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Why I miss postmodernism
I never imagined I’d say this, but I miss postmodernism. I was a foe of postmodernism back when it was still at the centre of intellectual life, and my criticisms of it – for its self-contradictory...
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Christians can have neutral supernatural beings
Back when I was a TA at Harvard, possibly my favourite student was an evangelical Christian. He was an economist, so his written work wasn’t as good as some of his other students, but his participation...
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Should we be polite to AIs?
I’ve been using Anthropic’s Claude.ai in a work context relatively often lately – to produce graphic illustrations, write summaries and so on. (I’m not crazy about referring to it as just “Claude”....
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Do you need anger for respect and accountability?
I am delighted to announce the publication of my first book, this coming fall, with Shambhala Publications. It is a book project I have been working on for many years, and the topic has veered...
View ArticleMindform Podcast interview
I was interviewed by Frank Lawton on a recent episode of the Mindform Podcast on self-development and wisdom, associated with Ryan A. Bush’s Designing the Mind. We begin with my formative story in...
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In memoriam: Alasdair MacIntyre
My photo of an elderly MacIntyre speaking in 2019 at “To What End?” Alasdair MacIntyre is dead. He had a very good run, better than many could dream of: he was 95 years old, and produced an output...
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Why we sometimes need to deadname
A little while ago I was at a party en femme and met an older man who didn’t know many transgender people but was interested in talking about it. He mentioned someone else he knew who’d transitioned,...
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Checks and balances are only as good as their enforcers
When the head of state or government goes rogue, what happens next? Consider the recent experiences of three countries where the top leader pursued an agenda far more radical than they had campaigned...
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“It is God’s will that I should have sinned”
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 in spirit”, is so...
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The return of Justice
I was delighted to hear that this fall Michael Sandel has returned to teaching his Justice course at Harvard. He’d gone many years without teaching it, which I think was a shame, because that course...
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Of course “racist” is a pejorative
Consider what happens when you call someone an introvert. They may agree or disagree with you, but they will probably not feel particularly flattered or offended. That’s because, functionally,...
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When marginalized people don’t say what we think they should
The late Saba Mahmood’s 2004 The Politics of Piety is a brilliant example of how to do philosophical ethnography. The book’s one flaw is its dense prose style, but even that may have been necessary in...
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Moral regress is annoying too
Daniel Kelly and Evan Westra recently wrote a widely circulated Aeon article entitled “Moral progress is annoying”. It would have been more convincing – but also go against their agenda – if they...
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In defence of moral laxity
Richard Chappell recently had a lovely post asking people to disagree with him. I obliged by expressing my misgivings about what he calls beneficentrism, “The view that promoting the general welfare is...
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You don’t have to drop philosophy for activism
The United States has always been a relentlessly pragmatic place, which doesn’t leave it much room for philosophy. Watching three Republican presidential candidates all take pot-shots at philosophy on...
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There are bad Buddhists and false Buddhist claims
Paul Fuller’s thoughtful and well researched new introduction to Engaged Buddhism cites my Disengaged Buddhism article together with an article I hadn’t heard of before, Victor Temprano’s 2013...
View ArticleThe path corrects the mind
This week I continue my response to Patrick O’Donnell’s comments disputing my claim that in classical Indian Buddhism “the causes of suffering are primarily mental”. The discussion last time was...
View ArticleIn praise of cultural appropriation
Jay Garfield, Bryan Van Norden, and most of my colleagues on the Indian Philosophy Blog are shamelessly committing massive acts of cultural appropriation. Perhaps I am too. And that’s a wonderful...
View ArticleOn civic virtue and unwritten constitutions
One of the more pressing questions in political philosophy is how to prevent the arbitrary use of power. I think Thomas Hobbes and Xunzi were sadly right to diagnose an abiding darkness in human...
View ArticleIs the eudaimonist proposition true?
Evan Thompson’s critique of my eudaimonistic and probabilistic approach to karma has two prongs: that it is not really karma, and that it doesn’t work on its own terms. I addressed the first criticism...
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