Atman in Advaita Vedanta: Variations on a theme from the Principal Upanishads”
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- MOHANTA, Dilipkumar (University of Calcutta, India) “Reflections on the Cognitivist-Skeptic Debate in Indian Philosophy and Pyrrhonism”
- MORGAN Julia ( Kauai Community College) , and Kuan-Hung CHEN (University of Hawai’i) “Knowing and Places in Hawaiian and Chinese Traditions: A Possible Construction of ‘
- MORIOTO, Bruce (Athabasca University, Canada) “Place Internality and Mind/Body Incommensurability”
- MOSER, Keith A. ( Mississippi State University) “Biological and Semiotic Marking of Human Space in Michel Serres’s Interdisciplinary Philosophy”
- MOWER, Deedee (Weber State University) “Discourses that Fragment Suburban Educational Spaces”
- MOWER, Gordy ( Brigham Young University) “Property as Place, East and West”
- MURATA-SORACI, Kimiyo (Belmont University) “On the Matter of Hospitality”
- MURRAY, Judson ( Wright State University) “Chinese and Japanese Views on an Ethics of Place Situated at the Homestead”
MITIAS, Lara (Antioch College) XXXXX MOELLER, Hans-Georg (University of Macau) “Exiles Since Childhood: On the Contingency of Place in Daoist Philosophy” This paper reflects on a rarely discussed “character” in the philosophically central second chapter of the Zhuangzi (Qiwulun): the “exile since childhood” (ruo sang 弱喪). As Guo Xiang (d. 312 CE), the editor of the standard version of the text, explains, a ruo sang is someone who lost their home at an early age. Such exiles will not even know if they return to their hometown; they have no sense of home and can consequently be content wherever they are. The figure of the ruo sang playfully challenges the demarcation of places according to a home/away-from-home distinction which figures prominently not only in the Confucian tradition. It suggests a conception of place as radically transient and contingent and thereby desists the idea of an ownership of space with all its potential emotional and socio-political hazards. MOHANTA, Dilipkumar (University of Calcutta, India) “Reflections on the Cognitivist-Skeptic Debate in Indian Philosophy and Pyrrhonism” In this presentation I will endeavor to demonstrate the unique 'space' in which the Pyrrhonian Skeptics and the Indian Skeptics can meet for dialogue. The skeptic who uses an attitude of doubt is a seeker of truth. S/he is a wise person who goes on questioning or raising doubt about cognitive claims on the basis of beliefs. In Indian philosophy, the attitude of doubt is accepted as an indispensable precondition for initiating any fruitful philosophical investigation. In the Nyaya school of Indian philosophy, we see that philosophical investigation begins with an ipso-facto doubt. Through the application of causal instruments of knowing (pramana) for eradicating doubt, they argue, we can arrive at right cognition / knowledge (which is free from doubt and error) about an object. However, the primary concern of philosophical skepticism is cognitive. It is critical about any kind of cognitive guarantee or certitude. It questions the veracity of the necessary tie that is claimed to exist between the truth of any cognitive position and how we arrive at it. No knowledge-claim can be accepted as absolutely indubitable or certain. Our judgments are never free from obscurity and uncertainty. Had it been so, questions like ‘Is the judgment true?’ could not be raised. This indicates that there always remains an epistemic gap between our available evidence and the asserted content. The no certainty position is followed from the no criterion argument. For the Skeptic, in this strict sense, certainty here means absolute certainty and this is next to impossible. S/he questions the assumption that the Law of Excluded Middle cannot be doubted. The claimer of the possibility of knowledge relies on the assumption that the judgment about the world of fact is either true or false. You are to accept either ‘p or not-p’; there is no other alternative. But the Skeptic finds no sufficient rational ground to accept either of the two. To the skeptic, to any pro-argument for a thesis there is an equally strong counter-argument and, therefore, s/he cannot have any thesis (pratijna in Sanskrit) to put forward or a thesis of her/his own. This is known as no thesis argument. The Cognitivist-Skeptic debate is an important aspect of India's Argumentative Culture and this fact is very often ignored by scholars. But a close re-reading of the development of philosophical thought in India will show that this debate tradition enriches India's cultural heritage by giving space and respect to the views of others as an alternative to one's own. I propose to examine two important charges usually brought against the skeptic’s position in Indian Philosophy. The first section contains a brief presentation of the position of philosophical Skeptic. The second section has two sub-sections -- the first explicates two objections raised against the Skeptic by the Cognitivist and the second contains a possible rejoinder to these objections. The third section is an attempt to show some common sharable arguments between Indian Skeptics and Pyrrhonian Skeptics. Any discussion