[lit-ideas] Re: The 'Near-Eastern' influences on the Greek philosophy, sc...

  • From: "Peter D. Junger" <junger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 10 Apr 2004 10:40:18 -0400

John McCreery writes:

: One implication of this argument is that without (2) Greek thought and 
: its Roman successors would have been left at the same pre-scientific 
: level as Hindu, Buddhist or Confucian philosophy, all wonderful mental 
: architectures built by unaided rational thought on the basis of what 
: one culture or another takes to be natural categories.

I wonder if this is quite fair to Buddhist ``philosophy,'' which
most certainly is---and was---not based on unaided rational thought,
but rather on one's own experience, is almost excessively concerned
with (natural) law-like rules---the first teaching by the Buddha
is referred to as the ``first turning of the wheel of the
law''---and seems much closer to modern scientific 
understanding---especially in the cognitive sciences---than is
any ``philosophy'' that grew out of monotheistic theology.  

I would also note that the skeptical tradition that in the West
starts with Pyrrho and passes through Sextus Empiricus to Hume 
appears to have been a product of the Greek encounter with
gymnosophists in India during Alexander's incursion into that
subcontinent.  The gymnosophists pretty clearly were not Buddhists,
since Buddhists wore clothes, but may well have been Jains or
may have been members of other traditions of ``philosophy'' that
were plentiful in India in the times of the Buddha and Ashoka and
Alexander.  That skeptical tradition strikes me as having far
more to do with modern ``scientific'' philosophy than does any
monotheistic tradition.

--
Peter D. Junger--Case Western Reserve University Law School--Cleveland, OH
 EMAIL: junger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx    URL:  http://samsara.law.cwru.edu   
        NOTE: junger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx no longer exists
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