Miscellaneous
My second dialogue with Evan Thompson covers his latest and most controversial book, Why I Am Not A Buddhist, which spotlights conceptual and functional problems with Buddhist modernism, Buddhist exceptionalism, Buddhist Empiricism, and neural Buddhism. With philosophical adeptness, Evan argues a cosmopolitan view of not-self and enlightenment, and skillfully slays popular one-dimensional co-options of the Buddhist teachings by Robert Wright and Sam Harris. This episode is dedicated to Evan’s father, writer and scholar William Irwin Thompson who recently passed away; a man who profoundly impacted my life particularly during my 20’s, when I was deeply interested in the cultural evolution of patriarchy and modern human’s loss of connection with the natural world.Evan Thompson is a writer and professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He works on the nature of the mind, the self, and human experience by combining cognitive science, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and cross-cultural philosophy, especially Asian philosophical traditions. The best place to find out more about Evan's work is his website.