Observant visitors will note that the blogroll has disappeared from this blog’s sidebar. (More precisely, returnees may note that; first-time visitors will note that the sidebar has no blogroll.) The explanation: I’ve recently performed a couple of upgrades: to the latest version of Wordpress, 2.6, and to the latest version of Blog.txt, [...]
I found the following in the Wikipedia article on the Indian Vaisesika school of philosophy. Think it’s a good argument?
The early vaisesika texts presented the following syllogism to prove that all objects i.e. the four bhutas, prthvi (earth), ap (water), tejas (fire) and vayu (air) are made of indivisible paramanus (atoms): Assume that the [...]
An interesting-looking collection of papers on John Heil’s From an Ontological Point of View is online at the Sito Web Italiano per la Filosophia.
At H-Net, (Humanities and Social Sciences Net), Richard Hayes reviews James Duerlinger’s new translation of the ninth chapter of Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakosabhasya, published under the title Indian Buddhist Theories Of Person: Vasubandhu’s [...]
The following is from the Wikipedia entry on William of Rubrick, a 13th-century Franciscan missionary:
At one point of his stay among the Mongols, William entered into a famous competition at the Mongol court, as the khan encouraged a formal debate between the Christians, Buddhists, and Muslims, to determine which faith was correct, as determined by [...]
Ran across an interesting article in the Bangkok Post called “Walking the path.” It’s about a woman named Rosana Tositrakul, who’s newly elected to the Thai senate as a representative from Bangkok.The whole thing is worth reading; this account of a genuinely socially engaged Buddhist can’t be summarized; virtually every sentence contains some worthwhile [...]
Panendeism.org describes itself as an organization “for the promotion of reason based spirituality.” But what does the word mean?
The term PanenDeism was first coined by Larry Copling in 2000 as a way to differentiate between the deistic conception and approach to belief that he had in mind vs. the theistic conception and approach that [...]
I’ve recently acquired a couple of gadgets that should make blogging quite a bit easier, and will increase the frequency of my posts. One is Bottomfeeder, an RSS aggregator; the other is Scribefire, the Firefox blogging client plugin. Together they make it a whole lot easier to surf the net and post links [...]
Every once in a while, a discussion I get into leads me to reflect on the nature of metaphysics, as well as on a related question: What do we mean when we talk about “reality? A lot of my thinking on this subject was shaped in a seminar I took with in grad school [...]