regarding how the Cognitivist position can be defended in the face of skeptical challenges is left outside the scope of this paper. Here the Nyāya position from classical Indian Philosophy and its Greek counterpart regarding the possibility of knowledge are represented by the term Cognitivism. The positions of Pyrrho (4th Century B. C. E.) in the Greek philosophical tradition and the Sanjaya-Nagarjuna-Jayarasi line of philosophizing in ancient India are conjoined by the term Cognitive Skepticism. The paper concludes with a note that the Skeptic does not leave the arena of knowledge empty-handed. However, Pyrrho refers to his philosophical opponents as a dogmatist whereas Nagarjuna calls them dristivādins (in Sanskrit). Pyrrho's senior contemporary Sanjaya-Belattiputra (5th century B.C.E.) and his disciple Supriya (4th C.B.E.) used to teach the method of philosophizing with four-cornered negation. In Sanskrit it is known as Amara-vikshepavada, the method of escaping like the movement of an eel fish. There is much similarity between the arguments developed by Sanjya-Nagarjuna-Jayarasi type skeptical arguments and Pyrrhonian arguments against the absolute claims to the possibility of knowledge. So it is wise to doubt everything and to abstain from advancing any thesis with absolute knowledge-claims. This abstention is called epoche in Greek. Nagarjuna calls it prasanga in Sanskrit. As all attempts to attain truth with certitude are doomed to failure, this abstention acts as the root of cultivating imperturbability, ataraxia. However, there are differences too between Indian Skeptics and Pyrrhonian Skeptics. In our elaboration of the arguments we will take care of this 'space'. It will be shown how the Skeptics can escape the charge of self-contradiction with their special use of 'negation'. This is called prasajya pratisedhah in Sanskrit, which is pure negation, to distinguish it from relational / propositional negation, which is prajudasa pratisedhah in Sanskrit. The Indian Skeptics would find the charge of contradiction as non-sensical. The charge rests upon the assumption that nothing is equal to something. Nobody does not mean somebody in any communicable sense. Again, the Skeptics would say that the Cognitivists have failed to understand the object-level and the meta-level difference of language and this leads them to accuse the Skeptics of self-reference. There are indistinct fuzzy areas in our actual state of knowability and we cannot make exclusive truth-claim about anything. The claim of the Cognitivists suffers not only significant flaws but the very assumption upon which it is founded is dogmatically accepted and therefore questionable. Being the worshippers of free enquiry the Skeptics are against any kind of rigid and dogmatic belief. The paper is an attempt to develop the arguments step by step. MORGAN Julia (Kaua'i Community College), and Kuan-Hung CHEN (University of Hawai’i) “Knowing and Places in Hawaiian and Chinese Traditions: A Possible Construction of ‘Āina (or River Hao) Epistemology” While the notion of a decontextualized disembodied knower is the ideal knower in an Enlightenment context, such an ideal is neither not the only way to know but, potentially, not the most useful in a contemporary world that may very well demand that we consider place as both the locus of knowledge and the locus of ethical obligations. The following will explore this dilemma first, by discussing the difference between place-based (or rooted) knowing and the disembodied knowers by exploring Chinese and Kanaka Maoli epistemologies, on the one hand, and Cartesian and Kantian epistemologies, on the other hand. Two examples demonstrate the notion of an embodied knower. The first example is from the Chinese text of the Zhuangzi, which contains a famous debate between Zhuangzi and Hui Shi on the knowability of the happiness of the fish. Zhuangzi’s argument was based on the quality of relationality of the particular place (River Hao). Zhuangzi even invites Hui Shi to reveal his standpoint instead of hiding it. This passage demonstrates that certain kinds of knowing are not reducible to abstract conceptualization. The second example is from the Kanaka Maoli tradition, where knowing is both context-based and relational. To that end, Kanaka Maoli gave carefully chosen personal names to places. These names, and their attendant stories, carried with them valuable accumulated knowledge about the place and its inhabitants, including soil, seasonal conditions, and other such Western-type propositional knowledge. Key to understanding the differences between these ideas of epistemology and knowledge is the recognition of a conceptual difference between place and space. While the Cartesian-Kantian-space-based knowledge has been prioritized and exceptiaonlised, this view of knowledge has some serious limitations and ignores basic facts about our world. Second, this discussion will explore how in acknowledging both the importance of and the viability of place-based knowing, we can address the problems of the Cartesian-Kantian-space-based traditions and acquire improved tools to navigate a plural and diverse world, opening up the realm of potential solutions for many of our current