[Buddha-l] The Shape of Ancient Thought

[Richard Hayes]

On Thursday 07 September 2006 14:19, curt wrote:

> There is no reason to believe that "philosophizing" hadn't already been
> going on for thousands of years prior to the invention of any sort of
> writing. 

That strikes me as indisputable. So your claim is simply that the Greeks did 
not invent the practice that they called philosophy, although I suppose they 
may have invented the word that Europeans now use to refer to that practice. 
If that is your claim, it seems quite safe, even though we really have no 
evidence of what kinds of ideas people had before they started writing their 
ideas down.

Your point, I take it, is that it is about as preposterous to believe that 
Greeks invented philosophy as it would be to believe that the Buddha was the 
first to discover what he called the four noble truths.

> If you really don't believe that there is any such thing as people who
> claim that the Greeks invented philosophy, 

You misrepresent me. I never said that I don't believe that there are people 
who claim that Greeks invented philosophy. I just said I've never encountered 
anyone who believed that in my circle of friends. But then I have never met 
anyone who admits to having voted for George W. Bush either. As I said, I run 
in a very carefully selected crowd of people who make me feel wise by 
agreeing with me.

> then just do a google search 
> on the names "Allan Bloom" and "Mary Lefkowitz". 

Thanks for the tips. I've never heard of either of these folks, but if they 
believe what you say they believe, then it sounds as though I haven't missed 
anything of great importance.

> They even have their own wikipedia entries:

Then I will no doubt be reading about them in due course. Many of the papers 
that students hand in to me these days are Wikipedia articles. That's because 
quite a few students at my university are so dumb that they think that 
professors are too dumb to google up the same articles the students can 
upgoogle. Thanks to Google, never has detecting plagiarism been so simple.

Today I walked into my Buddhism class read them several passages from Seneca 
and Marcus Aurelius. I refrained from giving a forty-minute lecture on 
Cognitive Archaeological Information Theory to explain how Greeks, Romans and 
Indians might arrive at similar strategies for being content and authentic. I 
confined myself to expressing the opinion that it's a damn shame our society 
has lost touch with what people like Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus,  
Siddhartha Vardhamana and Siddhartha Gautama taught. (In saying it was a damn 
shame, of course, I was descending into the dirty world of value judgment and 
thereby, in a way, ignoring the well-meant admonition of our friend Malcolm 
Dean and diminishing Buddhism by suggesting that it had much more to do with 
values rather than with facts).

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes