Atman in Advaita Vedanta: Variations on a theme from the Principal Upanishads”
HEMMINGSEN, Michael (McMaster University, Canada)
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- HENKEL, Jeremy (Wofford College) “The Inescapable Contingency of the Dhamma: Applying the Buddhist Critique of Essences to Buddhism”
- HEPACH, Maximilian Gregor (University of Freiburg, Germany) “Attempting a ‘ Philosophy of Climate ”
- HEYD, Thomas (University of Victoria, Canada) “Pilgrimage journeying in Bashō and Alexander von Humboldt”
- HIGGINS, Kathleen (University of Texas at Austin) “Putting the Dead in their Place”
- HOWARD, Veena (California State University, Fresno) “Queen Gāndhārī’s Mapping the Battlefield: Reversing the Gaze from Detached Dispassion to Dynamic Interplay of Emotions”
- HUANG, Yong (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) “Environmental Virtue Ethics: Contributions from the Confucian Tradition”
- HUFF, Benjamin ( Randolph-Macon College) “Servants of Heaven: The Confucian Gentleman’s Place Within the Cosmos”
- HUNG, Ruyu (National Chiayi University, Taiwan) “Critical Trilogy of Place: A Heideggerian Reflection on the Conflict over Land Development in a Taiwanese Village”
- HUNTINGTON, Patricia (Arizona State University) “Exploring the Place of Karma in Colonial Displacements: Basho, The Western Apache, and Yocagara”
HEMMINGSEN, Michael (McMaster University, Canada) “Place-Based Reasons in Non-Western Thought” In this paper I describe a place-based kind of validity claim that I refer to as “ecological truth”, and suggest that it shows up the limitations of Jurgen Habermas’ ontology of reasons. Habermas suggests that there are three kinds of reasons that are able to be offered in discourse: claims of fact, claims of normative validity and claims of honest self-expression. These three kinds of reason constitute, he thinks, the full range of validity claims available to us, and he identifies the ability to clearly distinguish between them as a specifically modern accomplishment. He holds that non-modern societies, many indigenous ones among them, blur the lines between these three categories and hence fall short of the ideal practices of discourse. Ecological truth, I suggest, is a kind of reason available in discourse that is rooted in a close intertwining of practices and communities with particular ecologies and environments that cannot be subsumed into the categories of fact, norm and self-expression. As such, I question Habermas’ certainty that he has charted the full extent of the kinds of reasons available to human beings. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos argues, “there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice.” I ask, therefore, why the three kinds of reasons used by “modern” Westerners should constitute the basic set, deviation from which equates to a failure of understanding. Using the example of “ecological truth” as an alternative kind of reason, I argue that, rather than being a confused blurring of the lines of the ideal set of reasons, expressions on the part of indigenous and “traditional” societies that do not conform to Habermas’ categories of fact, norm or self-expression are just as likely to be instances of an expanded ontology of reasons that are equally legitimate. HENKEL, Jeremy (Wofford College) “The Inescapable Contingency of the Dhamma: Applying the Buddhist Critique of Essences to Buddhism” If the Buddhist critique of essences is correct, it follows that there is no essence of Buddhism. But if this is the case, then what if any criterion can we use to determine whether any particular thinker or school of thought can appropriately be called Buddhist? If no objective criterion can be identified, then self-attribution risks becoming immune to error: Dōgen is a Buddhist because he says he is, and Śāṃkara is not a Buddhist because he says he’s not, and there’s no more to the issue than each individual’s claims. But, as Wittgenstein teaches us, if there is no way to be incorrect, then both correctness and incorrectness are rendered senseless. If this analysis is correct, then the Buddhist critique of essences seems to collapse under its own weight. But this conclusion need not be understood as a reductio of the Buddhist denial of essences. My thesis in this presentation is that we can identify an objective criterion for identifying a school as Buddhist while embracing the Buddhist denial of essences. We can do this by looking not for some one thing that all forms of Buddhism are, but rather for something that all forms of Buddhism do. Buddhism is not, fundamentally, any particular teaching, practice, or doctrine, nor some set thereof. Rather, Buddhism is an approach, a methodology. Specifically, Buddhism is a methodology for responding to a dominant ideology. This feature of Buddhism, I contend, explains why Buddhism can manifest in such varied ways and still be recognizable as Buddhism. Buddhism is inescapably contingent and hybridized—always existing in dependence on and in response to a dominant cultural milieu. HEPACH, Maximilian Gregor (University of Freiburg, Germany) “Attempting a ‘Philosophy of Climate” The places we find ourselves in everyday are themselves always in some sort of climate. We may first think of the climate zone we live in, or of the current season that has been influencing our mood. But even our indoor spaces are ‘well tempered’: Most of us spend our days feeling the constant climate of a warm Central European day in May year-round, literally conditioning the air to our needs. In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger dedicates most of his book to understanding the structure of our everyday existence in the world, yet the spatial dimension of our existence seems to fall short. As Watsuji Tetsuro points out eloquently in “Climate and Culture”, Heidegger neglects to emphasize that our being-in-the-world is always attuned to a certain climate. For Watsuji climate does not just describe ‘long-term weather’, but also the topography we find ourselves in. We may think of fertile soil as a good example for the complexity of climate: The fertility of soil is dependent not only on a certain amount of rain and suitable temperatures, but also on the right physical properties and nutrients of/in the ground. Furthermore, soil is only fertile insofar as it is fertile