contemporary environmental issues. MORIOTO, Bruce (Athabasca University, Canada) “Place Internality and Mind/Body Incommensurability” I want this paper to set out a way to address the subjective/objective distinction of the mind/body problem by winding my way through an analysis of place and music. Place, as it pertains to musical experience, can be described in ways that can serve to help formulate the relation between objective, physical conditions and subjective, mental conditions. Internal places where we go to find refuge or to reflect are also places where we have musical experiences. Analysis of this sense inner place indicates that the mind/body incommensurability problem is not a problem for musical experience and especially for creative performance and composition. Indeed, it is a vital tool for developing potential musical experience. I hope to disclose certain properties of musical experience that bridge the internal/subjective and external/objective conceptual gap, by show that this bridge presupposes an underlying or implicate axiological order. If successful, it may not so much solve the mind/brain incommensurability problem, but could very well advance a non-reductive approach to explaining the incommensurability as a condition for musical creativity, and in the longer run, for creativity in moral life. MOSER, Keith A. (Mississippi State University) “Biological and Semiotic Marking of Human Space in Michel Serres’s Interdisciplinary Philosophy” Throughout his extensive philosophical body of work from 1968 to the present, the French philosopher of science Michel Serres adamantly maintains that all sentient and non-sentient beings were arbitrarily tossed into the chaos of existence by indiscriminate, ecological forces that predate humankind by billions of years. From a scientific and objective standpoint, Serres explains that every living organism has the same intrinsic right to exist in a deterministic, chaotic universe. In numerous texts, Serres incorporates the principles of modern science to deconstruct unfounded notions of human ontological sovereignty that are grounded in chimerical wishful thinking rather than rigorous philosophical inquiry. This maverick thinker shares more in common with indigenous and eastern philosophers than his Western counterparts given his predilection to frame every issue from an ecocentric perspective. For Serres, understanding our connection to the myriad of threads that inextricably link us to the larger web of life is the key to comprehending our minute place in the biotic community of life. Although Serres often scoffs at pervasive anthropocentric logic that runs contrary to contemporary scientific erudition, he does recognize that homo sapiens are a different kind of animal on multiple levels. Specifically, the philosopher asserts that humans delineate the boundaries of our space in both similar and in extremely divergent ways in comparison to other species. First, Serres reveals that traces of archaic, primal behavior related to the marking of one’s territory through the excretion of bodily fluids are still clearly visible in the modern world. Similar to how many other organisms such as dogs, tigers, and lions urinate or defecate in a certain spot as a form of biological marking which serves to define the parameters of their personal space or property, Serres contends that humans still engage in this kind of primordial behavior without realizing it. In his provocative essay Le Mal Propre, Serres hypothesizes that the cult of virginity in Western civilization is a vestige of this evolutionary trait. After a woman’s body has been appropriated by a given male with his semen, the phenomenon of biological marking reveals why she can never “belong” to another man. In a patriarchal society in which male aggression remains unchecked, traces of archaic behavior which links us to other animals are still present lurking beneath the surface of social conventions. According to Serres, biological marking in the human population is proof that homo sapiens are part and parcel of the biosphere that conceived them starting with the cataclysmic events commonly referred to as a big bang. Serres illustrates that the biological predisposition to leave a little of our secretions behind to indicate possession and to stake our claim to a certain space is common throughout the animal kingdom. Nonetheless, Serres also theorizes that we have an innate inclination to soil the space around us by means of “semiotic contamination” (Filippi 52). The philosopher notes that other organisms including larks and nightingales engage in this sort of soft pollution as well. Yet, he implies that humans have a heightened predisposition to appropriate everything around us through signs. In Le Mal Propre, Serres suggests that our species possesses a pathological desire to incorporate every single space within our reach into our pervasive realms of symbolic representation. Whereas many other life forms tend to remain in the confines of their ecological niches for the most part, homo sapiens never seem to be satisfied until there is nothing left outside of the operational logic of our semiotic waste. As Massimo Filippi explains, “Other animals delimit