Philosophy of science

Preserving the spiritual nexus of Buddhist thought

Now that the Buddhist traditions confront themselves with cognitive neuroscience and other natural sciences, trying to build up or expand an edifice for studying the mind and conscious experience, it seems vital to stand for the legitimacy and self-sufficiency of Buddhist traditional thought, maintaining critical distance from the prestige (and thus privilege) the scientific apparatus holds in modern western society.

20 November 2023

Body, Mind and Emotions

Mapping emotions (1): introduction

Charles Hampden-Turner's classic Mapping the Mind (1982) includes sixty mapping models of the human being, of his psyche. His map categories range from historical to religious, to psychoanalytic, existentialist, psychosocial, creative, linguistic-symbolic, cybernetic, structural and “paradigmatic” perspectives. From Taoism, St. Augustine, Blake, Darwin, Marx, Weber and Freud, up to Lacan, Bateson, Chomsky and Varela. For the time, Hampden-Turner's text is extremely sophisticated, rich, and accessible; today his approach desperately needs an update.

19 November 2023

Life, Environment and Cosmos

Encounter and knowledge

Data-driven neuroscience from Buddhist meditation and mindfulness has gained enormous popularity recently. Yet, the transformative potential of man offered by Buddhism, under the fMRI scanner (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) - delimited as an 'object' of study - can become sterile, inanimate, and inert when it is displaced from its performative dimensions, constitutive of its meaning.

19 November 2023

Philosophy of science

Preserving the spiritual nexus of Buddhist thought

Mapping emotions (1): introduction

Encounter and knowledge

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