Atman in Advaita Vedanta: Variations on a theme from the Principal Upanishads”
BURIK, Steven (Singapore Management University)
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- BYRNES, Elyse (University of Hawai’i) “’Becoming Flowers:’ An Alternative Judeo-Christian Ecological Ethic”
- CAI, Liang (University of Notre Dame) “The Master Kept A Distance from His Own Son: The Place of Family Affection in Confucian Morality”
- CALLICOTT, J. Baird (University of North Texas) “The Ecology of Self as a Focus for Comparative Philosophy”
- CAPPELLINI, Roberta (Centro Interculurale Dedicato A Raimon Panikkar, Italy) “Hermeneutics and the Empeiria of the Soul in Panikkar” XXXXX
- CARLEO, R. A. III (Fudan University, China) “This World or That World: Valuing This Place in Contemporary Interpretations of Chinese Tradition”
- CASEY, Edward S. (SUNY Stony Brook) “Implacement and Displacement in the Light of Confucian Thought”
- CHAKRABARTI, Arindam (University of Hawai’i) “Going Places: Pilgrimage, Pillage, Penance and Progress”
- CHAN, Wing-cheuk ( Brock University, Canada) “Space and Art: From Heidegger to Daoism”
- CHAMPION, Erik ( Curtin University, Australia) “Philosophical Issues of Place and the Past in Virtual Reality”
- CHAO, Tien-yi (National Taiwan University, Taiwan) “The Conceptualisation of a ‘Feminine Universe’ in Lao Zi’s Dao De Jing
- CHAPPLE, Chris (Loyola Marymount University) “Living Within Space and Place: Directionality and Inner Experience in Indian Texts”
- CHATTOPADHYAY, Sanskriti ( Manipal University, India) “When in Mirror: Parallel ‘Place’ in ‘Film-‘Space’’
- CHEN, I-Hsin (The University of Manchester, UK) “A Place to Meditate: James Legge’s Translation of Xin 心 ”
BURIK, Steven (Singapore Management University) “Between Local and Global: The Place of Comparative Philosophy through Heidegger and Daoism” This paper argues for the importance of notions of place for comparative philosophy. I first provide a comparison of ‘local’ and ‘global’ thinking, using Heidegger and Classical Daoism. Next, building on this comparison, I look at a set of related notions of place and argue how they affect how we perceive the goals and ideas of comparative philosophy. It is often argued that the project of comparative philosophy displays some kind of inherent contradiction. For in order to be truly comparative, it needs to have some overarching position with regards to the comparata. In other words, it needs to transcend the things under comparison somehow. So it needs to be understood as some form of globalised or cosmopolitan thinking. On the other hand, that form of global thinking needs to reflect what is often considered its exact opposite, namely a certain form of local thinking or provincialism. For if the claims of comparative philosophy are to be taken serious, they need to display an appreciation of the importance of different ways of thinking as practiced or originated in, and in significant ways bound to, different parts of the world. Yet provincialism is often seen as a negative thing, understood as an unwillingness to see the bigger picture because you are stuck in your own way of thinking. How can we think and use these notions of place in order to alleviate such an apparent contradiction between these two positions necessary to shape comparative philosophy? Here I compare Heidegger and Classical Daoism. I argue that although often understood at least partly as ‘provincial’ thinkers, Heidegger and the Daoists actually display exactly that attitude we need in comparative philosophy. Cosmopolitanism and globalization are often undestood as involving a loss of rootedness, and provincialism is seen as a pejorative term, it has had a negative connotation for some time. Yet more recently, with the revitalisation of non-Western thought, the notion of provincialism can also be understood as standing for the attack on the idea of universality in the form of Western philosophy’s dominance over other ways of thought. Provincial then means rather a challenge to the dominance of the traditional western way of doing philosophy. As such, it is clear to see why the dominant tradition would want to discredit ‘provincial’ thought, since it does not tally with its universalist tendencies and ideals. Provinciality would be a reinsertion of man into his environment, into his place and surroundings, into the world, instead of the dominant approach of situating man outside of his physical and social reality, Thus provincial thought can be seen as a challenge to perceived distinctions between mind-body, ideas-matter, reality-appearance, inside-outside. Such an understanding of provincial thought might be able to bridge the notions of cosmopolitanism and provincialism, of the homely and Unheimlichkeit, of localism and globalization, of nostalgia and progress. Using Heidegger’s ideas of ‘Gathering’ and ‘Ereignis’, understood as preserving in belonging together through difference, I will compare such thought to the classical Daoists, and will argue that this way of thinking is also present there. I conclude by pointing to the importance of understanding the project