08 Sunday Feb 2026
Posted in Analytic Tradition, Politics, Truth
Tags
academia, Charlie Kirk, democracy, Harriet Taylor Mill, John Stuart Mill, pedagogy, Rebecca Tuvel, rights
Freedom of speech and expression is essential to a good society, to protect both the search for truth and self-expression. The problem is that protecting freedom of expression is harder than it looks – because some speech interferes with other speech.
John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill get this point clearly enough that they are worth quoting in full:
Continue reading25 Sunday Jan 2026
Posted in Analytic Tradition, Certainty and Doubt, Economics, Flourishing, Humility, Politics, Truth
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academia, Alasdair MacIntyre, Elizabeth Barnes, expressive individualism, Harriet Taylor Mill, John Stuart Mill, Noah Feldman, utilitarianism
Freedom of thought, belief, speech, and expression is a principle long cherished in the West. In recent years it has come under the most sustained attack I have seen in my lifetime, from multiple quarters. I believe it is worth defending, and it’s time to say more about why.
On Liberty, generally attributed to the English philosopher John Stuart Mill, is the most famous and widely cited defence of this principle, and for good reason. I had a low opinion of Mill for a while, as his Utilitarianism did a bad job, overall, of defending the utilitarianism I broke from – and that was one of the key reasons I broke from it. But On Liberty is an entirely different story. It provides a powerful and, I think, largely correct defence of free thought and speech on two grounds – neither of which is particularly utilitarian!
Perhaps the difference is because it now seems likely the book was co-written with Harriet Taylor Mill, John Stuart’s wife – probably published without the woman’s name on it to make a Victorian audience to take it more seriously. (For that reason I’ll refer to On Liberty as written by “the Mills”.) It might be that Harriet was less of a utilitarian than John. But the point here is the two big grounds that the Mills provide for why freedom of speech is important.
Continue reading24 Sunday Aug 2025
Posted in Early and Theravāda, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Self, Truth
Tags
Abhidhamma, Buddhaghosa, Candrakīrti, conventional/ultimate, Dan Arnold, Madhyamaka, Mark Siderits, Milindapañhā, Śāntideva, Tom Tillemans
Buddhists have never agreed on an overall metaphysics. They have long agreed that prajñā – accurately seeing things according to the ultimate truth – is hugely important, but they differ greatly on what that ultimate truth is. The Theravāda Abhidhamma view says everything is ultimately reducible to smaller parts; the Madhyamaka says it’s ultimately just emptiness; the Yogācāra says it’s all mind; Chinese Huayan and Tiantai views have their own trippy takes.
It recently hit me, though, that there’s actually a huge point of metaphysical agreement among all the Buddhist schools: huge enough to mean that this disagreement about the ultimate isn’t what matters most to them. And that’s on the point I discussed last time: namely that what really matters in Buddhist metaphysics isn’t so much the nature of the ultimate. Rather, it’s breaking down the conventional!
Continue reading17 Sunday Aug 2025
Posted in Attachment and Craving, Christianity, Deity, Foundations of Ethics, Islam, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Truth
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Augustine, C.S. Lewis, Candrakīrti, conventional/ultimate, existentialism, ibn Sīnā, Madhyamaka, Plato, Śāntideva
While Buddhist schools have many different takes on metaphysics – on what the world really is – they all acknowledge a distinction between two truths, or two levels of reality. That is: there is a conventional truth, the one familiar to us in everyday life where we can fruitfully speak of individual selves or persons and other everyday objects – and another, more ultimate (paramārtha) truth that is distinguished in some respect from the conventional, truer than the conventional. Their widely varying metaphysics mostly have to do with how we understand the ultimate truth, and I’ll talk about that more next week. I want to start this time, though, I want to note a key point that the metaphysical schools share: the importance of breaking down the conventional – or, put another way, of seeing through it.
Continue reading24 Sunday Mar 2024
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Aristotle, Bruce Cockburn, drugs, Kieran Setiya, Kyoto School, mathematics, mystical experience, Nishitani Keiji, Pali suttas, pragmatism, puruṣārthas, Rachael Petersen, religion, Richard Rorty, Seth Zuihō Segall
While the cover of Seth Zuihō Segall’s The House We Live In claims the book draws its account primarily from Aristotle, the Buddha and Confucius, the deeper, animating influence turns out to be pragmatism. There’s no problem with taking inspiration from pragmatism as such; the problem is that Seth’s pragmatism is so relentless and extreme that it rules out of court all opinions that differ from it – including, it turns out, those of Aristotle, the Buddha and Confucius.
The excessive pragmatism in question is expressed above all in this sentence: “whenever we ask ‘what’s the meaning of “X?”‘, we are really asking, ‘what is the significance of “X” for maintaining and enhancing our lives.'” (107) This pragmatic claim is simply not true. Some of us are really asking the latter question when we ask the former. Seth would like it to be the case that all of us are asking the latter question. But it’s not.
