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 come close to succeeding 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.
I make a new substantive post on the blog every alternate Sunday at 5pm. This is a regular schedule; if I need to miss a week’s post or more, I will announce it beforehand. If you’d like to keep up with the biweekly updates, you can follow Love of All Wisdom on Facebook or Twitter. You can also subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed (if you use RSS) or sign up for email delivery.
Philosophy is always a dialogue, and I think that part of the blog’s success is in its lively community of commenters. Please don’t feel shy to write a comment on the posts here. I offer a few simple rules to ensure the comments remain enjoyable to everybody; all posts that respect those boundaries are welcome.
The number of posts on this blog has grown to be quite substantial, in the hundreds by this point. I don’t expect that most people – if anyone, indeed – will read it all. Each post is tagged and categorized for easy reference; if you see a post tagged with a thinker you’re interested in, you can click on the tag to see what else I’ve written about that thinker. On the left of each page you’ll find a cloud of tags about the thinkers and miscellaneous topics I’ve written about the most, and a hierarchical list of categories into which I have classified philosophical reflection. All of these allow readers entry points to find the posts on topics that most interest them. I’ve explained this classification system in more detail in a post.
Below the tags and categories in the left column, I’ve also highlighted a number of posts that I think merit particular attention. The posts under “Basic concepts” are those which I think are most helpful for a beginner trying to make sense of my posts – the concepts and ideas that I return to again and again. “Popular posts” are those that have attracted a great deal of attention and praise from others, and my “Personal favourites” are just that. Please, feel free to jump in from any of these starting points and explore the site in any manner you wish. Most posts feature hyperlinks back to other posts that they build on and draw on; at the bottom of the posts, they will often show pingbacks to posts (of mine or others’) that have linked to them and built on them in turn. Both sorts of links are meant to be followed.
I consider this blog a work of (non-peer-reviewed) scholarship, and would be honoured if you wished to cite my blog posts in a traditional academic work. If you do, please give them a full citation, including the URL and post date, so that interested readers may find them online more easily. For example, if you wish to cite this post in author-date style, cite it in the text as “Lele 2010” and in the bibliography as:
Lele, Amod. 2010. “Ascent-descent and intimacy integrity together.” Love of All Wisdom, 26 September 2010. https://loveofallwisdom.com/2010/09/ascent-descent-and-intimacy-integrity-together/
In a footnote, cite it as:
Amod Lele, “Ascent-descent and intimacy integrity together.” Love of All Wisdom, 26 September 2010. https://loveofallwisdom.com/2010/09/ascent-descent-and-intimacy-integrity-together/
The philosophers in the pictures on the blog’s marquee are (left to right): Śāntideva, Aristotle, G.W.F. Hegel, Confucius and Martha Nussbaum.
A good initiative !!!
Hi, i´m Walter from Germany and stumbled over your blog looking for answers about the question of how bad things (evil) can be explained from an advaitic point of view- it seems that there are the same problems as in the Monotheistic traditions. In personal experience i found that however that question doesn´t exist- maybe it´s just a thought produced by the illusory ego. So we are in the very same cul de sac as Buddhism or the mediteranean religions.
Otherwise i would like to thank you for the great job with this website.
As a little gift from my side i would like to point out that Rupert Spira has the gift of leading one with simple questions towards that grasping of that consciousness which looks out of every ones eyes which is nicely enhanced if you cross study the thinking of Douglas Harding in the headless.org.
Best wishes from
Walter
Who is the lady pictured on the right?
That’s Martha Nussbaum.
You are invited to participate in the next session of the Logic and Religion Webinar Series which will be held on April 14, 2022, at 4pm CET with the topic:
Theist and Atheist Arguments in Indian Philosophy
Speaker: Sachchidanand Mishra (Benares Hindu University, India)
Chair: Agnieszka Rostalska (Ghent University, Belgium)
Please register in advance!
https://www.logicandreligion.com/webinars
Abstract: For a long time, philosophers have been proposing arguments to prove or to deny the existence of God. This attitude can be witnessed in western philosophy as well as in Indian Philosophy. In Indian philosophy, the theist arguments are put forward mainly by the Nyāya Vaiśeṣika school. Only a few arguments are proposed by the Yoga Philosophers. But if there is a debate between the theist and atheist, the onus is on the theist to prove God’s existence. The atheist only has to show that the arguments are not capable of proving the existence of God conclusively. This is the dominant attitude in Indian Philosophy. The Cārvāka, the Buddhists, the Jainas, the Sāṅkhyas, and even the Mīmāṁsakas and the Vedāntins have put forward atheist arguments to prove the incapability of the theist arguments in proving the existence of God. In this webinar, I would try to evaluate the arguments from both sides as presented by Indian philosophers.
With best wishes,