Atman in Advaita Vedanta: Variations on a theme from the Principal Upanishads”
MARTIN, Andre (McGill University, Canada)
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- MASON, Joshua (West Chester University of Pennsylvania) “The Right Road and the Proper Path: Metaphors of Navigating the Moral Landscape”
- MATTICE, Sarah (University of North Florida) “The Place of China in Translating the Heart Sutra ”
- MAYMIND, Ilana (Visiting Scholar UC/Irvine and Adjunct Faculty, Chapman University) “Exile as a Place of Empathy: Maimonides and Shinran Compared”
- McCRAW, David (University of Hawai’i) “Metaphors of Place in Pre-Han Chinese Thinking”
- 大 學 之道在 ...止於至善
- McKERRACHER, David (Boise State University) “Virtual Enframing: Social Media’s Subsumption of the Other into Theyness”
- McKINNEY, Jonathan (University of Hawai’i) “Zen, Beauty, and Living with the Planet”
- McRAE, James (Westminster College) “The Earth Ethic and Comparative Environmental Philosophy”
- MEISTER, Chad (Bethel College) “Vishishtadvaita Vedanta”
- MENDELSON-MOAZ, Aida (Open University of Israel) “Land, Territory and Border: Space and Ethics in Contemporary Israeli Literature”
- MICEL, THOMAS (Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand) “Textures of Spatial Alterity”
- MILLS, Ethan (University of Tennessee Chattanooga) “The Place of Logic in Classical Indian Philosophy”
- MITCHELL, Ryan (Yale University) “The ‘Heart of Things’ in a Heartless World Representation and Spatial Imagination in Han Fei’s Disenchantment of the Sovereign’s Charisma”
MARTIN, Andre (McGill University, Canada) “Methodological and Ontological Individualism” Loosely put, methodological individualism (MI) is the view that explanations in the social sciences essentially involve explanations in terms of individual-level phenomena (people, their thoughts, acts, etc.). MI is a view that has historically been subject to much criticism, e.g. early on by Emile Durkheim (1895) and later by Steven Lukes (1968), and yet it is taken to be a rather modest view by its proponents, e.g. J.W.N. Watkins (1957). In this paper I attempt to clear the debate about MI, defend MI’s plausibility, and point to where further discussion would be needed to conclusively deny or prove MI; in general, what I argue is central for all of these tasks is to see MI’s essential connection to ontological concerns about the individual/social. In the first part of my paper I set-up what the debate over ontological individualism (OI) should look like by drawing from more cemented debates in philosophy over metaphysical emergence and physicalism. In short, I define what possible views one can have over the ontology of the individual and put them, in part, in terms of whether the social does or doesn’t bring any radically new causal force into the world. In the second part of my paper I connect the methodological and ontological concerns by pointing out how methodological individualists (like Watkins) have based the former on the latter. This move shows where objections (e.g.by Lukes) that MI is either trivial or simply implausible have misconstrued MI, missing MI’s motivation from the non-trivial and prima facie plausible OI (loosely put, the view that the social doesn’t bring any radically new causal force into the world). Finally, in the third part of my paper I respond to some more focused objections to MI and point to other areas of philosophy that can help decide matters. For example, I present what is arguably Durkheim’s argument against OI and MI alike that social phenomena like fashion trends and social contagion are examples of new, “sui-generis”, causal forces in the world and so one can’t simply appeal to the individual level for an explanation, I respond with how OI and MI can account for these examples in a reasonable way, and finally I point to concerns in the philosophy of language that might prove to give stronger objections or more evidence in favour of OI and MI. MASON, Joshua (West Chester University of Pennsylvania) “The Right Road and the Proper Path: Metaphors of Navigating the Moral Landscape” The commonplace physical experience of walking on a narrow path provides a cross-cultural metaphor of morality. In English we say that to be “walking the line,” “on the straight and narrow” while “taking the high road” is to be moral. Failing morally is “deviant” behavior that “strays” “out of bounds.” Likewise in Chinese, “dao 道” has the mundane meaning of traveling a path or road, and is also the foundational moral concept. As walking on a path is as near to a universal human experience as we are likely to find, it seems that this embodied source of moral metaphors is available across cultures. However, there is more than one way to conceive of the path and how to stay centered and maintain one’s place upon it. One is to see the path as a fixed and universal route that all people must discover and conform to. Another is to see paths as steadily extending, spontaneously emerging, and meandering across a dynamic landscape. The first conception gives rise to an idea of a moral journey that is clearly defined, rigid, and eternal. Theories of teleology, divine command, and universal reason seem to accord with this kind of path. The second gives rise to an idea of a moral journey that is underdetermined, flexible, and contextual. Theories rooted in the Chinese tradition of the Yijing (Book of