Category Archives: Theoretical Philosophy

What should we call the movement?

04 Sunday May 2025

Posted by in Philosophy of Language, Politics

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, ,

In my view the most important thing to acknowledge about the 2010s movement around racial and gender issues is that it exists – something a surprising number of people try to deny. Support it or oppose it or be somewhere in the middle, we need to be able to acknowledge it and discuss it. What we call it is of secondary importance.

That said, in order to talk about it we do need to call it something, so it’s worth spending a little time thinking about what terminology to use. (While I have so far just called it by the neutral term “the new movement”, that term’s accuracy rapidly decreases for a movement more than a decade old, whose influence is beginning to fade.) Here, of course, the problem is that the movement is notoriously averse to being named. But that aversion is one of the movement’s dumbest and most obnoxious traits – as Freddie deBoer rightly notes, it is part of a demand to be exempted from the regular practices of politics – and even those of us who sympathize with the movement in general should find that aversion a little cringeworthy. There is no reason at all for us to follow it.

Continue reading →

Yes, there is a movement

27 Sunday Apr 2025

Posted by in Philosophy of Language, Politics

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

A few years ago I attempted to depict the new race/gender movement of the 2010s in a way as neutral, bland, and inoffensive as possible. I got strong pushback even on that much, with a denial that the movement even exists.

I knew that the movement I’m describing is highly resistant to being named. What I hadn’t expected was that even the acknowledgement of its existence is controversial. But I suppose that that controversy, at its heart, is tied to its resistance to being named: the movement tends to present its ideas as if they are just the common sense that everyone already believes, while at the same time demanding drastic and radical changes (open borders, “defund the police”).

Thus Afua Hirsch in the Guardian claims that the anti-woke “define themselves in opposition to an identity that doesn’t actually exist. They are anti-woke, even though there is no ‘woke’.” Some go so far as to claim that “woke” is a racial slur.

So, let’s get down to establishing a basic point: yes, whatever you call it or don’t call it, starting in the mid-2010s there has been a major radical movement around race and gender (including gender identity and sexual orientation), one which worked at length to limit public disagreement with it. You can support this movement or oppose it (or better yet support some parts of it and not others, as I do). But in the places where it has been influential (like North American universities or other educated urban enclaves), it has been such a powerful force that it makes no sense to deny its existence. You could more reasonably say it’s not one movement but a set of (real, existing) smaller ones – but I think there are good reasons to speak of it as one.

Continue reading →

Why we sometimes need to deadname

20 Sunday Apr 2025

Posted by in Friends, Morality, Philosophy of Language, Politics, Self

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , ,

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 reading →

Empiricism of the subtle body

23 Sunday Feb 2025

Posted by in Biology, Emotion, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Philosophy of Science, Supernatural

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

A public-domain illustration by Alex-engraver of the chakras and channels, taken from Wikipedia.

Traditional Indian and Tibetan tantric anatomy tells us that in the middle of the human torso there are three channels (nādis or “streams”), one each on the left, middle, and right, and that these proceed vertically upward through a number of circular centres (cakras in standard Sanskrit transliteration, chakras in modern English spelling). This account of the “subtle body” (sūkṣma śarīra) has become popular in modern yoga and other forms of alternative medicine or spirituality.

I don’t believe this account of the subtle body – but not primarily for the obvious reason.

Continue reading →

We need to see emotions as bodily

16 Sunday Feb 2025

Posted by in Anger, Compassion, Emotion, External Goods, Fear, Health, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Practice, Psychology, Stoicism, Unconscious Mind

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

The most important lesson I ever learned was back in Thailand in 1997: that the biggest contributor to my unhappiness wasn’t external problems like being single or unemployed, but my own mental states like craving. Fixing those mental states was a surer path to happiness and reducing suffering.

But the question that has played an ever-increasing role in the three ensuing decades has been: okay, but how? It is one thing to recognize that your craving and anger – or fear or self-pity or shame or other negative emotions – are the main thing keeping you down. It is quite another to do something about them. Our animal natures make those states quite recalcitrant.

Continue reading →

The philosopher takes the same psych meds as his dog

09 Sunday Feb 2025

Posted by in Action, Biology, Emotion, Health, Human Nature, Psychology, Unconscious Mind

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

Over the years I’ve managed to treat my insomnia in various ways, to the point that nowadays I can get a reasonably good sleep most nights. Mindfulness meditation – prescribed to me medically before I called myself a Buddhist – has been one big help with that. But just as big has been a medication called trazodone: primarily used as an antidepressant, trazodone in smaller doses helps one stay asleep and avoid the typical insomniac anxiety spiral where you wake up and worry that you can’t get to sleep and find that the worry makes it harder to get to sleep so you worry more. It does a great deal to take the edge off.

