Euclid, however, seems to have been the first to formalize mathematics — well, geometry. Mathematical techniques from many parts of the world have contributed to modern math, but deduction from axioms seems to have been Euclid’s.

If you want me to bow to Euclid, I’ll do so happily :)

Someone claimed that my objection was a mere emotional assertion on my part, and hence to be ignored. No, it was a scientist’s “show me”. Prove it. Trotting out the idol of the tribe and insisting that I bow doesn’t bend my back.

Karen, you feel offended, but I, the supposed-to-be-guilty party in the case, was not asserting that your objection was emotional. I was raising a scientist’s question. If the scientist’s evidence points to conclusions that the subject of his theory finds abhorrent, is that, in and of itself, grounds for rejecting them? My answer is “No.”

As for evidence, neither of us has done any proper research. But can you deny that you live in a time and place that where people are constantly arguing in terms of categories, whose members are supposed to share certain uniform properties, allowing deductive inferences about them? Those who employ this style of argumentation employ, even if ignorant of the source, the logic of the Organon. You may reply that you reject this logic, but rejection implies minimally an awareness of its existence. To object, reject, reframe, whatever it is you are up to, is prima facie evidence that influence has occured.

The only way to deny this proposition is to restrict the meaning of “influence” to direct imitation. I sincerely doubt that anyone here will be willing to make that move, undermining as it does all efforts to understand how texts in any tradition affect the tradition in question as the ideas they promote are reinterpreted by successive generations of reader/authors and spread to people who may never have read the original texts.

I repeat something I wrote in response to a similar question on lit-ideas,

To me what makes Taleb fascinating is not that the ideas he offers are original. He himself makes no such claim and is candid about his sources. The fascination lies in the range of erudition, with Popper bracketed by Solon and Sextus Empiricus on the one hand and George Soros and Mandelbrot on the other, and the practical relevance and application illustrated by roman a clef stories taken from Taleb’s experience as a Lebanese exile who has seen the delightful, peaceful country in which he spent his childhood descend into chaos and the securities trading business in which he makes his apparently very good living. His approach to trading is, by the way, contrary to all sorts of currently popular approaches, depending as it does on accepting continuing small losses to place bets on remote contingencies with very large payoffs, and keeping your winnings in treasury bonds to maximize security.

Whenever this kind of question comes up, I am reminded of Hal Walsh, who taught a seminar on metaphysics when I was doing philosophy at Michigan State. Walsh argued that there were no more than 75 original ideas in the whole of Western philosophy. For the seminar he jotted them down on slips of paper, had his students draw five from a hat, and attempt to construct a coherent metaphysics using all and only those five ideas–a very informative exercise.

I have long since resigned myself to the fact that most of the authors we read are original only in the ways in which they assemble and reshape existing material. Still leaves plenty of scope for innovation though. After all, every chemical in the universe is made up of various combinations of the same hundred-odd elements, the infinities of number theory can be derived from the five Peano postulates, and, as the geneticist Theodore Dobzhansky pointed out, the number of possible combinations of human genes exceeds the number of electrons in the visible universe.

To me it makes more sense to ask of an author, which ideas does he use and does he put them together in a provocative or interesting way. Taleb does that for me.

I’m a scholar, but not an academic. The two are not coterminous.

If various folks here want to insist that I’m deeply intellectually indebted to Aristotle and Plato, I’d like something more than a mere assertion of authority. Is this supposed to be some attribute of high culture (but not everyday culture) that I have absorbed? What is it then? Or is everyday life in Honolulu Hawai’i deeply influenced by Greek philosophers? How so?

It’s certainly true that Aristotle and Plato have been taught as canon in Graeco-Roman and successor societies for several thousand years. But have the bearers of high culture who engaged with these texts always engaged with them in the same way? Drawn the same conclusions? Do people still engage with these texts in the old ways? No. They’re a remote cause of the current state of affairs, along with many other influences — such as, say, Zoroastrianism, Manicheanism, Catharism.

Someone claimed that my objection was a mere emotional assertion on my part, and hence to be ignored. No, it was a scientist’s “show me”. Prove it. Trotting out the idol of the tribe and insisting that I bow doesn’t bend my back. It is, however, quite possible that there’s some theme in the Greek philosophers, as yet unarticulated, that I would instantly recognize and admit once it was teased out.

