Related
References
Fingarette, Herbert, et al. “Paul D. Wienpahl, Philosophy: Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.” Online Archive of California, http://texts.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb1j49n6pv;NAAN=13030&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00110&toc.depth=1&toc.id=&brand=oac4. Accessed 27 Apr. 2024.
professional scholar though he was, he remained to the end of his life dedicated to the idea of liberal education and to philosophy as a discipline that liberates.
emphasis on the individual student was a hallmark of all his teaching
He had a particular love for teaching philosophy, and his warm and enduring relationships with students at every level were notable signs of the central role the teaching of philosophy played in his life.
His career as a philosophical writer was productive and varied. He wrote important studies on Frege and Wittgenstein, on existentialism and Zen Buddhism, and on Spinoza.
He published about forty articles in scholarly journals, and three books: The Matter of Zen, Zen Diary, and The Radical Spinoza.
He lived in France for a year studying existentialism; he went to Japan to live in a Zen temple and study under a Zen master; in recent years, as the foundation of his Spinoza studies, he completed his own translation into English of the entire corpus of Spinoza’s works.
All Wienphal’s work was governed by a radical empiricism that he increasingly came to see as a form of mysticism.
In the face of cant and mere convention he showed impatience. This reflected his hunger for simplicity, his yearning for each one to accept and love others as they are. He himself had a remarkable, unaffected candor, a kindly directness, a deep need to help another where he saw help needed.
He was passionately dedicated to the world of ideas, most particularly to philosophy. He was up long before the sun, writing for hours in his hilltop study. For him, philosophy was a scholarly discipline but, much more importantly, it was a spiritual discipline of personal liberation.
https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2008/01/epiphany-guard-mysteries-constantly.html
I’m very much with Wienpahl on this, that “the point is not to identify reality with anything except itself” and any religious tradition worth its salt is only ultimately concerned to help its adherents experience this reality itself and not its own transient and wholly incomplete expression of that reality.
Note: And this is why, perhaps, photography and video or facilitating walks for direct contact with reality is an inevitable part of my work.
https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2008/03/mysticism-of-stone.html
“God [properly conceived] ceases to be an object and becomes an experience.” It is an attempt to un-centre or, even, free God.