Changes), in which the landscape is always transforming, accord with this second conception. Hence, while it may seem at first as if a universal feature of human embodiment gives us a universal vocabulary of morality, the cultural assumptions built into these metaphors force us to remain attentive to the particular connotations that these concepts carry. This paper describes two ways of understanding the moral journey – the right road and the proper path – and the different strategies required for staying on each. MATTICE, Sarah (University of North Florida) “The Place of China in Translating the Heart Sutra” In this presentation I explore a re-translation of the classic Mahayana text, the Heart Sutra (Prajñāpāramitā hṛdaya). The Heart Sutra is part of the larger Perfection of Wisdom category of Mahayana Buddhist texts, and is one of the most popular sutras in daily practice around the world. It is also one of the shortest sutras, and is understood to fulfill roles as both a text and a dharani. There are more than twenty translations and commentaries on the text in English; it does not suffer from a lack of translation or scholarly attention. However, in some sense its popularity also covers over certain philosophical issues, especially when translated in order to be most accessible to a large audience. I argue that there are several respects in which current translations do a disservice to some of the more subtle philosophical points made by this text. I begin with a brief overview of the controversial position put forward by Jan Nattier that the Heart Sutra is in fact originally a Chinese text that was only later translated back into Sanskrit to secure its authenticity. In her 1992 article, “The Heart Sutra: An Apocryphal Text?”, she argues for the hypothesis that the Sanskrit Heart Sutra is a back-translation from the Chinese, basing this in part on the explanatory power of the hypothesis for accounting for differences in the core passages between the versions of the text. While others, notably John McRae, have argued for the “Chinese-ness” of the text based on its importance in Chinese Buddhism, Nattier makes the more literal argument for the text having its origins in China and Chinese language. She concludes her piece by stating, “The Heart Sutra is indeed—in every sense of the word—a Chinese text” (199). Although the purpose of this presentation is not to argue for or against the literal “Chinese-ness” of the sutra, I start from the imaginative question, “What if the sutra were Chinese?” What impact would that have on how we, as scholars, approach the translation of the text? Because Sanskrit and Chinese are very different languages, I argue that taking the imaginative position of the text as Chinese does have important consequences for its translation into English—translating from Sanskrit or Tibetan into English is a very different process than starting with Chinese. I draw on the work of two figures, philosopher, sinologist, and translator Roger T. Ames, and translation theorist Lawrence Venuti, in order to argue for a particular re-translation of the text that is sensitive to concerns arising from the Chinese language. MAYMIND, Ilana (Visiting Scholar UC/Irvine and Adjunct Faculty, Chapman University) “Exile as a Place of Empathy: Maimonides and Shinran Compared” Historically, exile has been a political act with various philosophical and psychological ramifications. My presentation briefly focuses on the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides and his Japanese contemporary Shinran. In both cases their exile experience—an act of enforced displacement and change in community status—led them to rethink their personal identities and relations to tradition. By using exile as a heuristic device, I will point out some psychological, emotive, and ethical similarities between the two thinkers without overlooking their fundamental differences in religious worldview. Specifically, I will argue that their capacity for empathy was heightened by recognizing that, placed in unfavorable conditions, people may adopt a philosophical perspective and lifestyle they might have rejected in less contentious circumstances. McCRAW, David (University of Hawai’i) “Metaphors of Place in Pre-Han Chinese Thinking” Ancient Chinese texts, like the Lunyu, Mengzi, the Laozi and Zhuangzi, inscribed quite distinctive notions about place. Their notions about place involve metaphors that would prove central to their explorations of philosophy, social structure, and political organization. A careful (textual) archaeology can uncover some salient metaphorical foundations for much that still seems distinctive about old Chinese thought. A full account of these must await completion of our "excavation"; however, we can sketch a few preliminary observations: *These texts do not support a hard-fast distinction between time and space; instead, you find a continuum. *They do not support a hard-fast distinction between dwelling-in and movement- between; action and rest got conceived off as mutually entailing. *As a result, the metaphorical uses of place get bound up with those of moving along a way, so that place becomes an essential part of the central Chinese preoccupation with ways and waymaking. In a seminal phrase like the beginning of the crucial text "Way of Higher Learning," we read: 大學之道在...