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 reading01 Sunday Jun 2025
Posted in Confucianism, Daoism, East Asia, Greek and Roman Tradition, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Metaphilosophy, South Asia, Vedānta
≈ Comments Off on Is Asian philosophy footnotes to the Buddha?
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Alfred North Whitehead, Confucius, Livia Kohn, Plato, Śaṅkara, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Upaniṣads, Zhu Xi, Zhuangzi
Recently I wanted to explore a fascinating passage of the Daoist founder Zhuangzi, where the text recommends “sitting in oblivion” or “sitting and forgetting” (zuòwàng 坐忘). That passage bears striking similarities to mystical practices and experiences from around the globe.
To help figure it out, I turned to Sitting in Oblivion by the Daoism scholar Livia Kohn, which shows how “sitting and forgetting” was developed as a practice and taken up at great length by later Daoist thinkers. One passage of Kohn’s particularly struck me:
The most important aspects of the rather extensive Buddhist imports into Daoism for sitting in oblivion include the organizational setting of meditation practice in monastic institutions, the formalized ethical requirement in the taking of precepts and refuge in the Three Treasures, the doctrines of karma and retribution, the five paths of rebirth, and the various layers of hell, as well as the vision of the body-mind in terms of multiple aspects, defilements, hindrances, and purification. (107)
“Rather extensive” indeed! I knew that East Asian Buddhists had drawn a great deal from Daoism – I have sometimes uncharitably described Chan/Zen as “Daoists cosplaying as Buddhists” – but I hadn’t realized how much the influence went in the other direction. Karma, rebirth, meditation, monastic institutions, taking precepts, taking refuge? At that point you sure sound a lot like Buddhists without the name!
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 reading18 Sunday May 2025
Posted in African Thought, Eastern Orthodoxy, Greek and Roman Tradition, Place, Roman Catholicism
≈ Comments Off on Catholicism before Europe
Much has been made, in the US at least, of the fact that the new pope – Robert Prevost, now Leo XIV –comes from the USA. The papacy is one of the few institutions in the world where Americans have been under-represented. In recent decades, the reason for that was the US’s disproportionate global influence – a pope from outside the US was seen as a counterbalance. Yet until the previous pope – an Argentinian – it would have been ludicrous to argue that the selection of popes was in any way balanced, since for over 1200 years every single pope had come exclusively from the continent of Europe.
It’s crucial to remember, though, that that wasn’t always the case! For the Catholic Church as an institution predates the rise of European influence in the world. Christianity, with its combination of Greek and Hebrew influences, is closely tied to the development of the “Western civilization” with those same influences. And a look at the Church’s history can help remind us, in a new way, that the West is neither white nor European – for neither, fundamentally, is the Church.
Continue reading11 Sunday May 2025
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21st century, academia, Adam Rubenstein, Adolph Reed, Boston University, Democratic Socialists of America, gender, Google, Ibram X. Kendi, John Lansing, New York Times, NPR, race, technology, United States, Uri Berliner
A while ago I identified what I considered the Social Justice movement‘s first tenet: that the most urgent issue facing the world in the 21st century is inequalities of race and gender (including sexual orientation and gender identity). I stand by that description. I think that that view is implicit in Ibram X. Kendi’s most widely quoted idea: that neutrality is a mask for racism, that anyone who isn’t actively antiracist is racist. Because that idea directly implies that one must prioritize racism over other issues, that neutrality might be acceptable on other issues but not on this one.
There’s plenty more evidence that a wide swath of influential people treated race and gender as the most urgent issues of all. Let’s turn first to National Public Radio (NPR), the US’s major public audio broadcaster – its audio equivalent to the BBC or CBC. An exposé of NPR delivered by its veteran ex-editor Uri Berliner makes it clear: CEO John Lansing
declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission, the “North Star” of the organization. Phrases like “that’s part of the North Star” became part of meetings and more casual conversation.
