• About me
  • About this blog
  • Comment rules
  • Other writings

Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Category Archives: Blog Admin

Whither blogging?

27 Sunday Feb 2022

Posted by Amod Lele in Blog Admin, Politics

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

21st century, Bari Weiss, Facebook, Glenn Greenwald, John McWhorter, Matthew Yglesias, Substack, technology, Twitter, United States, WordPress

At the beginning of Love of All Wisdom’s tenth-anniversary post, I wrote: “In the span of the history of philosophy, ten years is the blink of an eye. In the span of the blogosphere, however, ten years is an eternity.” Immediately after the post went up, a thought occurred to me, which would probably have made that point even more effectively. Namely: does anyone even say “blogosphere” anymore?

Continue reading →

An index to the Thompson-Lele correspondence

04 Thursday Jun 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Blog Admin, Modernized Buddhism

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Evan Thompson, Eyal Aviv

My friend Eyal Aviv mentioned, even before my most recent round of replies, that he’d been teaching my correspondence with Evan Thompson in his classes and would like to have it all available in one place. I think that’s a great idea and I am obliging him here. I don’t know whether the correspondence will continue – that’s up to Thompson – but I think it’s already worth having an index post here for easy reference. I am listing all of the works that constitute this correspondence so far, in the order that they were published or posted. If there’s more to the correspondence, I can come back and update this post later. (So, I’m just putting this post up on Love of All Wisdom rather than the IPB so I don’t have to update it in multiple places.)

EDIT (27 Sep 2020): There has indeed been new round of correspondence since I first posted this index in June; we have agreed to close it with the final post today, so it should now be complete. I have added links to all of that new correspondence here. I have also added dates to each set of responses, in the hopes that that might make it easier to indicate which set one is speaking of (“Thompson’s April response”), (“Lele’s May-June replies”).

  1. Thompson began the discussion with his book, Why I Am Not A Buddhist (published Jan 2020).
  2. Lele‘s initial two-part review (Mar-Apr 2020):
    Why is Evan Thompson not a Buddhist? (1)
    Why is Evan Thompson not a Buddhist? (2)
  3. Thompson‘s long single-post response (Apr 2020):
    Clarifying Why I Am Not a Buddhist: A Response to Amod Lele
  4. Lele‘s eight-post reply (May-Jun 2020):
    i) On the challenging aspects of tradition
    ii) On being Buddhist and distinctively Buddhist
    iii) Grappling with impermanence
    iv) Is karma about why bad things happen to good people?
    v) The workings of karma, naturalized and otherwise
    vi) Bad things, good people, and eudaimonism
    vii) Naturalizing Buddhism and other traditions
    viii) Eudaimonist Buddhist modernism and the norm of authenticity
  5. Thompson‘s single-post followup (Jun 2020):
    Cherry Picking the Bodhi Tree: A Response to Lele
  6. Lele‘s seven-post followup reply (Jul-Aug 2020):
    i) Of shopping carts and cherry-picking
    ii) Karma: eschatology, theodicy, or eudaimonism?
    iii) Philosophical texts for philosophers
    iv) Karma in society
    v) What would Śāntideva do without rebirth?
    vi) Śāntideva’s passages on enemies and their context
    vii) Theodicy is not the core of karma
  7. Thompson‘s final response (Aug 2020):
    Losing the Thread: A Response to Lele
  8. Lele‘s two-post final response (Sep 2020):
    i) When does karma stop being karma?
    ii) Is the eudaimonist proposition true?

Festival of the Middle Way

06 Monday Apr 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Blog Admin

≈ Comments Off on Festival of the Middle Way

Tags

Barry Daniel, conferences, Stephen Batchelor

Barry Daniel, who interviewed me a couple years ago on the idea of literal conservatism, dropped me a line to mention that his Middle Way Society is now hosting a virtual online festival on April 18-19, on UK time but open to anyone. Presenters include Stephen Batchelor. It sounds like a great way to connect for philosophical conversations in a trying and difficult time. Check it out!

Facebook page available

24 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by Amod Lele in Blog Admin

≈ Comments Off on Facebook page available

Tags

Facebook, technology

I’ve just created a Facebook page for Love of All Wisdom. I’ve set it up so new posts should automatically post there, as well as to the Twitter feed. You can Like the page to be notified on Facebook when new posts come out. (I have one ready for this Sunday.)

New site options

24 Friday Jul 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Blog Admin

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

technology

I’ve been tinkering on the back end of Love of All Wisdom a little bit. I thought it might be worth alerting readers to two of those changes. First, there’s now a “related posts” option at the end of each post, automatically suggesting other posts that might be of interest. (I had a similar plugin installed years ago which wound up slowing down and crashing the site, but this one is part of the official WordPress Jetpack suite, so I’m hoping it works better.) Second, you should now be able to write comments by signing in with a Facebook, Twitter or WordPress.com acocount, which should hopefully make commenting easier. Enjoy!