止於至善. The process of learning, then, "comes to lie in alighting upon highest good." While the ways of cultivation have no endpoint, they will necessarily involve resting-places, and ancient texts quite often depend on visualizing progress as developing gradually through a series of stages, which they conceived of as places, or, roughly, "sites of instruction." Unearthing these sites will help us retrace and better understand the intellectual journeys they undertook, despite the vast gulfs of time-and-space that seemingly separate them from us. McKERRACHER, David (Boise State University) “Virtual Enframing: Social Media’s Subsumption of the Other into Theyness” Human places are undergoing rapid and never before imagined transformations. Not only does this change the landscape of our environments, but it also has ramifications on how we relate to the Other, oneself, and the Earth as a whole. As habitats go virtual, so our habits develop new tendencies. Just as we have ordered the world as standing reserve to bend to our will (enframing), so we ourselves are continuously challenged forth. What are the effects of this enframing on human relationships, considering the rise of social media in the 21st century? This question will be explored primarily using Heidegger’s Question Concerning Technology, Levinas’ founding of ethics on the face-to-face encounter, and H. Dreyfus’ critique of the internet (using Kierkegaard). Not only has the shared vulnerability and call of conscience instigated by the transcendence of the face-to-face encounter been enframed by social media, but the defining characteristics of individuals and human relationships are being misconstrued and leveled by over saturation, ease of access, ambiguity and anonymity. My thesis is that social media is not a neutral presence in our lives, but is rather a powerful force with insidious tendencies if not compensated for deliberately. For support I draw on conclusions from studies in sociology, psychology, and experimental philosophy. McKINNEY, Jonathan (University of Hawai’i) “Zen, Beauty, and Living with the Planet” The environment (Earth) is as dynamic and complex as any system that can be conceptualized. Nature has a long history of fluctuation and balance, both serving to promote the conditions of growth of new species and collapsing such conditions, annihilating whole species. Harmony and balance with nature comes at the cost of being vulnerable to its fluctuations and temperament. Humanity, having learned through many years of struggle, has made it a priority to master its local surroundings, controlling or consolidating the effects of storms, droughts, and cycles of predation. We self-identify as intellectual champions and pioneers of a conquered planet. The two primary foci of this paper will be to challenge these projections and to establish the place of humanity within nature rather than above it. To do so, I will introduce the works of Fritjof Capra, James Lovelock, and Lynn Margulis which establish the existence of a dynamic world of life. A key feature of such a world is autopoiesis, or the capacity to create and shape the world and oneself, or the world as oneself in this case. Once established, I will argue that humanity’s capacity to shape the world and itself comes from the Earth, rather than being uniquely human. In so doing, the human will fall from the throne of the Enlightenment, and finally find its place as a part of the living world. Such a shift necessitates a monumental change in how environmental ethics are conceived and practiced. To address such a challenge, I will introduce the polarizing voices of Zen Master Dōgen and Alfred North Whitehead. Each will provide a framework that relies upon similar notions of interdependence while promoting theories of action that support the opposing values of conservative meditation (zazen) and projective expression. My subsequent analysis will explore the intricacies of both, highlighting the important roles each play within a responsible environmental ethic. Ultimately, when living as parts in a vast interconnected system of life, humanity role changes from that of a monarch to that of a single cell within the body of the planet. Combining our efforts, as the human cells of the world, have the capacity to organ-ize, shaping the world and ourselves. It is through the delicate balance of our capacity for creative beauty and our diligent practice of humility that empowers us to live with the Earth responsibly. Our environment, and where humanity stands within it, are changing as a result of our current conceptions of global ethics; we should be mindful of our role within the world to reduce the malignance of our cancerous tendencies. McRAE, James (Westminster College) “The Earth Ethic and Comparative Environmental Philosophy” J. Baird Callicott is renowned as the leading interpreter of Aldo Leopold’s land ethic. Callicott’s early work provided a normative foundation for Leopold’s environmental ethic, while his subsequent work has drawn from comparative philosophy, ecology, and contemporary moral psychology to generate a new earth ethic that can offer viable solutions to our contemporary environmental crisis. This paper explores the core tenets of Callicott’s work from the perspective of comparative philosophy, particularly with regard to environmental conceptions of the self. With the earth ethic, “self” becomes radically