their territory by marking it with whatever their body is able to emit-urine, howls, cheerful warbles. Humans are not different […] However, unlike other animals, human beings seem to have no limits in this process of marking the existence” (51). As Filippi underscores, Serres affirms that human beings are the most extreme animals on this planet in terms of polluting the environment around us through the incessant reproduction of simulacra. MOWER, Deedee (Weber State University) “Discourses that Fragment Suburban Educational Spaces” In the spatial terms of urban, suburban, east, and west, the construction of educational boundaries has been historically used to separate and segregate particular groups of people. To understand the analysis of education through a theoretical mapping of space, one needs to acknowledge that space has characteristics or manners of enhancing our understanding. The way we use language or utterances to understand spaces is not solely created or individually derived. We need to realize that the utterances themselves are historically and socially situated for that space. The interactions that take place about spaces have sociolinguistic meaning because they were socially formed to identify individual selves with communities (Bazerman, 2004). In other words, created spaces become a signifier of particular peoples and practices, or educational spaces and pedagogies and the discourse surrounding those signifiers becomes visualized, repeated, and perceived as truth (Lefebvre, 1991: Soja, 1996, Buendia & Ares, 2006) by both those within the community and those on the periphery. Historically, race and social class have been used as indictors to ascribe characteristics to people and places. Educational spaces inherit the discourses of past social interactions and either perpetuate those attributes or work to form new interactions. Community members often unconsciously contribute to the discourses about their educational spaces they are assigned to using both race and social class distinctions. There are educational inequities when race and social class are continually used as determinants for school boundaries. Research in urban areas demonstrates these educational distinctions in segregated spaces. For example, Pauline Lipman’s (2002) work in Chicago, amongst others (Noguera, P. 2003) demonstrates how segregated neighborhoods receive unequal educational practices. In Lipman’s work, she explains how schools relegate certain populations, characterized by race and class, to particular parts of the city by drawing school boundaries that reflect the segregated communities. She also demonstrates how existing race inequalities are not only maintained by geographical boundaries, but inequitable educational opportunities and experiences increase. I argue that what has not been researched is how spaces perpetuate normalized discourses or the regularity of statements that provide “verbal performances that are identical from the point of view of grammar, that are also identical from the point of view of logic,” (Foucault, 1972, p 145) for dividing particular suburban educational spaces. Educational suburban spaces are juxtaposed to urban spaces but not to similar spaces within the suburbs. Cultural relationship gaps within suburban educational spaces may be between real and imagined spaces of difference. This paper reviews the local statements that form a regularity of thought or limitedness of ideas for separation among certain suburban educational spaces south of Salt Lake City, Utah to determine how points of logic through discourse historically maintain divided educational spaces based upon perceived and sometimes imagined differences in race and socioeconomic status. MOWER, Gordy (Brigham Young University) “Property as Place, East and West” One way among many by which the raw materials of earthly space can be transformed into place infused with human significance is through the enclosure of that space under a regime of private real property. This essay will explore two versions of property practices, one Western and one Eastern. In some ways the Western model has become a dominant approach to ownership in the modern world, but it is also controversial and carries with it intimations of humanity’s worst characteristics. The justifications for it coming out of the early modern period, however, sought to base property ownership on noble features of human beings. To begin with, then, property’s justification is deeply personal and formative, but the introduction of money and its commodification ultimately undercut the personal nature of place. As money itself becomes commodified, so does human labor, and so in turn do the spaces designated as property. The Eastern model is different in that it grants property title to families rather than individuals. There is an enlightened recognition here that it is not just the individual qua individual that needs place. There must also be place that is reflective of our social natures and most fundamentally of our personal identities as formulated through our family relations. This arrangement makes clear the place of and for an individual in the family, the community, and the state. The individual finds a