Inimkond Special Event: Margus Ott: Look From the Outside to See Better

Margust Ott, from the School of Humanities, will be presenting:

Look from the outside to see better: multiple sources for the philosophy to come

Living in one culture or civilization we acquire some ingrained thought habits. It is useful to explore other traditions in order to free our mind. Certainly those habits don't determine us in the manner of radical linguistic relativism, but they constitute (not altogether homogeneous) complexes that facilitate or inhibit some forms of thought and behavior.

When we explore conceptual constellations from other traditions, we can open up different possibilities of feeling and acting. I have undertaken this effort with the Chinese philosophical tradition and it could be applied also to Indian, Tibetan, Japanese, Arabic, Byzantine and other written traditions, and also to cultures with little or no written records - the latter case would simply pose higher demands for the researcher.

This endeavor brings up also important epistemological questions: as we cannot have a ground from which to judge different traditions, we have to work in a series of hypotheses, trials and errors where our understanding itself improves in a dialectical process where temporal factor is central - there are always some steps that cannot be omitted, and our knowledge rises from our stupidity, errors, temporary simplifications; and still we cannot be altogether sure that the outcome is adequate.