What is the aim and purpose of comparative religion? — baker

Comparative religion is the branch of the study of religions concerned with the systematic comparison of the doctrines and practices, themes and impacts (including migration) of the world's religions. In general the comparative study of religion yields a deeper understanding of the fundamental philosophical concerns of religion such as ethics, metaphysics and the nature and forms of salvation. It also considers and compares the origins and similarities shared between the various religions of the world. Studying such material facilitates a broadened and more sophisticated understanding of human beliefs and practices regarding the sacred, numinous, spiritual and divine. — Wikipedia

I explained earlier in this thread my motivation for studying it was to understand what was meant by the 'enligtenment' promoted by figures in the popular media at the time, such as:



I entered University through a 'mature-age student exam' (no longer offered). A large part of the exam that day was a comprehension test on a long passage from Bertrand Russell's essay, Mysticism and Logic - which was just the kind of thing I was interested in. I was to learn that there wasn't much discussion of it in philosophy or psychology, but there was at least some discussion of it in Comparative Religion, which had a broad curriculum. (The first class of comparative religion was taken up with the question, can religion be defined? which we failed.)

The point of that study was, as the quoted section says, to understand the common themes in different religious traditions, through a number of perspectives. It was as near as you can get to a kind of scientific study of the subject. I found the anthropological and sociological perspectives particularly interesting.

The 'old school' approach to comparative religion was very much 'beetles on boards' - the attempt to classify, summarise, describe, very much as laboratory specimens. That was exemplified by the Head of Department. They weren't really into 'finding yourself' or exploring enlightenment as a spiritual quest. That has begun to change in the later part of the 20th c with the advent of the 'scholar-practitioner' types (who often hailed from the sixties generation.) One of my classmates was the very interesting Harry Oldmeadow who has a good reputation in 'perennialist philosophy' circles.

Yes, I think you’re right about purification. I hope your back pain abates, if it’s any comfort, I’ve had that occur twice in my life, both times it was excruciating but it passed after a day.

thank you.

None of which makes your case. — Banno

I have no need to make a case for something which is laid out in any textbook in plain English.

Your examples are not conclusive. Regarding whether 'clouds are fluffy' or not, it is a factual matter. If in such cases the terms can't be defined clearly enough to be decided objectively, then it's ambiguous. Regarding how many apples should be in the basket, that is predicated on whether your calculation is correct, or whether you were possessed of the relevant data when you declared there ought to be five apples. You're not saying there ought to be five apples because it would be ideal, but that according to your calculations there should be five, which will either be correct or not. So you're not using 'should' in the normative sense in that context.

I wonder, where did you get that idea from? — Banno

The fact–value distinction is derived from the is–ought problem in moral philosophy as characterized by David Hume. This is the fundamental epistemological distinction described between:

1. 'Statements of fact' ('positive' or 'descriptive statements'), based upon reason and physical observation, and which are examined via the empirical method.
2. 'Statements of value' ('normative' or 'prescriptive statements'), which encompass ethics and aesthetics, and are studied via axiology.

So I'm saying that the former are primarily quantitative in nature, and hence capable of objective validation. The latter are primarily qualitative in nature and so are not subject to objective validation, although this doesn't imply that they're 'merely subjective', either. It is the orthodox interpretation of the import of the is/ought problem.

I didn’t understand your response. To recap - I understand the distinction Hume is making to be between the quantifiable (what is/is not) and the qualitative (what ought/ought not). And I see that fundamental distinction writ large in the entire debate about the ‘hard problem’ and the nature of consciousness, where the qualitative dimension appears as ‘qualia’, the significance of which is dismissed by the materialist accounts.

any acknowledgments or objections? — Nickolasgaspar

I’m afraid not. Anything I will say will be taken as evidence that I don’t understand neuroscience. But this is a philosophy forum, not a neuroscience forum, and the fact that you think neuroscience explains the problems of philosophy indicate to me that you don’t understand what kinds of problems philosophy seeks to tackle. Take a look at a couple of the pieces I pinned to my profile page, Anything but Human, and It Ain’t Necessarily So.

