Apr
25
Thu
Mind, Attention, & World Themes in Indian and Buddhist Philosophical Theory @ NYU Events Space 2nd Floor
Apr 25 – Apr 26 all-day

The philosophical traditions of India offer contemporary researchers an unparalleled and mostly untapped resource for fresh thinking about attention, its relations to mind and world. From Nyāya manas-theory to the extensive Buddhist theories about attention’s relationship with consciousness, and from precise taxonomies of the varieties of attention to discussions about the norms governing attention, epistemic, moral, and practical, the wealth and sophistication of Indian analysis is astounding. Our workshop will look at the ways in which Indian, including Buddhist, philosophical theory can enrich contemporary discussion, and there will be presentations by a world-class panel of speakers.

We hope too that this workshop will serve as a catalyst to Indian philosophical studies in the New York area. The workshop is open to everyone, free and without registration, and the program is here.

April 25, 2019|DAY 1 

8:45 am – 9:00 am

Coffee & Welcome  (Jonardon Ganeri NYU)

9:00 am – 10:45 am

Panel 1. Attending to Oneself

Chair: Nic Bommarito (Buffalo)

        9:00 am – 9:50 am

Sharon Street (NYU, via video conferencing)

  “On Recognizing Oneself in Others: A Meditation-Based Response to Mackie’s Argument from Queerness”

        9:55 am – 10:45 am

Muhammad Faruque (Fordham)

“Attending to Oneself: Muḥammad Iqbāl and his Indian Contemporaries”

10:45 am – 11:00 am

   Morning Break

11:00 am – 12:45 pm 

Panel 2. Attention and Affect

Chair: Joerg Tuske (Salisbury)

11:00 am – 11:50am

Evan Thompson (British Columbia)

    “Affect Biased Attention and Concept Formation”

11:55 am – 12:45 pm

Sonam Kachru (Virginia)

    “Attention and Affect: A View from Indian Buddhist Philosophy”

12:45 pm – 2:00 pm

Lunch Break

2:00 pm – 3:45 pm 

Panel 3. Decision and Exclusion

Chair: Emily McRae (New Mexico)

2:00 pm – 2:50 pm

Arindam Chakrabarti (Stonybrook)

     “Deciding to Attend and the Problem of Disjunctive Attention”

2:55 pm – 3:45 pm

Catherine Prueitt (George Mason)

“At the Limits of Pain: Attention, Exclusion, and Self-Knowledge in Pratyabhijñā Śaivism.”

   3:45 pm – 4:00 pm

Afternoon Break

   4:00 pm – 5:45 pm 

Panel 4. The Ethics of Attention

Chair: Eyal Aviv (George Washington)

        4:00 pm – 4:50 pm

   Curie Virag (Edinburgh)

“Attention as Cognitive Resonance”

       4:55 pm – 5:45 pm

   Shalini Sinha (Reading)

   “The Ethics of Attention in Śāntideva and Simone Weil”

April 26, 2019|DAY 2 

10:15 am – 10:30 am

Coffee

10:30 am – 12:15 pm

Panel 5. Self-Awareness and Attention

Chair: Payal Doctor (LaGuardia)

       10:30 am – 11:20 am

Amit Chaturvedi (Hong Kong)

“Phenomenal Priority and Reflexive Self-Awareness: Watzl meets Yogācāra”

       11:25 am – 12:15 pm

Nilanjan Das  (University College London)

“Śrīharṣa on Self-knowledge and the Inner Sense”

12:15 pm – 1:30 pm

Lunch Break

   1:30 pm – 3:15 pm

Panel 6. Mindfulness and Justification

Chair: Bryce Huebner (Georgetown)

         1:30 pm – 2:20 pm

Georges Dreyfus (Williams)

   “But What is Mindfulness? A Phenomenological Approach”

         2:25 pm – 3:15 pm

Anand Vaidya (San Jose)

    “Attention and Justification”

   3:15 pm – 3:30 pm

Afternoon Break

3:30 pm – 5:15 pm

Panel 7. The Wandering Self

Chair: Adriana Renero (NYU)

         3:30 pm – 4:20 pm

Carolyn Jennings (UC Merced)

    “From Attention to Self”

         4:25 pm – 5:15 pm

Zac Irving (Virginia)

    “Harnessing the Wandering Mind”

https://philevents.org/event/show/71418

Mar
22
Tue
Jonardon Ganeri (Toronto) Can theater teach us about what it’s like to be someone else? @ Zoom
Mar 22 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

How can we know what it’s like to be someone else? Classical Indian philosophers found the answer in theater, arguing that it’s not just a form of entertainment, but a source of knowledge of other minds. In this talk, I’ll explore how this theme is developed in Śrī Śaṅkuka (c. 850 CE) and examine the reasons his views were rejected in the later tradition. I’ll argue that those reasons are unsound, and that we can see why by turning to contemporary studies of the relationship between knowledge and luck.

Jonardon Ganeri is the Bimal. K. Matilal Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is a philosopher whose work draws on a variety of philosophical traditions to construct new positions in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology. His books include Attention, Not Self (2017), a study of early Buddhist theories of attention; The Concealed Art of the Soul (2012), an analysis of the idea of a search for one’s true self; Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves (2020), an analysis of Fernando Pessoa’s philosophy of self; and Inwardness: An Outsiders’ Guide (2021), a review of the concept of inwardness in literature, film, poetry, and philosophy across cultures. He joined the Fellowship of the British Academy in 2015, and won the Infosys Prize in the Humanities the same year, the only philosopher to do so.

This series is curated and co-presented by Brooklyn Public Philosophers, aka Ian Olasov.

Mar
24
Fri
Śrīharṣa on the Indefinability of Knowledge. Nilanjan Das (U Toronto) @ Faculty House, Columbia
Mar 24 @ 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm

In Sanskrit epistemology, philosophers are preoccupied with the notion of pramā. A pramā, roughly, is a mental event of learning or knowledge-acquisition. Call any such mental event a knowledge-event. In A Confection of Refutation (Khaṇḍanakhaṇḍakhādya), the 12th century philosopher and poet Śrīharṣa argued that knowledge-events are indefinable. Any satisfactory (and therefore non-circular) definition of knowledge-events will have to include an anti-luck condition that doesn’t appeal back to the notion of learning or knowledge-acquisition itself. But there is no such anti-luck condition. What is novel about Śrīharṣa’s argument is that it is motivated by his commitment to a certain “knowledge first” approach to epistemology: the view that knowledge-events are epistemically prior to other non-factive mental states and events. On this view, when we are trying to determine whether an agent has undergone a knowledge-event, we don’t initially ascribe to them some other non-factive mental event, and then check if that event meets some further conditions (like truth or reliability) necessary for it to count as a knowledge-event; rather, we treat certain mental events by default as knowledge-events until a defeater comes along.  Surprisingly, Śrīharṣa argues that this kind of “knowledge first” epistemology should give us reason to doubt whether our ordinary attributions of knowledge-events are reliably tracking any sui generis psychological kind. In this talk, I reconstruct Śrīharṣa’s position.

With responses from Rosanna Picascia (Swarthmore College)

RSVP is required for dinner. Dinner will take place at a nearby restaurant. Please contact Lucilla at lm3335@columbia.edu for further information.