Calendar

There is a clear need for a worldview that includes science and contemplation, arguably the two greatest achievements of humanity in studying the nature of reality. In my talk I will focus on the possibilities for future integration of aspects of science and contemplation, and perhaps even some far-future form of unification.

For these developments to proceed, two things must happen. From the science side, the role of the subject needs to be analyzed in qualitatively more detail, as different from a complex object that performs complex cognitive tasks. From the contemplation side, experts from different traditions with deep contemplative experience need to get together to establish a common language in which to talk across the cultural and dogmatic barriers, in order to find a more universal appreciation of the core of contemplation, akin to what science accomplished in the last few centuries.

In order to even start talking about a new worldview, the foundation for any conversation should be respect. Those scientists who view contemplation as at best a form of therapy, and at worst a form of superstition, will not be able to constructively engage in a dialogue. Neither will those contemplatives who view the scientific enterprise as necessarily reductionist and incapable of leaving any room for contemplation.

Note: here I use the word ‘contemplative’ to indicate those who actively engage in a form or spiritual practice, through meditation or prayer or a mixture of both. I prefer the word ‘contemplative’ or ‘mystic’ rather than ‘spiritual’ since the word ‘spirit’ can easily lead to inappropriate connotations.  Unfortunately, mysticism got a bad rap with current connotations like mystification as intentionally obscuring things.

Faculty House, Garden Room 1

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The paper follows and elaborates on a line of argument in my book The Confucian Political Imagination, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan this summer. I do not address the main argument of the book, but sum up a line of thought that has gradually taken form since I began to read Confucian texts. I explain what I learned about reading Confucianism from my teacher Tu Weiming, and why I could not follow the philosophical turn in American Confucian studies. I point to the importance of reading in an emphatic sense, and argue that the philosophical approaches to Confucian texts often leads to an impoverished reading of these texts. Then I provide my own suggestions towards a definition Confucian discourse. I briefly point to the historical reasons Confucian discourse is not philosophy, and finally I ask if all this really matters.

THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes:

Eske Møllgaard (University of Rhode Island)

With a response from:

Andrew Lambert (College of Staten Island, CUNY)

In the early part of the 20^th century, Joseph Needham formulated a substantial claim concerning the Chinese predilection for self-generated creation rather than creator gods and myths. Half a century later, scholars working in the West like Frederick Mote, Derk Bodde, and Chang Kwang-chih picked up on Needham’s insight to discuss the so-called lack of a “creation myth” in early Chinese culture, basing their arguments on what they called the “inner necessity” or “spontaneously self-generating” nature of things in the cosmos. While the claim that there are no creator gods or myths in early China is false and has since been convincingly refuted by many scholars, there may indeed be a way in which Bodde and company were onto something. In this talk, I will show how the notions of “inner necessity” and “spontaneity” are close but not the best fit for understanding certain early Chinese accounts of creation and the creative process. Through an analysis of claims about time, space, and boundaries in the recently excavated text, the Heng xian (The Primordial state of Constancy), I present an account of creativity – not “inner necessity” or “spontaneity” – that presupposes a rich and complicated philosophy of the self and change in the world. I make brief comparisons with ancient Vedic and Buddhist thought and ultimately show how scholars of early Chinese philosophy could benefit from more comparative work on these various traditions.

With a response from:

Christopher Gowans (Fordham University)

The Vaiśeṣika school of Indian philosophy is known for its distinctive doctrine of “individuators” (viśeṣāḥ), by means of which the various entities of the mundane world—substances, qualities, and motions—can be distinguished as unique individuals on purely formal grounds. As straightforward as the account is for these entities, the problem of individuation becomes much more complicated for universals. This paper uses the question “Can the Vaiśeṣika individuate universals?” to explore the next three categories in the Vaiśeṣika ontology: universals, individuators, and inherence. This is at once a discourse internal to the Vaiśeṣika, raising and attempting to solve a problem as it arises within that school’s basic framework, and simultaneously a comparative project, drawing especially on discussions of individuation in classical Platonism and its contemporary interpreters.

