PARK, Bradley (St. Mary’s College of Maryland)

“Place and Violence, or the Venerability of Philosophy”

Recently, the TMT debate has revealed the conflict between modern scientific efforts and alternative indigenous epistemologies. The Thirty Meter Telescope project (TMT) is a multinational scientific effort to build the world’s largest telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawai’i. Underlying this effort is a particular set of philosophical assumptions about nature as ascribed by the Western scientific tradition. Where Westernized scientists see easily accessible terrain and superb atmospheric conditions, the Hawaiian people see a spirited and potent ancestor. For Hawaiians, Mauna Kea is sacred; the mountain is considered mother of the people and that active force upon which all Hawaiian life is forged. The Hawaiian protest is not against science, but rather, against the pending annihilation of a once potent sense of place upon which the Hawaiian identity had been critically formed. For the Hawaiian people, Mauna Kea is deserving of unconditional respect, preservation, and kapu (limits) in its own right. As the community has protested against the TMT development, a serious fault between the epistemological assumptions of modern science and indigenous peoples has been illuminated.

But aren’t we always here in any case, in the particular place where our bodies are? No, because when we’re distracted—as in day- dreaming, for example—we aren’t here in any robust sense, but are rather absent. And indeed one of the major differences between Nietzsche’s time and ours, some 150 years later, is that the prevalence of modern information and communications technology has enormous power to distract us from being here.

Taking the form of a dialogue between representatives of two generations (one from the old guard ignorant with respect to social media etc., and one from the tech-savvy avant-garde), this multi-media presentation affords a broader perspective on the question of how much the advantages of these technologies may be outweighed by the way so many of them diminish our ability to actually be here.

“Merging the Private and Public in a Thirdspace: Examining the Civic Dimensions of Private Place-Making” 

We propose a two-person panel in which the first of us (Peterman) examines Wilfred McClay’s recent introduction to his edited volume, Why Place Matters:

Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America. (New Atlantis: 2014). Addressing the question of why place matters from two academic perspectives, comparative philosophy and public history, the panel addresses the tension between public and private senses of place and whether the tension between them can be resolved both conceptually and practically.

In this first discussant, Peterman, a philosopher, examines McClay’s enviably clear account of why place matters in the introduction to this set of essays. He argues that place matters because a sense of places, an achievement, grounds the develop of civic virtues by giving individuals something outside of themselves to care about. Despite the clarity of this account, which focuses on various ways in which place matters, Peterman argues, the account runs together different senses of place, including a role in social institutions that one can identify with and care about, a place as the bearer of personal significance due to one’s experiences their, and a place as a foundational bearer of significance within a moral or religious tradition. McClay treats the achievement of a novel personal sense of place, common in modern societies, as serving these other two roles. Peterman argues that this is a conceptual mistake, and that we need to acknowledge both why place matters in traditions because of their role in a tradition, such as the birthplace of Confucius, in families, connected to traditions or not, as well as why place matters because of a Daoist-style rambling that takes us to places where unexpected meanings arise. Peterman argues that this tension between tradition-bound senses of place and emergent fluid senses of place is inescapable. This raises the question of whether and how emergent sense of place could serve the function that McClay gives them: to ground the civic virtues by offering public spaces we care about and wish to nurture.

 In the second discussion, Shea, a pubic historian, builds from Peterman’s efforts to draw from Wilfred McClay’s arguments for why place matters in order to situate senses of place both between and beyond traditions and personal meanings.  Specifically, she picks up with Peterman’s assertion that McClay’s phenomenology of place privileges social, cultural and political underpinnings without making space for the importance of  “cultivating private sense(s) of place, unburdened by the goals of grafting our senses of place and places to a tradition.” 

This second discussion introduces an ongoing project in public history, which offers a model of how to cultivate a sense places(s) that is both fluid and can support civic virtue. That project, called, “Around Here: The Places that Shape Us” is a crowd-sourced, searchable, accessible catalogue of places – large and small, private and public, personal and shared that matter to people who live, work and recreate on and around the South Cumberland Plateau, locally referred to simply as “the mountain,” in south-central Tennessee.

 This discussion will show how this pubic history project does three significant things in order to render place attachment, place-making and sense of place meaningful from a civic perspective.  Through participation of any local residents with an interest, it invites a greater understanding of the role of place as touchstones of moral traditional processes on the mountain and explores how place matters in relation to local people’s efforts to maintain tradition, community and social order.  Second, it invites individuals to share their own encounters with place and to expand place-making practice on the mountain to allow for enigmatic, unique and deeply personal experiences of place.  Finally, the project itself practices pubic history, in Professor of Urban Planning Edward Soja’s term, in a thirdspace -- a conceptual space that not only mediates between individual and community, private and public, but also functions to expand the notion of public space to include the private and private space to include the public.

PETERS, Jill (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
“The Place of Buddhist Ethics in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)”
Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction is based upon the idea that our way of relating to the world leads us to generate stress within ourselves and this relation can be transformed through Buddhist mindfulness and insight meditation. This paper enquires how Buddhist ethics can be applied in the conceptualization of MBSR.
The applied Buddhist practices have emerged from a health-paradigm that defines health as an experience of wellbeing that can be reached when one is no longer attached to the manifestation of pleasure or pain. MBSR aims to change our relationship to the experience of suffering. According to the Buddhist idea of the web of interdependence, all natural historical and cultural factors are perceived as relational. In Buddhism, perceiving strain from the outside is interpreted as a lack of insight. Such a shortage in understanding can be replenished by cultivating its counterpart, virtue.

This paper proposes pragmatically employing the idea of skillful means,

Based upon the idea of kusala upaya, this paper proposes the term stress mastery. It is this ethic that gives MBSR the potential to change the clinical practice of stress treatment. The practice of MBSR offers a hermeneutics of interdependence to understand the experience of stress. Employing kusala upaya in MBSR means one can become proficient in handling stress, and in acting with great skill, one can master stress.

I blame both sides. Just war theory, though presently motivated in large part by a desire to reduce war crimes and atrocities, has suffered from an inflated notion of theory and moral authority which have proven to be largely impotent. Pacifism, even when taken narrowly as a position against war, has portrayed war as though it is an issue with clean boundaries, separable from the world’s largest and most grim issues. Both, then, have misled their audiences. Both underestimate how much war is entangled in a grim fabric of contemporary global issues regarding the relations of human beings to each other and to the natural world. Addressing war as a problem requires more than centers for study of war, or war colleges run by military authorities, or U.N. resolutions or peacekeepers. As Freud remarks about love, war is not on a separate page. Coming to terms with war will involve coming to terms with greed and bigotry and nationalism. But coming to terms with war also will require coming to terms with philosophical mistakes, including assumptions about what persons are which make empathy more remote a possibility because theoretically inexplicable. And it will have to dig more deeply than contemporary efforts to decide whether war is justifiable or not.