Love of All Wisdom

This blog is my attempt to do philosophy cross-culturally – not just to compare philosophies from different traditions, but to build a philosophical system myself that draws, with intellectual integrity, from wisdom from around the world. I don’t pretend to have succeeded at this endeavour yet. Developing a philosophy is an ongoing process, one I invite my readers to share.

What is wisdom? That’s the tougher question, and I suppose if I knew exactly what it was I wouldn’t have to look for it. (Plato tells us that the gods are not philosophers because they’re already wise and therefore don’t have to desire wisdom.) But as a working start I’d propose that wisdom has two major characteristics: it tells us about how we should live, and it shows us answers to the biggest questions, the questions that underlie all the other questions.

So the goal here is to love wisdom, search for it, and perhaps find it, wherever it comes from – Asian “religious” traditions, the classics of Western thought, modern natural science, other specialized disciplines, and contemporary philosophical reflection of both the “analytic” and “Continental” strains. Tall order? Of course it is. But for me, part of the idea of philosophy is to think big.

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