place by working together with family and members of the community. I will argue that both models have their defects, but they can perhaps usefully learn from each other. The Western model has a myriad of faults foremost of which perhaps is the cult of the individual that cannot help but promote a destructive selfishness. As labor becomes a commodity, isolated individuals leave their families to go to their “places” of work. The attachments there must overwhelmingly be to the firm in isolation, not to the community, not to the state. The individual truly recognizes that her time is not really even her own while she is at work. Mencius’ well-field system belongs to a bygone era and it is unlikely to find much place in the modern world. It is inefficient in comparison with modern farming methods. Nor is it feasible in its land distribution requirement given the constraints of modern populations. Nevertheless, the Eastern view of place might be made to complement the Western view. Every individual needs a place for productive effort. The Western model has successfully transferred this place from the farm plot to the workplace. The workplace, however, might not be very satisfying. If our identities are constituted in part by our relations, we will want a place for them where we work. We will want our workplaces to become broader communities, where, as in the well-field system, families interact, and they are connected to the larger community and even to the political community. MURATA-SORACI, Kimiyo (Belmont University) “On the Matter of Hospitality” Being in place, not as subjects stationed in an objective world-space but as mortals inhabiting with others in a proper abode, matters to everyone’s heart and mind. Our poignant desire for a proper implacement in the world hence the need of orientation calls us to heed the present ēthos and calls us to engage in the issue of how we are to rightly belong to the tradition by receiving, witnessing, and transferring the common memory of the past ways to be. The question of place, that is the general topic of the Conference, turns our gaze to a matter of reception and of the ethos. This paper will take up the current Japanese phenomena of (a) the World Heritage tourisms, (b) localization through a community’s consorted effort to economize for revenue and care for local landscapes of uncanny beauty, ancient architectures of temples and shrines, and historic sites of great importance for politics and narratives, and (c) identifying Japan as a culture of hospitality so as to reformulate a narrative of “we.” We will compare the current ways of recollection and appropriation of the past with those of Saigyō (1118-1190), Ippen (1239-1289) and Bashō (1644-1694) who traveled extensively Japan and mapped out, to use a Bachelardian term, the new “poetics of space” by virtue of their alertness to the essential emptiness (śūnya 空 ) of self-existence (muga 無我 ) in all phenomena. In reading appropriate passages from their texts, we shall highlight that the concurrence of being and language, which the three poets share in common, sets “place” free from an ordinary understanding of place as a sector of the universal space and enables all things, including the poets themselves, to show what they are truly in a “no-form” of reciprocal intertwining. By stepping into a foreign terrain of the past poets and by re-collecting the uncanny happening of the gift of the place, we will think anew the current mode of consecrating Japanese community as well as the familiar pattern of reception of life within an economy of negotiation and reconciliation for the sake of a common good. MURRAY, Judson (Wright State University) “Chinese and Japanese Views on an Ethics of Place Situated at the Homestead” My presentation will examine the use of place in efforts to criticize sociopolitically both intellectual elitism and moral degeneration. The specific places that serve as the inspirations for such criticisms are the farm and the hearth of the homestead, because they exemplify values and activities that are antithetical to hypocritical and parasitical intellectualizing and to the intrigues and moral compromises that often accompany social relations and affairs of state. My methodological approach is both cross-cultural and comparative, as the places and periods of interest are early China—both in its pre- and early imperial contexts--and Tokugawa Japan. What emerges from these populist ancient Chinese and medieval Japanese critical discourses is an ethics of place predicated on the assumption that where people locate themselves and what they do therein formatively influences who they are and how they conduct themselves morally. Together the farm and the hearth offer a particular kind of moral education. Proponents of it argue that it is the average and the lowborn who are best suited to moral cultivation, and the simpler and natural conditions and activities associated with these places cultivate a brand of virtuosity that is adaptive and practical, and that accords properly with, and thereby reinforces, nature’s generative and life-sustaining processes. 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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