Alan Watts (1915-1973) was an English philosopher best known for his lectures on spiritualism. Philosopher William Warren Bartley said,
"I remember asking Alan why he was teaching. He just smiled at me, and pointed out the window, to a bird flying. There was no reason why he was teaching, he replied. He taught, he said, just as the bird flies." (Interview with Werner Erhard: the Transformation of a Man, 1978)The rest of this post is some quotes from Watts.
Epistemology
"A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusion." (Alan Watts Teaches Meditation, 1992)
"...everyone has a religion, whether admitted or not, because it is impossible to be human without having some basic assumptions (or intuitions) about existence..." (In My Own Way: An Autobiography 1915-1965, 1972)
"The basic problem is to understand that there are no such things as things; that is to say separate things, separate events. That is only a way of talking. What do you mean by a thing? A thing is a noun. A noun isn’t a part of nature it’s a part of speech. There are no nouns in the physical world. There are no separate things in the physical world either." (Quoted in Watts on Wiggles Waves, 2007)
