[Buddha-l] Buddhists taking a stand against Islamaphobia

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

Op 09-08-12 05:45, Dan Lusthaus schreef:
>>> 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,
No, it is mostly ontological, see:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/solipsism
> which, unlike basic epistemological idealism, DOES
> make ontological commitments on the basis of its epistemic limitations.
> (Epistemological idealism can remain ontologically agnostic.
You forget, as I already mentioned cases of objective idealism like 
Hegel or Vasubandhu (not your interpretation but it serves as an example)
> )
>
>
>> 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).
Husserl would say that the e-mail is immanent in the computer as a 
noëma, but intentionally transcendent. So yes, you can only know what is 
going on in the world, there is nothing else to know, but you 'do' this 
with your mind, and in this sense you only know what is in your mind.
>
> Locke already knew
>> this, [...]
> Lots of name dropping, but no arguments.
I mean Locke could only explain how the impressions were turned into 
ideas, but could not explain how these ideas also implied imperceptible 
qualities like substantiality. In fact the constructivists (which are 
not considered to be serious philosophers in Europe) still face the same 
problem,
>
>
>> 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
I failed to read the name of Merleau-Ponty in the article, you just mix 
up unrelated items.
> 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.
Of course.
>
>> 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.
Sorry, you just should read better, this not at all what I said, I don't 
agree with your view on the late Merleau-Ponty, the more because you 
don't mention any sources. Merleau-Ponty tried to develop a new ontology 
with two categories the visible and the invisible (this implies thoughts 
and feelings and also what is not yet or not anymore visible). You can 
see his thoughts develop through L'oeil et l'esprit' and 'La prose du 
monde'. I don't see which teloi he abandoned and which notions of being 
and my sources (Rénaud Barbaras and Marc Richir) are not mentioning any. 
He may have inspired Derrida, but you will find no 'différance' in Le 
visible et l'invisible.
L'être sauvage is preconceptual, that is right, and as such it contains 
our dreams, myths as well as the rational thoughts we are about to 
think. Merleau-Ponty wanted to incorporate an anthropological reading of 
Freud in his philosophy. And the translation of 'sauvage' is wild, 
Merleau-Ponty also calls it 'l'être brut' and that is translated as 'raw 
being'.
> 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.is
Do you have any support for your unconventional realistic reading of 
Nāgārjuna, or is it just based on personal inclination?
>
>
>>> 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.
I did, but it doesn't make your point clear. I fail to see the word 
'correspondence' in the text.
>
>> Possession is a social concept.
> As above, you conflate "theories about x" with x itself.
Well a good theory describes and explains x. You have not theory at all. 
As is obvious from your words below, you just guess what children 
'think', but you fail to show any expertise. A dog also gets mad when 
you take away his food, but this does not mean that he has a clear idea 
of possession.
>   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.
We were not arguing about preconceptual concepts (I would love to do 
this some time, but not by e-mail and I would like some beer to go along 
with it), but just about the concept itself and I'm still waiting for 
this sociological evidence. Oh and I'm not convinced of the 
satkāryavāda, so don't try to tell me where concepts come from.

Erik