Calendar

Please join us in conversation with Philip Kitcher as we discuss themes from his new book, Life after Faith.  While atheist writers gleefully cataloguing religion’s intellectual and moral vices have been numerous of late, too few have treated their target with the respect it deserves for successfully providing emotional comfort and social cohesion. Kitcher changes that, acknowledging religion’s virtues even as he constructs a secular humanist alternative to replace it.

Talk with him about this on Monday, February 23, 2015 at 7:00pm at Book Culture, 536 West 112th St., NY, NY  (212) 865-1588

The Pratyabhijñā Śaiva tradition, as first systematized by Utpaladeva (10th century) and elaborated by Abhinavagupta (10th-11th century), follows a number of other classical Indian philosophical traditions in 1) fully acknowledging that Buddhist Vijñānavādins claim to account for the diversity manifest in the conventional world through an appeal to beginningless karmic imprints; and 2) utterly rejecting that this solution avoids circularity. To sum up the Śaiva critique: a Vijñānavādin cannot avoid the question of what causes the diversity of experiences in the conventional world by appealing to beginningless causal processes because these processes themselves require the existence of some kind of real stuff that has the capacity to manifest in diverse forms. These Śaivas hone their argument in relation to a Dharmakīrtian view of ultimate consciousness as utterly beyond causal relations—a view that Dharmakīrti (7th century) uses to brush aside any questions about the real relationship between conventional and ultimate reality as incoherent. These Śaivas argue that the question of how the variegation of a specific moment of awareness arises if no part of this variegation­—including the variegation of the causes that produce it—is inherent to what is ultimately real is philosophically salient. Moreover, this question cannot be addressed simply by an appeal to beginningless ignorance. While an appeal to beginningless karmic imprints is perfectly sufficient to account for the differences between various karmic streams within the conventional world, it is not sufficient to account for the mere fact that there is differentiated stuff capable of entering into causal relations. The Pratyabhijñā Śaivas offer a complex and distinctive solution to this problem: while they affirm that ultimate reality is beginningless in the sense that it is beyond time, they also claim that time itself has a “beginning” in the expression of the nondual differentiation inherent to the ultimate itself. They further link the expression of time with the creation of the subject/object pairs that define conventional worlds—and use Dharmakīrti’s own apoha (exclusion) theory of concept formation to explain how this happens.

THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes:

Catherine Prueitt (George Mason University)

With a response from:

Andrew Nicholson (Stony Brook University, SUNY)

Please save the following dates for our upcoming talks:

March 30: Kin Cheung (Moravian College)

April 13: Lara Braitstein (McGill University)

May 11: David Cummiskey (Bates College)

Embodied cognition theorists emphasize the role of the body and the environment in constituting mental processes. By examining how our brains interact with the rest of our bodies and how our entire bodies interact with the environment, we can learn much about human behavior and the human mind. Tools can be understood as extensions of the body, and in some cases as becoming part of the body. Does our mind extend to our tools? How does this change our world? How should we understand this relationship? In order to help us think through these fascinating questions, we will hear from an archaeologist who has theorized about the evolution of this human capacity, a biomedical engineer who uses computers to make robotic prostheses more fluidly extend human bodies, and a music theorist who shows how musical instruments become part of our bodies.

This event is free and open to the public, however, registration is required via Eventbrite.

Speakers:

— Lambros Malafouris (Johnson Research and Teaching Fellow in Creativity, Cognition and Material Culture; University of Oxford)
— Sunil Agrawal (Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Rehabilitation/Regenerative Medicine; Columbia University)
— Jonathan De Souza (Assistant Professor of Music Theory; University of Western Ontario)

Respondent:

— Lan Li (Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience, Center for Science & Society)

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Science and Society and the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.

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)