?

Here's a principle for you: there is a difference between saying how things are and saying how they ought to be. — Banno

So do you think that the distinction Hume articulates here is between ‘the quantitative’ (‘is’) and the qualitative (‘ought’)? That he is drawing a distinction between what is or is not the case, and what can only be inferred? Or would that be an over-simplification?

Our current epistemology demonstrates the Necessity and Sufficiency of brain mechanisms for the emergence of human mind states. — Nickolasgaspar

‘It’ does no such thing. There is no such consensus. This is a philosophy forum, as such knowledge of neuroscience is not assumed or necessary, although at least some knowledge of philosophy would be considered desireable.

Life is the emergence of specific biological process. Meaning is a quality that emerges in specific biological functions (brain functions). — Nickolasgaspar

That is because you assume that thought is reducible to neuroscience, which is precisely the meaning of 'neuroscientific reductionism'. There are many criticisms of neuroscientific reductionism which are too voluminous to try and give an account of here. But I would argue that it's a mistake to ascribe semantic content to neurological data. Semantic content, which is the content of meaningful statements, is of a different order to the kinds of data the neuroscience deals with. Saying that neurobiological signals 'mean' something or 'transmit meaning' is projecting semantic value onto neurological signals. But neuroscience itself is nowhere near to understanding this process on a practical level. Overall it is concerned with much more specific functions of the brain, typically but not always concentrating on pathologies of various kinds. So neuroscientific reductionism is said to commit the 'mereological fallacy', that is, the ascription of what conscious agencies are able to do, to only one part of the organism, namely, the brain.

Besides, that is not the point of the emerging science of biosemiosis, which I referred to, which is the sense in which signs (and therefore meaning) are inherent in all living processes, even very simple ones like single-celled organisms. That is in turn connected with the view that rational sentient beings such as ourselves don't live in a world comprising physical objects, but a world comprising meanings - the meaning-world or 'umwelt' which is interpreted by us as (among other things) a physical domain.

It is evident that meaning is constructed as we use words, but further, that our broader "form of life" is a construct. — Banno

According to biosemiosis, and pansemiosis, it's something inherent in the Universe. Life is the emergence of meaning. So this contention that life was 'the outcome of atoms which had no precognition of the end they were achieving', and that meaning is something 'we create', is, shall we say, deeply questionable.

Silence is indeed possible here. Perhaps you might give it a shot.

Maybe I should have said Kant would recommend you tell the Russian troops where the Ukrainian women are hiding because lying is wrong. — Tom Storm

In such cases we would tell Kant to fuck off.

...because my cynical eye tells me it ain't so; there can be no "cosmic grounding", it has to be all our own work. That's why it is important; if it were all down to god, our choices wouldn't be that important. — Banno

By 'cosmic', what I mean is this. A typically early-20th century view (put by Bertrand Russell and later by Dawkins et al) was that Darwinism had 'proved' that the mythology of creation was false. So instead of an intentional act, the obvious alternative was the opposite - life as a consequence of chance, given a vast enough universe and enough random interactions of atoms, then life arises as something like a chemical reaction, which then becomes subject to the Darwinian algorithm, which leads to its elaboration into the forms we now see. This is the subject of vast amounts of 20th C literature. And it is still the view of neo-Darwinian materialism, close to the mainstream.

So what's the alternative. I mean, I never for a moment believed that the creation mythology was literally true. So the fact that it's not literally true did not, for me, have the earth-shattering consequences that Dawkins seemed to imagine would flow from The God Delusion. I always saw mythological accounts as just that - mythological, not simply uninformed empirical theories. But they do carry a profound meaning. One of them is conveyed by the 'myth of the fall', which is a myth about the groundlessness of the human condition, the fact that everything we know and love is subject to death and destruction, and the fact that human nature seems to have innate capacities for destruction and less-than-optimal behaviour. THe problem of evil, and the problem of the vast suffering of life, remains.

