend reading the philosophers just cited and extrapolate to Quine.
Maybe one of you professional philosophers, David Zimmerman, John Rapko or someone else,
could explain what you guys are talking about for a lay person, who was not a philosopher major, who has never read a word of Quine, who has a vague idea of what Arthur Danto was up to, who is familiar with Sartre's example of indecision cited above and is curious about what this whole conversation is about. Thanks.
John Rapko's comments is just another one of those:
"Oh you analytic philosophers, closeted in intellectual safe spaces, with your thinly described examples, are so out of touch with what real people are concerned with."
As one of those analytic philosophers (closeted, etc.....) I hardly now how to reply, except to say: Take a few philosophy courses, and you might find out what all the fuss is about.
I hate to be so dismissive, but... sauces for the goose and sauces for the gander and all that.
As for SW's generous invitation that some of us try to explain "what this whole conversation is about" --- Sigh, that would be exhausting... But I'll try to work up the energy. Maybe.
David Zimmerman,
I know from previous experience that you are quite gifted at explaining complex philosophical arguments in terms that a lay person such as myself can understand. That's a compliment in my book.
To SW:
I thank you for your gracious comment.
To John Rapko:
I apologize for my condescending urge that you take a few philosophy courses. I am sure that you have. Nonetheless, I do not think that you quite get the dialectic concerning Quine's indeterminacy thesis.
s.w.
My sense is that they're talking past each other.
I haven't read Murdoch's book on Sartre so I'd be curious to know from J. Rapko what she said about Sartre's example of "the student's dilemma" (which I'm familiar with from Menand's discussion of it in _The Free World_).
Thanks for the responses, Profs. Zimmerman and Rapko.
I quoted the blurb about Tillemans's piece simply because it mentioned that Tibetan Buddhist philosophical literature has some themes relevant to Quine's concerns. I can't comment at all on the bit about mass nouns and count nouns - I'll gladly defer to Prof. Zimmerman on that. What struck me was simply that Quine's "gavagai" thought-experiment, or rather the general moral of the experiment (as I understand it secondhand), was apparently anticipated by other major philosophical tradition(s).
I was guessing that Prof. Rapko's comment was making a similar point, but I gather that I was only partly correct; the point of the comment wasn't merely that Quine's philosophy had precedent in East Asian philosophy, but also (more strongly) that the latter was superior, in that it reflected more profundity, imagination, and seriousness. (I won't try to decide whether this is correct!)
s.w., I'll try to make my understanding of the conversation somewhat clearer (just be warned that my thoughts are not those of a professional philosopher; I'll welcome any corrections from the pros on this):
What's known after Quine as the "indeterminacy of translation," or "inscrutability of reference," happens to have a certain resemblance or relevance to the concept of ineffability in Tibetan Buddhism. To quote a top search result from Google (told you I was an amateur!), ineffability for Tibetan Buddhism "is supposed to make enlightenment experiences a very special and holy mystery."
Compare and contrast this - more in spirit than in letter - with Quine's story about the field linguists observing some unfamiliar people saying "gavagai" in the presence of a rabbit. (As far as the linguists are able to jot down in their observation notes, it cannot be certain whether "gavagai" should be translated to "rabbit" (what ordinary English means by "rabbit") or instead to "Rabbithood instantiated" (as a more Platonic language would have it), "undetached rabbit part," etc. There is no one uniquely correct interpretation of this linguistic episode.)
Quine and the Tibetan Buddhists both in their own ways have some larger point to make about referential inscrutability or "ineffability" - I would spell this term out as: the opacity of words, the inability (or the importantly limited ability) of descriptive language to accomplish what it purports to accomplish. How do we know what people "really" mean to say, how people "really" understand the words they speak? What do we make of the limitations of language, of our communicative abilities in general, in light of this? (And what might this tell us about the human condition?)
I understand Prof. Rapko's comment to be saying that Quine's treatment of this, unlike his predecessors', reflected a certain comparative poverty of philosophical imagination, attitude, and spirit, which scholars of East Asian philosophy are in a better position to appreciate than scholars of the tradition to which Quine belongs. Again, the Tibetan Buddhists see something sacred and holy, something of deep, life-altering significance, in what Quine seems to merely see as an occasion to solve a theoretical puzzle, using what Prof. Rapko calls a "kindergarten story." (And this, he urges, isn't the only such story in the tradition to which Quine belongs; witness, among other things, the "trolley problem" in contemporary ethics.)
