Contact Professor Wolfgang Mann for more info.
Abstract. The Noble Lie proposed by Plato for the Just City in Republic III has been much misunderstood. Its agenda is twofold: to get the citizens of the City to see their society as a natural entity, with themselves as all ‘family’ and akin; and to get the Guardians in particular to make class mobility, on which the justice of the City depends, a top priority. Since the second is taken to depend on the first, the Lie passage amounts to an argument (1) that the survival of a just community depends on the existence of social solidarity between elite and mass, which allows for full class mobility and genuine meritocracy; (2) that this solidarity in turn depends on an ideology of natural unity; and (3) that such ideologies are always false. So the Lie really is a lie, but a necessary one; as such it poses an awkward ethical problem for Plato and, if he is right, for our own societies as well.
Presented by SWIP-NYC
THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY
Welcomes you to an IN-PERSON meeting:
Allison Aitken (Columbia University)
« A Case against Simple-mindedness: Śrīgupta on Mental Mereology »
With responses from Alexander Englert (Princeton University)
ABSTRACT: There’s a common line of reasoning which supposes that the phenomenal unity of conscious experience is grounded in a mind-like simple subject. To the contrary, Mādhyamika Buddhist philosophers beginning with Śrīgupta (seventh-eighth century) argue that any kind of mental simple is incoherent and thus metaphysically impossible. Lacking any unifying principle, the phenomenal unity of conscious experience is instead an ungrounded illusion. In this talk, I will present an analysis of Śrīgupta’s “neither-one-nor-many argument” against mental simples and show how his line of reasoning is driven by a set of implicit questions concerning the nature of and relation between consciousness and its intentional object. These questions not only set the agenda for centuries of intra-Buddhist debate on the topic, but they are also questions to which any defender of unified consciousness or a simple subject of experience arguably owes responses.
With responses from Mark Siderits (Illinois State University)
ABSTRACT: Buddhist philosophers often draw a distinction between two different kinds of truth: conventional truth (saṃvṭi-satya) and ultimate truth (paramārtha-satya). Abhidharma Buddhists philosophers typically understand this distinction in terms of an ontological distinction between two different kinds of entities: ultimately real entities (paramārtha-sat) and conventionally real entities (saṃvṛti-sat). Similar to contemporary philosophical discussions about ordinary objects, Buddhist philosophers debate the ontological status of conventional entities and the semantics of discourse concerning them. Mark Siderits (2015, 2021, 2022) has influentially argued for an eliminitivist position he calls “Buddhist reductionism” that interprets the Abhidharma position as one that denies conventional entities exist but that retains discourse involving apparent reference to them. However, in a recent article Kris McDaniel (2019), a prominent defender of ontological pluralism, challenges that view by proposing that the Abhidharma Buddhist distinction between conventional truth and ultimate truth be “defined up” from a more basic distinction between two different ways an entity can exist: conventionally or ultimately. In this paper I argue that Saṃghabhadra’s account of conventional reality and truth does lends itself well to McDaniel’s proposal but I will also argue that the account of conventional and ultimate truth that results differs in important ways from the models he offers. I will end by offering a modification of McDaniel’s account of conventional truth that is derived from Saṃghabhadra’s pluralist ontology. That view will, unlike the views suggested by both Siderits and McDaniel, allow for there to be ultimate truths about what is conventionally true.
Dinner will be kindly offered by the Columbia University Seminars.
RSVP is required for dinner. Please email Lucilla with eating requirements at lm3335@columbia.edu.
With responses from Timothy Connolly (East Stroudsburg University)
ABSTRACT: Recent philosophical discussions on compassion focus on the value and the nature of compassion as an emotion. Ancient Asian philosophical traditions such as Confucianism and Buddhism, however, emphasize compassion as a character trait that should be nurtured. This paper examines the insights drawn from these traditions to help inform the nurturing of compassion. For example, is empathy a necessary tool? What is the role of love and care? Does self-reflection contribute to the process?
Dinner will be kindly offered by the Columbia University Seminars.
RSVP is required for dinner. Please email Lucilla with eating requirements at lm3335@columbia.edu.
What makes right acts right? A Stoic answer to Ross’s question.
When W.D. Ross poses the question, “what makes right acts right?” (The Right and the Good ch. 2), he is asking a question that is prior to the deliberative question, “how do I determine the right thing to do?” The Stoics recognize this: in De Officiis 1.7, Cicero says that every inquiry about duty has two parts: (1) a theoretical part concerned with the end of goods and evils, which addresses such matters as whether all duties are perfect, whether some are more important than others, and what are the kinds of duties, and (2) a practical part which sets out rules (praecepta) by which our conduct can be made to conform with the end. This paper focuses on (1) and in particular asks Ross’s question about Stoic right actions (kathêkonta).
