15 Sunday Jun 2025
Posted in Certainty and Doubt, Epistemology, French Tradition, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Practice, Self, Serenity
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Chan/Zen 禪, David J. Blacker, drugs, Madhyamaka, mystical experience, Oxherding Pictures, Pierre Hadot, René Descartes, Śāntideva
David J. Blacker’s recent Deeper Learning with Psychedelics is a valuable attempt to think through the implications of psychedelics for philosophy and education. One passage in particular caught my imagination: Blacker points out the similarities between a psychedelic experience and René Descartes’s passage of radical doubt.
Continue reading08 Sunday Jun 2025
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Advaita Vedānta, Aristotle, drugs, Gauḍapāda, Ingmar Gorman, John Hick, MAPS, Meister Eckhart, mystical experience, nondualism, Rachael Petersen, religion, Roland Griffiths, Upaniṣads, Zhuangzi
I’m delighted to be giving a talk at Psychedelic Science 2025, the annual conference of the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies. The conference (June 17-20 in Denver) promises to be really fun and stimulating. If you can make it, I’d love to say hi: registration isn’t cheap, but you can use code SPEAKER15 to get 15% off your registration.
I’m especially excited because my talk is really experimental, the kind of broad comparative work that would have got frowned on when I was in grad school. I’m still aiming to exercise scholarly caution to avoid saying anything false, trying to stay reasonably close to what’s in the texts, but I am writing about multiple thinkers whose source languages (classical Chinese and old German) I don’t know well: something which I think one has to do in order to investigate human cultural commonalities, but which would have raised every eyebrow in my PhD program. It’s the kind of project that an aspiring professor only undertakes after getting tenure; in my case, I can do it because I’m no longer trying for a faculty job.
Continue reading25 Sunday May 2025
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Alasdair MacIntyre, Aristotle, autobiography, Friedrich Nietzsche, ISME, Karl Marx, Martha C. Nussbaum, obituary, relativism, Scotland, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Kuhn
Alasdair MacIntyre is dead. He had a very good run, better than many could dream of: he was 95 years old, and produced an output significant enough to be in competition for the title of “greatest philosopher of his age”. Few indeed are the 20th- or 21st-century philosophers who have an entire learned society – in his case the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry (ISME) – devoted to pursuing the implications of their work. It seems that MacIntyre himself was a little uncomfortable with that society’s existence. The one time I ever saw MacIntyre in the flesh was at the society’s 2019 conference, held on the University of Notre Dame campus near his home, in honour of his 90th birthday – but, I was told, he only participated on condition that his name not appear anywhere in the conference title. (Thus, given his focus on teleology and the aims of human life, the conference was called “To What End?”)
Even now, MacIntyre still sits outside what is usually considered the philosophical mainstream. Though he was trained in the English-language mainstream of analytic philosophy and taught in analytic departments, he refused to confine himself to the analytic mode of philosophizing, always writing in a way broader and less precise than analytic departments were usually willing to count as good philosophy. That experience surely shaped one of MacIntyre’s more powerful philosophical insights: the recognition that philosophy itself always operates within the context of historical tradition – the conception of tradition at issue being close to Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigms. Kuhn and MacIntyre recognized that different paradigms differed not just on what claims they believed to be true and false, but on the standards by which one judged them true and false; MacIntyre knew that within philosophy, analytic philosophy’s standards were never the only ones available.
Thus MacIntyre is the sort of philosopher whom one often first encounters in unusual ways, outside being taught him in a classroom. Thus one colleague at “To What End?” helpfully started conversations with “What’s your MacIntyre story?” – imagining, rightly, that everyone had their own personal story of encountering his ideas, more interesting than being simply taught him in an Intro to Ethics class. (Now that I think of it, the one place I remember being asked a similar question was on a long tour around the Laphroaig whisky distillery in Scotland, which also began with the guide asking “What’s your Laphroaig story?” – a comparison that would likely have pleased MacIntyre, as he always took his philosophy to be deeply informed by his Scottishness.)
Continue reading04 Sunday May 2025
Posted in Philosophy of Language, Politics
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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 reading27 Sunday Apr 2025
Posted in Philosophy of Language, Politics
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 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 reading23 Sunday Feb 2025
Posted in Biology, Emotion, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Philosophy of Science, Supernatural
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 reading16 Sunday Feb 2025
Posted in Anger, Compassion, Emotion, External Goods, Fear, Health, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Practice, Psychology, Stoicism, Unconscious Mind
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 reading09 Sunday Feb 2025
Posted in Action, Biology, Emotion, Health, Human Nature, Psychology, Unconscious Mind
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.
02 Sunday Feb 2025
Posted in Aesthetics, Analytic Tradition, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy
≈ Comments Off on Of offbeat philosophers
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Clive Bell, Donna Haraway, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Jalal al-Din Rumi, Jayarāśi, Lawrence Harvey, Mozi, music, Zera Yacob
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.
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