Hope that helps. Again, I don't wish to defend or attack anyone on these issues (which I'm still in the process of learning), and I apologize for any errors.
To take a wild guess: the reason why commenters often clash on this blog, on academic matters that might or might not be academic, is simply that this is a sort of backstage for everybody and people expect to be appreciated or validated and not what feels like an attack, there are certain interaction rituals that go astray, like spilt tea at a tea ceremony.
I doubt unlike with the Susselman affair, anybody has aggressive intent.
Proof of my idea is that things seem to be sorted out
Michael
That comment is helpful (at least to me).
This may be a silly question, but if the linguists see people saying "gavagai" in the presence of a rabbit, why don't they question the speakers further about what they were referring to? I'm sure that would not eliminate the "indeterminacy of translation," but it might reduce it...
To Michael L:
You say--- "What struck me was simply that Quine's "gavagai" thought-experiment, or rather the general moral of the experiment (as I understand it secondhand), was apparently anticipated by other major philosophical tradition(s)."
This is simply not true.
You also say--- "What's known after Quine as the "indeterminacy of translation," or "inscrutability of reference," happens to have a certain resemblance or relevance to the concept of ineffability in Tibetan Buddhism. To quote a top search result from Google (told you I was an amateur!), ineffability for Tibetan Buddhism "is supposed to make enlightenment experiences a very special and holy mystery."
No, again: the Buddhist doctrine has absolutely nothing to do with the alleged indeterminacy of radical translation. Rather than just going over this ground again, I invite you to look at my brief explaication of Quine's ideas from "Word and Object."
You also say--- "I understand Prof. Rapko's comment to be saying that Quine's treatment of this, unlike his predecessors', reflected a certain comparative poverty of philosophical imagination, attitude, and spirit, which scholars of East Asian philosophy are in a better position to appreciate than scholars of the tradition to which Quine belongs. Again, the Tibetan Buddhists see something sacred and holy, something of deep, life-altering significance, in what Quine seems to merely see as an occasion to solve a theoretical puzzle, using what Prof. Rapko calls a "kindergarten story."
All I can say is that one person's comparative poverty of philosophical imagination (i.e. Quine on Rapko's view) is another person's person's belief in supernatural myths (i.e. Buddhist and other religious beliefs on Quine's view).
Quine is a naturalist--- No occult entities allowed in enterprises that have genuine explanatory force. Now, Quine embraced a view of naturalism that is very narrow by some lights, e.g. in his hostility to the positing of mental entities, a hostility that the emerging cognitivist revolution in psychology, linguistics, etc. rejected--- think Chomsky. But Quine and Chomsky are both naturalists, and thus refuse to make non-natural posits, such as spirits, the sacred, the holy in explaining natural phenomena.
Thus Quine and other naturalist ontologists and epistemologists are simply in a different business from Buddhists and other devotees of Eastern (and indeed any other) religions. So--- Rapko's criticism of Quine (and naturalism in general, I gather) is siply beside the point.
John Rapko,
Presumably you also think that Zhuangzi's story about the useless tree or Mengzi's story about the farmer from Song are intellectually sterile because thinly described.
To LFC:
You ask--- "This may be a silly question, but if the linguists see people saying 'gavagai' in the presence of a rabbit, why don't they question the speakers further about what they were referring to?"
The answer is that this is radical translation. Thus there is no prior translation manual that the anthropologist's can use to translate their query about whether "gavagai" really refers to "rabbit," undetached rabbit bit," or whatever other rabbit adjacent idea might be a candidate for translation of "gavagai." Radical translators start from the ground up, so to speak with nothing to go on but the prior understanding of what counts as the native users' answers "yes?" or "no?" to a prompt when they see the anthropologist point to an item in the environment and say "gagavai?"
Michael,
Thanks for the explanation even though after reading David Zimmerman's comments about it, I
am even more confused. I sense that there's is not going to be a definitive version of this issue.
LFC (and others),
Sartre's dilemma comes from his essay (originally a public lecture), Existentialism is a Humanism, which is available online and is easy reading and a good introduction to Sartre.
Michael,
What's known after Quine as the "indeterminacy of translation," or "inscrutability of reference," happens to have a certain resemblance or relevance to the concept of ineffability in Tibetan Buddhism. To quote a top search result from Google (told you I was an amateur!), ineffability for Tibetan Buddhism "is supposed to make enlightenment experiences a very special and holy mystery."
In Sufism, my religion, which the mystical branch of Islam, i.e., the Islamic path to enlightenment, ineffability is indicated by the word dhawq (Arabic: taste). The idea being that it is impossible to describe the taste of something to someone who hasn't tasted it.