The endpoint of Stoic deliberation is determining what token action is the right action. The paper begins with the Stoic distinction between a thing’s choiceworthiness, its intrinsic disposition to elicit a choice response in a suitable subject, and its possession being to-be-chosen. The determination of what is to-be-done is made by weighing against each other all the values of the relevant action types specified by their content (the so-called ‘intermediate actions’) that are in accordance with nature, as Stoic value theory says that according with nature is an objective reason to do an action. What constitutes the rightness of the token right action, and is given in its reasonable defense, is the same as what constitutes the rightness of a perfect (katorthôma) action. The Stoic distinction between right and perfect action depends on the action’s moral goodness—not rightness—which is due to its causal origin.
Presented by Professor Rachana Kamtekar (Cornell University)
This event will feature a thought-provoking panel discussion with sexual and reproductive justice experts on the value of the sexual and reproductive justice framework and how it can be applied to diverse stakeholders, settings, and contexts. Panelists will also highlight examples from around the world of momentum towards sexual and reproductive justice.
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration is required for both in-person and online attendance. For additional information, please visit the event webpage. Please email Malia Maier at mm5352@cumc.columbia.edu with any questions. All in-person attendees must follow Columbia’s COVID-19 policies.
Hosted by the Global Health Justice and Governance Program at Columbia University.
Poets and singers in a number of medieval vernacular languages reached non-native audiences and inspired speakers of other languages to compose in theirs; and many imagined their compositions enjoying a universality similar to that of cosmopolitan languages like Latin and Arabic. An interesting rationalization of these aspirations can be discerned in a short verse narrative of a well-known episode in the youth of Alexander the Great, conqueror of India, together with his tutor, the philosopher Aristotle. Not only does it involve Greeks and Indians singing French songs and cosplaying French lovers, but the philosopher is induced to pretend to be a horse and then justifies his behavior as “natural,” with far-reaching implications which this talk will explore.
Sarah Kay is Professor Emerita in the Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture at New York University and Life Fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge. In Spring 2023, she is Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Columbia Society of Senior Scholars.
This talk is presented by the Columbia Maison Française, Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, The Society of Senior Scholars, the Department of Music, and Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
Book discussion on Gwenda-lin Grewal’s, Thinking About Death in Plato’s Euthydemus. A Close Reading and New Translation (OUP 2022)
Speakers:
Gwenda-lin Grewal (NSSR)
Cinzia Arruzza (NSSR)
Nicholas Pappas (CUNY)
Thinking of Death places Plato’s Euthydemus among the dialogues that surround the trial and death of Socrates. A premonition of philosophy’s fate arrives in the form of Socrates’ encounter with the two-headed sophist pair, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, who appear as if they are the ghost of the Socrates of Aristophanes’ Thinkery. The pair vacillate between choral ode and rhapsody, as Plato vacillates between referring to them in the dual and plural number in Greek. Gwenda-lin Grewal’s close reading explores how the structure of the dialogue and the pair’s back-and-forth arguments bear a striking resemblance to thinking itself: in its immersive remove from reality, thinking simulates death even as it cannot conceive of its possibility. Euthydemus and Dionysodorus take this to an extreme, and so emerge as the philosophical dream and sophistic nightmare of being disembodied from substance. The Euthydemus is haunted by philosophy’s tenuous relationship to political life. This is played out in the narration through Crito’s implied criticism of Socrates-the phantom image of the Athenian laws-and in the drama itself, which appears to take place in Hades. Thinking of death thus brings with it a lurid parody of the death of thinking: the farce of perfect philosophy that bears the gravity of the city’s sophistry. Grewal also provides a new translation of the Euthydemus that pays careful attention to grammatical ambiguities, nuances, and wit in ways that substantially expand the reader’s access to the dialogue’s mysteries.
The COVID-19 pandemic is said to be a once-in-a-century incident, and it brought to us a sense of crisis at various levels. What is a crisis, though? Can any unnerving moment or period be called a crisis, or are there different dimensions of a crisis to which we need to be attentive? Is solidarity possible after experiencing a crisis like Covid-19? Can Buddhism make any contribution to facilitating solidarity? This presentation explores the meaning and nature of a crisis and our responses to it by drawing on modern Korean political thinker Pak Ch’iu’s (1909–1949) analysis of crisis and feminist-Buddhist thinker Kim Iryŏp’s (1896–1971) Buddhist philosophy. By doing so, this presentation considers what social, political, existential, and even religious meaning we can draw from our experience of crises, and what questions these insights present to us.
With responses from Karsten Struhl (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY)
Presented by THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY
RSVP is required for dinner. If you would like to participate in our dinner, a $30 fee is required. Please contact Lucilla at lm3335@columbia.edu for further information.