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Dao — often translated as “the Way” — is China’s original and invaluable contribution to philosophy. Ineffable yet inexhaustible, Dao is metaphysically profound, empirically sound, and aesthetically renowned. From quantum physics to modern medicine, from fractal geometry to martial arts, from family relations to warring states, Dao’s insights are pervasive and effective. Daoism’s practices rank with those of Buddhism and Stoicism in cultivating peoples’ “best selves.” Dao conduces to individual serenity, social harmony, and political unity. This talk will be based on Lou Marinoff’s book “The Power of Dao,” using its case studies to illustrate some foundational ideas and their applications.

Lou Marinoff is Professor of Philosophy and Asian Studies at The City College of New York, and founding president of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association. He has authored internationally best-selling books on philosophy for everyday life. The Power of Tao reflects Lou’s lifelong devotion to Chinese philosophy. In youth he was a student of venerable Sing Ming Li, a grandmaster of Kung Fu and practitioner of Chinese medicine. In maturity Lou became a cultural advisor to venerable Xi Yongshin, Abbott of Shaolin Temple. As faculty of Horasis and the WEF, he serves global forums. His hobbies include photography, music, and tennis. Dao is his constant guide. For more information visit www.loumarinoff.com

Tuesday, May 2, 2017 at 6pm. This event is part of the Philosophy Series at The Cornelia Street Café, located at 29 Cornelia Street, New York, NY 10014 (near Sixth Avenue and West 4th St.). Admission is $10, which includes the price of one drink. Reservations are recommended (212. 989.9319)

In my talk, I wish to outline an alternative to a chapter in the history of modern philosophy, and present Kant’s tenets in the Critique of Pure Reason in the spirit of the Vienna Circle, the origin of analytic philosophy.

According to the traditional narrative, Kant overcame the limitations of British empiricism (Hume) and German rationalism (Leibniz) and with his “transcendental philosophy” raised philosophy to a new and superior level. Contemporary Leibnizian critics failed to appreciate the novelty of his approach. Although Kant complimented Salomon Maimon (1753-1800) for having best understood him among his critics, he saw no reason to accept Maimon’s criticism.

From the point of view of the Vienna Circle in the 1920-1930, the traditional narrative should be reversed. In the view of its members, there are no synthetic judgments a priori, and the Kantian project was therefore misconceived in principle. The “Kantian intermezzo”, as Neurath called it, should be skipped and philosophy should rather return to Hume and Leibniz. Exactly this was Maimon’s position. He characterized himself as a “rational dogmatist and empirical skeptic”, referring explicitly to Leibniz and Hume respectively.

I will present Maimon’s criticism of Kant’s synthetic judgments a priori and claim that it is valid. With this, questions concerning the progress of philosophy and its historiography will naturally rise.

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Gideon Freudenthal is professor emeritus at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel-Aviv University.

He is the author (or co-author) of:

Atom and Individual in the Age of Newton (1986)

Exploring the Limits of Preclassical Mechanics (1991)

Classical Marxist Historiography of Science: The Hessen-Grossmann-Thesis (2009)

No Religion without Idolatry. Mendelssohn’s Jewish Enlightenment (2012)

Presented by The New School for Social Research (NSSR) Philosophy Department.

Kant tried to explain how free moral action was possible.  Unfortunately, he is often interpreted as explaining free choice of action in terms of the unexplained free choice of a Gesinnung by a faculty of choice. By avoiding this mistake, we can see him as offering an informative decomposition of the task of free or moral action.  Further, one of Kant’s reasons for thinking that morality could not be explained by science depended on his assumptions about then current science. Since we can now reject that view of science, it is now possible to give a plausible scientific account, and so metaphysics, for Kant’s plausible account of the necessary conditions for free or moral action.

Patricia Kitcher is Roberta and William Campbell Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University.  She is the author of two books on Kant’s conceptions of cognition and the self, Kant’s Transcendental Psychology (Oxford University Press, 1990) and Kant’s Thinker (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Presented by The New School for Social Research (NSSR) Philosophy Department.

