Milinda’s Questions is the personal weblog of Alan Cook of Austin, Texas. It takes its name from the Milindapanha, a Buddhist text in which the Bactro-Grecian King Milinda addresses a series of questions to the monk Nagasena, culminating in the king’s conversion to Buddhism.
Depending on their reasons for visiting this blog, readers may want to know:
- more about Alan Cook;
- more about the Milindapanha;
- more about this blog, and why it’s called Milinda’s Questions.
Click on the links above to find out what you want to know. (Some of them will lead you to other pages.)
My name’s Alan John Cook. I was born December 18, 1957, in Emory University Hospital in Dekalb County, Georgia. I have lived in Austin, Texas since 1987.
Some visitors to this site may be acquaintances of mind from the past, or present, who are wondering if this blog is produced by the guy they know. For the record, I am the Alan Cook who:
- graduated from Henderson High School in Chamblee, Georgia in 1975.
- graduated from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1979.
(Anyone who’s inclined to ask “What was your major?” is encouraged to visit the college’s website.) - taught English in Hamamatsu, Japan from 1984 to 1987.
- was a graduate student in the Philosophy Department of the University of Texas at Austin from 1987 to 1997.
If this doesn’t sound like the person you’re looking for, I’ve got some information available about other people with the same name here.
Some readers may come to this page because they’re wondering what qualifies me to express an opinion on any of the various topics I sound off about on this site. The general answer to this question is: I am a rational sentient being, a fairly competent user of the English language, and a citizen of the United States of America. (I add that last one not because I think Americans speak from any position of epistemic privilege, but simply because it’s the only answer I know to the question “What gives you the right to say that?” — a question that, IMHO, betrays a basic misunderstanding of what a right is.)
As for facts about me that might be thought to make me marginally more informed than at least some other people about particular topics:
- I am of Anglo Southern Protestant ancestry, my forebears having lived in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi for a couple of centuries;
- I have a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin, and was a doctoral candidate in that department (but did not complete the Ph.D.);
- I lived in Japan for several years, speak very bad Japanese, and occasionally blog on Nihonophilic and Nihonophobic topics;
- I am a longtime practitioner of various Buddhist meditation traditions, particularly vipassana.
It should go without saying that anything I write on this site should be evaluated on its own terms, and not based on any appeal to authority.
Clearly, this is not a resume or curriculum vitae (much less an autobiography.) It’s possible I might post an online resume at some point if it seems to me to be a strategic move; suffice it to say for now that over the years I’ve been a stagehand, a title abstractor, a technical volunteer, a copy shop clerk, a litigation support analyst, a proofreader and copy editor, an ESL teacher, a philosophy instructor, a programmer, and a computational linguist. I currently keep body and soul together, to the extent that I manage to do so, as essay scorer for various standardized tests (the TAKS, the SAT, etc.) at Pearson Educational Measurement. (And my use of the “body and soul” expression is purely a figure of speech; it should not be construed as an implicit concession to any kind of mind/body dualism.)
To contact me, drop me an e-mail at: ajcook-at-sbcglobal.net
When I started this blog a couple of years ago, I began my first post by quoting a recent translator of the Milindapanha as follows: What is most interesting about the Milindapanha is that it is the product of the encounter of two great civilizations - Hellenistic Greece and Buddhist India - and is thus of continuing relevance as the wisdom of the East meets the modern Western world. King Milinda poses questions about dilemmas raised by Buddhist philosophy that we might ask today. And Nagasena’s responses are full of wisdom, wit, and helpful analogies.
I went on to say:
I can’t promise that you’ll find “Wit, wisdom, and helpful analogies” on this blog. (For that matter, many modern readers won’t find much of that in what Nagasena had to say, either.) And it would be pretentious of me to claim that this blog will be a “product of the encounter between two great civilizations.” My goal is more modest: to do philosophy, in the sense that Stanley Cavell had in mind when he said:
[T]o confront my words and life as I pursue them with the life my culture’s words may imagine for me: to confront the culture with itself, along the lines in which it meets in me. This seems to me a task that warrants the name of philosophy.
The line that confrontation traces out in me right now is through such topics as Buddhist meditative traditions and contemporary Western analytic philosophy, particularly the philosophy of mind. I make no guarantees as to where it will lead, though; and I do promise it will meander over a variety of topics while getting there.
