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

Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Dr. Seuss

How the Grinch found eudaimonism

27 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Christianity, Confucianism, Flourishing, Friends, Human Nature, Judaism, Pleasure, Rites, Virtue, Zest

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Christmas, Confucius, Dr. Seuss, law, Mohandas K. Gandhi, television

Last week my wife and I re-watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas! – the original Chuck Jones cartoon, not the later remakes. As we talked about it, I realized that that Christmas special, and the original book, are a great depiction of eudaimonism – perhaps even in a Confucian form.

Continue reading →

New York as Eden

17 Wednesday Mar 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Attachment and Craving, Christianity, Early and Theravāda, Economics, Food, Gratitude, Happiness, Place, Psychology

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Ambrose, Barry Schwartz, Calvin Trillin, Christopher Peterson, Dr. Seuss, Four Noble Truths, Hebrew Bible, Herbert Simon, New York City, Penelope Trunk

[EDIT: Image of New York City removed at copyright holder’s request.]

This weekend I went to New York City with friends so they could attend a bridal shower. I love New York – but I’m also wary of it. Happiness researcher Christopher Peterson ran an online happiness questionnaire and analyzed the results by zip code – and found that the most miserable zip codes of all were found in midtown Manhattan. Peterson himself cautions that this is not a controlled or rigorous experiment, and even if it were, it would still be measuring happiness by the questionable measure of self-report.

Still, in many respects these results are exactly what I would expect. I found this happiness data from Penelope Trunk, who nails the problem with living in New York exactly. If you are (like me) the kind of person who loves city life, then in New York you really do have the best of everything, at least on this continent and in some cases anywhere: the best food, the best entertainment, the best shopping for almost any goods you could want, the best access to transportation, the best art. But that’s exactly the problem. On one hand, you’re competing with everyone else to have access to the best of everything, so everything is very expensive, so you have to work much harder to make more money. (A little like Dr. Seuss’s Solla Sollew, where they have no troubles except for the fact that you can’t actually live there.) On the other hand, and more insidiously, if you live in New York, it’s probably because you are the kind of person who tries to have access to the best of everything.
Continue reading →

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

  • Nathan on Thoughts on MonkTok
  • Thoughts on MonkTok – The Indian Philosophy Blog on Thoughts on MonkTok
  • Amod Lele on Stoicism for boys, mindfulness for girls?
  • Amod Lele on Stoicism for boys, mindfulness for girls?
  • Amod Lele on Stoicism for boys, mindfulness for girls?

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 law Martha Nussbaum modernity mystical experience Pali suttas pedagogy Plato qualitative individualism race rebirth religion Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha) technology theodicy Thomas Kuhn United States utilitarianism Śaṅkara Śāntideva

Categories

  • African Thought (13)
  • Applied Phil (282)
    • Death (36)
    • Family (42)
    • Food (17)
    • Friends (14)
    • Health (23)
    • Place (27)
    • Play (14)
    • Politics (162)
    • Sex (20)
    • Work (37)
  • Asian Thought (403)
    • Buddhism (291)
      • Early and Theravāda (125)
      • Mahāyāna (118)
      • Modernized Buddhism (88)
    • East Asia (84)
      • Confucianism (54)
      • Daoism (13)
      • Shinto (1)
    • South Asia (131)
      • Bhakti Poets (3)
      • Cārvāka-Lokāyata (5)
      • Epics (16)
      • Jainism (24)
      • Modern Hinduism (37)
      • Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika (6)
      • Sāṃkhya-Yoga (14)
      • Vedānta (36)
      • Vedas and Mīmāṃsā (7)
  • Blog Admin (27)
  • Indigenous American Thought (5)
  • Method (244)
    • M.T.S.R. (137)
    • Metaphilosophy (161)
  • Practical Philosophy (358)
    • Action (11)
    • Aesthetics (43)
    • Emotion (153)
      • Anger (31)
      • Attachment and Craving (26)
      • Compassion (5)
      • Despair (3)
      • Disgust (3)
      • Faith (19)
      • Fear (7)
      • Grief (5)
      • Happiness (47)
      • Hope (15)
      • Pleasure (32)
      • Shame and Guilt (6)
    • External Goods (50)
    • Flourishing (85)
    • Foundations of Ethics (107)
    • Karma (43)
    • Morality (64)
    • Virtue (151)
      • Courage (5)
      • Generosity (13)
      • Gentleness (6)
      • Gratitude (10)
      • Honesty (13)
      • Humility (22)
      • Leadership (4)
      • Mindfulness (15)
      • Patient Endurance (29)
      • Self-Discipline (9)
      • Serenity (28)
      • Zest (6)
  • Practice (123)
    • Karmic Redirection (5)
    • Meditation (33)
    • Monasticism (45)
    • Physical Exercise (3)
    • Prayer (14)
    • Reading and Recitation (12)
    • Rites (20)
    • Therapy (10)
  • Theoretical Philosophy (334)
    • Consciousness (15)
    • Epistemology (109)
      • Certainty and Doubt (15)
      • Prejudices and "Intuitions" (28)
    • Free Will (17)
    • God (64)
    • Hermeneutics (55)
    • Human Nature (30)
    • Logic (28)
      • Dialectic (16)
    • Metaphysics (90)
    • Philosophy of Language (18)
    • Self (64)
    • Supernatural (49)
    • Truth (59)
    • Unconscious Mind (14)
  • Western Thought (427)
    • Analytic Tradition (91)
    • Christianity (142)
      • Early Factions (8)
      • Protestantism (22)
      • Roman Catholicism (49)
    • French Tradition (47)
    • German Tradition (85)
    • Greek and Roman Tradition (111)
      • Epicureanism (24)
      • Neoplatonism (2)
      • Pre-Socratics (6)
      • Skepticism (2)
      • Sophists (7)
      • Stoicism (19)
    • Islam (37)
      • Mu'tazila (2)
      • Salafi (3)
      • Sufism (9)
    • Judaism (33)
    • Natural Science (88)
      • Biology (24)
      • Philosophy of Science (47)
    • Social Science (149)
      • Economics (32)
      • Psychology (61)

Recent Posts

  • Thoughts on MonkTok
  • Stoicism for boys, mindfulness for girls?
  • A very brief survey of Latin American philosophy
  • Confucius in middle age
  • King’s improvement on Gandhi

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.