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Author: Wrisley

Religious Practice and the Limits of Philosophy

Religious Practice and the Limits of Philosophy

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In reading Siderits’s excellent Buddhism as Philosophy I have come to realize the following problem. If a religion has its base in philosophy, if its central tenets are supposed to follow from the use of reason and argument, then none of its conclusions can ever be firm enough to ground religious practice. There will always be difficult objections and questions that cannot be answered in a way sufficient to allow one to say, “I know this is true and I…

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The Role of Beauty in Living Well

The Role of Beauty in Living Well

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“That is beautiful!” is easy to say and easy to ignore, as it has become platitudinous. This is certainly regrettable, for beauty ought not be identified with the trite and such associations can cloud our thinking about beauty. Such clouding can also result from the mistaken association of “beauty” with beauty pageants and fashion models. All of this can make us neglect an important question: What is the role of beauty in human well-being? Following Daniel M. Haybron’s classification scheme…

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What’s Wrong With Cartesian Reasoning? Part I

What’s Wrong With Cartesian Reasoning? Part I

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There are many reasons to read Nietzsche. Whether you agree with his substantive views, taking him seriously will help to keep you intellectually honest. An example comes from Beyond Good and Evil, Part One: On the Prejudices of Philosophers, §5: What provokes one to look at all philosophers half suspiciously, half mockingly, is not that one discovers again and again how innocent they are – how often and how easily they make mistakes and go astray; in short, their childishness…

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Implications of the Desire to Know

Implications of the Desire to Know

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I was thinking about Aristotle’s claim in the Metaphysics that all humans by nature desire to know. It occurred to me that if this is true it might partially explain why people are so often susceptible to errors of reasoning like the bifurcation fallacy and oversimplifying important but difficult issues, e.g., God’s existence, abortion, gun rights, justice, etc. My thinking was that if people really do by nature desire to know, but the issue they are thinking about is too complex…

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The Relational Nature of Personal Identity Part II

The Relational Nature of Personal Identity Part II

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In the original essay on the relational nature of personal identity, from October 10th, 2010, I wrote the following: What are some of the typical components of personal identity? 1) Body 2) Consciousness associate with/centered in one body (including will and self-consciousness). 3) Memories of consciousness (as the direct causal product of 2) But it seems to me that we should also include things such as: 4) Sets of beliefs 5) Attitudes/dispositions 6) Emotional make up 7) Ways of thinking…

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The Great Clod: Earth, Identity, and Death

The Great Clod: Earth, Identity, and Death

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Taoism strikes me as similar to quantum mechanics in at least one respect: if you claim to grasp it, then you don’t. Nevertheless, that doesn’t preclude approaching an understanding of either. In his What is Taoism? H.G. Creel has an excellent chapter entitled, “The Great Clod”—a chapter that is quite helpful in regard to one aspect of Taoism. In explaining the meaning and role of “the Great Clod” in Taoism, Creel quotes, in order to set up a contrast, a…

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When Death Comes

When Death Comes

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The first poem I ever learned by heart was Mary Oliver’s “When Death Comes.” When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps his purse shut; when death comes like the measle-pox; when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of…

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Buddhism and the Genius of Meditation

Buddhism and the Genius of Meditation

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Enlightened? No! Buddhist master? No. Buddhist? Working on it. But Buddhist or no, I have been practicing a form of Buddhist meditation, again, for the past month and four days. This is something I’ve been doing (mostly) off and on for the past fifteen years or so. I’m pretty terrible at it. In fact, I composed the gist of this essay while “meditating” this morning. I’ve got a nice spot in an upstairs room in the house I’m renting in…

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Understanding Desire

Understanding Desire

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When doing philosophy, when trying to understand something better, one should optimally do a combination of the following: think about the topic, research what others have said, and talk to friends and colleagues about the topic. Here I’m writing the results of the first and hoping to engage in the third. I’m feeling a bit lazy about doing the second, at this point. Thinking about desire, I am fairly perplexed. One way to begin thinking about desire is to say…

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Why So Many Disagreements Are Just So Damn Intractable

Why So Many Disagreements Are Just So Damn Intractable

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In a recent essay, I made a distinction between what I called epistemic reasons and purely causal reasons. The former are potentially truth preserving (capable of providing epistemic justification) the latter are not even potentially truth preserving (and thus are incapable of providing epistemic justification). In this essay, I’m going to appeal to the same basic distinction regarding reasons that do and do not provide epistemic justification, but I’m going to refer to them simply as epistemic reasons (ERs) and…

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