Fire Philosophy

Fire philosophy offers pragmatic guidance about how to live life with wisdom and courage. It is an antidote to abstract theoretical philosophy. We will make complicated but profound philosophy make sense so that your life’s journey can deepen and flourish.

Topics may include but are not limited to accessible translations and encounters with

✅ Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy

✅ Buddhist philosophy generally

✅ Zen Buddhism philosophy specifically

✅ Western philosophers like Jacque Derrida and Heidegger and other “too hard for me to understand” big-time thinkers

Subscription to Fire Philosophy

We will offer the majority of what we publish for free.

For subscribers seeking a more generous and intimate experience:

🔥 Subscriber-only recorded conversations about published topics

🔥 Capacity to post comments and ask questions and receive replies

🔥 A monthly Q & A session

🔥 Subscriber only posts that contain all the secret dark knowledge we can’t just go flaunting around in public

🔥 Book and movie recommendations to help orient you about what to learn next

🔥 A direct portal into our community for those who genuinely care about their lives and the lives of everyone and are ready to take responsibility

🔥 A chance to flex the generosity muscle, without which philosophy remains a theory

🔥 An earned sense of authentic well-being for supporting many decades of dedicated work to make this kind of depth of understanding and writing possible

Schedule of Fire Philosophy

🎯 Fire Philosophy will be written once a week, more or less. Beyond that, no one can really say, and it’s best to have no expectations.

Who are we?

I’ve recently retired from a long career teaching at Occidental College in Los Angeles. That was practically perfect for me--I could stay in touch with young, agile minds while probing any of the great spiritual/philosophical writings that I desired, not to mention time to wander throughout Asia and the great mountain ranges of the world. Although I had no idea that would inevitably lead me to writing, it did, and I am so grateful. Writing for me meant thinking deeply, letting ideas sink all the way down so that I could put them into practice and into a language that was truly my own. I’ve written and edited articles and books, mostly on Buddhist thought and practice but always with an eye toward other traditions of wisdom. The books that might interest this audience most are: Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism, The Six Perfections: Buddhism and the Cultivation of Character, What Is Buddhist Enlightenment?, Buddhism: What Everyone Needs to Know, and Living Skillfully: Buddhist Philosophy of Life from the Vimalakirti Sutra. Buddhism/Zen came to me as a profound inspiration, a source of ideas and practices of meditation that have guided me for many years now.

My sources of inspiration go far beyond Buddhism, though, and it’s probably true that half of my reading has been in other wisdom traditions, most notably what is called Continental philosophy. That includes Nietzsche, and I’ve been reading his works in astonishment for most of my life. For me, the best of Nietzsche and most profound edges of Buddhism and Zen just fit together, each taking a turn to shine inspiring light on the other. To have come of age just when the great writings from around the world became available was an amazing gift. Of all the times to be born, how could I--we!--be so lucky? I also have the good fortune to be married to a poet, a really great poet and live in proximity to two wonderful children, now adults with their own interesting lives. While I live and flourish in urbanity, with friends, music, and museums all around me, I crave the solitude of the wilderness. I’m an avid--no addicted--hiker and backpacker, and seek the high Sierras or the Joshua Tree deserts whenever I can slip away. I have long believed Nietzsche when he said that “all truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” And although I’m still waiting for one that’s “truly great,” the best ones that have popped up so far certainly have that as their origin. So I just keep walking, the higher into the mountains and the further into the wilderness the better. I hope someday never to come back.

Malek is a student of philosophy as a way of life. Finding that contemporary disciplinary and national boundaries largely miss the profound historical currents that connect cultures, thinkers and texts, he has sought to explore the sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit connections between the wisdom traditions of the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and the the West.  He has spend much of his life thinking through the possibilities for living afforded by the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Prof. Moazzam-Doulat teaches courses on social and political philosophy. His research is focused on contemporary political theory and religion with special emphasis on the relationship between Islamic and European philosophical responses to modernity and imperialism. He has worked as a public policy analyst and advocate focusing on issues of privacy broadly conceived. He has also worked for the ACLU of Southern California on post-9/11 public policy and civil liberties issues facing the Muslim, Arab, and Iranian communities in Southern California. He was one of the founding editors of Studies in Practical Philosophy (1998-2005), a quarterly journal dedicated to the exploration and promotion of social and political thought and activism grounded in the tradition of Continental philosophy.

Krzysztof (pronounced "Wise Ass") has a PhD in Literature and teaches in the department of Rhetoric at the University of Texas, Austin. He is also a Zen Mentor and Council Member at Appamada Zen Center and is trained in Hakomi and Internal Family Systems Therapy and consistently gets his ass whooped in jiu-jitsu at V.O.W. under the tutelage of Ryan Villalobos. His main literary loves are Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, about whom he has published essays.