Charcot: Buddhist Leanings?

Finding Political Blogs and Their Political Leanings

The Blogosphere has more influence on both the general public’s opinions and mainstream media nowadays. As vast political blogs representing grassroots voices go online, it is both interesting and useful to find them and determine their political leanings as either liberal or conservative. In this paper, we address both problems by using front pages of blogs in a corpus we built to create two c...

17 Buddhist Bioethics

Describing anything as ‘Buddhist’, including in this case a distinctively Buddhist bioethics, is fundamentally problematic from both a historic and Buddhist point of view. Historically, the Buddhist tradition has evolved in dozens of countries for 2500 years, with no one tradition having clear doctrinal authority over the others. Internally, even if a common Buddhist ethics was implicit in the ...

Portraits of Buddhist Women

Journal of Buddhist Ethics

I argue that central Buddhist tenets and meditation methodology support a view of free will similar to Harry Frankfurt’s optimistic view and contrary to Galen Strawson’s pessimistic view. For Frankfurt, free will involves a relationship between actions, volitions, and “metavolitions” (volitions about volitions): simplifying greatly, volitional actions are free if the agent approves of them. For...

Buddhist Theory of Causation