In the current academic climate, teaching is often seen as secondary to research. Teaching Philosophy seeks to bring teaching philosophy higher on the academic agenda.An international team of contributors, all of whom share the view that philosophy is a subject that can transform students, offers practical guidance and advice for teachers of philosophy. The book suggests ways in which the teaching of philosophy at undergraduate level might be facilitated. Some of the essays place the emphasis on individual self discovery, others (...) focus on the wider political context, many offer practical ideas for enhancing the teaching of philosophy through exercises that engage students in often unconventional ways. The integration of students' views on teaching provides a necessary reminder that teaching is not a one-way process, but a project that will ultimately succeed through cooperation and a shared sense of achievement amongst participants. (shrink)

This paper provides an analysis of suffering and compassion in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas describes compassion as ‘the nexus of human subjectivity’ and the ‘supreme ethical principle’. In his early texts, suffering discloses the burden of being, the limits of the self, and thus the approach of alterity. Levinas’s later phenomenology of suffering as passive, meaningless, and evil, functions as a refutation of rational explanations of suffering. I argue that Levinasian substitution, the traumatic election to an excessive responsibility, (...) is the compassionate suffering that Levinas terms the nexus of human subjectivity. For Levinas, ethics is the compassionate response to the vulnerable, suffering Other. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy provides the advanced student or scholar a set of introductions to each of the world's major non-European philosophical traditions.

J. Baird Callicott claims that moral pluralism leads to relativism, skepticism, and the undermining of moral obligations. Buddhist ethics provides a counterexample to Callicott; it is a robust tradition of moral pluralism. Focusing on one of the most significant texts in Buddhist ethics, Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra, I show how it draws on a multiplicity of moral principles determined by context and skillful means (upāya kauśalya). In contrast to Callicott’s description of pluralism as detrimental to moral life, I suggest that South Asian (...) Buddhist traditions provide a model of moral reasoning that is both robust and flexible, a model appropriate for the many kinds of moral obligations that arise in the context of environmental ethics. (shrink)

This essay reviews four recent texts—two anthologies and two monographs—designed for environmental ethics or environmental philosophy courses. I describe the different approaches the authors and editors have chosen, and why, depending on the teaching context, one or another of these books may be the best choice for a particular group of students. The final pages briefly discuss elements I often weave into my own environmental philosophy courses, including drawing on the resources of particular places for teaching environmental philosophy, doing environmental (...) art, and the kinds of practices developed by Joanna Macy and Christopher Uhl to explore what it means to live in a time of ecological crisis. (shrink)

William Edelglass - Foundations of Dharmakirti's Philosophy - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.1 154-155 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by William Edelglass Colby College John D. Dunne. Foundations of Dharmakirti's Philosophy. Studies in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2004. Pp. xix + 467. Paper, $39.95. The diverse traditions of Buddhist thought in South Asia shared a belief that the Buddha's enlightenment was constituted by insight into the nature (...) of reality. In addition to moral training and mental stability, "seeing things the way they really are" was considered necessary to achieve liberation from suffering. For this reason, Buddhist traditions in South Asia devoted much energy to philosophical analysis, contesting each other's claims concerning what exactly constituted the "right view" . Because non-Buddhist philosophical traditions also.. (shrink)

This essay arose from a collaborative project exploring the meaning of apophatic discourse in different religious traditions. I focus on the paradox of language as both liberating and ensnaring that resonates across the great diversity and heterogeneity of Buddhist traditions. Apophatic discourse is a widespread response to this paradox, as it is motivated by a recognition of the limits of words and concepts even as it seeks to point to that which is beyond these limits. The questions of whether there (...) is a nonconceptual reality beyond the limits of words and concepts, and if so, what it might be, and why, precisely, language and reason are incapable of articulating nonconceptual reality, and what the role of language might be in leading beyond itself, are all sources of considerable debate among Buddhist thinkers. What is shared by figures with different responses to these questions is an understanding of apophasis as a form of Buddhist practice. The aim of Buddhist apophatic practice is to disrupt our natural linguistic attitude, in which we are beguiled by language, presupposing that our words and concepts somehow correspond with the ultimate nature of reality. How is apophatic discourse—enacting an awareness of the limits of language—meaningful if it cannot actually describe that which it is about? Buddhist apophatic discourses, such as ontological doctrines of ineffability, negations, and silence, are not simply pointing to ultimate reality, but are meaningful as transformative practices in the context of an interpretive community with shared soteriological goals and doctrines. Thus, even as apophatic discourse is ever transcending positive claims, it depends on kataphatic discourse to have any specific meaning. (shrink)