of comparative philosophy in a similar way if it is to live up to its intended purposes. BYRNES, Elyse (University of Hawai’i) “’Becoming Flowers:’ An Alternative Judeo-Christian Ecological Ethic” In his widely read essay “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” Lynn White Jr. argues that Christians are totally divorced from nature as well as any possibility of sympathy—“to a Christian a tree can be no more than a physical fact...” he writes, “the whole concept of the sacred grove is alien to Christianity....”1 However, I will argue that this is definitively not the case—The Garden of Eden, the original sacred grove of the Judeo-Christian tradition, serves as an image of humankind united with not only God, but nature as well. The garden serves as a symbol of unity throughout the Torah and the later books that compose the Christian Bible—imagery that would be later revived and reinvigorated by the artists of the Romantic movement. In order to construct an alternative Judeo-Christian ecological ethic, I will trace the significance of the garden and nature in Judeo-Christian thought, its development in the philosophy of those who engage in the relation between humanity, nature, and god, (namely Whitehead and Nishida); and its application to our ongoing ecological crisis in the form of a human comportment suited to this particular understanding of nature as garden: cultivation. Using an Arendtian frame, I will argue that only the comportment of cultivation, specifically in contrast to the comportment of the fabricator—edification— allows for human and nonhuman agency, political engagement, and subjective revelation. I will show that cultivation serves as a form of action (unlike labor or fabrication) which both interact with nature purely in terms of use-value. The “boundlessness” of action characterizes the making of permeable boundaries that distinguishes cultivation from edification. To more clearly illustrate these points, I will provide both an example of garden and gardener par excellence; namely, the Garden of Eden, and the gardener-poet, Keats. CAI, Liang (University of Notre Dame) “The Master Kept A Distance from His Own Son: The Place of Family Affection in Confucian Morality” Consanguineous affections and filial piety have been heated topics in the study of Confucianism. Scholars have asked if xiao (filial piety) is the root of Confucian morality and if it leads to moral corruption. Despite different answers to those questions, xiao is generally reduced to family affection, and loving one’s parents, in turn, is said to be the most fundamental human emotion praised by Confucians. During the debate over the filial piety, one passage— The Analects, 16.13— has drawn little attention from scholars. Cheng Kang, a disciple of Confucius, asked the master’s son Boyu if he had received different from what other students received? Cheng was pleased to find out that Confucius not only taught the same teachings to his own son but also kept a distance from him. Attempting to explore the apparent tension between devotion to the master and devotion to the parents, I point out that the family lives of both Confucius and his disciples were absolutely overshadowed by their communal life together. Xiao in the Analects refers to affections beyond parent-child love and is used to prescribe the relationship between teacher and disciples. Although graded love—prioritizing the love of one’s family— has been characterized as one of the most prominent ethical doctrines of Confucianism, it finds no place in Confucius’ learning community. Furthermore, according to Confucius and Mencius, young children are emotionally attached to their parents; but adults’ love of their parents, while still spontaneous and natural, is sporadic and inconsistent. That love needs to be constantly reawakened by appealing to specific circumstances and by the moral action of xiao. Equating family love with xiao and regarding consanguineous affections as primary moral resources of Confucian ethics is a misreading of early Confucianism. CALLICOTT, J. Baird (University of North Texas) “The Ecology of Self as a Focus for Comparative Philosophy” The atomic self is deeply rooted in Western thought. Its advent seems to coincide with the emergence of alphabetic literacy in Greece, enabling a reader/writer to use language in the absence of an interlocutor. Oral consciousness is necessarily relational and communal. Literate consciousness is private and interior. Suddenly death and even change became problematic. The solution to the problem of death was the independent psyche residing in the body, such that the inevitable death of the latter was not also necessarily the death of the former. The concept of the independent psyche is traceable to Pythagoras; it was refined and forcefully defended by Plato. From these Greek origins the atomic self was adopted by the religions of the Book (as they are quite revealingly called); and it was modernized and resecularized by Descartes. It remains to be seen what consequences the new communications technologies (twitter for example) will have for