The Case for a Contemplative Philosophy of Education

I argue for the use of contemplative practices, such as meditation, journaling, reflection, etc., as an adjunct or alternative form of pedagogy that can help enrich student engagement, facilitate the creation of a philosophical mind state, and engender intrinsic curiosity and related psychological and/or motivational qualities that are supportive of educational ideals. I report on my own scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) research performed in my philosophy classes, as a case study in point. I found that the more times students in my different philosophy courses meditated, the more their subjective responses changed on surveys about their philosophical attitudes and beliefs

Jay L. Garfield, Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy

Book review of Jay Garfield's Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy

Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists

Book review of Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists, Pitchstone Publishing, 2013, 280pp., $14.95, ISBN 978-1939578099 (paperback). Foreword by Michael Shermer. Science, Religion & Culture 1:2 (August 2014), 93-9

Earlier Buddhist Theories of Free Will: Compatibilism

A critical review of the first wave of publications on Buddhism and free will between the 1960s and 1980s

What Do Buddhists Think about Free Will?

A critical overview to the bulk of extant Buddhist theories of free will

Meditation Matters: Replies to the Anti-McMindfulness Bandwagon!

A critical reply to the anti-mindfulness critics in the collection, who oppose the popular secularized adoption of mindfulness on various grounds (it is not Buddhism, it is Buddhism, it is a tool of neo-capitalist exploitation, etc.), I argue that mindfulness is a quality of consciousness, opposite mindlessness, that may be cultivated through practice, and is almost always beneficial to those who cultivate it

Buddhist Hard Determinism: No Self, No Free Will, No Responsibility

A critical review of Charles Goodman's view about Buddhism and free will to the effect that Buddhism is hard determinist, basically because he thinks Buddhist causation is definitively deterministic, and he thinks determinism is definitively incompatible with free will, but especially because he thinks Buddhism is equally definitively clear on the non-existence of a self, from which he concludes there cannot be an autonomous self

Buddhist Perspectives on Free Will: Agentless Agency?

A collection of essays, mostly original, on the actual and possible positions on free will available to Buddhist philosophers, by Christopher Gowans, Rick Repetti, Jay Garfield, Owen Flanagan, Charles Goodman, Galen Strawson, Susan Blackmore, Martin T. Adam, Christian Coseru, Marie Friquegnon, Mark Siderits, Ben Abelson, B. Alan Wallace, Peter Harvey, Emily McRae, and Karin Meyers, and a Foreword by Daniel Cozort

The Counterfactual Theory of Free Will: A Genuinely Deterministic Form of Soft Determinism

I argue for a soft compatibilist theory of free will, i.e., such that free will is compatible with both determinism and indeterminism, directly opposite hard incompatibilism, which holds free will incompatible both with determinism and indeterminism. My intuitions in this book are primarily based on an analysis of meditation, but my arguments are highly syncretic, deriving from many fields, including behaviorism, psychology, conditioning and deconditioning theory, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, simulation theory, etc. I offer a causal/functional analysis of meta-mental control, or 'metacausality', cashed out in counterfactual terms, to solve what I call the easy problem of free will

If God Didn’t Satisfice, We Could Still Exist

Theodicies of satisficing – defenses of God’s goodness that justify creating minimally satisfactory beings/worlds – originate with Robert Merrihew Adams (1972, 1979). Adams (1972) argued that in creating imperfect beings God was graceful in giving the undeserved gift of life. There have been many objections to Adams’s argument; e.g., Jerome A. Weinstock (1975) objected that God still would have been graceful in granting undeserved life to superior beings, and, among others, E. Wielenberg (2004) objected that grace doesn’t erase the imperfection of creating imperfection. However, Adams’s theodicy arguably maintains two points: (a) non-existing superior beings cannot be harmed by not being created, and (b) if God must create superior beings, we wouldn’t be them. Setting aside whether God is justified in satisficing per se, I target one element of Adams’s satisficing theodicy, viz. (b), his “non-identity” thesis: we would not be the superior beings God could have created. I argue that this thesis is inconsistent with the theology informing Adams’s theodicy. That theology identifies us not as our bodies, but as our nonphysical souls. On that theology’s “identity thesis,” identity of subjects of experience is preserved through conception, life, death, and the after-life, and thus is capable of preservation in alternate bodies. Thus, God could have created us as better beings in a better world, exhibiting grace and avoiding imperfection. Thus, (b) cannot support God’s satisficing. I entertain an objection that God could create souls whose identities vary with their bodies, but reply that He could create souls whose identities do not vary trans-corporeally