[Buddha-l] Buddhists taking a stand against Islamaphobia

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

Op 07-08-12 22:37, Dan Lusthaus schreef:
> On the other hand, the survival rate for people standing in front of
> speeding trucks insisting it is only in their heads is very, very low.
> The most compelling argument against the type of idealist closure Erik
> recounts is to slap them -- hard -- in the face, repeatedly, until
> they relent and admit there is a physical reality that impacts their
> mental experience without being reduced to it exclusively.
You must be very popular with your students, Dan. But you are making two 
big mistakes.
First of all I did not say what my own view was on the matter (I wrote a 
book on Nāgārjuna who is not an idealist) and there are more theories on 
truth than just materialism and idealism. More important is that you 
don't understand the whole problem. The truck and your teaching methods 
don't prove anything. If everything is ideas me getting killed and 
getting hit by your pedagogical treatment and all the consequences will 
also be ideas. There is no experiment that can show any difference 
between materialism and idealism.
You disappoint me because you have read some Husserl, but appearantly 
did not understand much, let alone Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and 
contempary phenomenologists. There you will find a more interesting and 
intelligent approach than this old and oldfashioned idealism-debate.
> Hence, as Foucault and others have observed, the correspondence theory
> (big in the 16th c; e.g. Descartes) gave way to the representational
> theory (big in the 18th-19th c; e.g., Kant). The idea that theft is a
> social construction is a later derivative of the representational
> theory (when it is treated as more active than passive). But it is not
> a social construction (while the judicial systems designed to curtail
> and punish it are). Tiny children already have a powerful sense of
> "mine" and have to be socialized to accept the notion of sharing
> (there are rare exceptions of generous tots). Western philosophy
> progressing from correspondence to representation to constructivism
> parallels what Yogacara brought to the Indian epistemological scene,
> which by and large nevertheless remained rooted in correspondence theory.
Well you even see a progression that leads to Yogacāra, Since when did 
Kant influence Indian Buddhist writers? I must re-educate myself on 
historical dates.
I beats me how you can say that theft is not a social construction when 
it is defined in law books. Theft is when someone takes something in his 
possession against the rules and we are not born with rules. Tiny 
children also are socialised, be it with somewhat imperfect and unstable 
results.

Erik