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”
One of the central questions facing human beings is how we should respond to the humanity of others. Since the enlightenment, secular Western ethics has gravitated towards two kinds of answer: we should care for others’ well-being, or we should respect them as autonomous agents. Largely neglected is an answer we can find the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism: we should love all. Analytic philosophers have started to pay more attention to love. But unlike those working within religious traditions, for whom an ideal of love for all serves as the central, organizing ideal in ethics, most of these philosophers see love as confined to the domain of intimate relationships between friends, family, romantic partners and the like. This paper argues that an ideal of love for all, of agape, can be understood apart from its more typical religious contexts and moreover provides a unified and illuminating account of the the nature and grounds of morality. Against challenges to the idea that love for all is possible, I offer a novel account of what it would be to love all. I go on to argue that while it is possible to love all, most of us should not, as doing so would rule out the possibility of loving particular friends and families. Instead, we should approximate love for all. I argue that the minimal approximation of love for all is, surprisingly, respect, deriving the basic, structural features of deontological ethics (including anti-welfarism and anti-aggregation) from my account of love for all.
Reception to follow.
riday, November 10
9:30–9:55 Check–in and Coffee
9:55 Welcome
10:00–12:00 Adam Smith
Speaker: Ryan Patrick Hanley (Boston College)
Commentator: Samuel Fleischacker (University of Illinois Chicago)
12:00–2:00 Lunch Break
2:00–4:00 Immanuel Kant
Speaker: Marcia Baron (Indiana University Bloomington)
Commentator: Kyla Ebels–Duggan (Northwestern University)
4:00–4:30 Coffee Break
4:30–6:30 German Romanticism
Speaker: Frederick Beiser (Syracuse University)
Commentator: Owen Ware (University of Toronto)
6:30–7:30 Reception
Saturday, November 11
9:30–10:00 Check–in and Coffee
10:00–12:00 Friedrich Nietzsche
Speaker: Andrew Huddleston (University of Warwick)
Commentator: Claire Kirwin (Northwestern University)
12:00–2:00 Lunch Break
2:00–4:00 Simone De Beauvoir
Speaker: Michelle Kosch (Cornell University)
Commentator: Susan J. Brison (Dartmouth University)
4:00–4:30 Coffee Break
4:30–6:30 Contemporary
Speaker: Simon May (King’s College London)
Commentator: Alecxander Nehamas (Princeton University)
6:30–7:30 Reception