the atomic self. Do they intensify privacy and interiority or reconstitute virtual communities? If popularized, the consequences of the postmodern sciences for self reconstruction are more predictable: consciousness is an emergent property of the central nervous systems of vertebrates, not an entity in its own right; organisms are exquisitely adapted by evolutionary processes to the physical, chemical, and biological conditions of the Earth; multicellular organisms are super-ecosystems, the habitats of thousands of species of microbes outnumbering the organisms’ own cells ten to one; personal identity (the self) is shaped by one’s environmental and social relationships. The increasing popularity of voluntary assisted suicide for those whose quality of life has significantly diminished indicates that death is becoming less problematic, suggesting that the conscious self is regarded as an organic epiphenomenon, the extinction of which is inevitable and nothing to fear—the only question thus being the optimal moment of extinction. CAPPELLINI, Roberta (Centro Interculurale Dedicato A Raimon Panikkar, Italy) “Hermeneutics and the Empeiria of the Soul in Panikkar” XXXXX CARELLI, Paul (University of North Florida) “Beyond the Western Borders” Travel requires crossing borders and changing places. Travel literature in the European tradition has been characterized as progressive and teleological and therefore sees the crossing of some borders as necessary for the establishment of others. The Western traveler (Dante, for example), focuses on the definition (de-finis) of self, the delimiting of possibilities, as the primary telos towards which all travel aims. This is in stark contrast to Daoist notions of travel which stress the freedom of wandering without a specific goal. It is the multiplication of possibility, with the attendant opening up for the traveler ever-widening opportunities for response that constitutes travel for Zhuangzi and others. Travel for the Ancient Greeks does not rest easily on either side of this bifurcation, but, perhaps surprisingly, has more affinities with Daoist travel. Many-turning (polytropus) Odysseus, the Greek traveler par excellence, frequently transgresses boundaries—personal, societal, geographical—becoming a traveler at home in any place though native to none. Attempting to situate this ancient Greek paradigm of travel with respect to the positions of the Daoist and later European models will place us in an ideal location from which to reconsider the borders of our own east/west discourse. CARLEO, R. A. III (Fudan University, China) “This World or That World: Valuing This Place in Contemporary Interpretations of Chinese Tradition” Major works of two of the most celebrated living Chinese philosophers, Li Zehou and Chen Lai, follow Roger Ames in emphasizing a general divergence in worldviews between Chinese and Western traditions of thought. Traditional Chinese thought, they argue, predominantly views humans and the reality they inhabit as “one-world,” celebrating this world and understanding reality (including the divine) as occurring through and within it. This differs from “two-world” thinking, typically more associated with Western traditions, which sees the manifest world (including things, humans, and the divine) as ultimately originating from or grounded in a transcendent realm. Thus, in “two-world” thought, this world is inferior or secondary to that world. The implications of such a divergence—a valuing of this place or that which lies beyond this place—are potentially expansive and fundamental. Li and Chen see the implications of this divergence as crucial to understanding the philosophical and cultural histories of China and the West. For them, “one-world” thinking makes Chinese traditions unique as well as invaluable to global philosophical discourse. This is because such thought suggests alternative approaches to how we understand and value our relationships with the other humans and things through which our world is constituted. It thereby further provides perspectives on ethical issues that have been generally overlooked in Western philosophy. After establishing the general distinction Li Zehou and Chen Lai draw between one-world and two-world thought, this paper outlines the various historical and philosophical implications that Li claims arise from China’s one-world thinking. Chen Lai generally affirms and even identifies further potential of Li Zehou’s theory here, including how his ideas can contribute to our understanding of early Confucian texts. However, Chen puts forth one major point of dissatisfaction with Li Zehou’s “one-world” claim. I thus conclude by analyzing Li’s and Chen’s divergent positions regarding metaphysical aspects within China’s “one-world” tradition, and consider Chen Lai’s assertion that in such a discussion we must rely on concepts native to Chinese thought, which fall outside the (inherently “two-world”) vocabulary of Western philosophy. CASEY, Edward S. (SUNY Stony Brook) “Implacement and Displacement in the Light of Confucian Thought” I will explore how place figures in Confucian writings with special attention to the contrast between rootedness in a single place (home, region, homeland) and being uprooted from a settled place as in circumstances of forced migration -- a phenomenon now so conspicuously present on a world-wide scale. To what extent can one carry one's placial roots with one in living in new places, and if just how so? What are the limits of displacement? CHAKRABARTI, Arindam (University of Hawai’i) “Going Places: Pilgrimage, Pillage, Penance and Progress”
