Choosing a few traditions
I have long had an ambition which, I am slowly realizing, is unlikely to be fulfilled. It is an ambition suggested in this blog’s title: the idea of putting together all the major philosophical...
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The power of a beautiful temple
We think these days a lot about Buddhist ethics, which often involves some thought about Buddhist politics. We tend to think a lot less about Buddhist aesthetics. Now there’s an obvious explanation...
View ArticleIn which I am interviewed
The always interesting skholiast, whose ideas have figured strongly in quite a few of my posts here over the years, took what I consider the enormously flattering step of interviewing me about my...
View ArticleThe wisdom of serenity
There are probably few people in the English-speaking world unfamiliar with the Serenity Prayer. In its best-known form this prayer asks: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot...
View ArticleAristotelian vs. Buddhist eudaimonia
Damien Keown’s The Nature of Buddhist Ethics closes by arguing for parallels between Buddhist and Aristotelian ethics. He claims that “there are many formal parallels between the ideal of human...
View ArticleOn being Buddhist and distinctively Buddhist
At the start of my replies to Evan Thompson’s response, I noted that there are two core ways in which my eudaimonist Buddhist modernism differs from a great deal of premodern Buddhist tradition. I...
View ArticleWhen virtue is not in our control
I’ve been thinking a lot on a recent exchange I had with Seth Segall, in the comments on my post about terminology to use for karma. Seth’s comment specified a distinction that is important elsewhere...
View ArticleThe need for subjectivity
I first read Quentin Meillassoux in a local reading group in summer 2016, and thought at first that I was largely in agreement with him. That changed in 2019 when the same group read the Kyoto...
View ArticleA very brief survey of African philosophy
For the most part, the study of non-Western philosophy has tended to focus on the continent of Asia. There are many good reasons for this. More than half of humanity lives in Asia. And Asia has long,...
View ArticleNo opposite for the ultimate
I have considerable sympathies for nondualism and have started in recent years to think that it might be true. But there is an important qualifier to any such view. Namely: I do not think that there...
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