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
New York Workshop for the Cosmos of Dōgen Presents
Dōgen in Dialogue with Analytic Philosophy
Dōgen (1200-1251) is a Japanese Zen master and one of the most original and intriguing philosophers in the entire history of Japan. In this workshop, some important themes of Dogen’s philosophy such as self, time, reality, causation, ineffability of the ultimate truth & etc., are reinterpreted, mainly but not exclusively, from the perspectives of analytic philosophy. Those analytic Dōgen studies purport to shed new lights to his thoughts as well as the contemporary philosophical debates on those topics. The workshop also features contemporary philosophical talks on Self, that are inspired by Dōgen’s insights. So, overall it aims to revive Dōgen as a fruitful dialogical partner for contemporary philosophy.
I Analytic Dōgen Studies
Yasuo DEGUCHI (Kyoto University): Self as Anyone
This talk will explore Dōgen’s ideas on self as well as time, being and reality in terms of analytic philosophy such as trope, formulating it as Self as Anyone.
Naozumi MITANI (Shinshū University): On the Elusiveness of Dōgen’s Ontology
This talk tries to explicate Dōgen’s Ontology that can be found in those chapters of Sōbōgenzō as Gebjōkōan, Busshō and Inmo, as non-monistic process philosophy, consulting philosophical ideas of contemporary philosophers such as W. Sellers and T. Nagel.
Shinya MORIYAMA (Shinshū University): Dōgen on Time and Self: Reflections on Uji
This talk will summarize the main theses of Sōbōgenzō’s Uji chapter as (1) time doesn’t pass, (2) time presupposes self that is to be reduced to everything in the world, and (3) time succeeds with each other without any gap between them. Then it tries to explicate Dōgen’ ideas on time and self that are encapsulated as those enigmatic claims in the light to contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of time.
Naoya FUJIKAWA (Tokyo Metropolitan University): Eloquence of Silence? : A Note on Dōgen on Silence
This talks will try to analyze Dōgen’ ideas on silence as the best way to convey Dharma in terms of contemporary pragmatics such as Gricean framework, mentioning to interpretations by Priest and Casati (forthcoming), Priest’s Fifth Corner of Four, Garfied’s Engaging Buddhism.
Hsun Mei CHENG (Kyoto University/National Taiwan University): The Knowledge of Reality and Reality in Dōgen’s Philosophy
Dōgen’s idea on our knowledge of the ultimate reality will be explored in terms of contemporary philosophical vocabularies such as knowing-that vs. knowing-how (G. Ryle, J. Stanley and T. Williamson), tacit knowledge (M. Planyi) and non-conceptual knowledge (F. Hoffman). Then it will be claimed that Dōgen’s knowledge should be understood as a tacit and non-conceptual knowing-how.
Hayato SAIGŌ (Nagahama Institute of Bio-Science and Technology): Dōgen on Interdependence: Nārgārjuna and Category Theory
Recently Yorizumi (2011) proposed a Saussurian reading of Dōgen’s idea of interdependence, following Toshihiko Izutsu’s interpretation of Buddhistic philosophy, interpretation it as an arbitrary construct of our minds. This talk tries to propose an alternative interpretation on his idea of interdependence in the light of
category theory in contemporary mathematics, focusing on reflexive features of Dōgen’s interpretation.
II Philosophy of Self a là Dōgen
Yasuo DEGUCHI (Kyoto University): Self as We: Toward a Revival of East Asian Holistic Self
This talks tries to argue for a new idea on holistic and somatic self; self as we, being inspired the speaker’s interpretation on Dōgen’s ideas on self; self as anyone.
Shigeru TAGUCHI (Hokkaido University): Self in Superposition: Husserl, Tanabe, and Dōgen
The aim of this talk is to compare Husserl’s concept of Ur-Ich with Tanabe Hajime’s concept of “species” in order to reconsider the basic state of “self” and its primordial relation to other selves. I claim that self is not a substance, but a kind of “mediation.”
