Month: September 2014

• September 14, 2014

  Making perspicuous the connections: Cheerfulness, surprise, and marvel

  1. It dawns on me that there is a particular kind of person that I have been trying to describe over the past couple of years. There are three sets of terms that bring this kind of character more sharply into focus: dispositional terms, aesthetic terms, and an occurrence term. 2. The dispositional terms are…
• September 11, 2014

  Against embodied practice

  Everyone from designers to educators to New Agey types seems to be talking these days about ’embodied practice.’ I believe there is a more literal meaning as well as a more figurative one. According to the literal meaning, one is actually to be involved in some activity where one is conscious of being an embodied human…
• September 9, 2014

  ‘Stages’ of meditation

  I want to describe the ‘stages’ or ‘states’ of meditation that I have gone through. To do so, I won’t be relying upon doctrine, only on lived experience and on metaphorical language (such as ‘states’ or ‘stages’). The latter is necessary since any non-discursive experience will have to enter into language in order to be intelligible.…
• September 3, 2014

  Self-deception and self-knowledge (with a brief excursus on the Socratic elenchus)

  I think it a good starting point to claim that someone would’t think of deceiving himself unless that about which he were about to deceive himself were thought to be painful for him to confront. The thought of someone trying to deceive himself about something pleasant sounds patently absurd. It could only be that someone who got a…
• September 2, 2014

  2 meditation techniques for beginners

  The following two meditation techniques are intended to give new conversation partners and philosophical friends in my philosophy practice some ‘handles’ on how to get started meditating. When I write that it is necessary for you to meditate for at least 30 minutes before any philosophical conversation with me, you might wonder why this is…