[Buddha-l] First encounters of the Buddhist kind

[Richard Hayes]

On Monday 14 May 2007 12:14, David Webster wrote:

> Over at our course blog, I have been asking people for their first
> experiences of the study of philosophy - this is at
> http://r-p-e.blogspot.com/2007/05/starting-out-as-philosopher-and-levels.ht
>m l  - 

I get a page not found message at first. Then I copied the URL into the 
browser window, and my browser crashed. This happened twice. Are you sure you 
want to hear our first experiences with the study of philosophy?

My very first experience with philosophy was a course taught by the chair of 
the philosophy department at a small and pretty highly acclaimed liberal arts 
college in the United States. The professor, a crusty eccentric in his 70s 
who had a degree in botany but none in philosophy, believed (and preached) 1) 
that no philosophical question can't be either answered by scientific method 
or shown to be an inherently unanswerable pseudo-problem; 2) that all 
religions are systems of superstition that have been superseded by science 
and common sense, 3) that no women are capable of serious intellectual work 
and should therefore not be admitted to colleges and universities, 4) that no 
people of African or Asian descent are capable of the sort of objectivity 
needed to do proper science, and 5) that all left-handed people are 
congenitally disabled and too mentally retarded to do serious intellectual 
work. (These last three beliefs were empirically verified by the fact that no 
woman, African, Asian, African American, Asian American, Asian African or 
left-handed person ever got higher than a D in his courses.) Absolutely 
nobody took this guy seriously; almost everybody took one course from him 
just to see him in operation. To my horror, he took a liking to me and 
thought I had promise as a philosopher, as a result of which I studiously 
avoided reading any philosophical literature for the next five years.

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