Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The logic of Buddhist philosophy

aeon.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 210 posts

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#111

Post by KrisAndrew »

ableal wrote: post #74

(Just a quick note, don't have time for more now.) "The great lodestar of the German Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, said that there are things one cannot experience (noumena), and that we cannot talk about such things. He also explained why this is so: our concepts apply only to things we can experience. Clearly, he is in the same fix as Nagarjuna. So are two of the greatest 20th-century Western philosophers. Ludwig W…

Wittgenstein would say that the Buddha and Schopenhauer were playing a quite similar language-game.

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#112

Post by jackbravo »

septerr wrote: post #86
livingparadox wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would clarify that the "paradox" of being fully human and fully divine is an apparent paradox, not an actual paradox. Most theologians I've come into contact with hold to Jesus' nature being the intersection of all divine traits and all human traits, allowing him to be both God and Man without contradiction. The confusion I think lies in the ambiguity of the word "fully". Its a paradox if we take it to mean "100% o…

Is there any statement/belief in Christian philosophy that Human cannot be divine or Divine cannot be human? If there is then the paradox does exist.

Christian philosophy is a monotheistic philosophy. There is only one god. That is why Jesus being god and human is part of the larger paradox of the holy trinity.

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#113

Post by muraiki »

notdonspaulding wrote: post #92
muraiki wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The approach in Eastern Christianity (pre-Great Schism groups such as the Orthodox, Coptic, and others) is generally that of Apophatic or Negative theology. "Leave behind the senses and the operations of the intellect, and all things sensible and intellectual, and all things in the world of being and non-being, that thou mayest arise by unknowing towards the union, as far as is attainable, with Him who transcends all…

> It should also be noted that I'm not talking about some fringe group of Christianity, but rather the second largest group of Christians in the world. Can you be more specific? Are you talking about Orthodox Christians being the second largest group? If so, are you considering Roman Catholic to be the largest group?

Yes, I'm sorry for being unclear; the three main groups of Christianity would be Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant. But my point isn't to make some kind of numbers claim (it wouldn't matter if Orthodox actually fall in 3rd place anymore), but rather to illustrate that these are not fringe beliefs.

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#115

Post by wyager »

How the hell are there this many people here who buy this hogwash?

>Nagarjuna often runs through the four cases of the catuskoti. In some places, moreover, he clearly states that there are situations in which none of the four applies. They don’t cover the status of an enlightened person after death, for example.

Are you kidding me? This article isn't even about formalizing non-boolean logic. It's thinly veiled religious propaganda, artificially ascribing mathematical formality to a mystical religion.

And yes, statements are either true or false. If you can't say a statement will be either true or false (you don't have to know which one), the statement is ill-defined. Non-binary logical systems are useful only insofar as they allow us to model uncertainty, not because they reflect the nature of reality.

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#116

Post by wyager »

wwweston wrote: post #114

> If something is ineffable, i, it is certainly neither true nor false. Wouldn't it instead be the case that it's simply not expressible inside a given formalism (or other form of expression)?

That is absolutely the case. If something is "ineffable", it's probably logically ill-defined, and we should treat anyone who tries to use something "ineffable" in formal argument as a mystic spouting hogwash.

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#117

Post by pasquinelli »

javert wrote: post #6

But the Law of Non-Contradiction does hold. And it's very easy to save the PEM if you distinguish the value of a proposition (true or false) and the cognitive status of the proposition (certain, probable, possible, or arbitrary). Moreover, to exist is to have a particular identity, to have a nature, to be something. Thus, all of this work is utter hogwash. The professor who wrote this IS practicing mysticism and irra…

"If this kind of thinking were to get "popular," Western civilization and science would collapse into skepticism and religion would take over again."

western civilization and science hinge on how people think about stuff? i think you seriously overestimate the importance of western philosophy to western civilization. roughly speaking, nobody cares but you, and western civilization's fate is independent from what you care about.

and besides, the law of non-contradiction and the law of excluded middle are pretty common sense, yet it isn't altogether clear that religion won't take over again.

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#118

Post by transfire »

It is amazing how tangled men can get in their own thoughts and words. The concept of ineffable is nonsense from the outset. By the definition given, if something were truly ineffable, not a word has been spoken about it. What is being contorted here is the difference between the limitations of words to describe an experience, which is the Buddhist ineffable, and the idea of the unassailable noumena, which is the Reality that might be outside of any experience we can have. There is also nothing mysterious or limiting about Western logic. A statement is either true or false; or it is a contradiction (which generally means a premise was false), or indeterminate (which simply means that no one knows which it is).

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#120

Post by smithy44 »

Could the 'easterners' point be the avoidance of reification and the limitation and mental trapping that involves? For example, we say we see a tornado. But there is no essence of the tornado, no 'thing' there.. it is a perceptual grouping of a set and series of events. Nevertheless, functionally there very much is a tornado. 'It' has its conditions, states, and results. (But there is only the wind...) (And in some visions of physics, this goes all the way down to the vacuum.) Renaming for clarity of action is useful, but no new substances are generated by the act. (One doesn't have to think in terms of the objects in someone else's code nor in terms of the lumped matter discipline.) So if one can think outside of the perceptually given externally, how much more so might it be useful to do so in relation to internals, i.e. 'my anger'.
Post reply on HN