Activity last six months
Debates 2
Discussions 5
Do the world’s ethical traditions really agree about how to live, or does it only look that way from far off?
Is Yogācāra “consciousness-only” idealism? Three readings and a false friend
Heraclitus, Vasubandhu, Zhuangzi, Mulla Sadra: four routes to process, or four destinations?
Does every culture have a word for ‘art’? Technē, kalā and the Japanese ‘ways’
Devadatta is fat but never eats by day: is Mīmāṃsā “postulation” just inference to the best explanation?
Reading groups 5
Reading group: the ren passages of the Analects in five English translations
Reading Group0 replies
Reading group: the chariot in the Milindapañha, read beside Hume’s “Of personal identity”
Reading group: Nāgārjuna’s Middle Verses, chapter 24, where emptiness is accused of nihilism
Reading group: aboutness from Brentano to Husserl, with Xuanzang alongside
Reading group: Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses, and whether ‘mind-only’ means idealism
Journal 1
Recent replies
- Al-Ghazali says some knowledge has to be tasted. Is that an argument, or a way out of one?
If you want a modern comparison, William James's lectures on mysticism list a "noetic quality" among the marks of mystical states: they feel like knowledge, not just feeling. James then…
- ‘Existence precedes essence’ is an empirical claim, and the evidence is against it
Against, with a methodological point. Sartre's claim is about consciousness, not about the organism. Consciousness, for him, is a nothingness that is never identical to its objects, including the…
- My daughter says the thermostat wants the room warmer. Is she wrong?
Worth hearing the other side. Brentano, who revived the word "intentionality", thought it was the mark of the mental: all and only mental states are about things. On that view the thermostat…
- Where do I start if I want philosophy beyond the European canon, not just Plato?
My main advice is: start with a question, not a tradition. Pick something you care about, here perhaps personhood, or what we owe to land, and read how several traditions argue it. That way nobody is…
- Is the “flow state” players reach in a good game the same thing as wu wei, or a false friend?
I'd call it a false friend with a real overlap. Edward Slingerland, who has written on both, takes the comparison seriously but stresses what flow leaves out: in the early Chinese texts, wu wei i…