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Making Sense with Sam Harris

#102 — Is Buddhism True?

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Samharris, Currentevents, Politics, Ethics, Religion, Neuroscience, Science, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.629.1K Ratings

🗓️ 30 October 2017

⏱️ 56 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sam Harris speaks with Robert Wright about his book Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

0:12.1

hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing

0:16.2

the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense

0:20.7

Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharis.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed

0:26.1

to add to your favorite pod catcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads

0:31.2

on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.

0:35.8

So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.

0:46.9

Today I am speaking with Robert Wright. Robert is an author, I think most famously of the book The

0:54.2

Moral Animal, which was one of the first books that many of us read on evolutionary psychology.

1:01.1

Robert has written many other books, and for many journals, he's written for The New Yorker,

1:05.8

The Atlantic, Time, Slate, The New Republic. He's a recipient of the National Magazine Award for

1:13.2

SA and Criticism, and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He's taught

1:19.2

in the psychology department, the University of Pennsylvania, and in the religion department at

1:24.9

Princeton. He's currently a visiting professor of science and religion at Union Theological Seminary

1:31.1

in New York. Robert's new book is Why Buddhism Is True, The Science and Philosophy of Meditation

1:39.0

and Enlightenment. We talk almost entirely about the book. We start the conversation putting

1:44.7

some of our checkered history to rest so that we can move on. Those of you who know the history

1:50.2

will know that it has been, as I often say, of these kinds of things fairly prickly, but we have a

1:58.2

very collegial conversation on the topic at hand. We talk about the connection between meditation

2:06.8

and morality. There's a fair amount about the harmony between evolutionary psychology and the

2:13.5

Buddhist view of the mind, also a lot about the eluciriness of the self and how to make sense of

2:19.2

that claim. In any case, I now bring you Robert Wright. I am here with Robert Wright. Robert,

...

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