Writing

I write fiction and philosophy, and I am particularly interested in philosophical stories and story-like philosophy.

My most recent book is Introducing Happiness: a Practical Guide, a brief and breezy guide to the various philosophies of happiness, and published by Icon Books.

My novel, Cargo Fever, a philosophical romp which draws on my experience of travel and research in Indonesia and which features a variety of curious gods, ape-men, humans and such-like mythical creatures, was published by Tindal Street Press in 2007. I am currently in the final stages of a second novel, The Descent of the Lyre, a tale of banditry, guitar music and sainthood set in the Rhodope mountains of Bulgaria. In 2010, I was awarded a grant from the British Academy to research my third novel in China. Believing that adults should not have all the fun, I write stories for children, and my book The Snorgh and the Sailor, beautifully illustrated by artist Thomas Docherty, is forthcoming from Alison Green books / Scholastic, in 2012.

My philosophy book Finding Our Sea Legs, which draws upon stories from Europe, America, India, China and the outer islands of Indonesia to ask some fundamental questions about ethics, was published by Kingston University press in 2010. I am working on a further philosophy book called The Cheerful World.

I am also an enthusiastic blogger. For over five years I wrote what I increasingly came to think of as a ‘Buddhish’ blog at thinkBuddha.org. thinkBuddha.org was nominated as one of the top one hundred blogs of 2009 by the Sunday Times, but I decided to more or less retire the blog in its sixth year. I occasionally add to thinkBuddha.org, and also blog from time to time here on this website. I also write for a wide range of publications, including academic and literary journals, and have been commissioned to write for BBC Radio 4. It is not unheard of for me to make occasional forays into poetry.

Books

Cargo Fever - Small Finding Our Sea-Legs - Small The Snorgh and the Sailor

Contributor to

I have contributed two chapters – one on twentieth century philosophy and one on contemporary philosophy – to Dorling Kindersley’s The Philosophy Book (that is, everything from Nietzsche to Žižek). I also have a caffeine-fuelled paper on philosophy, ethics and idleness in the forthcoming Blackwell/Wiley collection on coffee and philosophy.

The Philosophy Book The Philosophy Book

Small press.

Here’s a sample of some of the small press magazines I’ve written for, all noble and august publications.

Small Press

 

Finding Our Sea-Legs

Finding Our Sea-Legs

Finding Our Sea-Legs is my first philosophy book, published by Kingston University Press in 2009. It is at one and the same time a philosophy book, a collection of strange and sometimes unsettling stories, and a voyage of sorts through some of the more enduring questions of ethics. The argument grows out of the following two philosophical suggestions (I would not want to go so far as to call them propositions): the first comes from Aristotle, and is the suggestion that ethics is like navigation; and second comes from the storytelling traditions of India, and is the suggestion that stories are like the sea. The book tries to chart a passage between these two suggestions, to weave a suggestive philosophy made of stories.

The book has been reviewed by David Chapman, over on Approaching Aro.

Will Buckingham writes thinkBuddha, my favorite blog. Finding Our Sea-Legs: Ethics, Experience and the Ocean of Stories is his first book of “Buddhish” ethical philosophy. It is a remarkable and important work.
The book is unconventional in form: written in colloquial English with little jargon. It tells many stories: about talking fish, million-year-old princesses, and the need to lower your mast as you near the horizon, lest your boat get stuck between the sky and the sea.
Finding our Sea-Legs is also unconventional in content. It is one of very few books about a key problem in contemporary philosophy: the tension between the urgency of ethics and their inherent ambiguity.

You can find another, contrasting, review over on philosopher Robert Ellis’s Moral Objectivity website.

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