[Buddha-l] Fsat Mnifdlunses?

[Dayamati]

On Aug 14, 2009, at 11:23 AM, Alberto Todeschini wrote:

> Jayarava wrote:
>
>> We are going to have one or another delusion anyway.
>
> I've been reading quite a bit on heuristics and biases over the past
> several months. I find that frequently this topic is infinitely more
> relevant than philosophical discussions of epistemology or  
> philosophy of
> mind.

I don't know exactly how to measure interest, except by keeping track  
of how long it takes me to fall asleep, and I have no idea at all how  
to assess relevance. Nevertheless, I quite agree with Alberto that  
there are many works that appeal to my subjective and idiosyncratic  
tastes far more than philosophical texts do. One exception to that  
general observation is the writing of William James. He is an  
excellent antidote to the temptation to indulge in an impulse to act  
on a Lusthausian sense of duty to correct those whom one perceives to  
be in error.

Coincidentally (if you believe in such things as coincidence), as  
these recent rounds of heroic chest-thumping error-annihilation have  
been unfolding on buddha-l, I have been rereading James's A  
Pluralistic Universe. Few works in philosophy have shaped the course  
of my own Buddhist practice than that book (and several other items in  
the Jamesian corpus). I love his notion of pursuing "thickness"  
instead of settling for the "thin" doctrines that escape the rigors of  
logical analysis. Most Buddhist philosophy strikes me as hopelessly  
thin and incapable of getting one successfully from the bedroom to the  
breakfast table in the morning, let alone though the complexities of  
the rest of the day.

For anyone who has nothing better to do, please permit me to draw  
attention to a blog posting I recently wrote as a result of being  
inspired by a passage in William James. It's at http://dayamati.wordpress.com/


Dh. Dayāmati (Richard Hayes)
http://web.me.com/dayamati/ (That's one hell of a domain name for a  
Buddhist, eh? しかたがない。)