So in a larger sense one can perfectly well accept the findings of empirical science - big bang cosmology, evolution by natural selection - and still find that many of the problems of philosophy remain. So what the naturalist account needs to offer is some grounds for why all of this has happened, what it actually means. The existentialist-atheist answer is that it means nothing whatever, that we 'create meaning' and must be brave enough to acknowledge it. That's one answer.

The answer that I prefer is more Bergsonian - that the evolutionary process is an essential part of the Cosmos. We're not simply the accidental outcome of chance and necessity but our being is intrinsic to the unfolding of the Cosmos.

I cross posted whilst you were busy recycling that garbage photo, which again makes me wonder whether I'm simply wasting my time putting up coconuts.

hey it was Nietszche who was adulated by the Nazis, not Kant. I think the ideology of the Ubermensch is far more suited to fascist authoritarianism than the Critique of Pure Reason.

SO the first ask is to show folk that ethics is not like physics, and is not a branch of theology nor of biology. — Banno

Unlike yourself, I don't rule out the perspective provided by philosophical theology or religion generally, insofar as they provide a cosmic grounding for ethics.

I think I'm probably most drawn to 'natural law theory' but I'm not going to go to any lengths to defend it. (I note there's a pretty decent entry on it in Wikipedia. And with that, I bow out.)

I think the idea behind 'meaningless matter' is simply that matter (apparently) can be fully accounted for in terms of physical laws, which act with no intentionality or end in mind. It is an expression characteristic of philosophical materialism. Hylomorphic dualism harks back to Aristotle which does not have those assumptions.

Meaning is inherent within form. How could there be form without meaning? — Janus

Hence the appeal of hylomorphic dualism, although that's worlds away from what Nishijima means. Although I think you mentioned you have To Meet the Real Dragon, didn't you? Still think it a great book.

You and I ought be working together to show Nickolasgaspar that there is more to ethics than physics. Have you noticed his profile image? The Scientism is strong in this one. — Banno

Well, true. But it's kind of the default, isn't it? Hasn't evolutionary biology rushed in to fill the vacuum left by the abandonment of traditional creeds? It seems very much taken-for-granted.

You're right that it's hard to 'find a creed'. When I set out on my quest, the last thing I wanted to become was a believer in anything. I thought that all creeds were the fossilised remnants of ideas. But it's turned out not to be so simple.

There cannot be any watertight argument for the kind of idea I'm considering. You recall Fooloso4's thread on Phaedo. Rife with aporia, inconclusive arguments.

Good for you. So what. — Banno

So, it addresses the question, although I do understand that your stereotyping contempt of anything you categorise as 'religious' has no gapps in it whatever.

I have read, and pondered, the Prajnaparamita, and, of course, one can easily see why thinking like this is all but absent from our culture and thinking. It calls for the annihilation of the world, if taken to its conclusion. — Constance

Actually, Buddhism of all schools stridently rejects the charge that it is nihilistic. It is a charge that was frequently made by its Brahmin opponents and was also characteristic of the early European intepretations of Buddhism. It's not 'annihilation of the world' but a clear insight into clinging to the apparent reality of sensations and concepts as inherently real. It's a subtle skill, and exceedinly hard to master - I don't claim to have mastered it in the least.

The point I tried to make, which I'm afraid has not come across, are the convergences between that characteristically Buddhist discipline of 'choiceless awareness' of the contents of consciousness and the idea of 'bracketing' that is found in phenomenology. That has been the subject of considerable commentary i.e. in the 'embodied cognition' movement.

So an unconditional good is something you would find, something you would come across out in the world. — Banno

There is a phrase that you will find in the sayings of mystical lore, 'the good that has no opposite'. The thrust of this is that what we normally consider good is always part of a pair - that is, good fortune, good luck, good health, and so on, are always paired with their opposites, in that either is possible. What is good always comes with the possibility of what is bad - good health and good fortune are with us only for so long as their opposites do not prevail.