Schedule
5 th Oct. 2018 Room 6300
Analytic Dōgen Studies I
10:00 – 11:30 Deguchi
Lunch
13:00 – 14:30 Mitani
14:40 – 16:10 Moriyama
16:20 – 17:50 Fujikawa
Dinner
6th Oct. 2018 Room 7113.XX
Analytic Dōgen Studies II
10:00 – 11:00 Hsun-Mei Cheng
11:00 – 12:00 Hayato Saigo
Lunch
II Philosophy of Self a là Dōgen
13:30 – 15:00 Deguchi
15:10 – 16:40 Taguchi
17:00 – 17:00 Lap Up Discussion
Dinner
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 20th 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.
How is the ancient exhortation to “know thyself” related to consolation, virtue, and the study of nature? How did the commitment to self-knowledge shift over the centuries in writings by Islamic, Jewish, Christian, and early modern natural philosophers? How did medieval women contribute to modern notions of self, self-knowledge, and knowledge of nature? This conference explores the meditative “reflective methodology” from its ancient roots, through medieval Christian, Muslim, and Jewish traditions to the so-called “new” methodologies of early modern science. Speakers include Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Pierre Force, Clémence Boulouque, Christia Mercer, and Pamela Smith.
Points of focus will be: (1) the relation between the ancient imperative to “know thyself” and medieval concerns to reflect on one’s self as a means to find ultimate truths; (2) the meditative genre as it developed from Augustine’s Confessions through Christian and Islamic spiritual exercises to late medieval Christian meditations and early modern kabbalist writings; (3) the continuity between medieval meditations and the reflective methodology of early modern science; and (4) the meditative genre’s afterlife in Freud, Foucault, Arendt, and contemporary science.
Conference co-sponsored by the Center for New Narratives in Philosophy, the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, the Departments of Philosophy, French, English and Comparative Literature and the Maison Française
To download a PDF about this event click here.
Deutsches Haus at NYU and the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute will jointly present the conference “Political Theology Today as Critical Theory of the Contemporary: Reason, Religion, Humanism,” to be held at Deutsches Haus at NYU, from February 15-17. Reverend Eugene F. Rivers III will deliver one of the keynote speeches. For a detailed conference schedule, please click here.
Across the globe the liberal logic of capitalism and technocracy has seemingly triumphed, and with it a culture of secularism, now the dominant ideology of the liberal establishment that prefers progress to tradition, an individualized identity to a sense of shared belonging, and free choice to common purpose. As much as this regime has produced wealth, it has also generated inequality and dissatisfaction. The populist insurgency that is sweeping the West is in large part a repudiation of this secular politics, opening the space for a post-liberal political theology. A resurgence of religion is underway that marks the failure of the secularization thesis and the need for alternative cultural resources, beyond positivism, to understand the place of humanity within the cosmos. Is this our new “Great Awakening”?
Amid the crisis of rationalism, critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas have sought to rescue the project of a reasonable humanism from the twin threats of religious fundamentalism and secular naturalism. Yet Habermas’s conception of postsecularity remains residually secularist because he does not permit faith to make any substantive or critical contribution to public discussion that could undermine the primacy of formal, procedural reason. In response Pope Emeritus Benedict invoked Adorno and Horkheimer’s dialectic of enlightenment because the slogan “reason alone” leads to the dissolution of reason—to the conclusion that only will and power have any reality. The only way to avoid this outcome is to recall—so Benedict’s argument in his much-commented but poorly understood 2006 Regensburg address—that the West’s commitment to humanist reason is grounded in the classical and Christian idea that human rationality participates in the infinite reason of transcendence. Otherwise the rational is but the illusion of our own and of nature’s will to power.
The 2019 Telos Conference will discuss the role of political theology as critical theory of the contemporary: the reappearance of faith in civic life. The focus will not be on intellectual history but rather on how faith is reshaping politics and culture today.
Please note: Sessions taking place at Deutsches Haus at NYU will be open to the general public. Attendance for break-out sessions will be limited to conference participants who have registered with the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute only. Events at Deutsches Haus are free and open to the public. If you would like to attend this event, please send an email to deutscheshaus.rsvp@nyu.edu. As space at Deutsches Haus is limited, please arrive ten minutes prior to the event to ensure you get a good seat. Thank you!
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)