In Sufism, dhawq (Arabic: lit.'tasting') is direct, first-hand experience.It refers, principally, to the Gnosis of God which is achieved experientially, as a result of rigorous empiric spiritual wayfaring. It plays an important role in the epistemology of Al-Ghazzali, and is often expressed, to some extent, in teleological statements scattered throughout his works.
As an aside, this from David Bentley Hart:
During a September 16, 2022, conversation with Rainn Wilson, Hart shared briefly about an "indescribable" past experience of his own on Mount Athos:
I was in this state of spiritual despair, and I also had an encounter. ...So I understand both the difficulty of explaining it and the impossibility of forgetting it, at once, and how it can change your life. But it doesn't come as a set of instructions. It sure as hell didn't turn me into a saint but did actually make me realize that the spiritual dimension of reality is reality.
David Bentley Hart
A bit of the interview from which the above quote was taken. The video should open up at the 1:03:00 mark:
A Conversation Between Rainn Wilson and David Bentley Hart
s.w.
Thanks, I'm very aware it comes from _Existentialism is a Humanism_ since in Menand's chapter on existentialism he discusses it fairly extensively. (I just didn't want to give the impression I'd read the primary source when I hadn't.)
D Zimmerman
Thank you for the response to my question.
To LFC:
You are most welcome.
To Ahmed Fares:
Sorry to be snippy.... but your comment on Quine and Sufism came late in the exchange about Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy radical translation and allegedly relevant competing ideas, which prompts the question:
Have you even read those earlier comments? If so, you would realize that you have already received an answer to your suggestion that non-naturalistic views like Sufism have anything at all to do with what concerned Quine. See, e.g. David Zimmerman at 1:38 and then 3:43 for comments that show that there is no relationship whatsoever.
One writes these comments in the hope that people will read them.... and not simply go over the same ground without taking them into account.
Ahmed - thanks, will definitely check out later - I have family who like Rainn Wilson and have suggested his podcast to me before. I have read and enjoyed a few things from Bentley Hart as well.
I will have to rethink the point about Buddhism anticipating Quine - as I said, I am far from having a great understanding of either. Would it be less objectionable simply to say there are loose parallels in their thought? It was not my intention to suggest anything bolder. Although their philosophical purposes and orientations and the details of their reasoning are obviously quite different, both (I take it) raise questions about the capacity of descriptive/referential language to do what common sense finds it to achieve mostly unproblematically.
(And granting this, Ahmed joins in to describe how other religions find significance in these (or, if you prefer, loosely parallel) issues, as to the limits of language in relation to religious/mystical experience.)
(Typing this on my phone, so sorry if my phrasing is clunkier than usual.)
There are either two Michael's or just three of us...
M. Llenos: All the Michael comments from September 4 so far (except yours above at 7:35PM) are mine. Silly habit I guess, but I prefer not to share my last name (though I have shared it with Prof. Wolff and s. wallerstein). Just paranoid about who in my personal life sees me commenting...
To Michael:
You say--- "I will have to rethink the point about Buddhism anticipating Quine."
Why in the world?
Have you not read any of the comments about the utter irrelevance of any religious views to the ideas of Quine?
David Zimmerman,
I have no idea what Quine had to say except what you write above. I do have some familiarity with Buddhism.
I don't see why Buddhist thought could not have anticipated some ideas of Quine.
Buddhist thought doesn't just revolve around religious metaphysics, but includes reflections on language, on the self, on mind, on ethics, etc.
That doesn't mean that Quine took ideas from Buddhism, only that by chance they may have coincided.
Prof. Zimmerman: Yes, I read your comments. Tone down the bile, please.
For the heck of it, I just searched (in Duck Duck Go for a change) on "Quine + Buddhism," and the following is one of the things that came up. I haven't really read it, but some here might find it of interest. (The author's name does not ring a bell, and I didn't look him up.)
