What does it mean to be a Buddhist?
In âWhat Does it Mean to Be a Marxist?â, Norman Geras distinguishes âthree meanings of âbeing a Marxistââ: personal, intellectual, and sociopolitical. He writes that âfor someone to be a Marxist, in the first â personal â sense âŚ, he or she must (a) subscribe to a significant selection of recognized Marxist beliefs and (b) describe him or herself as a Marxistâ. About the intellectual meaning he writes that âa person can work â as writer, political publicist, academic, thinker, researcher â within the intellectual tradition begun by Marx and Engels and developed by later figuresâ, and about the sociopolitical...
“Protestant Buddhism”
The term âProtestant Buddhismâ was introduced in 1970 by Gananath Obeyesekere to describe a development in Ceylonese Buddhism that started with Anagarika DharmapÄla almost a century earlier. The notion was further developed in a 1988 book he co-authered with Richard Gombrich, but variants of the term have also been used outside the Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) context â in reference to certain trends in Western Buddhism, for example, as well as to the switch from âself-powerâ čŞĺ jiriki to âother-powerâ äťĺ tariki in Japanese Pure Land Buddhism. The term is also sometimes used in a more general sense in reference to...
The Cluelessness of Longtermism
Longtermism is a variety of utilitarianism (itself a variety of consequentialism) that holds that far-future utility potentially far outweighs near-future utility, and therefore, that we should prioritize far-future consequences of our actions and policies. Utilitarianism is often summarized with the slogan âthe greatest happiness for the greatest number of peopleâ, but the term âutilityâ or âbenefitsâ tends to be preferred by some philosophers (especially those who are close to, or have a background in economics). An associated, even shorter characterization of utilitarianism is that it aims to maximize utility (or benefits). Longtermism, then, holds that we should aim to maximize...
Can an Anarchist Take Refuge?
The first of the Bodhisattva vows is to liberate all sentient beings (from suffering) and it isnât a stretch to include sociopolitical liberation in that goal. It shouldnât come as a surprise, then, that Buddhist anarchism has been a small, but persistent undercurrent within Buddhism and anarchism throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. One may wonder, however, whether it is really possible to be both a Buddhist and an anarchist, although this very much depends on the definitions of âBuddhistâ and âanarchistâ. The term âanarchismâ suggests that an anarchist opposes or rejects (áźÎ˝-) (coercive/opaque) power/authority (áźĎĎÎŽ) and the institutionalization thereof...
Residual Emissions
Residual emissions are carbon emissions that are difficult or impossible to (fully) eliminate due to technological or other limitations. These emissions are extremely important, because â given that we effectively cannot avoid them â they need to be compensated with various kinds of carbon removal technologies (mainly carbon capture and storage) to be able to reach net zero (or carbon-neutrality). Carbon removal is very energy intensive, however, and there are limits to how much carbon we can remove. Estimates of these limits vary, but the most optimistic ones are typically somewhere in the neighborhood of 25Gt/year, or roughly half our...
Buddhism, Marxism, and Negating Self-centeredness â Preliminary Remarks on the Philosophy of Neville Wijeyekoon
summary â In 1943, S.N.B. (Neville) Wijeyekoon published a book under the pseudonym Leuke aiming to compare Buddhism and Marxism. It starts out doing so indeed, but the second half of the book presents his own philosophy focused on achieving mental harmony by negating self-centeredness through âmerging oneâs self in social welfareâ. Wijeyekoonâs wrote two more books, and in one of those he further developed aspects of this idea, while eliminating the overt Buddhist and Marxist influence. This long blog post summarizes and comments on two of Wijeyekoonâs books (namely, his first and third). I do not have access to...
Predicting Global Warming for Dummies
Climate scientists use supercomputers and extremely complicated models to predict the future climate, but there is a shortcut that can be used to predict average global warming. The key to that shortcut is the following simple formula: $$ \Delta T_{anom.} = \frac {ECS \times ( C_{atm.} â 280 )} {280} \: – \: \psi,$$ in which \(\Delta T_{anom.}\) is the average temperature anomaly (or average global warming), \(ECS\) is âEquilibrium Climate Sensitivityâ, \(C_{atm.}\) is atmospheric carbon (in ppm COâ equivalent), and \(\psi\) (from Greek ĎῌĎÎżĎ, meaning âcoldâ) stands for various cooling effects. If you have the values of the variables...
Some Disorderly Thoughts on Antisemitism and Related Matters
1 In response to protests at American universities against Israelâs genocidal âwarâ in Gaza, the United States House of Representatives accepted the âAntisemitism Awareness Actâ on April 30. This act codifies the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism as well as its attached list of eleven âcontemporary examples of antisemitismâ. Most of those examples are antisemitic indeed by any reasonable interpretation of the term, but three of those â namely, examples 7, 8, and 10 â are a bit more dubious, largely due to their ambiguity. The text of these examples is the following: (7) â Denying...
Davidsonian Pragmatism
Donald Davidson didnât like being called a pragmatist. He associated pragmatism with William Jamesâs definition of truth as that what works (or something similar), which he rejected for a number of reasons. Davidsonâs understanding of pragmatism and how it contrasts with his own view is probably most clearly expressed in a passage from âTruth Rehabilitatedâ: Truth is not a value, so the âpursuit of truthâ is an empty enterprise unless it means only that it is often worthwhile to increase our confidence in our beliefs, by collecting further evidence or checking our calculations. From the fact that we will never...
Atrekic Buddhism
To be clear, atrekic Buddhism is not a variety of Buddhism. Itâs not un-Buddhist either, I think, but weâll get to that later. The term âatrekic Buddhismâ works in a similar way as âmethodological anarchismâ (famously proposed by Feyerabend) or âmetaphilosophical anarchismâ. The latter is a â more or less â anarchist approach to doing philosophy. It isnât anarchism per sĂŠ (i.e., anarchism as political ideology), but can be thought of as something like anarchism about philosophy. That said, it could be argued that (political) anarchists should also be metaphilosophical anarchists (but not necessarily the other way around), which doesnât...
The Jaina Doctrine of AnekÄntavÄda
In part II of A Buddha Land in this World, I proposed a variety of perspectival realism based on, among others, YogÄcÄra and the philosophy of Donald Davidson. The term âperspectival realismâ refers to a loose collection of theories that are realist, in the minimal sense of recognizing the existence of a mind-independent, external reality, but that reject the idea that there is just one ârightâ way of describing reality. Rather, descriptions or understandings of or views on reality are perspectival, that is, they are views from particular perspectives, or constructions due to particular conceptual schemes. And because there is...
Carbon-neutrality by 2050
(Originally published on December 15, 2020. First major revision on June 13, 2022. This is the second major version.) A few years after carbon-neutrality became an official goal in the Paris Agreement of 2015, one after the other, governments started to announce that their countries would be carbon-neutral by 2050 or a little bit later. Richer countries generally opted for 2050, while China and India, for example, aimed for 2060 and 2070, respectively. The promise of carbon-neutrality by 2050 (or 2060, or 2070) is a cheap promise, however, as the target is so far in the future that it doesnât...