Beyond the Turing test
Artificial intelligence is all the rage right now, and for good reason. When ChatGPT first made the news this December, I tested it by feeding it the kind of prompt I might give for a short comparison...
View ArticleThe Confucian obligations of a manager
I recently passed the examination to be a project management professional. In the Standard for Project Management – the Project Management Institute‘s statement of principles underlying project...
View ArticleHow to learn from indigenous North American philosophy
A little while ago I made it through David Graeber and David Wengrow’s ambitious The Dawn of Everything. It’s an exciting book for a variety of reasons, one of which is its approach to indigenous North...
View ArticleSelf-improvement by not-self-improvement
Years ago, in a difficult period of my life, I had looked for philosophical help and explicitly found it in Buddhism and not Daoism, rejecting Daoism and its sudden-liberation views in about the...
View ArticleMysticism vs. magic
While lecturing at Stonehill I made a comment about some traditional practice, I don’t remember which, that it was “less mystical and more magical.” Or maybe it was the reverse. What I remember clearly...
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Mystics, Marx, and negating the negation
The phrase negation of the negation is best known from Karl Marx’s work, as when he uses it to describe capitalist production in Capital. It’s an odd phrase that seems simply redundant in the formal...
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The importance of deep differences
In thinking further about Seth Segall’s The House We Live In: Virtue, Wisdom and Pluralism, I want to turn from reviewing the book itself, whose broad approach I generally agree with, to exploring my...
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In defence of ultimate meaning and truth
While the cover of Seth Zuihō Segall’s The House We Live In claims the book draws its account primarily from Aristotle, the Buddha and Confucius, the deeper, animating influence turns out to be...
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Listening to non-pragmatists
I’ll close my discussion of Seth Zuihō Segall’s The House We Live In by noting how its radical pragmatism undermines itself in practice – which, for pragmatists, is the place that matters. Seth wants...
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You don’t have to drop philosophy for activism
The United States has always been a relentlessly pragmatic place, which doesn’t leave it much room for philosophy. Watching three Republican presidential candidates all take pot-shots at philosophy on...
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