(May 21, 2016 at 11:40 pm)Rhythm Wrote: All you seem to be trying to establish is that western philosophy has/had it's crazies. Agreed. So does eastern philosophy, but when I bring it up you tell me that's not the eastern philosophy you're talking about. Counting the hits, ignoring the misses. Something tells me these metrics are hopelessly skewed...
Something with all of that scrubbed out, something closer to causal determinism in the western tradition, something more syncretic......yeah? -Just- as your formulation of anatta was the scrubbed, syncretic version. I'm neither surprised, nor criticizing you for preferring those versions. They are the versions sold to the western audience - for obvious reasons.
I'm actually not interested in the fact that there have been nuts on both sides of the Euphrates to scribble down nonsense and call it philosophy. We both agree on that. What we keep coming back to is that I'm talking about eastern philosophical traditions and you keep talking about eastern religion. It's like objecting to the rationality of Democritus's atomism by citing Zeus's shapeshifting philandering.
And my formulation of anatta isn't scrubbed. It's syncretic in that it integrates what we know about modern physics with the original doctrine, but to Nagarjuna it was exactly what I propounded: a refutation of substance theory informed by a commitment to skepticism. Likewise with paticcasamuppada. In its original formulation, even before the more sophisticated philosophical traditions arose, it was a formalization of phenomenological causal processes.