New blog theme

27 Saturday Jun 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Blog Admin

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Craig Martin, technology

Longtime readers may recall a review of this blog that expressed dismay at my white-on-black visual theme. My commenters generally agreed and I had intended to change it. (It looked great to me because I grew up with DOS, but I’d rather not limit the blog’s appeal to people who share my technological quirks.) In the intervening time I tried a number of times to find an alternate theme, but never quite found one I was happy with.

Today, my friend Craig Martin also mentioned he found the theme hard to read, and I offered the usual excuses of why I hadn’t changed it yet. I then realized with some embarrassment that it’s been five years since I originally said I’d change the theme.

So I decided it was time to do it. My apologies to those who have had trouble reading the old theme over the years through my delays, but I think an apology is less important than fixing the damn problem. The new theme of the blog is called Château. There are some things about it I’m still not happy with – but le mieux est l’ennemi du bien. Better to have it out there and leave the possibility of another change at a later date. The various features of the old theme should work, except for the old blogroll, which was getting way out of date anyway. Besides the white on black, the most obvious change should be something I’d always wanted as part of a new theme: the banner with a picture of very different philosophers, from very different times and places, all of whom I admire. (I’ll leave it to commenters to say who they are!)

The Indian Philosophy Blog

08 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by Amod Lele in Blog Admin, South Asia

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

technology

It is with great pleasure that I announce the creation of the Indian Philosophy Blog, a new group blog exploring all aspects of Indian thought. We hope to be for Indian thought what the excellent Warp, Weft and Way has been for Chinese. I have done some of the technical work to help put this together but the content is that of the contributors. Please check it out! I will continue to do my blogging in cross-cultural philosophy here, but intend to cross-post any posts that are directly related to Indian thought.

Fixed tag and category bug

23 Saturday Mar 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Blog Admin

≈ Comments Off on Fixed tag and category bug

Tags

technology

I’d been doing a bit of tinkering with Love of All Wisdom on the back end, which made the blog tags and categories stop working for about a week. (The tags and categories are the way the blog is organized – labels like “Xunzi” and “Jainism” that attach to every post that addresses a given topic, listed down in the right sidebar. I’ve written in greater detail about that organization before.) I think the problem is fixed and you should be able to find posts by tag and category again. I encourage you to give it a try as a way of exploring the site. If you find anything that doesn’t work, please let me know.

World philosophy map and timeline

07 Thursday Jun 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Blog Admin

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Boston University, pedagogy, technology

As part of my job I’ve been learning to use MediaKron, an interesting tool developed by Boston College (not the same as Boston University, where I work) which creates maps and timelines for educational use. I’ll be helping a pilot group of Boston University faculty use MediaKron; to help myself learn it, I designed a website mapping out different major philosophers in time and space, including most of the thinkers I post about most often here. I’m hoping the site is helpful to visualize some of the long and complex history of philosophy – feel free to use it yourself or even show it to your students.

(Feel free to editorialize about how you can’t believe philosopher X was not included, if you like. I think I covered the very biggest figures, and I included the ones I write about most, but I know there are plenty of major ones who aren’t on there.)

[EDIT 8 Aug 2017: My site has moved to a new URL. I’ve changed the text above to reflect that.]

One way to classify philosophy

27 Sunday May 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Blog Admin, French Tradition, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

academia, postmodernism, technology

As of this Thursday, Love of All Wisdom will be three years old. I’m happy with the way the blog has been working out – the ideas I’ve been able to get out to the world, and the discussion they’ve provoked both in the comment forums here and in other places (in person, on social networking sites, and even earning me an invitation to publish in a journal). I thought this would be a good occasion to do something I’ve been meaning to do for a while: explain the scheme of tags and categories I use to classify blog posts. There’s so much written here now that I doubt many people are going to read it all; I only intend it to expand in the future. And the tags and categories – listed to the right of this post in the pages’s sidebar – are a good way to explore the topics that are of most interest to you. Continue reading →

← Older posts

Welcome to Love of All Wisdom.

I invite you to leave comments on my blog, even - or especially - if I have no idea who you are. Philosophy is a conversation, and I invite you to join it with me; I welcome all comers (provided they follow a few basic rules). I typically make a new post every other Sunday. If you'd like to be notified when a new post is posted, you can get email notifications whenever I add something new via the link further down in this sidebar. You can also follow this blog on Facebook or Twitter. Or if you use RSS, you can get updates through the RSS feed.

Recent Comments

  • Seth Zuihō Segall on Eliminating and interpreting as Buddhists
  • Nathan on Does the Sigālovāda Sutta prohibit attending the theatre?
  • Amod Lele on Does the Sigālovāda Sutta prohibit attending the theatre?
  • Nathan on Does the Sigālovāda Sutta prohibit attending the theatre?
  • Amod Lele on Does the Sigālovāda Sutta prohibit attending the theatre?

