Read in January 2026

January was a busy time at work and home. As far as philosophical reading goes, I mostly read papers on substitutional quantification (along with relevant background). I’d like to write up a little overview of that subject and publish it here. The main risk is that (true to usual form) I’ll research it endlessly and never actually write anything, so my goal will be to put up something here without getting hung up on quality.

I had a number of books on the go this month, but only finished two:

Jon Raymond, God and Sex

As I read this book, I spent a lot of time trying to untangle my own personal discomfort with it from my assessment of it as a work of art. It’s a little difficult to go into why without spoilers, so I’ll stay vague. Part of the issue—and yes, this is very silly—is that in general first person narratives featuring extended dishonesty make me really uncomfortable. But this is of course an eminently reasonable subject for a work of art. The narrator also indulges in a wild amount of very unconvincing rationalization. The narrator ends his tale, it seemed to me, with a very long way to go in understanding what he’d lived through and done. Again, this is fine! But at times I wasn’t sure how much wiser the story was than the narrator. In the end, though, I decided that the author had done that main thing that I ask of a piece of fiction, which is to raise a series of questions that elude any simple resolution. The reworking of themes from a novel of Graham Greene is well done. As much as I disliked reading it, I have to admit that this novel wasn’t bad. Recommended especially for people who aren’t me.

Marshall Glickman, Beyond the Breath: Extraordinary Mindfulness Through Whole-Body Vipassana Meditation

At the core of this book is the claim that whole-body vipassana meditation as taught by S.N. Goenka is highly worthwhile. After he tried it, the author found that it “fostered better moment-to-moment awareness” than meditation in the Zen tradition that he had been doing and also compared with more narrowly breath-focussed Vipassana.

That’s the core of the book—exactly what you’d expect from the title—but the core of the book is rather small. The chapter on technique is about 25 pages and could have been a pamphlet. Glickman does what he can to describe it, but admits that this is difficult to transmit in writing, so he begins and ends the book with (reasonable enough) exhortations to try 10-day retreats to really learn the technique. There is a little bit more about whole-body vipassana specifically, including his argument that it likely goes back to the Buddha, and some useful comparison with other meditation traditions within Buddhism.

This material was welcome and interesting. But surrounding this small core is a lot of general material about Buddhism that isn’t really connected to whole-body vipassana in particular. To my surprise, a central aim of the book turned out to be showing “that science can be a valuable tool for understanding Buddhism better.” For example he tries to show that “karma can be understood as our unconscious”, drawing on “recent neurochemical findings”. In line with this ambition, Glickman tries to provide naturalistic explanations and justifications for a few traditional Buddhist notions.

Although the author seems pretty likable—he writes with warmth, humility, and an admirable lack of dogmatism—I did not care for much of this part of the book. I’m much more familiar with attempts to naturalize ethics in the Western tradition. It’s a broadly promising research program, but there are a lot of ways to develop it and a lot of ways to go wrong. Glickman’s discussion seemed to me largely unaware of the pitfalls and difficulties that meet serious attempts to do this, so I found most of what he said frustrating or inadequate.

Actually, there were two major problems here. One is that the relationship between science and other claims is handled badly. The other is that Glickman’s understanding of the relevant science is weak, apart from any attempt to relate it to Buddhism. For example, he seems to go in for a pretty unsophisticated version of extrapolative evolutionary psychology, apparently influenced by Robert Wright’s terrible book The Moral Animal. Agreed, humans are a product of evolution, but (once again) there are a number of ways to go wrong when making specific claims and predictions from that fact. It’s just very hard to write and think about this well, and because he seems unaware of the methodological issues in this area, the text is bound to frustrate anyone who is aware of them.

Here’s an example of sloppiness about what science tells us: Glickman repeats the claim ‘from Psych 101, if the word “Coke” is flashed on a movie screen for a microsecond, much of the audience will head to the concession counter, even though they had no idea they’d seen the word.’ The truth is that the original study (by Vicary) claiming to show this was already discredited in the 1960s and empirical psychologists have only ever found very modest effect sizes. I admit that this is just a footnote and not really a load bearing claim, but come on, man.

Anyway, by the time I got to the author’s speculation that “[r]ecent breakthroughs in neurobiology suggest how precise karmic accounting can be possible” I was not in a receptive mood. The author also tries to explain Buddhist notions about the illusion of selfhood, but I had to add it to the growing list of Buddhist discussions of this subject that I can’t make any sense of. More on this in another post, perhaps.

As for the practical advice about meditation in the book, much of it struck me as interesting and well-presented. I’m currently also reading The Mind Illuminated, another meditation manual, and was struck by differences between Glickman’s advice and the advice in that book. Glickman, for example, advises against counting your breaths. He also advises against any kind of labeling as you meditate. The Mind Illuminated offers both of those techniques to beginners to help them on their way; they can outgrow them as they advance. I suppose Glickman’s worry is that you get better at what you practice, so you should be careful to practice the right things from the start, whereas The Mind Illuminated wants to make sure that people can get their practice off the ground in the first place and is more confident that once they make progress their practice can evolve. As a beginner, I’m not sure what the best approach is—just mentioning something that caught my eye.