Meanwhile my dog, Christmas Belle (so named because we got her in a snowstorm on December 22), faced various anxiety issues that made her resistant and fearful to getting in the car and going to the vet. To help her cope with those situations the vet recommended… trazodone.

Christmas Belle Feeley-Lele, when not feeling anxiety. Photo by author.
Continue reading →

Of offbeat philosophers

02 Sunday Feb 2025

Posted by in Aesthetics, Analytic Tradition, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy

≈ Comments Off on Of offbeat philosophers

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

Writing advice often rightly asks authors: “When was the last time you wished a book was longer?” Well, now I can say: it was when I recently read Lawrence Harvey’s Offbeat Philosophers: Thinkers Who Played A Different Tune (whose publishers offered me a review copy). This book clocks in at a mere 73 pages, plus bibliography. Fortunately it’s priced accordingly ($10 for the paperback, $8 for the e-book), but Harvey doesn’t leave himself a lot of room to do the job. The book catalogues ten “offbeat” philosophers; it could have used more of them, but more than that, it could have given them each more space. They get about six pages each (including a list of questions-for-further-reflection), which leaves little room to explore the depth that makes a philosopher’s thought exciting.

Harvey doesn’t say a lot about what makes a philosopher “offbeat”, or his criteria for inclusion. He develops the musical metaphor: as in musical syncopation, where “the regular rhythmic flow is disrupted with accents and stresses occurring out of step with the expected norms”, so “the philosophers in this short anthology all play to what might be termed a different tune – one that serves to disrupt and unsettle the fixity of rhythmic thought.” (1) That’s a very imprecise way of putting things, the sort of imprecision that might drive an analytic philosopher crazy, but perhaps that’s just the point: in a philosophical world still ruled by the analytic tradition, to be “offbeat” may well mean to avoid putting precision first.

Continue reading →

The significance of feminine beauty

05 Sunday Jan 2025

Posted by in Aesthetics, Food, Self

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

The English word aesthetician can describe two kinds of professionals. In the less common sense, it can describe a philosopher who makes a living theorizing about art and beauty. In the more common sense, it can describe someone who makes a living helping women with makeup and hair and nails.

These two senses have something to do with each other. But we don’t usually talk about it.

Continue reading →

Getting psychedelic spirituality right

29 Sunday Dec 2024

Posted by in Health, M.T.S.R., Metaphysics, Politics, Psychology

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

American psychedelic advocates received a great disappointment a couple months ago when the Food and Drug Administration refused to approve MDMA (ecstasy) as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. The disappointment was great enough to lead Jules Evans of the Ecstatic Integration Substack to ask: “Is the psychedelic renaissance over?“

It seems silly to me to read too much into this one decision. It is not final; a new application could be made in a few years. More importantly, it is one decision, about one substance, by one agency in one country – for one purpose. (It was also a great disappointment for us in Massachusetts that our state voted down the ballot question to legalize psychedelics, but it too is just one state, where the question was extremely poorly promoted; Oregon and Colorado have proceeded with decriminalizing psilocybin.) If the entire “psychedelic renaissance” hung on the outcome of one agency’s decision or one state referendum, it would have been a shallow “renaissance” indeed. Even within the US there are already many other avenues for improving the legal status of psychedelics.

Public-domain AP photo of Timothy Leary.

That said: Michael Pollan’s book How To Change Your Mind probably did more to kick off the supposed current renaissance than anything else, and one of Pollan’s most important takeaways in the book was, let’s not screw this up. Psychedelics were famously popular in the 1960s, but the messages around them were dominated by overenthusiastic salespeople like Timothy Leary, who had little sense of caution. The resulting backlash was so strong that it created the ignorant world I grew up in, in the 1980s and 1990s, where even video games felt the importance of including a heavy-handed “don’t do drugs” message – extending even to cannabis. What the FDA ruling should remind us of, is the importance of avoiding the mistakes of the ’60s – so that the renaissance can lead to an enlightenment, if you will.

Continue reading →

Sketching an existentialist Buddhism

22 Sunday Dec 2024

Posted by in Foundations of Ethics, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Modernized Buddhism, Physics and Astronomy, Self

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

If we take a modern Buddhist approach where the ultimate reality is emptiness, what then does that look like in practice? Especially as we think about the key question:how can you be yourself if there is no self?

In thinking through my Buddhism, I had once turned to a reductionist “Sellarsian solution” because it allows in some sense for selves as conventional (rather than ultimate) truth. I’ve now moved instead to a Buddhist view that is based on emptiness rather than reductionism – and, crucially, the emptiness view allows selves in that conventional sense too. For that reason, I think an emptiness-based approach may still be able to leave room for an expressive individualism, where we seek to be ourselves more fully.

Continue reading →