Philosophical Exercises

(The plan? To try one new philosophical exercise every month. This article is part of a series. In the previous episode, we explored Postural Yoga and the sense of earth ) For the month of March, I tried to practice Spinozist mindfulness. It’s not that “Spinozist mindfulness” is an established practice, mind you. I just wanted to see if it could be! In the end, my impression is that Spinoza and mindfulness are not a perfect match. However, they are far from being a bad match. I don’t know if my impression is correct, and I suspect that verifying it would require no less than answering some very thorny questions of Spinoza scholarship (more on that later). My tentative speculation is that the paradigmatic Spinozist practice of recalling the philosophical system laid out in the Ethics might be closer to loving kindness meditation , not mindfulness. All of this pondering started as I was reading Christos Hadjioannou ’s excellent article about what a Stoic version or a Heid...

  (The plan? To try one new philosophical exercise each month. This article is thus part of a series. January was all about Anti-Curiosity Exercises )      I saw an amazing academic talk, which renewed my enthusiasm for Yoga, and which prompted me to try out a different way of going about my Yoga practice (which I had mostly abandoned, like I do regularly). The talk in question was given by Hayden Kee and was called “Embodiment, Disembodiment, Reembodiment: Insights from Phenomenology and Postural Yoga” 1 (available on Youtube, see footnote). I also read the corresponding article 2 , which I thought was worth it to go slightly more in depth with some ideas. Now, to be fair, I was already enthusiastic about Yoga. Mostly because it does me a lot of good whenever I go back to it. Yoga allows me to break through the false sense that I am a little homunculus living inside my skull and piloting a machine of limbs, as a puppeteer would a puppet. As a practice, it cures m...

    I am setting myself a challenge: in 2024, I commit to practicing one new philosophical exercise each month. And then write about it! For January 2024, I took on Plutarch’s anti-curiosity exercises, described in his essay On Curiosity. 1 The reason why I selected this practice to start off the year is because I was wondering if these exercises could help counteract Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I have OCD myself and I am part of a team of philosophers who is leading an inquiry into this condition. We are trying our best to put the voices of the people who have OCD at the center of the discussion. The project is called Stuck on the Puzzle 2 : it involves a podcast being produced, a blog calling for guest-posts, and hopefully, eventually, the design of a philosophical exercise that could perhaps help when dealing with OCD.      Reflecting on my own OCD, I came to agree with Juliette Vazard ’s assessment that this disorder must have something to do...

The following article was originally published as “The Trustful Approach: introducing an original philosophical exercise to live social discord mindfully” as it was meant to serve as a first introduction to this philosophical exercise. However, since it is a long article, which goes a lot into details regarding the theory behind the practice, and since my thinking has evolved regarding some aspects, I have since then published another post , which is a shorter and way better introduction to the exercise. I encourage you to read it. In the end, the new title of the present article reflects better what is in it.           The trustful approach is a philosophical exercise that I have developed in order to deal with heated disagreements and chronic outrage. It is especially tailored to political disagreements, though it can be useful in other cases. The aim of the practice is to make you a more focused, lucid, and serene interlocutor, without losing your grip o...