The good that has no opposite is a good that is not subject to vicissitudes. That is what, I think, religious teachings intend to convey. Does it exist 'out in the world'? It's not a species of animal or some form of natural phenomena. But I think, for instance, the kind of unconditional commitment to charity that is found in charitable organisations indicates a belief in such principles.

Would you class secular humanism as foundational? — Tom Storm

'Secular' means 'excluding religion'. So you're left with something like the common good, what works, greatest good for greatest number, or (here's a favourite) 'evolutionarily advantageous'.

I think there are ethical theorists who develop philosophies on such a basis - John Rawls, I believe, and probably also Peter Singer. But I've always had confidence that there is an unconditional good, and if that makes me religious, then so be it.

Religious doctrine is written by people, no? — Isaac

That's the secular take on it. But the religious believe in the principle of revealed truth, which by definition is the revelation of a true good. I'm not saying you or anyone should accept that, but it's worth noting the difficulties involved in its absence.

And anyway, consider traditional philosophy, as distinct from religious revelation. According to Pierre Hadot, in ancient philosophy 'The Sage was the living embodiment of wisdom, “the highest activity human beings can engage in . . . which is linked intimately to the excellence and virtue of the soul”. So in that view, the sage is able to discern 'the good' which the uneducated and untrained do not. In that understanding, humans don't possess an innate ability to discern the good, at least not without training in philosophy, which is concerned with discerning the good, and the curriculum of philosophy is in learning that skill.

So the above examples prove... — Nickolasgaspar

I don't think they constitute any kind of proof, and actually I didn't use the term 'absolute'. What I'm asking is, what could be the grounds for certain acts or attitudes to be considered good independently of your or my or society's evaluation of them as good - a 'true good' if you like.

By independently evaluating each act and realizing if it is in favor or against the well being of members and their society we can arrive to objective conclusions about the moral value of an act. — Nickolasgaspar

which is basically an appeal to utilitarian ethics. Not that utilitarian ethics are necessarily bad.

I think the question is, is there any true good? Is there anything which is unconditionally good, not a matter of either social convention or individual conviction? I don't know if that automatically entails absolutism - the requirement is simply for some good that is not simply a matter of individual or social judgement. And that seems a very hard thing to discern sans a religious doctrine.

As for objectivity, its range is restricted to what can be objectively validated. The dilemma for modern culture is that there are many ethical questions which cannot be so validated, hence are not objective, but that there are no shared criteria other than objectivity against which to make judgements. This is the crux of Hume's is/ought problem - that what is measurable is not the same as what is necessarily preferable.

My sense is that the electorate is pretty sick of Morrison as PM but that it's still going to be a stretch for Labor to flip it. I think Albanese's overall game has improved hugely in the last 6 months odd, he never seemed a credible alternative to me before then but he does now.

Actually, if you think about it, this 'using the concept of spirit only figuratively' is not a million miles from Aquinas' analogical language.

Maintaining that God cannot be expressed as a being seems to remove him from the discussion of different 'modes' or levels of 'being' rather than provide the means for such. — Paine

Note the inclusion of the indefinite article 'a'. I think when you use that, you're already including 'God' in a set - the set of possible deities, or whatever. This is addressed by Paul Tillich - if God is being qua being, then He cannot be a being. See Pierre Whalon God does not Exist, also What is the Ground of Being? (I think by a blogger called 'metacrock'.)

What is the phenomenological reduction? It is a suspension of the natural way we relate to the world, the everydayness, the science, and the implicit default interpretations that are always there in a given moment of conscious existence, in the effort to discover the "things themselves". — Constance

:clap: Hence the links that have been discerned between Pyrrho (ancient Skepticism), and Buddhism, which has emerged in the last couple of decades (e.g. see Everard Flintoff 'Pyrrho and India'). From this you can discern a 'family resemblance' between Husserl's ‘epoché’ and the Buddhist ‘śūnyatā, between the Skeptic 'ataraxia' (tranquility) and the Buddhist 'nirodha' (cessation) which connotes 'suspension of judgement'. e.g. from an OP on the Buddhist teaching on emptiness:

Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there's anything lying behind them. — Thanissaro Bhikkhu

where the resemblance can be clearly seen.

