buddhism

Philosophical Inquiry as Spiritual Exercise Audio + Notes

April 21, 2018 — 6 Comments

Here’s the audio and the notes for my part of yesterday’s panel on philosophical inquiry as spiritual exercise (also available as a pdf here). All in all, I’d say it was a great session with lots of good discussion, my demeanor in the below photo notwithstanding. Many of these themes are central to my first comprehensive exam, and my dissertation research in general, so there’ll be more to come along these lines in the next few months.

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Pierre Hadot on Philosophy as a Way of Life

– Pierre Hadot (1922–2010) was a French philosopher and historian of ancient philosophy, especially of Plato and Aristotle and Stoicism, Cynicism, Epicureanism, and Neoplatonism. He was a professor at the Collège de France in Paris where he also wrote and taught on Marcus Aurelius, Plotinus, Descartes, Kant, Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, and others. I’m drawing from two of his translated works, What is Ancient Philosophy? and the collection of essays found in Philosophy as a Way of Life. The central question in both these texts is largely the same. 

– What does it mean that philosophy is a way of life? For Hadot the answer is simple. Philosophy, when done right, involves our whole being. It means paying attention to our theoretical and intellectual beliefs, but it also means attending to our values, feelings, and practices. It requires that we pay attention to ourselves and develop a concern for those around us, for the other people in our lives and communities. It’s a whole form of life.

– Philosophy for Hadot is an existential choice in our mode of living. It’s a choice of life but also a way of making a life. In this sense, philosophy is a kind of a self-making that issues from our choice of practice. This is why Hadot argues that philosophical discourse must be understood from the perspective of the way of life of which it is both the expression and the means. Both the expression and the means, both theory and practice conjoined: This is the key to entering Hadot’s reading of philosophy, and perhaps to entering the philosophical life for one’s own self. Continue reading

Andy Clark on Perceiving as Predicting

May 30, 2017 — 8 Comments

Andy Clark’s work in the philosophy of mind has long had a strong influence on my thinking. I’ll have a bit to say about how his extended mind thesis figures into philosophical practice in my upcoming talk for the Media Ecology Assocation, but in this post I want to explore his work on predictive processing and perception, as he’s converging on similar conclusions to my own about the nature of perception, understanding, imagination, and action—namely, that they all arrive together in the co-construction of experience.

His tools and models for making this claim are different from my own, and so what most interests me in this context is how his (more advanced) resources—including a computational theory of the brain, coupled with extended and embodied notions of cognition, hierarchical predictive processing models, and Bayesian accounts of inference—match up with what I’ll shorthand as the transcendental–phenomenological resources of philosophy that I’ve been using in my recent posts. Clark is not strictly speaking a cognitive scientist, but he’s definitely closer to the “neuro” in “neurophenomenology” than I am. What’s at stake for me here is the following question, How accurate and useful are these transcendental–phenomenological resources in the face of cognitive science?

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