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13 Sunday Apr 2025
Posted in Confucianism, Courage, Economics, Leadership, Morality, Politics, Virtue
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21st century, democracy, Donald Trump, Han Feizi, Korea, law, Liz Truss, Republican Party, Thomas Hobbes, Tim Wu, United States, Yoon-Suk Yeol
When the head of state or government goes rogue, what happens next?
Consider the recent experiences of three countries where the top leader pursued an agenda far more radical than they had campaigned on, in a way that caused widespread panic. In South Korea, Yoon-Suk Yeol attempted to impose martial law, marking an attempted return to something like the country’s past military dictatorship. In the UK, Liz Truss attempted tax cuts so radical that even the business community hated them. In the US, Donald Trump is now attempting something like both: after having been blatantly caught trying to sabotage the election and encouraging a riot that sought to prevent a peaceful transfer of power, now he is not only claiming to be move toward an unconstitutional third term in office, he has also engaged in tariffs so drastic that the market’s reaction to them was even worse than to Truss’s cuts. (Trump is taking as much from the rich as much as Bernie Sanders would – just without giving any of it to the poor.)
But there is an obvious difference between the three cases: Yoon and Truss were removed from power within a few months after their drastic measures, while there is not the slightest sign of any such thing happening to Trump. And that should lead us to ask: why this difference?
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 reading23 Sunday Mar 2025
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conservatism, Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni, Leslie Lenkowsky, Narendra Modi, Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan, Ronald Reagan, United States, war
As awful as the second Trump administration is, very little is accomplished by criticizing it from the perspective of a leftist like me. The administration wants to appall us, even take revenge on us. That’s the point. I’ve seen multiple bumper stickers and T-shirts proclaiming “Trump: Make liberals cry again.” As far as I can tell, last time, Trump drew strength from every apopleptic tweet our team raged out about how horrible it all is. We can and should take concrete steps to fight it all – the only obvious one being to contribute to legal funds challenging his actions in the courts, of which Democracy Forward seems to be the most prominent – but we do little by publicly expressing our outrage. Our hatred of any Trump administration is a feature, not a bug.
Old-fashioned Reaganite conservatives who stay true to their principles are going to be pretty horrified, too. When an unrepentant admirer of the old Soviet Union conquers back USSR territory (at great human cost on both sides), it’s got to be crushing to see the leader of “the free world” walk away from the conflict on terms favourable to the conqueror. But it’s been startling to see how few even care about those Reaganite principles anymore. Some of the ones who do, like Dick Cheney, often already campaigned for the other side – in a way that may have served only to illustrate that side’s complete ideological incoherence. (If you advertise that you’ve got endorsements ranging from Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney, does that really look like you’re the common-sense consensus candidate, or does it look like you stand for nothing at all?)
All of which makes far too much criticism of the administration effectively irrelevant. If you’re a true-blue Reaganite, let alone a leftist, it means none of the people who put this administration in power actually care what you think. And that’s a big problem, because what the administration is doing is really, really bad – even from the perspective of its sympathizers.
Continue reading09 Sunday Mar 2025
Posted in Emotion, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Psychology
One of the things that really surprises me about contemporary mindfulness meditation is how rarely – especially at the beginning – they highlight what, as far as I can tell, is the most beneficial aspect of the practice. It’s not a “secret” in the sense of being concealed away somewhere, just that beginners are rarely told how important it is; I more or less had to figure it out for myself. This holds true for the practices I’m most familiar with – Headspace, Robert Sokolove’s medical mindfulness recording, Goenka vipassanā – but also seems to hold for other forms of modern mindfulness that I’ve listened to recordings of. Because of this, I think it’s easy for a beginner to misinterpret what mindfulness meditation is about.
Headspace’s meditation instructions usually involve focusing your attention on your breath – its inward and outward movement, the way your chest and stomach rise and fall with the breath. (Sokolove’s likewise.) Goenka vipassanā puts more emphasis on repeatedly scanning your attention up and down through your body. But it’s become clear to me that that focus, on the breath or the bodily sensations, is not the point of any of these exercises.
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