Online research in philosophy

In Descartes's time the issue between materialists and their opponents was framed in terms of substances. Materialists such as Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Gassendi maintained that people are physical systems with abilities that no other physical systems have; people, therefore, are special kinds of physical substance. Descartes's DUALISM, by contrast, claimed that people consist of two distinct substances that interact causally: a physical body and a nonphysical, unextended substance. The traditional.

For two hundred years materialist philosophers have argued that man is some sort of machine. The claim began with French materialists of the Enlightenment such as Pierre Cabanis, Julien La Mettrie, and Baron d’Holbach (La Mettrie even wrote a book titled Man the Machine). Likewise contemporary materialists like Marvin Minsky, Daniel Dennett, and Patricia Churchland claim that the motions and modifications of matter are sufficient to account for all human experiences, even our interior and cognitive ones. Whereas the Enlightenment philosophes might have thought of humans in terms of gear mechanisms and fluid flows, contemporary materialists think of humans in terms of neurological systems and computational devices. The idiom has been updated, but the underlying impulse to reduce mind to matter remains unchanged.

This article explores the autobiographical writings of Western monks living in Thailand in the light of scholarship on modern and Western Buddhism to understand their constructions of Buddhism. I explore Western monks' understanding of Buddhism before leaving for Thailand, their experiences of integrating into Thai Buddhism, and their lives after returning to their home countries. Their constructions consist of Buddhism as a scientific, rational tradition focused on the practice of meditation. These constructions are challenged during monastic life in Thailand and further problematized when reintegrating into their home countries. I find that they encounter challenges incorporating monasticism into Western countries and may choose lay life?reflecting the trend of laicization in Western Buddhism. I conclude that their constructions of Buddhism conceived in Western countries affect their experiences in Thailand and afterwards.

Roderick Nash’s conc1usion in Wilderness and the American Mind that St. Francis “stood alone in a posture of humility and respect before the natural world” is not supported by thorough analysis of monastic literature. Rather St. Francis stands at the end of a thousand-year monastic tradition. Investigation of the “histories” and sayings of the desert fathers produces frequent references to the environment, particularly to wildlife. In stories about lions, wolves, antelopes, and other animals, the monks sometimes exercise spiritual powers over the animals, but frequently the relationship is reciprocal: the monks provide for the animals and the animals provide for the monks. This literature personifies wild animals and portrays them as possessing Christian virtues. The desert monk is portrayed as the “new Adam” living at peace with creation. Some of the literature is anti-urban, with the city treated as a place of sin, the desert a place of purification. The wildemess functions much as a monk’s cell, providing freedom from worldly concems and a solitary place for prayer and contemplation. The monks’ relationship to the desert is evidence of their spiritual progress.

How can materialists begin to do justice to the experiencing subject? Some materialists, whom I call ?structuralists?, believe that the brain sciences offer at least the distant prospect of a materialist psychology with an experiencing subject. Others, and notably those materialists who are functionalists, believe that this faith is misplaced, and offer us instead a functional psychology. I argue, briefly, that functionalism cannot deliver the goods, and go on to elaborate and defend the structuralist claim that consciousness or experience is the formation of content conceived as that laying down of traces commonly assumed to be involved in perception and cognition.

Most modern scholars seem to assume that Buddhist monks in early India had a good knowledge of Buddhist doctrine and at least of basic Buddhist texts. But the compilers of the vinayas or monastic codes seem not to have shared this assumption. The examples presented here are drawn primarily from one vinaya , and show that the compilers put in place a whole series of rules to deal with situations in which monks were startlingly ignorant of both doctrine and text. One of these examples is particularly interesting for what it suggests about the linguistic sophistication of nuns, and another because it presents a case in which a nun is required to fill an important liturgical role in public and in the presence of monks.