As an historical and interpretive study, the paper shows the inadequacy of Jonardon Ganeri’s “graph-theoretic” account of the Vaiśeṣika ontology, and presents Udayana as an troubled innovator who struggles to fully reckon with the traditional account of individuation and commonality as it was attested in the commentaries of Praśastapāda and Śrīdhara. I argue that the three categories of universals, individuators, and inherence are best understood as metaphysical principles of commonality, peculiarity, and relation quite distinct from the first three mundane categories. This has important implications for Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika understandings of causality, time and eternity, the process of inferential reasoning, and the limited extent to which the basic Vaiśeṣika framework can be understood as describing cosmogony, and not merely cosmology. I conclude with some brief reflections on the challenges of practicing ontology in purely abstract terms, as Udayana and the mature Platonists sometimes attempt.

There are two approaches to life. The first one, which we are identifying with Sir Karl Popper, is to think before we act and to let our hypotheses die in our stead when the overall outcome is likely to be negative. We act now for a better future, and we think now which action will bring the best future. Both decision theory and backward induction are technical versions of this train of thought.  The second approach, which we will identify with the Buddha, is to live in the present and not allow the future to pull us away from living in the ever present  Now. The Buddha’s approach is echoed in many others who came after him, Jelaluddin Rumi, Kahlil Gibran, and even perhaps Jesus.  It occurs in many contemporary teachers like Eckhart Tolle and Thich Nhat Hanh.  We may call Popper’s approach “futurism” and the Buddha’s approach “presentism.”

In this talk, we will discuss various aspects of the discourse on presentism and futurism. The purpose is to contrast one with the other. We will not attempt to side with one against the other, and instead leave it as a future project to find a prescriptive action-guiding choice between the two. We merely conjecture that a better optimal choice between these two positions may be somewhere in between. (This is joint work with Jongjin Kim.)

A number of philosophers working on Buddhist traditions have recently explored similarities between the cultivated experience of not-self, and the clinical experience of depersonalization. In this talk, I will offer some reflections on this theme. But my primary aim will be to push a similar kind of exploratory project one step further. Drawing on tools from cognitive and computational neuroscience, as well as insights from Yogācāra Buddhist philosophy, I will explore some of the most significant similarities and differences between anomalous experiences evoked by meditation, and anomalous experiences that are commonly labeled as hallucinations. I will then argue that understanding how such experiences are produced offers a powerful framework for thinking about the socially and historically situated nature of everyday experience.

It is commonly claimed that mind-body dualism is entirely foreign to China—or “the East” more generally. This talk will explore how engaging with the cognitive sciences and digital humanities undermines claims such as this, and more broadly can help us to do our work as scholars of comparative philosophy. Embracing an embodied view of human cognition gets us beyond strong social constructivism and its accompanying cultural essentialism. In addition, new tools from the science and digital humanities can, in combination with traditional archaeological and textual evidence, allow us to more accurately and rigorously assess claims about the philosophical and religious historical record. Specifically, I will focus on novel large-scale textual analysis techniques, online databases for sharing scholarly knowledge, and work in contemporary evolutionary anthropology and cognitive science relevant to the mind-body issue. I will conclude by considering how early Chinese views of mind-body relations do, in fact, differ from some modern Western conceptions, and how taking a more reasonable view of cultural differences can allow us to genuinely learn from other cultures.

With a response from:

Paul Goldin (University of Pennsylvania)

John Dewey, in his resistance to foundational individualism, declares that individual autonomy so conceived is a fiction; for Dewey, it is association that is a fact. In his own language: “There is no sense in asking how individuals come to be associated. They exist and operate in association.” In a way that resonates with Confucian role ethics, the revolutionary Dewey particularizes the fact of associated living and valorizes it by developing a vision of the habitude of unique, defused, relationally-constituted human beings. That is, he develops a distinctive, if not idiosyncratic language of habits and “individuality” to describe the various modalities of association that enable human beings to add value to their activities and to transform mere relations into a communicating community.

In Confucian role ethics, Dewey’s contention that association is a fact is restated in a different vocabulary by appealing to specific roles rather than unique habitudes for stipulating the specific forms that association takes within lives lived in family and community—that is, the various roles we live as sons and teachers, grandmothers and neighbors. For Confucianism, not only are these roles descriptive of our associations, they are also prescriptive in the sense that roles in family and community are themselves normative, guiding us in the direction of appropriate conduct. Whereas for both Confucianism and Dewey, mere association is a given, flourishing families and communities are what we are able to make of our facticity as the highest human achievement.