Knowing modern Japanese wouldn’t help me read the Genji Monogatari, which is written in an antique form of Japanese. Modern Japanese read it in translation, or heavily annotated. Perhaps an analog would be Chaucer.

I know Roger Ames. He attends my Zen center. I’m sorry I missed his lectures on Zen and Confucianism, which I’m told were quite interesting.

Taleb does not argue that historical explanation is impossible, only that, as a matter of fact, historians rarely consider the hypothesis that the events they describe are random and proceed systematically to demonstrate that this is not so.

Isn’t that the difference between Idiographic and Nomothetic approaches to knowledge? The discipline of History is usually practiced as the former, and implicitly regards its subject matter as accidental or subjective.

History … is also plagued by survivor bias.

Which is why you should, instead, always do Archaeology (where an understanding of taphonomy and sampling is explicitly built in (er…sometimes)).

But seriously, is there something new here? I haven’t read the book.

As a Jew married to a scholar of Buddhism living in Polynesia _I_ am not the one drawing boundaries between Aristotle as the ‘Western’ thinker versus ‘Chinese’ and ‘Indian’ philosophy. Recognizing tradition means discerning connections, not drawing boundaries. As I hinted at in my last comment, you can think of Aristotle as a Muslim philosopher (via Ibn Khaldun) or (more relevant for me) influencing Jewish thinkers such as the Rambam (Maimonides). And as for Buddhism which is it, “Chinese” or “Indian”? Or perhaps the version of Chan that you practice is “Japanese”? What about the bits of the Pirke Avot that found there way into the Dhammapada Commentary?

And as for your subject position, Karen, don’t worry — I was referring quite specifically to your own biography as you have narrated it here, which involves reaction against “the whole scholarly enterprise” at a personal, institutional, and religious level which has clearly left you preoccupied with issues regarding rationality, authority and knowledge and how alternatives might be found in “the east” — I mean you left a Great Books University and took up Chan Buddhism of all things! Can you not see that rejecting The Western Tradition involves being influenced by it, including drawing lines around it and other work so that you can cross them in the course of your own identity work?

But at any rate I think we’ve pretty much gotten to the bottom of the Rhodes so I’ll refrain from further comments here.

Some random bibliography:
You may want to take a look at my colleague Roger Ames’s work if you haven’t already:
http://www.hawaii.edu/phil/cvs/PDF/AmesCV06.pdf
On the history of ‘great books’ and ‘Western tradition’ in American education you might want to check out _The Opening of the American Mind_ by Lawrence Levine and, for Chicago in particular, _Powers of the Mind_ by Donald Levine. Heh… of course there is also Bloom’s _The Anxiety of Influence_ but since he has had no influence on you then you probably don’t need to bother…

Good luck with it!

On a separate topic, I read the implications of the BLACK SWAN argument differently: they seem to undermine the possibility of prediction yes, but its[sic] not clear that this undermines after the fact explanation.

Taleb does not argue that historical explanation is impossible, only that, as a matter of fact, historians rarely consider the hypothesis that the events they describe are random and proceed systematically to demonstrate that this is not so. History is not only storytelling, which involves asserting causal relations that may or may not have actually existed; it is also plagued by survivor bias. The historian writing the history of Rome, for example, rarely considers the Carthagian perspective that might well have prevailed had Hannibal been just a wee bit luckier.

I don’t like being slotted into a syllogism such as: Karen, part of Western culture; Western culture, derived from Aristotle and Plato; ergo, Karen influenced by Aristotle and Plato.

Does it matter to the anthropologist analyzing Karen’s behavior that she doesn’t like what he sees? Not, does it matter emotionally? Being a gentleman, he may not wish to offend. But, does it matter analytically, if the anthropologist has evidence on which to build a case for something of which Karen may be unaware or to which, if made aware, she may object?

I recall Vic Turner pointing out that the anthropologist studying a ritual may see people acting in ways that contradict the meaning they ascribe to what they do. No big surprise this, just the sort of inference that occurs in other contexts where people have things to deny. A psychoanalyst, for example may detect a hidden complex which her patient has repressed. A analyst of ideology may point to social contradictions of which the members of a society are normally unconscious.

