Modernity and modernism
It can feel pedantic to insist on the distinction between modernity and modernism (as I do in my tag cloud). I’ve seen eyes roll when I do it, and understandably so. Two nouns both deriving from the...
View ArticleGenealogy (and encyclopedia and tradition) of ethics
This week’s post is eleven years old; I wrote it as a short assignment for David Hall‘s course on method and theory in the study of religion in 2002. The assignment was to write a “genealogy” of a key...
View ArticleA book about everything
Recently I’ve been carrying around and reading a copy of G.W.F. Hegel’s masterwork, the Phenomenology of Spirit. Carrying a book with such a strange and obscure title, and no cover art, sometimes makes...
View ArticleSynthesis via dialectic
In my view, one of the most important, and often unrecognized, distinctions philosophy is between compromise and synthesis. A compromise merely finds a middle ground between two other positions; it can...
View ArticleHow dialectic transcends and includes
This week I’d like to continue to think through the topic of dialectic, which I began to explore last week in the terms of a double movement transcending and including. In my most detailed previous...
View ArticleThe coherence of composite texts
A while ago I discussed how Janet Gyatso had objected to my approach of assuming authorial coherence and single authorship in my dissertation on Śāntideva (and in other works). I said there that...
View ArticleNo apologies for studying Laozi and Zhuangzi
I’ve lately been trying to get a better understanding of Daoist thought, as I believe Daoism to be the major philosophical tradition I have so far understood the least. I have done this by turning to...
View ArticleThe appeal of the unappealing
As I noted last week, I owe a real intellectual debt to Chris Fraser‘s work for helping me figure out Zhuangzi – or the Zhuangzi, as Fraser would say. His interpretations have been of incredible value...
View ArticleHow a sensible person could hold the radical Zhuangist view
Last week I critiqued Chris Fraser‘s readiness to discard the “implausible, unappealing radical” view that he found in the Zhuangzi. My reflections there were general and methodological. Here I want to...
View ArticleDigital philosophy
The term digital humanities has quickly become trendy over the past couple years. The term has often excited me, since digital technology in the humanities is both a part of what I do for a living, and...
View ArticleA journey to Buddhism with Hegel
A few years ago I told what I thought of at the time as the story of my philosophy: how I left a utilitarian worldview and came to discover Buddhism in Thailand at age 21. I realize now that there’s...
View ArticleWhat I believe
At my Indian wedding, the ceremony referred at length to becoming gṛhastha: that is, entering the householder stage of life. This turned out to be truer than intended: my wife and I are in the final...
View ArticleWhy care about philosophy?
After I had my first epiphany in Thailand, being changed by Buddhist ideas, I thought for a while that philosophy was the key to a good and happy life – that what we really needed to live well was to...
View ArticleIdeal types in philosophy
When I use concepts like intimacy and integrity and ascent and descent on this blog, I very often refer to them as ideal types. So far I have explained what that means mostly in passing, and it’s time...
View ArticleThe different pieces of intimacy and integrity
Regular readers will have seen how fruitful I have found Thomas Kasulis’s distinction between intimacy and integrity worldviews. So it is worth interrogating that distinction further and seeing how...
View ArticlePutting intimacy/integrity back together
Last week I submitted Thomas Kasulis’s dichotomy of intimacy and integrity worldviews to critical scrutiny. I pointed out the distinction between the epistemological element on one hand, in which...
View ArticleAccounting for Hegel and the Pali
My previous two substantive posts, on Thomas Kasulis’s intimacy/integrity distinction, went in opposite directions from one another. Two weeks ago I noted how the intimacy/integrity distinction seems...
View ArticleUnderstanding understanding
I have recently begun the exciting opportunity to teach a course in Indian philosophy in Boston University’s philosophy department. Thinking about and designing the course, I had the great opportunity...
View ArticleSearching for ascent and descent (1)
A couple years ago on this blog, after exploring a number of ways of classifying world philosophical traditions cross-culturally, I found the most robust and satisfying to be a 2×2 grid: we may...
View ArticleSearching for ascent and descent (2)
For reasons I discussed last time, I’ve found it important to categorize philosophies using the ideal types of ascent and descent – but have not yet been able to specify them as clearly as an ideal...
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