[Buddha-l] The arrow: its removal and examination

[Blumenthal, James]

Richard wrote,

>Don't hold your breath waiting for the world of academic philosophers to show 
>signs of any love of wisdom.

Unfortunately this is my experience as well.  I am the "Asian/Buddhist" philosophy person in an otherwise Western Department.  Of course one person can cover Asia, but with only 10 people covering Western philosophy, the holes are glaring.  My periodic suggestions that we could use more people doing Asian philosophy usually gets a polite smile.  Don't get me wrong; they always pay proper lip service to diversity and claim to recognize the importance of non-Western thought.  But it still takes me raising the issue for anybody to see that a course on Buddhist ontology, epistemology, and logic should fulfill our undergrad major requirement in the upper division metaphysics and epistemology category.  I have attempted to engage various members of the department from time to time.  I gave the historian of logic a copy of Tom Tillemans' article, "Is Buddhist Logic Non-Classical or Deviant?".  His response: "The guy seems to know what he is talking about."  At least he read it.

I believe there is so much to gain from real dialogue between philosophical traditions.  Like inter-faith dialogue, as the world continues to shrink, this sort of work becomes more and more important.  I think part of the problem is simply understandable laziness.  It is no small feat to come to a commanding understanding of Dignaaga and Dharmakiirti and their interpreters, much less to do that on top of a thorough grasp of the history of Western logic.  So to be able to converse in any sort of sophisticated way takes serious work.  And at this point, there are very few with whom to converse.

Jim 


James Blumenthal, Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy
Oregon State University
102-A Hovland Hall
Corvallis, OR 97331-3902