sharing in the form of dhamma

[Jason]

For anyone who's also into Western philosophy, you might find this interesting. You can even tell me it sucks if you want.

[Ben]

It looks good, Jason.
A good and elderly friend of mine is an expert on Hereclitus and whenever we have conversations it makes me wonder about the cross-fertilization of the Hellenic philosophy and Early Buddhist thought.
At times like this I wish I had the time to satisfy my curiosity of western philosophy.
Thanks for sharing!
kind regards

Ben

[poto]

I liked the article. The Buddha never claimed to have a lock on the Dhamma, so I would expect one can find nuggets of Dhamma elsewhere.

Kinda reminded me of the Nagara Sutta:
"So I too found the ancient path, the ancient trail, traveled by the Awakened Ones of old."

[Jason]

I liked the article. The Buddha never claimed to have a lock on the Dhamma, so I would expect one can find nuggets of Dhamma elsewhere.

Kinda reminded me of the Nagara Sutta:
"So I too found the ancient path, the ancient trail, traveled by the Awakened Ones of old."

Yeah. I think that, in some regards, Plato and the Buddha are ultimately saying something very similar; although to me, the Buddha seems more confident, like he's pointing you towards the experience instead of trying to stumble upon it through reason alone. Plato, on the other hand, seems like he's coming at it from a more theoretical, less experiential point of view, almost like he's unsure if it's completely possible.

[Sobeh]

The Kant-Bentham ethical spectrum strikes me as a false dichotomy, but the article was nevertheless interesting on account of my never having read Plato.

[Jason]

The Kant-Bentham ethical spectrum strikes me as a false dichotomy, but the article was nevertheless interesting on account of my never having read Plato.

How so?

[Sobeh]

Those are both driven by a sense of what it is to be an ethical principle, a sense which differs from that described by moral particularism, which thereby offers a third leg to the earlier dichotomy, disrupting it. In short:

From here:

"The particularist believes, like the generalist, that the perfectly moral person is the person who is fully sensitive to the moral reasons present in the case. But the particularist paints a very different picture of what it is to be fully sensitive to those reasons. The particularist picture is one which takes moral reasons to operate in ways that are not noticeably different from the way in which other reasons function—more ordinary reasons for action, say, or reasons for belief rather than for action. Morality may be distinguished by its subject matter, but moral thought does not have a distinctive structure.

...

The argument is {that} there is more than one sort of relevant property, or more than one way in which features can get to be morally relevant. So a position with only one absolute principle is false, and one with more than one such principle cannot make proper sense of conflict."

[Jason]

Those are both driven by a sense of what it is to be an ethical principle, a sense which differs from that described by moral particularism, which thereby offers a third leg to the earlier dichotomy, disrupting it. In short:

From here:

"The particularist believes, like the generalist, that the perfectly moral person is the person who is fully sensitive to the moral reasons present in the case. But the particularist paints a very different picture of what it is to be fully sensitive to those reasons. The particularist picture is one which takes moral reasons to operate in ways that are not noticeably different from the way in which other reasons function—more ordinary reasons for action, say, or reasons for belief rather than for action. Morality may be distinguished by its subject matter, but moral thought does not have a distinctive structure.

...

The argument is {that} there is more than one sort of relevant property, or more than one way in which features can get to be morally relevant. So a position with only one absolute principle is false, and one with more than one such principle cannot make proper sense of conflict."

I see. When I wrote that, I wasn't trying to say that Kant and Bentham represent two ends of some kind of the ethical spectrum where the Buddha and Plato fall between, only that they take what Kant and Bentham stress and emphasis them together. I realize that there are other ethical principles and frameworks; I simply mentioned them because I also happened to be reading about them while reading the Republic.