A pilgrimage must be distinguished from just any travel or tourism. Setting out on an arduous self-purificatory journey from one’s own place to a distant holy destination played a crucial role in ancient and medieval religious lives. This paper would briefly discuss three classic examples of such pilgrimage, from Hindu, Christian and Islamic literature and theologies. Arjuna’s so-called “tīrtha-yātrā” before the great battle in the Mahabharata; the Parson’s tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; and Koranic scripture on the ongoing Islamic practice of Hajj to Mecca. Drawing general social, political and cultural conclusions from these disparate examples, I try to unearth some unobvious connections between pilgrims, colonizers, and refugees—lessons relevant to our own times and for a global philosophy of place. CHAN, Wing-cheuk (Brock University, Canada) “Space and Art: From Heidegger to Daoism” In his later topology of Being Heidegger raises the question: “What is the general character of space?” While denying the primordial status of the physical-technological space, Heidegger claims that only art can uncover the authentic character of genuine space. For Heidegger, clearing-away is the special character of space. As release of places, clearing-away is a double movement of unoncealment and concealment. Artist space thereby discloses regions of dwellings for human beings. This paper tries to show that Daoist philosophy of art can concretely substantiate Heidegger’s theses. Particularly, it can explain why the emptiness as the special character of space is neither nothing nor deficiency. In return, it will unfold the ontological character of Daoist philosophy of art and hence its possible contributions to overcoming the danger of our technological age. CHAMPION, Erik (Curtin University, Australia) “Philosophical Issues of Place and the Past in Virtual Reality”
On the other hand, evoking cultural significance may be helped by a philosophical consideration of how specific human experiences can be understood and conveyed. The Dictionary of Philosophy says (on p.464) phenomenology “is the attempt to describe our experience directly, as it is, separately from its origins and development, independently of the causal explanations that historians, sociologists or psychologists might give”. While hermeneutics, it says (on p.274-5), “explores the kind of existence had by beings who are able to understand meanings, and to whom the world is primarily an object of understanding (rather than, say, of sense-perceptions)”. I wish to investigate whether an approach that would best utilise multimedia and the differing multimodal ways in which we learn and experience the outside world would be phenomenological and hermeneutical. In other words it would attempt to understand how the way individual societies experience the world, how they interpret the world to themselves and to each other, how their cultural signs are made, modified, and learnt. It would also attempt to discover how the horizons of current visitors could be nudged out of balance by being either overwhelmed by encounters with genuine alterity (that is, sense of otherness), or by gradually learning how to be accepted in this totally different phenomenological world. A further pressing issue in the design of virtual places and especially in the design of virtual heritage environments is to avoid the ‘museumization’ and ‘Western’ viewpoint as forewarned by Ziauddin Sardar and others. Can this technology help provide an appropriate sense of alterity and an appropriate situated sense of place? CHAO, Tien-yi (National Taiwan University, Taiwan) “The Conceptualisation of a ‘Feminine Universe’ in Lao Zi’s Dao De Jing and Jane Lead’s Writings about Spiritual Alchemy” This paper aims to compare the feminisation of the cosmos in ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Zi’s Dao De Jing with that in the spiritual and esoteric writings by the seventeenth-century mystic Jane Lead (also Jane Leade, 1624-1704). My study suggests that both authors celebrated female-centred cosmology, though the cosmos’ femininity is portrayed in different ways. In Dao De Jing, Lao Zi creates the image of ‘Great Mother’ to illustrate the creative energy of the cosmos, while Lead develops visions of ‘Virgin Sophia’ in Fountain of Gardens (V.2, 1697) and The Wonders of God’s Creation (1696), referring to the image of Sophia as the ‘virgin body’ of God, who revealed the secrets of the cosmos to her (Hirst 2005). By comparing and contrasting the two authors’ narratives about a ‘female universe’, I hope to explore the ways