Current Projects
A central focus of my research has been how to conduct successful inquiry in any subject, and philosophy in particular. Surprisingly, no one had specified in any systematic way how we can learn and study the options of philosophy from any culture or context, and so I made that the point of much of my early work. The results were simple procedures that can be applied to a wide range of life contexts. As I refined this work and implemented it more deliberately in my teaching, an unexpected pattern emerged: students reported significant increases in their capacity to think clearly, make independent choices, and energetically execute choices.
These changes were not the result of motivation or emotional support, but of learning how inquiry itself works.
After more than twenty years of this work, I founded Φ Philosophit™, a coaching platform grounded in philosophy. Just as physical fitness training develops bodily strength in the athlete, Phitness training develops agency and effective autonomy in the Life Athlete. Phitness consists in clear thinking, free choosing, and the energetic implementation of success. Like physical training, it is practical and demanding: it involves repeated challenges, controlled failure, recovery, and a return to the task. The result is increased personal strength and autonomy.
Φ Philosophit™ is not counselling or therapy. Unlike most coaching programs, which borrow loosely from psychology and treat people as passive recipients of support, Φ Philosophit™ is based on philosophical skill. It draws on more than 3,000 years of philosophical research from the Western, Chinese, and Indian traditions and operates on a simple premise: enduring success requires the ability to think clearly for oneself. Philosophical training over the long term often yields Phitness only as an inconsistent side effect, Φ Philosophit™ is designed to train these skills in a short amount of time: months, not years.
For more information, visit philosophit.com.
My research in Yoga began after my MA in South Asian Studies, which focused on the history of Indian philosophy. While completing a PhD in philosophy on the topic of translating moral philosophy, I chose to translate the Yoga Sūtra
(the basic text of the Yoga tradition) as a side project. The rest is history. The classical philosophy of Yoga had a transformative impact on how I thought about research problems. From there I learned of the importance of clear, logic based thinking, as something different from beliefs and assumptions.
In time I noticed that there were no reliable sources of understanding of Yoga’s basic philosophy available online, as most of what is said about the topic originates from authors who lack training and competence in philosophy and the necessary specialization in translation to unlock the ancient wisdom. Also, most of what people believe they know about Yoga has to do with how the understanding of yoga shifted to accommodate oppression over a thousand years of colonization. So instead of learning about the original moral and transformative practices of Yoga, they learn about coping mechanisms for stress.
So I started the 🟔Yoga Philosophy Institute in 2019, to make research-based knowledge of Yoga’s intellectual roots available to all who have an interest in Yoga.
For more, see yogaphilosophy.com
