07 Sunday Sep 2025
Last month I had the good fortune to attend a weeklong conference of Buddhism scholars in Leipzig, Germany – a wonderful opportunity in many ways, not least that one gets to be in a world far removed from the current craziness of American politics. So not long afterwards, I set myself the goal of not saying the T-word to anyone during my week there.
I succeeded at that goal, barely. But it was really hard.
Continue reading31 Sunday Aug 2025
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Alison Vipond, autobiography, Canada, Claude Vipond, Dave Harkness, Facebook, Jayant Lele, mystical experience
Grief can be more complicated than we often make it out to be. In the wake of my father’s death, several people have reminded me of this point, and they’ve been right – in a way that I know a little too well, because of other experiences with grieving over the past decade.
Continue reading20 Sunday Apr 2025
Posted in Friends, Morality, Philosophy of Language, Politics, Self
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Caitlyn Jenner, gender, identity, LARP, Maria Heim, Nora Berenstain, Prayudh Payutto, Rebecca Tuvel
A little while ago I was at a party en femme and met an older man who didn’t know many transgender people but was interested in talking about it. He mentioned someone else he knew who’d transitioned, and asked about how to refer to that person when discussing things they’d done together before the transition. He said that in that context it felt more natural to refer to them by their old name and pronouns. While I understood that, I responded “It’s considered polite to refer to someone who’s transitioned by their new name and pronouns, even when you’re talking about them before the transition.”
I stand by that response, and I think that that custom is quite appropriate. For most trans people, their new identity is important to them, they have gone to some struggle to reach it, and that’s how they prefer to be thought of in general; they’d prefer to turn the page on the chapter of their life where they had been called something else. So where there are not other major considerations that override, it’s generally polite and preferred to respect their wishes to be referred to by their new name and pronouns, even retrospectively. That norm seems to me extremely reasonable. What I disagree with is an emergent norm that goes much further than this.
Continue reading06 Sunday Apr 2025
Posted in Family, Flourishing, Friends, Place, Politics, Social Science
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Alasdair MacIntyre, autobiography, Canada, identity, J.D. Vance, Jason Stanley, LARP, Mark Granovetter, United States
Canadians have always had a love-hate relationship with the USA; for obvious reasons, the hate side is stronger right at the moment. The US government is doing everything it can to make the country hateable – and harder to live in. When lawful permanent residents are detained without trial for exercising their free speech, this becomes a scary place indeed. So it’s quite understandable that many of those who can leave the US for Canada are planning on doing so – like the philosopher Jason Stanley making a high-profile announcement that he’s leaving Yale for Toronto.
It’s tempting to try to do something similar myself. But I’m not going to. And I want to talk about why.
Continue reading10 Sunday Mar 2024
In thinking further about Seth Segall’s The House We Live In: Virtue, Wisdom and Pluralism, I want to turn from reviewing the book itself, whose broad approach I generally agree with, to exploring my major points of philosophical difference with it. I think this is a particularly important approach here because the book’s biggest weakness is its refusal to go down to deep philosophical differences, differences in questions of ultimate value, meaning, truth, reality. Such an approach leaves Seth in no position to understand his political opponents, many of whom are going to be conservative Christians (in the US) or conservative Muslims (worldwide). I don’t think you can reach a full mutual understanding with them unless you understand their differences from you at this very deep, foundational level.
For when we look at Seth’s engagement with monotheistic thought – the thought that underlies those conservative Christian or Muslim views – it turns out to be unfortunately superficial. They get their most extensive treatment on pp 133-7, in which the wide range of thinkers quoted includes Francis of Assisi, Rabbi Hillel and Albert Schweitzer. But notice how the section characterizes the work done by its quotations:
Continue reading04 Sunday Jun 2023
Posted in Compassion, Consciousness, Emotion, Foundations of Ethics, Friends, Honesty, Human Nature, Metaphysics, Morality, Psychology
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Alan Turing, Blake Lemoine, Boston University, ChatGPT, Confucius, David Chalmers, Frans de Waal, Google, nonhuman animals, obligation, pedagogy, phenomenology, Replika, technology
Artificial intelligence is all the rage right now, and for good reason. When ChatGPT first made the news this December, I tested it by feeding it the kind of prompt I might give for a short comparison essay assignment in my Indian philosophy class. I looked at the result, and I thought: “this is a B-. Maybe a B.” It certainly wasn’t a good paper, it was mediocre – but no more mediocre than the passing papers submitted by lower-performing students at élite universities. So at Boston University my colleagues and I held a sold-out conference to think about how assignments and their marking will need to change in an era where students have access to such tools.
