The Sociology of Philosophies

its own right on which the intellectual division of the attention space could go on, not with spectacular changes in the level o ...

“normal science” of philosophy, played at a level of reified abstractions, providing a fund of small-scale puzzles rather than t ...

the grand syntheses of Aristotle, Aquinas, Dharmakirti—with the syncretism which occurs when there is external pressure to put t ...

and thereafter tended to swamp it. Finally, there is a version of the abstrac- tion-reflexivity sequence which takes place on th ...

tified with the self, picked out of these texts some 30 to 40 generations later by highly abstract Advaita philosophers, is only ...

metaphysical level in many fewer generations than in the Indian network. The cosmological part of the Greek sequence does not th ...

legitimation. In the next generation, the long-standing network of elite phi- losophers answers with the Tao Te Ching, blending ...

cal sequence is resumed in China. In the period 1030–1200, Neo-Confucianism is created out of a revival of Han dynasty cosmologi ...

The sub-sequence which leads into empirical science would seem to be the opposite of the occultist branch; and indeed the propon ...

ralistic focus of traditional science but its social dynamics. I have called this dynamic rapid-discovery science (Chapter 10). ...

world vision that they offer. They are pre-epistemological. In disputes between rival positions, commonsense standards are relie ...

theological conservatism, logic, almost alone of the Greek heritage, survived as a staple of the curriculum in the orthodox madr ...

avowed intention to fence off the sphere of forbidden speculation, but provides a tool by which Idealist constructions might pro ...

We have now to consider the causes of the epistemology-metaphysics sequence. Three analytically distinct, sometimes historically ...

the less contentious logic of the Aristoteleans and the Stoics. The epistemologi- cal concerns of Greek philosophy were kept ali ...

debates reinforces the mood that there can be no agreement on knowledge. In the later centuries of medieval Christendom, the end ...

sophistication of the philosophical networks. Skepticism, however, was a long- standing position in Greek philosophy, going back ...

ing up against imported Greek philosophy. Ibn Sina’s fame-making project is to amalgamate this alien heritage with the key dispu ...

Then: doubt proves the existence of the doubter and of a luminous ground of consciousness; this is the highest reality, beyond d ...

Yet among the most powerful tactics in setting off new intellectual move- ments are broadenings of the cogito approach. Kant’s t ...