Do we throw away these lines of interpretation or explanation simply because someone doesn’t like them? That would, it seems to me, bring our whole enterprise to a grinding halt.

I don’t think that cultural boundaries can easily be drawn, and I don’t like being slotted into a syllogism such as: Karen, part of Western culture; Western culture, derived from Aristotle and Plato; ergo, Karen influenced by Aristotle and Plato. I don’t discern any Aristotle or Plato in my mental landscape and I often don’t feel like a “Westerner”.

The ritual genuflection to Plato and Aristotle seems to me more of a claim to “high culture” on the part of the people claiming the centrality of the Greeks, plus a rationalization of time spent plodding through the old texts. Having done two years of classical Greek, and struggled through Xenophon, I can’t say that I was deeply edified by the process. (BTW, this isn’t directed at you — you’re just following down a well-worn path — it’s a snark at the whole damn scholarly enterprise that starts history with Homer and leaves out the Analects, the Upanishads, etc.)

The lingering deference to the classical tradition remind me of one of Charlotte Yonge’s novels (Yonge being a Victorian novelist, best known for The Heir of Redclyffe), in which the whole May family awaits with bated breath the results of a college competition for the best original Latin poem. One of the May sons wins! Joy and jubilation; he will go down in history; his future is assured! Except that the future lay not with the young men writing Latin poetry, but with the young men (and women) in the laboratories, scribbling for the press and the stage, building railroads, digging up potsherds, etc.

Actually, the old text with which I feel the deepest involvement is the Genji Monogatari. I’ve got two translations, the Seidensticker and the Waley; the Waley is flawed, but lovely, and my copy is falling apart.

As for cross-cultural comparison, I think this is another thing that the Rhodes lacks. HRAF is now out of fashion, but anthropologists as a whole are willing to compare any place to any other place and flatter themselves to think that they have a pretty global knowledge of the realm of human options. We read about private secretaries, for instance, and think of talking chiefs in the Pacific Northwest or the priests in Indoeuropean tripartite divisions of society. Rhodes doesn’t have this distinctive, instinctive inventory of examples to work from and compare to. Again, this is not bad, it just makes him different from anthropologists.

Gadamer: This was a guy whose favorite line was “I basically only read books that are a thousand years old.” I seem to remember that there is an essay at the end of Philosophical Apprenticeships that is accessible, but really the long, slow crawl through Truth and Method is the only way to go. His goal is to describe the structure of human understanding and the role that tradition plays in it.

He’s interested in the way that interpretation involves us realizing the history of the effect that the text we are reading has had on our consciousness because of its effect on our society. So to you Karen, I guess he would say “your study of Buddhist texts is in fact a commentary on Aristotle and Plato (to wit, that it drove you into the arms of the Platform Sutra).” Escaping your tradition, after all, is the best sign that it has an enduring effect on your consciousness.

But whatever. I see Aristotle as a precursor to the Rambam and not Aquinas, so there you go.

I’m not sure how anthropological her work is, although it is great stuff.

I think oneman has hit on an important point point here–while explicit cross cultural comparison (in the HRAF or other modes) isn’t exactly practiced these days (though what, if not cross-cultural comparison, is the anthropology of “modernity”) these days, there is an implicit comparative dimension to most anthropological work that has something to do with what Rex doesn’t see in Rhodes. Rex says:

bq. 2. There is no analysis that seems anthropological. I mean there are generalizations from the data about how, in general, these offices work. But there is no ‘value added’—no riffing on indigenous themes to add an extra layer of analysis of signification.

Some of that value-added attention to themes comes from the implicitly comparative “what makes this an ENGLISH state?” or “what makes this a WESTERN BUREAUCRATIC state?” question.

What distinguishes our anthropology from other anthropologies is not our methodology, which are tools that others can and do use. I know we’d like there to be this thing that’s clear as a bell and unrefutable, but I’m quite sure there isn’t any such thing — we’re stuck with subtle intellectual influences, disciplinary histories, and Rex’s starting point, our sense of craft and vocation.

Oh, and cross-cultural comparison, if anyone does that sort of thing anymore…