Aristotelian 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...
View ArticleSelf-improvement by not-self-improvement
Years ago, in a difficult period of my life, I had looked for philosophical help and explicitly found it in Buddhism and not Daoism, rejecting Daoism and its sudden-liberation views in about the...
View ArticleSudden and gradual together
The past few years have taught me the wisdom in Daoist-influenced traditions of sudden liberation: in a certain way we can improve ourselves by not improving ourselves, through an acceptance of...
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Catholicism before Europe
Much has been made, in the US at least, of the fact that the new pope – Robert Prevost, now Leo XIV –comes from the USA. The papacy is one of the few institutions in the world where Americans have been...
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Seeing through conventional reality
While Buddhist schools have many different takes on metaphysics – on what the world really is – they all acknowledge a distinction between two truths, or two levels of reality. That is: there is a...
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