As people spoke at the conference, my mind drifted to larger questions beyond pedagogy. One professor in the audience noted she’d used ChatGPT herself enough that when it was down for a couple days she typed in “ChatGPT, I missed you”, and it had a ready response (“I don’t have emotions, but thank you.”) In response a presenter noted a different AI tool called Replika, which simulates a romantic partner – and looks to be quite popular. Replika’s site bills itself as “the AI companion who cares”, and “the first AI with empathy”. All this indicates to me that while larger philosophical questions about AI have been asked for a long time, in the 2020s they are no longer hypothetical.
Continue reading05 Sunday Jun 2022
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"Weird Al" Yankovic, Freddie deBoer, generations, LARP, Martin Hägglund, Maya Tokomitsu, music, Ted Gioia
I have frequently been critical of the advice given by baby boomers to “do what you love and the money will follow”. After the hard experience of my generation and the ones following it, I think the word has gotten out how terrible that advice is, with books coming out with titles like Do What You Love and Other Lies. We are now at the point that Freddie deBoer can describe the critique of that advice as “endless”, and critique the critique:
Continue readingThere’s also the endless genre of “don’t do what you love” essays, which critique the omnipresent cultural assumption that you should do what you love. And yeah, that can be exploitative, as employers will often use that love as a means to be selfish with your pay and benefits. But what’s the alternative? Don’t try to get paid doing something you like? Do what you hate? I read Maya Tokomitsu’s book on this question, and like so much of what the socialist left publishes these days it was far more compelling as a critique of what exists than as an argument for a better alternative.
05 Sunday Dec 2021
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20th century, 21st century, autobiography, G.W.F. Hegel, James Doull, Karl Marx, Nicholas Thorne, Plato, Socrates, Thrasymachus, Thucydides
My oldest friendship is with Nicholas Thorne, whom I met in the 1970s. That’s not a typo, even though he and I are in our mid-40s; the friendship began, so our parents say, when he crawled up to my house’s doorstep, before we were old enough to walk. He is probably the one who most sparked my interest in philosophy, when he studied in James Doull’s Hegelian department at Dalhousie University and was delighted by what he found. It was through him that I found my lifelong interest in Hegel. Eventually, both of us got our PhDs in philosophical fields but, as is so typical for our generation and those after, neither of us found long-term full-time faculty work.
Nevertheless, we both kept up our passion for philosophy and kept writing. I’m delighted that Thorne has now published a book, Liberation and Authority, and I’m pleased to review it here.
Continue reading27 Sunday Dec 2020
Posted in Anger, Christianity, Confucianism, Flourishing, Friends, Human Nature, Judaism, Pleasure, Rites, Virtue, Zest
Last week my wife and I re-watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas! – the original Chuck Jones cartoon, not the later remakes. As we talked about it, I realized that that Christmas special, and the original book, are a great depiction of eudaimonism – perhaps even in a Confucian form.
Continue reading19 Sunday Apr 2020
Posted in Buddhism, Flourishing, Friends, Jainism, Monasticism, Pleasure
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Alasdair MacIntyre, architecture, ascent/descent, Ayn Rand, COVID-19, expressive individualism, intimacy/integrity, Tattvārtha Sūtra, vinaya, Yoga Sūtras
As I write this post, I, probably along with most of my readers, face severe restrictions on normal human social activity, in order to limit the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus. Electronic communications have made it possible to continue a social life despite these restrictions – but much of this conversation tends to focus on the virus and the limitations of life under it. I find myself yearning for more conversations about other things, and you may be as well. I also do not think I have anything particularly profound to say about the virus so far. For these reasons, I am not going to write here about the virus, at least for now. Instead, for the next little while I’m going to write about other topics that I’d been planning to write about anyway, but on an increased frequency to suit my and others’ changed schedules: every Sunday rather than every alternate Sunday. This is the first such post. I was not thinking about the virus when I originally wrote it, but perhaps it takes on a different resonance now.
A good human life, in general, requires living with other human beings. Some would take this claim as a truism, but I think it’s important to establish it. The ideal of the autonomous, independent individual is not merely a modern Western conceit, as is usually thought; this ideal is held up as a high ideal by monastic traditions in ancient India, perhaps most prominently in the Yoga Sūtras and Jain Tattvārtha Sūtra which describe their highest ideal as kaivalya, aloneness.
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