Religion is about the Good, as Witt said. — Constance

Also from a Buddhist source:

The Universe is, according to philosophers who base their beliefs on idealism, a place of the spirit. Other philosophers whose beliefs are based on a materialistic view, say that the Universe is composed of the matter we see in front of our eyes.

Buddhist philosophy takes a view which is neither idealistic nor materialistic; Buddhists do not believe that the Universe is composed of only matter. They believe that there is something else other than matter. But there is a difficulty here; if we use a concept like 'spirit' to describe that 'something else other than matter', people are prone to interpret Buddhism as some form of spiritualistic religion and think that Buddhists must therefore believe in the actual existence of spirit. So it becomes very important to understand the Buddhist view of the concept 'spirit'. I am careful to refer to spirit as a concept here because in fact Buddhism does not believe in the actual existence of spirit.

So what is this something else other than matter which exists in this Universe? If we think that there is a something which actually exists other than matter, our understanding will not be correct; nothing physical exists outside of matter....Some people explain the Universe as a universe based on matter. But there also exists something which we call value or meaning. A Universe consisting only of matter leaves no room for value or meaning in civilizations and cultures. Matter alone has no value. We can say that the Universe is constructed with matter, but we must also say that matter works for some purpose. So in our understanding of the Universe we should recognize the existence of something other than matter. We can call that something spirit, but if we do we should remember that in Buddhism, the word 'spirit' is a figurative expression for value or meaning. We do not say that spirit exists in reality; we use the concept only figuratively. — Nishijima Roshi, Three Philosophies, One Reality

Notice the convergence between 'matter alone has no value' and the aphoristic passage previously quoted from Wittgenstein 'If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so'.

A lurking issue with these comparisons is that in our minds skepticism is usually associated with a kind of common-sense realism which implicitly preferences sensory (i.e. empirical) experience, whereas the ancient skeptics and Buddhists were skeptical of the innate sense of reality that common-sense realism takes for granted.

A second difficulty is that Buddhism's aims were soteriological (i.e. concerned with salvation or liberation), but in our minds such philosophies must necessarily depend on the acceptance of dogma (which is what we equate with 'faith'). So here we're presented with something that seems paradoxically like a 'skeptical faith'.

Fair enough. Although it is the absence of the qualitative dimension that prevents there being any real basis for ethics, other than ‘what I think is right’ - as I think has been amply demonstrated by the earlier discussion about it.

What I thought was significant about it was, first, the way it shows that the Vienna Circle, and A J Ayer, completely misconstrued Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Second, the implicit religiosity * of Wittgenstein’s philosophical orientation, characterised by his adoption of Tolstoy’s adaptation of the Gospels. And finally how that accounts for his conviction that ‘ethics are transcendent’ along with those other aphorisms which indicate the transcendent source of ethics. As that essay states, none of these are the views of one who had renounced metaphysics, as the positivists claim. Rather his ‘silence’ is understandable as a kind of apophaticism which actually has a long pedigree in ‘traditional metaphysics’.

Thinking further about @Banno’s emphasis on the metaphysics of ‘doing’ - those schematic representations I provided earlier about the various levels of the hierarchy of being in the different traditions. The point is, all of those were indeed very much associated with cultures which embodied those understandings in social practices, religion, even in architecture (i.e. sacred architecture). In other words, they weren’t simply meaningless phrases but the distillation of the sacred principles of those cultures. It is (as Karen Armstrong says) modern Western culture which treats those terms as ‘propositional’ i.e. reduces them to verbal formulas and then declares them ‘meaningless’ - the same culture which has declared life and all who live it that ‘outcome of the accidental collocations of atoms’ (Russell, A Free Man’s Worship.)

——-

* Thomas Nagel says in his Secular Phillosophy and the Religious Temperament that Wittgenstein clearly had a religious attitude to life while not an adherent of any particular religion.

