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Sketching an existentialist Buddhism
If we take a modern Buddhist approach where the ultimate reality is emptiness, what then does that look like in practice? Especially as we think about the key question:how can you be yourself if there...
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The physics of emptiness
How can we reconcile Buddhism with expressive individualism (“be yourself”) and with natural science? When I had previously turned to Wilfrid Sellars for help on this question, I had compared Sellars’s...
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How to live knowing the world will die
We can say with confidence that, someday, there will be no more human beings. That means that we are fooling ourselves if, as Simone Weil claims atheists must do, we seek an absolute good in a human...
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Eventual human extinction and why it matters
There will, eventually, be an end to the human race. We don’t think enough about the significance of this fact. I am not even talking about avoidable apocalypses, as real as the threat of those is. I...
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The saksit of Notre-Dame
Basilique Notre-Dame. Photo by David Iliff. Licence: CC-BY-SA 3.0 Basilique Notre-Dame – one of the most magnificent cathedrals in North America – was the first work of architecture to leave a real...
View ArticleThe world before and after us
Over the past several years I have moved steadily away from any views that see value at the heart of reality, especially natural reality – views that often lead one to some sort of God as the author of...
View ArticleOn tradition and observation in Tibetan medicine
Two disclaimers are required for this week’s post. First, Janet Gyatso was on my dissertation committee and before that served as my doctoral advisor. Second, Columbia University Press offered to send...
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 ArticleWhat has climate change to do with the study of religion?
Laurie Zoloth has recently been chosen president-elect of the American Academy of Religion; she will be chairing the AAR’s 2014 annual meeting in San Diego. In that capacity, she has decided to...
View ArticleThe classical enumeration of categories, and why it matters
There’s a recurring theme in Indo-European thought that has often perplexed me: categories. The Indian Vaiśeṣika school of thought is known primarily for enumerating a set of categories (padārthas)...
View ArticleValue beyond obligation
The work of Harvard analytical ethicist Christine Korsgaard is justly renowned, for her clever attempt to reconstruct a Kantian ethics in the abstract terms of contemporary analytical moral philosophy,...
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