Continue reading04 Sunday Apr 2021
After writing my previous post about history and the love of literature, I realized there’s a lot more one could say about the way history can deepen our appreciation of a work of literature – and perhaps even more so of philosophy, where I’ve thought about the question a lot more. I noted Herder’s recognition of the differences between eras, but there’s a lot more to say beyond that. It’s a particularly important point to make within philosophy, since it’s at the heart of the analytic-continental divide: analytic philosophers typically appreciate the truth of philosophical texts but without reference to their historical context, and continental philosophers typically learn about the historical context of texts without reference to their truth.
I am not satisfied with either of these approaches, because I think learning the historical context of a text is directly relevant to assessing its truth. And I think it’s time to unpack what I mean by that a bit more.
Continue reading28 Sunday Mar 2021
Posted in Christianity, Daoism, Deity, Indigenous American Thought, Metaphysics, Truth, Vedānta
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Advaita Vedānta, Augustine, Aztec, G.W.F. Hegel, Hebrew Bible, James Maffie, Krishna, Kyoto School, Laozi, Nishida Kitarō, Nishitani Keiji, nondualism, Śaṅkara, Satan, theodicy, Zhuangzi
I have considerable sympathies for nondualism and have started in recent years to think that it might be true. But there is an important qualifier to any such view. Namely: I do not think that there could possibly be an omnipotent omnibenevolent God. The problem of suffering is just too intractable.
Many nondualists, especially Sufis, would identify the nondual ultimate with that God. And I cannot accept that view. For similar reasons I am skeptical of a Vedānta view where the ultimate is sat: both being and goodness. There is too much being that is not good.
For this reason I have been inspired by a wonderful passage in Nishida Kitarō’s “The logic of nothingness and the religious worldview”:
Continue reading13 Sunday Sep 2020
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Abhidhamma, Buddhaghosa, Erik Braun, Noble Eightfold Path, Pali suttas, Paul Fuller, Wilfred Cantwell Smith
Paul Fuller’s The Notion of Diṭṭhi in Theravāda Buddhism, as its title might suggest, is a dry, abstract, technical monograph. It may also be one of the more spiritually beneficial books I have ever read.
I suppose maybe both of these things are appropriate to the book’s subject matter, the Pali Canon. One of the Canon’s “three baskets”, the abhidhamma, is notorious for its level of technical abstraction – and yet Theravāda tradition has consistently held it to be of great spiritual benefit. Erik Braun has demonstrated how the modern Burmese traditions of vipassanā meditation, now enormously popular around the world, have their origins in study of the abhidhamma.
Continue reading28 Sunday Jun 2020
Continuing my response to Seth Segall, my greatest disagreements are with his second point. So I will begin by quoting that at length:
As a hospital pastoral care provider I minister to patients of all faiths, and I have been impressed at how their faiths shape their own understanding of the virtues and contribute to making their lives admirable. So, if you are a person who finds a belief in rebirth compelling, and if you find that a belief in rebirth inspires you to practice being more compassionate to others, I have no quarrel with you. Please continue. The only statement I am willing to make without hesitation is that a belief in rebirth (let’s just use “rebirth” here as a stand-in for all the parts of Buddhism I happen to disagree with) doesn’t work for me, and I expect it won’t work for the majority of modern Westerners. I don’t want to be imperialistic about my beliefs. My attitude is, “this is what works for me,” and if you are feeling the same kind of dissonance with aspects of the Buddhist tradition, see if it works for you, too. On the other hand, I would never want to tell the Dalai Lama that he is practicing Buddhism wrong.
I do recognize the importance of working with people as they are, especially in a difficult field like pastoral care. Still I am nervous about saying that false ideas – which I do take rebirth to be – constitute “the best model for” any given person. Continue reading
09 Sunday Jun 2019
Posted in Analytic Tradition, Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, Karma, Metaphysics, Self, Truth
Tags
Buddhaghosa, Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, conventional/ultimate, expressive individualism, G.W.F. Hegel, Jay Garfield, Madhyamaka, Maria Heim, Pudgalavāda, Śāntideva, Wilfrid Sellars
The conflict between Buddhism and qualitative individualism is a major difficulty for my own philosophy. In addressing that conflict, there is one approach that has repeatedly stuck out at me. I don’t think it actually solves the problem, but it may be a step towards a solution.
That step is to build on the similarities between the Buddhist conventional/ultimate distinction and Wilfrid Sellars’s distinction between the manifest and the scientific image. Both of these dichotomies are focused on the human person or self: at the conventional (sammuti/vohāra) or manifest level, selves and their differences are real and important, and stories can be told; at the ultimate (paramattha) or scientific level, selves disappear, reduced to smaller particles that form a more fundamental level of explanation.
We may note here a key way that Sellars departs from at least Buddhaghosa’s Buddhism. He agrees with Buddhaghosa’s view that the ultimate/scientific level is an important respect truer than the conventional/manifest. But the further difference is very important: for Sellars, the manifest image is necessary for ethics (and probably aesthetics and politics.) Continue reading