What Banno said. also see the Philosophy Now article upthread.

But Witt, like Kant, in denying metaphysics any meaning — Constance

I don’t think either of them did that though. More that they were scrupulous about the use of conceptual language for what is beyond its scope.

The distant cause of these problems was the loss of the use of analogical language and symbolic imagery. That in turn goes back to Duns Scotus ‘univocity of being’. It was that which foreclosed the possibility of there being expressions conveying different modes or levels of being.

(But I’m not going to be able to develop on that right now as it’s not the kind of dialogue that lends itself to tapping out characters on an iphone in a car park. But see this post.)

They’re not my intellectual property, and they’re not literal descriptions.

I found it an illuminating read.

As Ray Monk says in his superb biography Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1990), “the anti-metaphysical stance that united them [was] the basis for a kind of manifesto which was published under the title The Scientific View of the World: The Vienna Circle.” Yet as Wittgenstein himself protested again and again in the Tractatus, the propositions of natural science “have nothing to do with philosophy” (6.53); “Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences” (4.111); “It is not problems of natural science which have to be solved” (6.4312); “even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all” (6.52); “There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical” (6.522). None of these sayings could possibly be interpreted as the views of a man who had renounced metaphysics.

That's at odds with the notion, due in the main to Wittgenstein, that the really important stuff of ethics, aesthetics, of life, is non-propositional, the it is shown, not stated - something I thought you were down with. — Banno

Makes you wonder why he bothered putting pen to paper.

Any thoughts on this? It is, after all, posted on the website of the British Wittgenstein Society.

reference?

Relevant OP
https://www.britishwittgensteinsociety.org/wittgensteintolstoy-and-the-folly-of-logical-positivism

The discussion was around where in the Huston Smith schema I presented does science belong - actually the comment was ‘science ought to be added to it’. So I said that science is already there, in the ‘inner circle’. There’s a simplified version of the schematic (from integral psychology):



Natural science is situated mainly in the inner circles - physics and biology. There are always questions as to whether psychology is a science at all, and as for theology….well, what need be said.

So for the purposes of naturalism, only natural explanations ought to be considered - which is perfectly sound. But when it comes to the philosophical question of the reality or otherwise of the outer rings - well, that’s a metaphysical question. Properly speaking the naturalist response to whether they are real is not to venture an hypothesis (‘that of which we cannot speak’….)

Positivism is the tendency to assert that nothing outside the naturalist circle should ever be considered, because there is no evidence - well, nothing which it considers evidence. It starts by excluding certain kinds of factors or ideas - again quite sound with respect to its scope of application but not beyond. But this doesn’t mean there is no beyond. That is what occurs as a result of taking mythological naturalism as a metaphysic, which it isn’t.

Scientific laws are universal in scope, within their range of applicability. But the question of ‘what is a scientific law’ is not itself a scientific question. It’s a metaphysical issue, one on which there are various competing schools of thought. But it’s not really subject to scientific verification.

I would say more, but I family duties are screaming calling.

Faith is believing despite the evidence. — Banno

Something more like positivism.

as if the rejection of scientism leads folk to the rejection of science as a profound human enterprise. — Banno

Nothing of the kind. Think about what the postulate of methodological naturalism excludes. When that is transposed to the domain of philosophy it is not only ‘scientism’ that results. That is what I think that TLP passage is driving at.

I think this a too narrow notion of science. Science is, for many if not most scientists, a spiritual practice, a way of transcending their self by achieving an understanding of the world. The rituals of bottle washing and statistical analysis are part of a far bigger picture, they have a place within a great enterprise that has as it's goal the comprehension of reality itself. How is that not much the same as your circles in circles? — Banno

I had this more in mind:

At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. — TLP 6.371

It probably wouldn't be ethical — Agent Smith

Certainly wouldn't. How do you think the lucky guy would feel 'hey we've brought you back to life, but all your relatives died a million years ago. Let us know if you need anything.'