contextualized and “place” becomes a normatively charged space that defines both who we are and how we ought to act. MEISTER, Chad (Bethel College) “Vishishtadvaita Vedanta” In the writings of the twelfth-century Vedantin philosopher Ramanuja (c.1017-c.1137 C.E.), an influential interpretation of the Vendatin writings was generated that later came to be called Vishishtadvaita (qualified non-dualism) Vedanta. An important aspect of this interpretation is that Brahman, the Ultimate Reality [God] has two essential aspects, conscious (cit) and non-conscious (acit), such that the entire aggregate of things—the world in totality—has, as its true inner Self, Brahman insofar as it constitutes the body of Brahman. In the Sanskrit writings of his Sri Bhasya (commentary on the Brahma-Sutras) and Vedartha-Sangraha, Ramanuja carefully develops what he means by the terms “world,” “body,” and “Brahman.” In examining the Sanskrit texts of Ramanuja, I will unpack these terms as utilized by him. As it turns out, the analogy of the world as the body of Brahman (God) as proffered by Ramanuja furnishes a deep integrative connection between, and unified space of, the world and the divine reality. This connection provides rich and relevant insights for both eastern and western approaches to the nature of the divine, to the God-World relation, and to the role of the human being—insights that are especially relevant to certain contemporary ecological and social concerns. MENDELSON-MOAZ, Aida (Open University of Israel) “Land, Territory and Border: Space and Ethics in Contemporary Israeli Literature” Borders and identity are fundamental elements of the modern nation-state. In the Israeli context, land is both a motherland and an historical home. After the 1948 war, Israel applied the principle of territorial sovereignty on its land and employed rhetorical and institutional mechanisms that generated commitment to guarding the border and tightening bonds with the land. The Six Day War in 1967 introduced a new concept – the Green Line – which is the border line between the State of Israel and the Occupied Territories. A border presumably signifies the separation between the “here” and the “there,” between “my country” and a foreign country. And yet, in the context of the Occupied Territories, the borders become blurred, creating a twilight zone, a liminal region, which is simultaneously internal and external, apparently temporary but in fact permanent. Whereas previously, territory justified the national struggle, which elicited solidarity, the liminal region of the Occupied Territories violated the clear connection between the nation-state and the territory, implicating and complicating the national identity. Following the wake of the first Intifada in the late 1980's, which brought this twilight zone into the attention of wider Israeli society, in a traumatic and tangible way, Hebrew literature became engaged with the question of borders and identity. In Hebrew literary works from the 1990'a to the 2000's whether focusing principally on Israeli soldiers’ experiences across the Green Line, or exploring Israeli society itself, the theme of space is tied to the concept of borders. In many of these works, the border implies a transition from one moral and psychological existence to another, creating a physical, psychological and moral rift. In this liminal zone, the civil identity is frozen, and another identity is resuscitated – one that obeys other laws, that accord with male stereotypes projecting roughness and aggression, often on the verge of emotional dissonance and madness. Most interestingly, the question of border and national space is illustrated aesthetically. The literary works offer poetic alternatives of presenting and dismantling the borders, often creating deterritorialization – not just of the liminal space of the Occupied Territories, but also of the entire national space and sovereignty. In my paper, I aim to analyze the concept of borders, space and ethics in the Hebrew literature of the Intifada era, revealing powerful thematic and poetic strategies of confronting these issues. I will elaborate on the works of Itzhak Ben-Ner, Orly Castel-Bloom and Michal Govrin. MICEL, THOMAS (Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand) “Textures of Spatial Alterity” This lo-fi architectural and urban design research contests the claims of the universal quantifiable spatial continuum of homogenous modernity, by proposing speculative urban scans and analysis to identify conditions of otherness, of micro-alterity, including the unusual and unexpected, as sources of spatial and individual meaning and value. The condition of urban alterity (interiority and exteriority in exchanges) is offered as the source of innovation in the hypermodern condition. Witness the spatial turn in the humanities of the 1990s, which resulted in a grounding of theoretical propositions and historical analysis mapped onto territories or locations, both physical and social, as a means of embedding and fine tuning research though spatial locations and spatial movements. The discourse of space is the discourse of the performativity of space – beyond functionalism into personal aberrant customization – habitus, misrecognition, formality, honestly, decisiveness, imagination, sense, and suspense are all necessary conditions produced though space and bodily discourse, and