Further Studies In Philosophy

 

A few thoughts aloud

(Reading Toulmin and Montaigne this morning sparked some exciting musings and thoughts!)

Serious studies of philosophy…ahhh, that makes me so happy. That makes me smile, and chuckle with joy.

Now, the really big show, which I want to do formally one day (having eschewed formalities, with good reason, I believe, most of my life, and for the past 30 years and 50,000 hours of independent studies, in the tradition of Thoreau and Montaigne):

A philosophical examination of the philosophy of David Hume – who is as yet UNANSWERED in the West – in comparison with Nagarjuna – the only philosopher I know who HAS answered Hume: the preeminent scholar and philosopher of Mahayana Buddhism (both Tibetan and Zen).

Included need to be chapters on:

David Hume: his central challenge, and why no one in the West has adequately answered him.

Nagarjuna: a) the philosophy of the Middle Way; and b) a response to Hume, and c) to the present impasse of Western philosophy (now stuck in a rotting bog, an intellectual cul de sac, after being high-jacked and effectively lobotomized by 50 years of post-modernist claptrap and pseudo-philosophical, pseudo-intellectual psychobabble

Ancient, medieval and modern Skepticism, from Pyrrho to Montaigne to Hume, to the 20th century and the present

Nihilism from the ancient Sophists, through Nietzsche, the existentialists and the post-modernists

Positivism, scientism, and sheep dip

The fallacies of mechanism, dualism, reductionism, and the Newtonian-Cartesian world view

The middle way between the dogmatic ideological fetishes of modernism, and the equally dogmatic nihilism and relativism of post-modernism

Secular and religious fundamentalism: from neoliberalism and neoconservatism, to fundamentalist Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism and Islam (all of which pose far lesser dangers than do the quite literally fascist and world-destroying aforementioned fetishes)

Gender, sex, race, class, and other forms of hierarchy from 10,000 BP to the present (both value hierarchy and power hierarchy, which of course are different from hierarchies of complexity – which the brilliant polymath Ken Wilber conflates and seems not to recognize)

The rebirth of an ecology of mind and an ecological worldview (as opposed to a dualistic, mechanistic, reductionist worldview, philosophy, or paradigm) – not a magical worldview, nor a primitivist worldview, nor a pantheistic worldview, but simply an ecological worldview (see Joanna Macy, Helena Norberg-Hodge, and Allan Wallace) which is, or will be, both liberating and enlightening, as well as eminently practical and pragmatic (see Dewey and William James) and based, not in fairytale hocus-pocus, or post-modernist labyrinthine confusion, but in a radical empiricism – which is to say, the birth of a true empiricism for the West, and a rebirth of empiricism and common sense for the world

Lots to work on! Yeah! 🙂

(And if a university, say in Cordoba, Argentina, or Guanajuato, Mexico – or via distance education at my alma matter, Trent University, or perhaps the college founded by one of my teachers, Lama Zopa, outside Florence, Italy, Institute Lama Tzong Khapa  – wants to give me a grant to pursue such a course of studies, be it called a phD program, or a very ambitious masters degree, I would not object!)

JTR,

April 4, 2020