The last time I read any Quine was a long time ago, and I'm not particularly up on Buddhism either, so I don't have a dog in this fight. But fwiw:
http://davidpaulboaz.org/philosophy-of-physics-and-cosmology/quines-holistic-revolution-in-science-and-philosophy/
I've already discussed continuous creation before but since there is mention of Buddhism, I thought of repeating that from the Buddhist perspective and note something further from the following quote (emphasis mine):
It has already been suggested (ch. 5), that the Islamic atomistic theory of time may have been the result of Indian influence. In discussing this possibility, MacDonald has drawn attention to an article on 'Atomic Theory (Indian)' by Hermann Jacobi. In it Jacobi referred to the theory of the momentariness of all things formulated by the Sautrânkitas, a Buddhist sect which originated in the second or first century BC. According to that theory everything exists for only an instant and is then replaced by a facsimile of itself, so that it is but a series of momentary existences like the successive frames in a cine-camera film. The concept of entities that appear for only an instant and then disappear was used by Buddhists to prove that all is merely appearance and that absolute reality does not fall within the domain of the intellect. But how and why this atomistic temporal concept, which Buddhism used for its own purposes, was adapted to the very different objects of Islam remains an open question.
In other words, philosophers are trying to understand with mind, what is beyond mind. Like the prisoners in Plato's Cave Allegory who, having never seen reality, keep insisting that reality is the shadows on the wall.
"Mysticism teaches that there is wisdom inaccessible to the intellect. You can only reach it through surrender, being nothing."
~ The Rabbi in #Netflix #RussianDoll S1E3
AF, there was quite a bit of contact between the various religious traditions back when the Silk Road was a thing. The Dunhuang discoveries have been quite interesting. Fr. Francis Tiso has written some interesting speculations.
To all:
This blog is The Philosophers Stone.... not The Religious Mystics Stone.... something to keep in mind.
Professor Wolff raised an important question but almost all of the discussion here has nothing to do with trying to find an answer. Here are some candidates: the cost of creating and maintaining scientific and engineering laboratories; increasing cost of regulatory compliance, e.g., EPA and OSHA regulations for scientific and engineering laboratories; human resources to manage payroll, travel, healthcare, sick leave, vacation, disability, retirement plans; funding retirement plans so that faculty can retire with some modicum of economic security, the lack of which was a major problem in the past; legal costs, e.g., for litigation resulting from alleged sexual harassment, which was accepted and therefore went on for years (with therefore no legal costs) and is now not acceptable; maintenance and upgrading of physical plant and grounds; increased campus security measures, both material and human; and healthcare for students. Then there is the cost of funded research. If a faculty member wins an NIH grant that covers 25% of salary, NIH pays 25% of its salary cap. The university has to make up the balance for faculty who are paid more than NIH cap (e.g., senior medical faculty). Some foundations do not pay negotiated rate for indirect costs and the university must cover the difference for indirect costs. One expense no longer occurs: grounds crews each morning rounding up the dinosaurs in Harvard Yard and herding them to the MIT campus.
Prof. Zimmerman, I am neither interested in nor qualified for getting into a serious debate with you, but I want to follow up on yesterday's conversation - I wasn't too happy with the outcome. Maybe we can briefly sort this out. Speaking for myself, it was not my intention to say anything controversial or disparaging in light of the fact that (at least) one scholar, Tillemans, purportedly "links the relevant Buddhist concerns to the Quinean idea of the inscrutability of reference."
My view (really, my rough, cursory impression) boils down to this: Quine seems to have raised some questions, explored some themes, and advanced some ideas which would have been of significant interest - perhaps sympathetic interest, perhaps even partial familiarity - to people in other philosophical traditions from very different times and places.
The "perhaps" isn't meant to suggest something like, "It's barely, trivially conceivable that..."; more like, "I wouldn't find it surprising if it turned out that..."; and it isn't meant (by me) to be a criticism of Quine, or a reason to be less impressed by the quality of his work.
I've seen people suggest parallels between Buddhism and e.g. Hume (specifically Hume's view of the self), in a similar spirit. The point of such observations, as I see it, is not that everything important and original was exhaustively laid out long before any Western philosophers made their mark, making the latter tremendously overrated. It's just that there seem to be interesting recurring resemblances (some much looser than others) in the history of thought - such that we could often imagine philosophically interesting conversations taking place between the protagonists.
To Michael:
Thank you for your thoughtful and conciliatory message.
On the general question of whether one is well-advised to seek parallels between ideas from different philosophical traditions (however one individuates such traditions, which is sometimes difficult), I can only say:
Different cases will sustain different degrees of credibility and...
The general enterprise of finding parallels should be undertaken with great scholarly sensitivity and a large degree of caution, and even humility.
There are good examples undertaken in that spirit. There are, for example, genuine affinities between the content of the Buddhist doctrine of the "no-self" and Hume's thoughts about what he does not encounter when he introspectively "looks within."
The question, however--- even in this comparatively favourable case-- is whether these affinities add up to much when the individual cases are further considered in their actual philosophical context.
