Category: Perennial Philosophy
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Encountering the Encompassing
PHIL 1050, MWF @ 1:00pm, Monday 19 Sep 2016 My young friends were asked to read Jaspers chapter on das Umgreifende, the Encompassing or as Ralph Mannheim translates the term in Way to Wisdom, the Comprehensive. Not an easy thing to talk about or think about. My hope was that our…
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The nameless backgrounds the nameable
MWF PHIL 1050.006, 1:00pm, Friday 16 Sep 2016 We took a close look at poem 1 about the Dao (Way), spending time on the (ironic) difference between the Nameless and the nameable. Basically, it is difficult to name the Ultimate Source of Reality and any attempt to name the Source must fail. Laozi does not…
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Pressing against
Intro to Philosophy (MWF @ 1pm)–09 Sep 2016 We went through and hit some notions from Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
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It’s Not Cool to Hate the ‘Star Wars’ Prequels Anymore | Inverse
I am super happy to see this. A struggle for me over the last 20 years has been to get folks to see the Star Wars prequels as films in their own right that contribute visually and allegorically to mythography established in the original trilogy. I’ve often wondered if the subtlety…
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Reverence Ritual Worship Worldview
For this class, we took a step back to explore a few concepts before we move from India to China.
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Diversity of worship, unity of thought
Because we had roamed around in and out of a few topics yesterday, I decided to mostly lecture today with the hope that we would catch up a bit but that there would still be a lot of good questions from my friends. From what I read toward the end…
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Coordination, Subordination, and Exordination
Yesterday in our class, the discussion led me to talk for a little bit about a distinction originally made by Marcuse, I believe, regarding soft versus hard totalitarianism. I extended this description out to all manner of group structures that lead to implicit or explicit domination. Thinking about it last night,…
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Ordering expectations
In Tuesday’s class, we touched on the diverse story traditions from ancient India. My colleagues spent time at the beginning of our meeting talking with each other about what they had discovered about Indian sacred traditions, and what questions this had brought up to them. There were basic similarities, of…
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Introducing the Reality of Reality
Beginning our section on Hinduism today. So I decided to do two lecture sessions.
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Taking things for granted
Lecture from Sacred Living Traditions. Following a class exercise asking “What is a chair?”, we had small group discussions on “What is religion?” The basic work was to think through what we take for granted, how we do not ask questions about most ordinary things. This leads toward a habit of…
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never mine
Reaching out to the limits of the universe Desire stretches–grasp grasping– for a peppermint or whatever Empires rising and falling all of reality just a sweet little distraction Deathless gesture taking-in-hand yet never mine
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Hidden Desire: Nietzsche, Gay Philosopher
Most folks I know who focus on Nietzsche are very heteronormative. Yet Nietzsche as gay man has always made so much sense to me. Why do folks NOT read Nietzsche as a man who loved men, a man even more trapped by living in a culture where it was easier…
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Ethics and The Unblocked Life
Ethics: Acting in a situation with appropriate energy. Doing without overstepping what is necessary for life. (Where “life” is to be held as distinct from mere existence or survival.) And maybe that opens up the next query: What is life? The narrative goes that Buddha taught that life is suffering.…
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Mindful Self-Acceptance? Bad Idea According to Ancient Chinese Philosophers
Asian philosophies have proven extremely influential in the United States, but are they being interpreted correctly? Frequently not, says Harvard China historian Michael Puett, who focuses on two main ideas in this video: one transported relatively recently to the United States, and another that sheds new light on the so-called…
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