Subscribe by Email

Post Tags

20th century academia Alasdair MacIntyre Aristotle ascent/descent Augustine autobiography Buddhaghosa Canada conferences Confucius conservatism Disengaged Buddhism Engaged Buddhism Evan Thompson Four Noble Truths Friedrich Nietzsche G.W.F. Hegel gender Hebrew Bible identity Immanuel Kant intimacy/integrity justice Karl Marx Ken Wilber Martha Nussbaum Mencius modernity Pali suttas pedagogy Plato qualitative individualism race rebirth religion Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha) T.R. (Thill) Raghunath technology theodicy Thomas Kuhn United States utilitarianism Śaṅkara Śāntideva

Categories

  • African Thought (12)
  • Applied Phil (270)
    • Death (36)
    • Family (40)
    • Food (17)
    • Friends (13)
    • Health (23)
    • Place (25)
    • Play (12)
    • Politics (152)
    • Sex (20)
    • Work (36)
  • Asian Thought (393)
    • Buddhism (283)
      • Early and Theravāda (119)
      • Mahāyāna (116)
      • Modernized Buddhism (83)
    • East Asia (82)
      • Confucianism (52)
      • Daoism (13)
      • Shinto (1)
    • South Asia (128)
      • Bhakti Poets (3)
      • Cārvāka-Lokāyata (5)
      • Epics (15)
      • Jainism (23)
      • Modern Hinduism (35)
      • Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika (6)
      • Sāṃkhya-Yoga (14)
      • Vedānta (35)
      • Vedas and Mīmāṃsā (7)
  • Blog Admin (26)
  • Indigenous American Thought (3)
  • Method (234)
    • M.T.S.R. (132)
    • Metaphilosophy (156)
  • Practical Philosophy (348)
    • Action (11)
    • Aesthetics (41)
    • Emotion (151)
      • Anger (31)
      • Attachment and Craving (26)
      • Compassion (5)
      • Despair (3)
      • Disgust (3)
      • Faith (19)
      • Fear (7)
      • Grief (5)
      • Happiness (46)
      • Hope (15)
      • Pleasure (32)
      • Shame and Guilt (6)
    • External Goods (48)
    • Flourishing (81)
    • Foundations of Ethics (105)
    • Karma (42)
    • Morality (61)
    • Virtue (146)
      • Courage (5)
      • Generosity (12)
      • Gentleness (5)
      • Gratitude (10)
      • Honesty (13)
      • Humility (22)
      • Leadership (4)
      • Mindfulness (14)
      • Patient Endurance (28)
      • Self-Discipline (8)
      • Serenity (27)
      • Zest (6)
  • Practice (115)
    • Karmic Redirection (5)
    • Meditation (31)
    • Monasticism (42)
    • Physical Exercise (3)
    • Prayer (14)
    • Reading and Recitation (12)
    • Rites (19)
    • Therapy (10)
  • Theoretical Philosophy (326)
    • Consciousness (14)
    • Epistemology (105)
      • Certainty and Doubt (14)
      • Prejudices and "Intuitions" (27)
    • Free Will (17)
    • God (62)
    • Hermeneutics (55)
    • Human Nature (29)
    • Logic (27)
      • Dialectic (15)
    • Metaphysics (90)
    • Philosophy of Language (18)
    • Self (63)
    • Supernatural (48)
    • Truth (59)
    • Unconscious Mind (14)
  • Western Thought (415)
    • Analytic Tradition (90)
    • Christianity (137)
      • Early Factions (8)
      • Protestantism (21)
      • Roman Catholicism (46)
    • French Tradition (47)
    • German Tradition (84)
    • Greek and Roman Tradition (110)
      • Epicureanism (24)
      • Neoplatonism (2)
      • Pre-Socratics (6)
      • Skepticism (2)
      • Sophists (7)
      • Stoicism (18)
    • Islam (37)
      • Mu'tazila (2)
      • Salafi (3)
      • Sufism (9)
    • Judaism (33)
    • Natural Science (86)
      • Biology (22)
      • Philosophy of Science (47)
    • Social Science (144)
      • Economics (30)
      • Psychology (59)

Recent Posts

  • Eliminating and interpreting as Buddhists
  • Does the Sigālovāda Sutta prohibit attending the theatre?
  • Of mental health and medical models
  • Of perpetually vulnerable subjects
  • The scattershot application of “neoliberalism”

Popular posts

  • One and a half noble truths?
  • Wishing George W. Bush well
  • Do Speculative Realists want us to be Chinese?
  • Why I am not a right-winger
  • On faith in tooth relics

Basic concepts

  • Ascent and Descent
  • Intimacy and integrity
  • Ascent-descent and intimacy-integrity together
  • Perennial questions?
  • Virtuous and vicious means
  • Dialectical and demonstrative argument
  • Chastened intellectualism and practice
  • Yavanayāna Buddhism: what it is
  • Why worry about contradictions?
  • The first philosophy blogger

Personal favourites

  • Can philosophy be a way of life? Pierre Hadot (1922-2010)
  • James Doull and the history of ethical motivation
  • Praying to something you don't believe in
  • What does postmodernism perform?
  • Why I'm getting married

Archives

Search this site

All posts, pages and metadata copyright 2020 Amod Lele. Comments copyright 2020 their comment authors. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA) licence.

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.