[Buddha-l] neuroscience: neural plasticity

[curt]

Joy Vriens wrote:
> I never liked the term until I read Pierre Hadot's Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, who convinced me that for lack of a better term covering everything covered by "spiritual" we would have to resign ourselves to seeing and using it....
>  
>   
I hesitate to add my two cents here - for fear of sullying Pierre Hadot 
with my endorsement.

Even better than "Philosophy as a way of life: Spiritual Exercises from 
Socrates to Foucault" is "What is Ancient Philosophy? Here are three 
reviews of that book:
An in depth New York Times review that is generally favorable, but 
complains because Hadot spends too much time on late antique "mystical" 
philosophy:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B05EFD8163AF93BA2575BC0A9649C8B63
And generally positive review from the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, which 
contains an unfortunate churlish pot-shot at the books translator, 
Michael Chase, which tells us more about the reviewer than about the 
translation (which is excellent): 
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2002/2002-09-21.html
A whiny Christian reviewer who doesn't like what Hadot has to say 
because it makes Christianity look bad: 
http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=2099

Here is a quote from "Philosophy as a way of life: Spiritual Exercises 
from Socrates to Foucault"

"'Spiritual exercises.' The phrase is a bit disconcerting for the 
contemporary reader. In the first place, it is no longer quite 
fashionable these days to use the word 'spiritual.'[!] It is 
nevertheless necessary to use this term, I believe, because none of the 
other adjectives we could use - 'psychic,' 'moral,' 'ethical,' 
'intellectual,' 'of thought,' 'of the soul,' - covers all the aspects of 
the reality we want to describe. Since, in these exercises, it is 
thought which, as it were, takes itself as its own subject-matter, and 
seeks to modify itself, it would be possible for us to speak in terms of 
'thought exercises.' Yet the word 'though' does not indicate clearly 
enough that imagination and sensibility play a very important role in 
these exercises. For the same reason we cannot be satisfied with 
'intellectual exercises,' although such intellectual factors as 
definition, division, ratiocination, reading, investigation, and 
rhetorical amplification play a large role in them...

" In the view of all the philosophical schools, mankind's principle 
cause of suffering, disorder, and unconsciousness were the passions: 
that is, unregulated desires and exaggerated fears. People are prevented 
from truly living, it was taught, because they are dominated by worries. 
Philosophy thus appears, in the first place, as a therapeutic of the 
passions .... Each school had its own therapeutic method, but all of 
them linked their therapeutics to a profound transformation of the 
individual's mode of being. The object of spiritual exercises is 
precisely to bring about this transformation."