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

What Do Buddhists Think about Free Will?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent Buddhist Theories of Free Will: Compatibilism, Incompatibilism, and Beyond

Critical review of Buddhist theories of free will published between 2000 and 2014

Meditation and Mental Freedom: A Buddhist Theory of Free Will

I argue for a possible Buddhist theory of free will that combines Frankfurt's hierarchical analysis of meta-volitional/volitional accord with elements of the Buddhist eightfold path that prescribe that Buddhist aspirants cultivate meta-volitional wills that promote the mental freedom that culminates in enlightenment, as well as a causal/functional analysis of how Buddhist meditative methodology not only plausibly makes that possible, but in ways that may be applied to undermine Galen Strawson's impossibility argument, along with most of the other major arguments for free will skepticism