are inextricably bound to both. It is an advantage to architectural thought that the spatial turn tended to locate invisible or abstract processes in physical space. We can now see processes in space, on location as it were, and modulate them to some greater degree by attention to what is often overlooked, minimally present, or disappearing. Today now space is now increasingly in play – space is in play is an activation of codes of space in discourse – and this is aggravated by border conflicts, homelands, identity formation and insurgencies – all of which are produced in the rhetorical space of stabilized identities. From human geography to landscape practices to politics of dwelling, the mutability of identity is in play in the porosity of spatial condition. This paper seeks to activate aspects of alterity theory to open up an unexpected line through urbanism, one privileging creativity and innovation – and asking what can be done to make the increasingly diminishing spaces at the architectural-urban interface exceptional in their otherness? MILLS, Ethan (University of Tennessee Chattanooga) “The Place of Logic in Classical Indian Philosophy” I use the word ‘place’ in two senses: in the sense of the pakṣa (place, subject) within a formal Nyāya inference (anumāna), but also in the sense of the importance of logic and argumentation more generally within the classical Indian tradition. After looking at the inclusion of place in the first sense in the discussion of inference as a means of knowledge, I argue that this first sense reveals an important feature about place in the second sense, which touches on what one might call the architecture and ethics of debate. Logic arose in the classical Indian tradition as rules for formal debate in particular and norms for rational discourse more generally. The pakṣa is an essential part of these rules and norms insofar as it grounds discussion in a mutually agreed upon subject/place, which allows for a more fruitful and virtuous debate. My discussion draws on classical sources such as the Nyāya Sūtra (1.1.32-39 and 1.2.1-9) and Dignāga’s Hetucakraḍamaru as well as contemporary sources such as Matilal’s The Character of Logic in India. I then discuss two places in the Indian tradition where the pakṣa exemplifies its function: debates about the status of the external world and about the existence of a creator deity. I end with a contemporary reflection: given the tendency of discussants in many contemporary political and philosophical disputes to talk past one other (e.g., US Presidential Debates, analytic- continental disputes, etc.), the place of logic in classical India encourages reflection on ways in which we might keep our debates grounded, rational, and respectful. MITCHELL, Ryan (Yale University) “The ‘Heart of Things’ in a Heartless World? Representation and Spatial Imagination in Han Fei’s Disenchantment of the Sovereign’s Charisma”
While Han Fei has often been characterized, in both China and the West, as a proto-totalitarian thinker, competing interpretations of his oeuvre are gaining increasing prominence. Notable in such efforts is the attempt to discern the extent to which the Han Feizi operates as a descriptive theoretical critique of its contemporary politics rather than only as a normative or practical intervention therein. Indeed, the ultimate recommendation that Han Fei develops for the all-powerful sovereign developed in his writing is, paradoxically, to assume a position of quiescent passivity, refraining from any unnecessary use of his authority and choosing instead to “suffuse” the political system as a legitimating figure who operates only through objective, neutral standards—the law, or fa (法). Han Fei thus problematizes the figure of the sovereign in a way that has proved theoretically productive (albeit polemical) for the Chinese tradition much as Thomas Hobbes or Carl Schmitt have in Western political philosophy. Accordingly, this paper argues that a fuller understanding of the critical dimension of Han Fei’s account of sovereignty can be obtained by comparative reference to the latter figures. While all three theorists take the subject of sovereign power as their main area of focus, they adopt three very different argumentative strategies for portraying (in an “immanent” fashion) the actual operation of that power. Adapting Clifford Geertz’s notion of the “thick description” of social practices and definition of political charisma as the “sense of being near the heart of things,” I argue that the Han Feizi deploys a spatial idiom of critique, centered on access to the sovereign, that at times surpasses in verisimilitude the approaches of later Western realist political philosophers. Directory: phil -> wp-content -> uploads phil -> Going global oddities of globalism phil -> Identification ethics and spirituality phil -> Special Topic: “The home-made bombing at the Marathon Races in Boston, Massachusetts” by Sally Ramage pages 2-50 phil -> The Role of Error in Computer Science phil -> 菲律賓私立大專校院（非屬Autonomy and Deregulated heis） phil -> Gualtiero Piccinini phil -> Buildings Leased/Sold phil -> Phillip M. Adams & Associates, L. L. C., V. Dell, Inc. 2009 wl 910801 uploads -> Atman in Advaita Vedanta: Variations on a theme from the Download 0.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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