[Buddha-l] Buddhists taking a stand against Islamaphobia

[Dan Lusthaus]

Erik, you seem to be missing many points. I have limited time, so quickly:


>> The position that *one cannot know what, if anything, is going on outside 
>> of
>> one's mind* is idealism,
> Wrong, this is called solipsism.

Wrong. That is epistemological idealism. Solipsism is an extreme form of 
epistemological idealism, which, unlike basic epistemological idealism, DOES 
make ontological commitments on the basis of its epistemic limitations. 
(Epistemological idealism can remain ontologically agnostic.)


>It would be like seeing on
> your computer screen what is not in your computer.

Since most computers these days are wired or wirelessly connected to all 
sorts of things outside of themselves, including all sorts of cams, etc., 
this is not only possible, but ubiquitous. As Husserl (since you brought him 
up) would indicate, intersubjectivity -- in this case being able to view the 
same things on different screens, and even different people in different 
places reading the same thing on different screens ...  for instance, 
someone in the Netherlands reading what is also on a screen in the US -- is 
not just "in your computer" or "your mind," but intersubjectively apodictic 
(in Husserl's sense of that term).

The slap-argument is especially effective against solipsism.


Locke already knew
> this, [...]

Lots of name dropping, but no arguments.

> If refuting idealism would be that simple it would not exist.

I never claimed to refute idealism per se, only the pseudo-dilemmas entailed 
by the truck example. They are polemical bluffs since you are certainly sane 
enough to not stand in front of a speeding truck in support of what you 
yourself must know is silly argument.

>Already
> Berkeley's opponents made this argument, which never impressed any
> philosopher.

In fact, Hume was very much impressed by Berkeley (Bishop Berkeley, by the 
way, considered himself an "immaterialist," not an "idealist"), and anyone 
who has encountered Hume's versions of Berkeley's arguments cannot fail to 
be impressed. The primary motive behind Kant's first critique was to respond 
to Hume, which he did weakly (noumena remains a problematic concept); Hume 
has not been refuted. He is either ignored or denigrated (or subjected to 
distorted interpretations), but not refuted.

> Merleau-Ponty's chiasma (crossing over) means the mutual
> interpenetration of the visible and invisible, which has of course
> nothing to do with nerves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optic_chiasm

That appealed to his sense of dialectical ambiguity.

You are familiar with the fact that he held a chair in Child Psychology at 
the Sorbonne and that even in early work like Phenomenology of Perception he 
paid careful attention to scientific studies related to biology and 
perception.


>His late work contains the beginningsn of an
> ontologie based on the 'wild being' which for a change is not rational
> and a mix of fact an fiction.

His être sauvage (even être brut et sauvage) -- which might be less 
sensationally translated as "raw being", though "wild being" has become the 
standard English equivalent -- is simply a deeper exploration of the 
pre-thetic, which is not "not rational", but preconceptual, or more 
precisely, with its intentionalities already embodied and thus veiled in 
ambiguity. The Visible and the Invisible, published posthumously, was 
unfinished; he had formulated numerous outlines for where it would go, but a 
careful reading of the "chiasm" chapter -- dense but finished, an ingenious 
overview of Husserl's Krisis whose structure it follows -- shows that he was 
abandoning several of the teloi he has originally set out for himself, 
particularly various notions of "being" that he initially presumed would be 
recovered in the end. Several speculative attempts at laying out what the 
unfinished sections would have been like have been published. Some see his 
late work as prefiguring, even setting the stage for, Derridean thinking (it 
was, e.g., Merleau-Ponty who first brought Husserl's "On the Origins of 
Geometry" out of obscurity to the forefront, which became the theme of 
Derrida's early work, which included his French translation of that essay, 
and so on). Characterizing the project of Merleau-Ponty's last work as "a 
mix of fact an[d] fiction" strikes me as terribly off the mark.

>> Nagarjuna challenged the idea that language and its intrinsic
>> conceptualizations accurately and coherently mirrored reality, and, in 
>> fact,
>> he exposed language's own pretense to coherency as insupportable.
> Look at the last verses of chapter 7 and 17 of the MMK where he
> explicitly states that the world is an illusion conjured up by an
> illusionary self.

That's not what those verses say at all -- and they are borrowings from 
passages already in the Pali Nikayas, in which context they are not usually 
interpreted as illusionalism. In Nagarjuna they are declaring the incoherent 
theories that pretend to account for 'reality' (e.g., the three marks of all 
conditioned things) to be illusory, not the facticity of pratitya-samutpada.


>> Even for the Yogacaras, ultimately tathata as
>> cognized by a Buddha comes down to a higher form of correspondence.
> With what? What is a 'higher form of correspondence'?

See the bhasya to v.10 of Vasubandhu's Vimsika.

> Possession is a social concept.

As above, you conflate "theories about x" with x itself. Even feral children 
have a sense of what is theirs (try taking it from them). You need to find 
the "raw being" lying beneath the concept of "possession" to see where the 
concept(s) itself comes from.

Dan