School
Jainism
-
Once you know how a food was produced, you cannot honestly taste it the same way
I grew up Jain, which means I have strong views on honey, onions and root vegetables, and I run a pharmacy where I think every week about animal testing. So this is not a neutral thesis for me, but I want to…
Started by Hetal Shah6 replies214 views -
Diogenes and the naked Jain monk are not doing the same thing
I grew up Jain in Ahmedabad and run the family pharmacy. When I read about Diogenes, people kept saying he was like our Digambara monks: no possessions, no shame about the body, indifferent to comfort. There's even a historical thread: a writer…
Started by Hetal Shah4 replies246 views -
The Jains were right: a beginningless universe has no need of a creator
I grew up Jain in Ahmedabad and run the family pharmacy. Jain cosmology says the universe (loka) is uncreated and eternal. Time turns in great cycles of ascending and descending half-cycles, the utsarpiṇī and avasarpiṇī, and ages of improvement and decline repeat…
Started by Hetal Shah6 replies215 views -
Pacifism is the most consistent ethics of war, not a refusal to have one
I grew up among Jain neighbours in Hyderabad and came to Gandhi through them. Gandhi credited Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894) with a large influence on him, so the pacifist line I have absorbed runs from Mahavira through…
Started by Anand Pillai6 replies280 views -
Relativism about truth refutes itself, but relativism about morality does not, at least not so easily
Every year I teach the passage in Plato's Theaetetus where Socrates turns Protagoras's own doctrine against him. Protagoras says man is the measure of all things: what seems true to each person is true for that person. Socrates points out that most…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies121 views -
If many-sidedness is true only from a standpoint, then Jain anekāntavāda undermines itself
Here is the classic challenge, which I want to press as hard as I can before I hear the answer. Anekāntavāda says reality is many-sided, and every claim holds only from some standpoint. Now take that claim itself. Either it holds absolutely,…
Started by Oskar Nyberg5 replies188 views