in which both challenged the established male-centred cosmology in their societies through a cross-cultural critical approach. CHAPPLE, Chris (Loyola Marymount University) “Living Within Space and Place: Directionality and Inner Experience in Indian Texts” This paper will open with the famous teaching of Satyakama in the Upanisads, wherein during his time in the forest, a bull teaches him the importance of being oriented to the four directions, the first "quarter" of his 16 fold learning experience. It will continue with a comparative analysis of the elemental and bodily aspects of human experience as articulated in the Sāṁkhya Kārikā, the Abhidharmakosha, and the Tattvarthasutra. The paper will conclude with passages in the Yogavasistha that connect inner space and outer space through the practice of concentration on Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Space. CHATTOPADHYAY, Sanskriti (Manipal University, India) “When in Mirror: Parallel ‘Place’ in ‘Film-‘Space’’ Tuan’s ‘undifferentiated’ ‘space’ gains value and familiarity to become ‘place’. The reality of ‘place’ though is geographical and physical for him, in the domain of film becomes reality of a different kind. The question thus becomes that of a possibility of the construction of ‘place’ in and from this domain that contains unique creation(s) of ‘space’. Images that (the analogy of Indian classical music can be drawn, as film practitioner and thinker Kumar Shahani did) ‘always lead from a kinetic home to a point of rest’ create the ‘space’ in and of the film. Thus the film becomes a domain that embodies ‘space’ –open, liberating, and challenging. Perception leads to an object-horizon/figure-ground dichotomy. From that dichotomy the domain begins to take a turn towards familiarizing ‘space’ in more concrete terms. Film is in search of tangible inhabitations of senses (or one may argue of these ‘sense- places’). From Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani to Deb Kamal Ganguly, in the works of the thinker-practitioner-makers of Indian film, the ‘place’ has been searched through sound, images, and through concept-images (conceptualized as a move from Deleuze’s time-image and movement-image). These concept-images have the possibility to create a rupture between the ordered relationships of signifier and signified. This rupture leads to an erosion of meaning making which affects the memory-experience and thus, in the next step, the intimate recognition and value endowment that converts ‘space’ into ‘place’. This may come across as the antithesis of the turn of ‘space’ to ‘place’ and yet it is not. Instead of a recognition of a representation (which it ruptures) of familiarity of a ‘place’, through an indulgence of proximate senses as well as the distant senses this practice create a presentation (which is built) of a new ‘place’. The experience and reaction to this sense of ‘place’ thus becomes one that is unique to the domain that is projected singularly by film. The body of film that arose out of the culture of materiality and the body of video that developed on malleability of image construction have separate sense of ‘space’ embedded in them. The expression of the move from ‘space’ to ‘place’ hence is different as well. For the purpose of this research endeavour one shall study into both the body of films by Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani, and video by Deb Kamal Ganguly to perceive and compare the flexibility of this creation in different formations of visual art. CHEN, I-Hsin (The University of Manchester, UK) “A Place to Meditate: James Legge’s Translation of Xin 心” James Legge’s (1815–1897) translation of xin 心 in his annotated Chinese Classics (1861; 1893) serves as an excellent example of how translating a key Chinese philosophical concept for an English-speaking international audience is able to create a place for metaphysical meditation on the higher purpose of humanity. Legge translates xin variously into “mind,” “heart,” “soul,” “spirit,” “higher nature,” and “the right way” based on his dynamic understandings of the meanings and contexts of Ruist/Confucian teachings. While modern scholarship has established Legge as a pioneering missionary, sinologist, and translator, my paper suggests that Legge’s translation of xin reveals his role as a philosopher who attempts to build thoughtful connections between the Chinese and Western intellectual traditions from antiquity to the contemporary. For Legge, xin generates universal spaces of thought on the opposition between the animal human and the mind of reason, the dialectic relation between the quiescent and the active, and the transcendence from the selfish desires to the principle of Heaven. By looking at Legge’s nuanced comprehension of xin, the paper demonstrates how Legge draws inspiration from the ancient sources, the commentaries by Zhu Xi and others, and Christian discourses in order to enrich the spaces of his interpretations, and how he transforms these spaces into a place to meditate through cross-cultural hermeneutics. 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