At the core of Kantian liberalism is a conception of the independent autonomous subject. On the other hand, the most central and distinguishing feature of Buddhist philosophy is the doctrine of no-self. It thus seems that Buddhists should reject Kantian liberalism. My larger project develops the connections between Buddhist perfectionism, liberalism, and principles of justice. In this paper, I focus on Buddhist and Kantian conceptions of self-constitution, but my ultimate concern is the significance of the doctrine of no-self to theories of justice.

Buddhists need some conception of a minimal self to account for the karmic-continuity of persons and also to provide an adequate account of the subjectivity of experience. I argue that we should reject the (Abhidharma) reductionist view of the self as a mere fiction that is reducible to its simpler and more basic parts. As is often noted, the Buddhist reductionist approach is similar to Derek Parfit’s view. Parfit also argues that there is no deep metaphysical self and that relations of personal identity are reducible to relations of psychological connectedness and causal continuity in a series of experiences. Christine Korsgaard has responded to Parfit’s reductionist view by developing a non-metaphysical account of Kantian agency and self-constitution. I argue that the Buddhist doctrine of no-self is consistent with a more minimal, non-substantial, emergent, view of the self. This approach, which is more fully developed by Evan Thomson, Matthew MacKenzie, Georges Dreyfus, and others, is surprisingly similar to Korsgaard’s practical conception of the self. As a result, the non-reductionist Buddhist approach is also not vulnerable to Korsgaard’s objection to reductionist views. In addition, I argue that the process of self-constitution is embedded in a recursive nexus of dependent origination, and reject Korsgaard’s conception of the independent autonomous subject, which she refers to as “over and above” its ends. In short, a Buddhist can accept Korsgaard’s basic account of self-constitution but nonetheless reject the Kantian idea of the independent autonomous subject. For Buddhists, the Kantian autonomous subject is instead part of the “primal confusion” that projects a reified subject-other division on experience. This confusion is the source of existential suffering, anxiety and stress, which characterizes too much of the human condition. The goal is to transcend the Kantian subject and internalize the pervasive interdependence of persons. Instead of the autonomous self, Buddhism embraces a perfectionist ideal, of a non-egocentric reorientation and re-constitution of the self.

Buddhists thus have reason to reject Kantian liberalism, if it is based on the autonomy and independence of persons. In his shift to Political Liberalism, John Rawls recasts the conception of the person, as “a self-originating source of valid claims,” and emphasizes that this conception is restricted to the political domain. It is part of a narrow conception of the “moral powers” of a free and equal citizen; it is not a metaphysical conception or comprehensive ideal. I conclude by exploring the contrast between Buddhist Perfectionism and Political Liberalism.

With a Response From:

Carol Rovane (Columbia University)

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Also, please visit our website:

http://www.cbs.columbia.edu/cscp/

Co-Chairs

Professor Jonathan Gold

Associate Professor, Princeton University, Department of Religion

jcgold@princeton.edu

Professor Hagop Sarkissian

Associate Professor, The City University of New York, Baruch College | Graduate Center, Department of Philosophy

hagop.sarkissian@baruch.cuny.edu

Rapporteur

Jay Ramesh

jr3203@columbia.edu

Kant’s conception of action cannot be understood in purely causal terms. The internal structure of action can only be explained in terms of a two-level meaning structure involving both a priori and empirical components.

Short bio:

Alejandro G. Vigo (Buenos Aires, 1958) is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Navarra. Prof. Vigo earned his undergraduate degree in Philosophy (1984) from the University of Buenos Aires and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Heidelberg (1993). He has been a fellow of the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas (CONICET, Argentina), of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) and of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Between 1993 and 2006 he taught at the Universidad de los Andes and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He has published over 120 articles in collective volumes and journals in Latin America, Europe and the United States, along with many books. In 2010 he won the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Prize (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Bonn) and in 2017 the International Philosophy Award “Antonio Jannone” (Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome).