Love of All Wisdom

This blog is my attempt to do philosophy cross-culturally – not just to compare philosophies from different traditions, but to build a philosophical system myself that draws, with intellectual integrity, from wisdom from around the world. I don’t pretend to have come close to succeeding at this endeavour yet. Developing a philosophy is an ongoing process, one I invite my readers to share.

What is wisdom? That’s the tougher question, and I suppose if I knew exactly what it was I wouldn’t have to look for it. (Plato tells us that the gods are not philosophers, because they’re already wise and therefore don’t have to desire wisdom.) But as a working start I’d propose that wisdom has two major characteristics: it tells us about how we should live, and it shows us answers to the biggest questions, the questions that underlie all the other questions.

So the goal here is to love wisdom, search for it, and perhaps find it, wherever it comes from – Asian “religious” traditions, the classics of Western thought, modern natural science, other specialized disciplines, and contemporary philosophical reflection of both the “analytic” and “Continental” strains. Tall order? Of course it is. But for me, part of the idea of philosophy is to think big.

I make a new substantive post on the blog every Sunday at 5pm. This is a regular schedule; if I need to miss a week or more I will announce it in the preceding week’s post. If you’d like to keep up with the weekly updates, I recommend you subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed (if you use RSS) or sign up for email delivery. You can also follow my feed for the blog on Twitter @loveofallwisdom.

I consider this blog a work of scholarship, and would be honoured if you wished to cite my blog posts in a traditional academic work. If you do, please give them a full citation, including the URL and post date, so that interested readers may find them online more easily. For example, if you wish to cite this post in author-date style, cite it in the text as “Lele 2010″ and in the bibliography as:
Lele, Amod. 2010. “Ascent-descent and intimacy integrity together.” Love of All Wisdom, 26 September 2010. http://loveofallwisdom.com/2010/09/ascent-descent-and-intimacy-integrity-together/

In a footnote, cite it as:
Amod Lele, “Ascent-descent and intimacy integrity together.” Love of All Wisdom, 26 September 2010. http://loveofallwisdom.com/2010/09/ascent-descent-and-intimacy-integrity-together/