Defining ascent and descent
In the previous two posts I tried to show how I came to the best definition I could find for ascent and descent. Namely, ascent is an attempt to transcend the particular human condition, in the name of...
View ArticleMatilal vs. Radhakrishnan
A little while ago on the Indian Philosophy Blog, Matthew Dasti provided a fascinating glimpse into the recent, 20th-century history of “Indian philosophy” – not the doing of it but the studying of it,...
View ArticleParadigms in philosophy
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was a groundbreaking work that changed the way the world thinks about natural science. Kuhn claims that science works not as a steady, additive...
View ArticleFirst principles of paradigms
There are two different ways to apply the distinction between dialectical and demonstrative argument, and it’s important to be aware of the difference. I draw the terms dialectical and demonstrative...
View ArticleParadigms in Wilber and MacIntyre
I have juxtaposed the works of Ken Wilber and Alasdair MacIntyre against each other more than once here. They are at odds in many respects, and MacIntyre often has the best illustration of Wilber’s...
View ArticleTowards an Institute for Cosmopolitan Philosophy
Jonardon Ganeri, the renowned scholar of Indian philosophy, has recently posted an online blueprint for an “Institute for Cosmopolitan Philosophy in a Culturally Polycentric World”. He suggests an...
View ArticlePhilological and philosophical approaches to the Zhuangzi
Last year, I made several posts criticizing Chris Fraser‘s interpretation of the Zhuangzi, supported by a previous post on interpretive method. Fraser was kind enough to reply at length to my posts by...
View ArticleReading the Zhuangzi as a composite text
This week’s post follows the previous one and should be taken in the same light: namely, that while my views expressed in it have developed in response to a thoughtful and valuable exchange between me...
View ArticleGoodness as preventing suffering
A while ago I referred to Śāntideva’s thought as “ethics without morality” – a deliberately provocative formulation based on Shyam Ranganathan’s eccentric definition of morality as that which conduces...
View ArticleIs there Indian political philosophy?
On the Indian Philosophy Blog, commenter Anthony S asked an important and difficult question: what are good resources for thinking through Indian political philosophy? . I’m interested not so much in...
View ArticleThe blurry boundary between premodern and modern
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about two excellent books on very different topics, both of which I’ve written about at Love of All Wisdom before: Andrew Nicholson’s Unifying Hinduism, and Brian...
View ArticleIn which I am interviewed
The always interesting skholiast, whose ideas have figured strongly in quite a few of my posts here over the years, took what I consider the enormously flattering step of interviewing me about my...
View ArticleInterview, part 2
The second half of Skholiast‘s interview with me is now available, for anyone interested.
View ArticleNew article on Śāntideva’s metaphysics and ethics
I have just published a new article published in volume 22 of the excellent free and open-access Journal of Buddhist Ethics. The article is entitled “The Metaphysical Basis of Śāntideva’s Ethics“....
View ArticleIs “Buddhist ethics” Buddhist?
David Chapman has on his blog a provocative new series of posts about Buddhist ethics. You can get a strong sense of the tenor of these posts from their titles: “Buddhist ethics” is a fraud, “Buddhist...
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My first encounters with Alasdair MacIntyre
In philosophy as in any other field, one sees further by standing on the shoulders of giants. I have tried to engage in detail with contemporary thinkers whose work seems like it might be helpful in...
View ArticleThe need for substantive standards of rationality
I ended the last post with the question of how to put together the insights I have found from Western philosophies like Hegel’s, on one hand, and Buddhism on the other. That question is the twenty-year...
View ArticleChoosing a few traditions
I have long had an ambition which, I am slowly realizing, is unlikely to be fulfilled. It is an ambition suggested in this blog’s title: the idea of putting together all the major philosophical...
View ArticleOn the very idea of Buddhist ethics
I’ve recently been reading Christopher Gowans’s Buddhist Moral Philosophy: An Introduction. It is an introductory textbook of a sort that has not previously been attempted, and one that becomes...
View ArticleBelonging rationally to a tradition
I ended last year pointing out that while one can love all wisdom, it is almost certainly too hard to be able to sift through all the wisdom out there and put it together in the space of a single...
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