Category Archives: Buddhism

Who Is My Neighbor?

On the Parable of the Good Samaritan in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

As I revisit the conclusion of my 2010 doctoral dissertation on Charles Taylor, originally written under the title Charles Taylor and Modern Identity, I realize that many of the problems that structured that work now reappear in the contemporary debate on artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence is not only a new technology. Nor is it merely an ambivalent tool, capable of emancipatory or destructive uses depending on the political conditions in which it is embedded. It is also a new figure within a long history through which life, speech, the body, and suffering are translated into administrable categories. What appeared in Taylor as the problem of modern identity, and in the work of the theologian Ivan Illich as the institutional corruption of Christianity, reappears today in the form of an algorithmic bureaucracy capable of reorganizing the very field in which something can appear as visible, useful, communicable, governable, or recognizable.

The question that serves as the guiding thread is not new. It appears in the Gospel of Luke, when a lawyer asks Jesus: “And who is my neighbor?” The question seeks to establish a kind of delimitation or boundary. The lawyer wants to know how far moral obligation extends. He wants to know who belongs within the circle of responsibility and who remains outside it. Jesus responds with the parable of the Good Samaritan: a man falls wounded on the road. A priest and a Levite pass by him, but they continue their way, indifferent to the man’s suffering. A Samaritan, however, stops, approaches him, bandages his wounds, takes him to an inn, and cares for him.

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The Tantric Distinction

On the World of This Ordinary Body

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One of the most influential responses to modern representationalism has been to return to the body. Against the image of a mind separated from the world, locked inside the head and devoted to representing an external reality, much of contemporary philosophy of cognition has insisted that knowing means acting, perceiving, moving, speaking, feeling, and participating from within a situated embodiment. The mind would not first be inside and then go out toward the world; it would already be engaged with a world through the body.

This shift has been important. It made it possible to question the modern figure of the abstract, disembodied subject, transparent to itself, separated from history, affectivity, and the concrete conditions of existence. It is no accident that some of the central works of enactivism have emphasized precisely this dimension: The Embodied Mind, Mind in Life, Sensorimotor Life, Linguistic Bodies. In all of them, the same intuition appears: there is no mind without body, no cognition without action, no meaning without a lived world.

But this response contains a difficulty that has not always been thought through with sufficient radicality. The return to the body can become a new form of naivete if it assumes that the lived body, by itself, liberates us from abstraction, ideology, prejudice, or totality. Against the representational mind, the body then appears as a circle of authenticity. One is tempted to think that, in the face of the algorithm, the virtuous response is direct experience; in the face of calculation, what we must emphasize is the sensitivity that promises to preserve our humanity; in the face of abstraction, the demand to cling to an immediate presence; and in the face of artificial intelligence, that resistance means reclaiming embodied life. It is no accident that this drift is aligned with the emotivist turn, with the culture of mindfulness, and with the contemporary cult of fitness.

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Doctoral Thesis Defense: “Life in History: Beyond Biology, Phenomenology, and the Cognitive Sciences”:

The public defense of the doctoral thesis Life in History: Beyond Biology, Phenomenology, and the Cognitive Sciences took place on April 17, 2026, at 12:00 noon, Spanish mainland time, in the A. Calsamiglia Degree Room.

The research was supervised by Professor Raquel Bouso García and received external evaluation reports from Manuel Heras Escribano and Raúl Fornet-Betancourt. The examination committee was composed of Raúl Fornet-Betancourt — RWTH Aachen University —, Enrique Del Percio — University of Buenos Aires —, and Natàlia Cantó Milà — Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

The text that follows reproduces the statement prepared for the defense. It presents the intellectual itinerary that led to the thesis, sets out its main hypothesis, and summarizes the argumentative shift it proposes: moving from an understanding of life centered on self-organization, autonomy, and the immanent production of meaning toward a conception of life as constitutive openness to exteriority, in critical dialogue with Varelian enactivism, phenomenology, the cognitive sciences, and the philosophy of liberation.

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“Born to Flourish” or “Trained Not to See”?

The Disturbing Dystopia of Born to Flourish, by Richard Davidson and Cortland Dahl.[1]

There are books whose naivety is too sophisticated to be innocent. Born to Flourish, by Richard Davidson and Cortland Dahl, falls into this category. Its overall thesis seems appealing: human beings are born with the capacity to “flourish,” and that flourishing can be cultivated by training skills such as mindfulness, connection, self-understanding, and purpose. None of this, considered in the abstract, is objectionable. Who could be against the possibility of living with greater meaning? The problem begins when these categories are presented as if they could float above history, political economy, imperial violence, ecological devastation, and the material conditions that make contemporary malaise possible.

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Matthieu Ricard and Javier Cercas on “La Grande Librairie”: The Truth of Suffering and the Politics of Neutrality

Meditation as a Humanistic Discipline

[This entry is the summary of the second meeting of the seminar «Appearance and reality. On Living, Dreaming and Dying», held last Thursday, 17 February 2022].

1. The Current Moral Order and Critical Ethics

In the second session we began with a brief summary of what had been covered in the previous session. In particular, we returned to the notion that there are two perspectives on ethics proposed by the Philosophy of Liberation, and insisted on the idea that this distinction can be fruitfully applied to a better understanding of Buddhist ethics.

In short, the critical proposal of the Philosophy of Liberation can help us to «free ourselves» from conservative perspectives, which tend to create or defend systemic injustices, producing victims voluntarily or involuntarily due to the attachment to the dogmatic formulations of tradition, and to established institutional forms.

Let us remember that Buddhism is, before anything else, an ethic. That is, a system that teaches us how to act, that helps us to distinguish what we should or would do well to cultivate, and what, on the contrary, we should avoid, because it is harmful.

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Buddhism and Philosophy of Liberation

[This entry is the summary of the first meeting of the seminar “Appearance and reality. On living, dreaming and dying”, held last Thursday, 10 February 2022].

1. Introduction

We begin by briefly explaining the programme “Dimensions of Experience”, of which this module is a part. “Dimensions” aims to introduce students to Buddhist meditative practice. However, unlike other courses, the perspective adopted is a critical one. That is, meditation techniques are not simply offered for implementation in our daily lives, but are reflected upon. From our perspective, meditation can be counterproductive and even harmful. Moreover, we believe that a certain interpretation of Buddhist philosophy, in collusion with postmodernism, has been an unwitting ally of neoliberalism and all the evil that this system of social and ecological relations has caused and is causing in the world.

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Standing at the Edge. A response in Six Steps and a Proposal

[The following text is my response and proposal to the event «Standing at the Age» organised by Mind & Life Europe, and broadcast on 26 January 2022. The Youtube link to the event:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOxcy5St-

(1) I have listened very carefully to the interventions of the panellists. I found many valuable elements for reflection. However, I believe that there is an underlying problem that must be explicitly taken on board. It is not possible to talk about standing at the edge without taking into consideration that this edge is a civilisational construction. Is the expression of a very particular «totality with its exteriority», a historically instituted regime of social and ecological relations that dominates not only institutional forms and social practices, but also, in a subterranean way, our own consciousness, our imaginations.
«One world is dying and another has not yet been born». This phrase by Antonio Gramsci expresses the bardo’s experience at the political level.

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