Grief can be more complicated than we often make it out to be. In the wake of my father’s death, …Continue reading →| Love of All Wisdom
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…| Love of All Wisdom
I spent almost the entire decade living in the United States, except for two three-month stints in Toronto in 2001 and India in 2005. It was not the ideal decade in which to do this, for the US of this decade was the US of George W. Bush: a man who opposed almost everything I had ever stood for, whether substantively (torture, wars of choice, gutting environmental regulations), procedurally (incompetent patronage appointments for natural disasters, governing unilaterally without respect for o...| Love of All Wisdom
While Buddhist schools have many different takes on metaphysics – on what the world really is – they all acknowledge …Continue reading →| Love of All Wisdom
One of the reasons Buddhists emphasize the idea of non-self so much, I think, is they see the kind of …Continue reading →| Love of All Wisdom
A few years ago I wrote about my old friend Nic Thorne’s book on Thucydides and Plato: how they both …Continue reading →| Love of All Wisdom
Like most of those around me, I feel the pull of expressive individualist ideas: I think it is a hugely important part of being human to be ourselves and express ourselves, in ways that express our…| Love of All Wisdom
Advertisement for BU’s Day of Engagement. Four years ago, Ibram X. Kendi was the academic star of the moment, topping the bestseller lists, receiving a MacArthur Genius Grant, and being hande…| Love of All Wisdom
This Friday, while I was taking my lunch break from work, my mother called to let me know that my …Continue reading →| Love of All Wisdom
Having discussed the history of standpoint theory, I now want to dive into it more philosophically. While I have plenty of outsider’s objections to standpoint theory, here I want to explore w…| Love of All Wisdom
I’ve expressed plenty of disagreement with the Social Justice movement and will continue to do so. I also believe that there is truth in everything, an important reason to listen to all one’s foes. So I want to engage with that movement’s ideas in more philosophical depth, in a way that starts with sympathetic understanding. A couple years ago I tried to list those ideas neutrally and descriptively. Now I’d also like to go into the background, as neutrally and descriptively as possibl...| Love of All Wisdom
I’ve expressed plenty of disagreement with the Social Justice movement and will continue to do so. I also believe that …Continue reading →| Love of All Wisdom
Being gender-fluid, in a certain sense I transition and detransition my gender every week (just not medically). It feels only …Continue reading →| Love of All Wisdom
Transgender identity raises a variety of interesting philosophical questions, and on an issue this controversial, the answers to those questions will necessarily be controversial too. I recently fo…| Love of All Wisdom
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 cau…| Love of All Wisdom
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) promise…| Love of All Wisdom
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). …| Love of All Wisdom
I think I’ve shown that the kammatic-nibbanic distinction should matter to the historian, textual scholar, or anthropologist trying to figure out what Buddhism has meant in other times and pl…| Love of All Wisdom
Last winter my wife and I made a wonderful trip to Sri Lanka. Before I say anything about the trip’s philosophical implications, I just want to note that you should go there if you have the m…| Love of All Wisdom
Weterners who have studied Buddhist philosophy and ethics, even when we have done so at length, are often thrown for a loop when we read the Mahāvaṃsa. This text – one of the most historically orie…| Love of All Wisdom
Last time I discussed Jan Westerhoff’s potent objection to naturalized Buddhism: if there is no rebirth then we can end our suffering simply by committing suicide. Westerhoff takes this objec…| Love of All Wisdom
A couple of my recent posts have explored the idea of anti-politics – the idea that concern with affairs of the state is typically detrimental to a good human life. The anti-political view is…| Love of All Wisdom
My discussion with Justin Whitaker continues after my last post, which was a response to his original post about trans* inclusiveness in Buddhism. There followed a discussion back and forth between…| Love of All Wisdom
Years ago, in a difficult period of my life, I had looked for philosophical help and explicitly found it in Buddhism and not Daoism, rejecting Daoism and its sudden-liberation views in about the st…| Love of All Wisdom
Longtime readers will know I don’t have much patience for the concept of “religion”. I continue to endorse the various critiques I’ve made in the past: the concept of “…| Love of All Wisdom
Courage figures prominently in many lists of the virtues. It is a key example for Aristotle of how virtue is a mean: the courageous person is neither cowardly nor rash, but finds an appropriate mid…| Love of All Wisdom
The mainstreaming of mindfulness meditation continues at a rapid clip. According to the Center for Disease Control, in the years 2012 to 2017 the percentage of adults meditating in the United State…| Love of All Wisdom
Perhaps the most common term for a man who is not traditionally masculine is “sensitive.” The term is sometimes spelled out further so that such men are called SNAGs, “sensitive n…| Love of All Wisdom
My previous post examined the problems that led me to move away from utilitarianism, including its Rawlsian variant. Happily, I also found solutions. While working at the UN in Bangkok, I spent a l…| Love of All Wisdom
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 (inclu…| Love of All Wisdom
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 op…| Love of All Wisdom
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 …| Love of All Wisdom
Ron Purser’s critique of modern mindfulness is thoroughgoing, and extends beyond chastising its skepticism of political engagement. Purser also criticizes modern mindfulness on other grounds,…| Love of All Wisdom
The Buddhist propositions that Evan Thompson articulates go deep. They proclaim three flaws of all the things around us, in ways that (Buddhist tradition has typically claimed) make them unwor…| Love of All Wisdom
It has taken me far too long to read Martha Nussbaum’s Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice – long enough that, in characteristic Nussbaum fashion, she has already authored …| Love of All Wisdom
One of the things that helped me realize the need for self-improvement by not-self-improvement was regular practice with the excellent Headspace meditation app, created by a former Tibetan monk nam…| Love of All Wisdom
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 ment…| Love of All Wisdom
When Donald Trump first rose to rapid popularity in American politics, many people were shocked and had no explanation. I was not among those people, for a couple of reasons. Among them: one way to…| Love of All Wisdom
On Stephen Walker’s recommendation, I’ve been turning to the articles of Chris Fraser in order to understand the difficult Daoist thinker Zhuangzi. (Happily, Fraser makes most of his ar…| Love of All Wisdom
Judging by the comments, many readers found my diagnosis-prognosis post to be dark and pessimistic. Going back to the post, it’s not hard to see why. I endorse there the dark view of our exis…| Love of All Wisdom
Since reading Martha Nussbaum’s Anger and Forgiveness, I have found myself continually more attracted to her concept of transition-anger. That is: the main, and perhaps only, place where ange…| Love of All Wisdom
It’s not hard to see why the Catholic Church condemned Meister Eckhart for heresy. One of his teachings, in particular, is shocking even today: the good or blessed man, properly “poor i…| Love of All Wisdom
It doesn’t sit very well with many modern readers, including myself, to put a high value on shame. We often find shame to be something that cripples us, makes us burn with embarrassment in a …| Love of All Wisdom
The phrase negation of the negation is best known from Karl Marx’s work, as when he uses it to describe capitalist production in Capital. It’s an odd phrase that seems simply redundant …| Love of All Wisdom
There are probably few people in the English-speaking world unfamiliar with the Serenity Prayer. In its best-known form this prayer asks: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I ca…| Love of All Wisdom