Hume was a radical empiricist who aimed to ground knowledge claims (e.g. "There is a self") in sensory and perceptual experience. When he "looked within" he encountered (or so he said) no such single unified subject, but rather only "a bundle of particular impressions." Thus, lacking a sensory/perceptual basis upon which to ground an inference to the existence of a unified self, he adhered to his empiricist principles and withheld belief in the the conclusion that humans have such a self. His enterprise was epistemological.
Buddhists, on the other hand, are not empiricists (at least how I understand that tradition from a distance). So, their doctrine of the "no self" does not seem to figure as the conclusion of an argument about what humans can know and about what knowledge claims must be based upon. Rather it seems (to me) to figure as a state to be striven for in the quest for a certain kind of spiritual peace or serenity or something like that. Their enterprise, unlike Hume's, is ethical.
Thus, there may be affinities of bare content in the two doctrines (if that's the word), but their philosophical contexts and motivations are vastly different (or so it seems to me), so different in fact that drawing the parallels between the claim made in the British empiricist tradition and the similar claim made in the context of an Asian religious tradition, while interesting, is pretty shallow philosophically (or so it seems to me).
As for Quine and Buddhism or Sufi or what have you, the situation is even worse. First, there isn't even a surface similarity between what the religious traditions in question say about linguistic reference (insofar as they have been depicted here) and what Quine says. And even if there were, the philosophical motivations for the claims (Quine vs. the religious folk) are so vastly different as to render the teasing out of parallels worse than facile, but downright misleading.
I have tried to spell out these differences in earlier post, so I won't go over the same ground again unless someone wants me to.
I appreciate your message. I hope that my response makes sense.
Thanks for the time and thought required to write that, Prof. Zimmerman. I appreciate your message as well - look forward to seeing your commentary in the future here. :)
Michael, leaving Quine aside, there have been speculations on East/West contact and Hume/Buddhism in particular (one sample - there are a few):
https://www.sjsu.edu/people/anand.vaidya/courses/comparativephilosophy/s1/Could-Hume-have-known-about-Buddhism-by-A.-Gopnik.pdf
By Hume's time the Jesuits were literally everywhere and they took notes so who knows?
The reference to Hume and a self (or lack of) that Prof. Zimmerman provided is also used as a Buddhist meditation technique.
You may find Nagarjuna interesting.
Nagarjuna. The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika (p. viii). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
Regarding translation, this is from the introduction:
"Inada reads Nagarjuna from the standpoint of the Zen tradition, and his translation reflects that reading; Kalupahana reads Nagarjuna as a Theravada commentator on the Kaccynagotta-stra, and his translation reflects that reading, as well as his view about the affinities between James’s pragmatism and Theravada Buddhism. Sprung adopts Murti’s Kantian interpretation of Mdhyamika, and his translation reflects that interpretation. Streng reads the text as primarily concerned with religious phenomenology.
And in the commentary:
"Moreover, there is then no explanation of how these powers arise and why they come to be where they are. This is all startlingly anticipatory of Wittgenstein’s famous echo of Hume in the Tractatus:" (6.371, 6.372)
Totally, Nagarjuna has been on my reading list for a while, and has shot up close to the top as a result of this discussion. Thank you! I happen to have that copy of Fundamental Wisdom (but didn't get beyond a couple chapters on my first attempt), as well as Jan Westerhoff's philosophical introduction. Really look forward to getting into it, as soon as I wrap up one other item I'm currently working on (Critique of Practical Reason).
I had to look up the Tractatus reference; here are the passages, if anyone's interested:
(6.37) A necessity for one thing to happen because another has happened does not exist. There is only logical necessity.
(6.371) At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are explanations of natural phenomena.
(6.372) So people stop short at natural laws as at something unassailable, as did the ancients at God and Fate.
And they both are right and wrong. But the ancients were clearer, insofar as they recognized one clear terminus, whereas the modern system makes it appear as though everything were explained.
Michael,
You read books I would not dare to read.
I'm on the level of reading books that explain the books that you dare to read.
I just finished, "Everything all the time, everywhere", by Stuart Jeffries, which explains (to my satisfaction at least) post-modernism, linking it to neoliberalism.
Jeffries is a journalist, obviously very smart, writes clearly, witty, on the left,
understands popular culture as well as so-called high culture. Highly recommended for those of us who are unlikely to pick up Kant's critiques or primary sources in Indian philosophy for our reading.
https://www.vox.com/23296772/vox-conversations-postmodernism-neoliberalism-stuart-jeffries
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