Love of All Wisdom on Substack
Love of All Wisdom 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.
My name is Amod Lele. (Pronunciation: “uh-MODE” or “ah-MODE,” like a mode of transportation; “LAY-lay.”) I am gender-fluid, and go by the name Sandhya (“SUND-ya”, like “Sunday” with the last two letters reversed) when presenting female. I was born and raised in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and have lived in the Boston area for more than two decades.
I began reading Western philosophy in high school, but my real philosophical awakening came on a trip to Thailand in 1997, coming to learn more and more about Buddhism. I found myself wishing for many things, getting them in turn, and still not being happy. I eventually realized it was all about the Second Noble Truth: suffering comes from craving. The problem wasn't with whether or not I got what I wanted. The problem was with me. Philosophy was no longer just about abstractions or even social issues; it spoke directly to me. If you're interested in more details of this story, I've discussed them in two posts on the Love of All Wisdom blog site.
In the following decade I received a PhD from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University, studying cross-cultural philosophy with a focus on the Buddhist thinker Śāntideva. I started Love of All Wisdom as a WordPress blog in 2009 while working as a visiting assistant professor at Stonehill College. The blog site remains active and holds all the posts from 2023 and before, along with more recent posts that are both on the blog site and here on Substack. So there are several hundred posts on the blog site that are not found on Substack, and I encourage you to explore them; the best way to do that is through the list of tags and categories in the site’s left sidebar, so that you can find posts related to topics that interest you most.
Love of All Wisdom is entirely free. I typically make a new substantive post every Sunday at 5pm. I intend this to be a regular schedule; if I need to miss a week’s post or more, I will generally announce it beforehand.
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