for something, for certain plants to grow, or for people to be able to live off of the land. Yet climate is not only experienced as something seemingly ‘objective’ in the world; our own emotions may very well be experienced as a form of climate or weather, as Hermann Schmitz points out. We may be swept up by a mood that fills the air, or be aware of the tense atmosphere in the room we are in. In a more general sense we also speak of intellectual or political climates that determine what can be thought, done and said. What all these aspects of climate show, is that climate is not a single observable phenomena, but rather something of which we are both a part and which determines who we are in existential ways. Aspects of what I have here called ‘climate’ seem to turn up in terms such as the between, which Heidegger develops in his later work, or the Chinese/Japanese term ki,2 which may come closest to describing what I am after here: something in which everything is, and which is seemingly between everything. The place in which everything takes place? To think about climate means to reflect upon all the different ways we influence the world around us, and how our environment in turn influences us. Difficulties begin to arise when we begin to ask even the simplest questions, such as what is cold when we feel cold: is it the air, or us? In the following I hope to illuminate this fabric of climate, of place, we are woven into. HEYD, Thomas (University of Victoria, Canada) “Pilgrimage journeying in Bashō and Alexander von Humboldt” In this presentation I argue for the place-making power of pilgrimage journeying by comparing the travel accounts of Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694) in Oku no hosomichi and Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) in Voyage aux régions equinoxiales du Nouveau Continent. I propose that both Bashō’s fictionalised account of his travel to remote regions of Japan, climaxing in his visit to Dewa Sanzan, and von Humboldt’s walk to the summit of the Teide volcano on the island of Tenerife, in the Canary Isles, constitute pilgrimages, albeit not religious. I argue that their journeys both reinforce and reconstitute their destinations as places, carving them out of the surrounding space. As a result of their respective journeys their destinations stand out as infused with particular meaning, which later visitors may seek to reconstruct and reaffirm through their own journeys. HIGGINS, Kathleen (University of Texas at Austin) “Putting the Dead in their Place” Place seems to be a notion that is inapplicable to the dead, for in a straightforward way they are no longer situated within our time-space continuum. Yet in part for this reason, their living survivors struggle to find a place for them. Whether or not this struggle plays out in the appropriation of literal places varies with cultures. Some, such as those that have a tradition of sky burial, eschew associating terrestrial places with particular dead individuals. But in many societies, living people create and mark sites for relating to the deceased in the form of burial and reburial sites, memorials, shrines, altars, dedicated spaces, and images that symbolically revive the dead (such as paintings, photographs, and sculptures). The practice of dedicating literal places to the dead serves a number of functions that benefit bereaved people (whether considered individually or as groups). The very gesture of marking a place for the dead helps to restore a sense of normalcy to our world after the presumption of continuity in space and time has been disrupted by a cherished person’s death. Such places also enable the living to act on behalf of the dead in a context in which one’s efforts seem otherwise ineffectual and one’s sense of failing the deceased may be acute. As sites of action for sheltering the dead (tending to their remains and honoring them and their legacies), such places help the living to re-assert relationships of caring and close connection with the deceased. By providing a space in which the person’s absence can be felt as present, they provide the living with a focus for communicative gestures directed toward the deceased person, satisfying a desire that may otherwise be frustrated. Such places can also reassure the living that a beloved individual will not be forgotten, for they are often marked by some announcement that reminds the world of what it has lost with this person’s death. However, literal places for the dead have their ironies. Robert Musil argues that memorials erected to preserve people and events in our memories are especially ineffective for this purpose, for they become part of the landscape that we typically ignore as we pass by. Moreover, even though the places deliberately associated with a deceased person can help to summon up a sense of that person’s presence for the living, they draw attention to the person’s absence. That absence can be a real presence, but the memory can be at least as painful as reassuring. Such places are also potential sites of collision between our memories of the deceased and the imaginings we have of the person as now having an alien status or lacking existence entirely. One might see the effort to find a literal place for the dead as ill-conceived, if understandable. It might seem a gesture of denial in the face of reality, a fetishizing of the remains of the person, or a form of concretizing of wishes that cannot be fulfilled. But the possibility of maintaining a meaningful place for the dead in the sense of having a degree of a “live” relationship with them is not delusory. A living person can do this by placing the relationship with a deceased person on a new footing, now in the role of a guide and perhaps an ancestor. While this involves considerable work of creative imagination on the part of the living person, such active relating can involve honoring, deferring to, and even negotiate with someone who is dead. It can result in finding new meanings in the relationship. While literal places and spaces can serve facilitative roles, they do not on their own ensure a place for the dead in our lives. But to the extent that the living person remains open and responsive, relationships with the dead can continue to develop. We cannot know what we are to the dead, if such a notion is even coherent. But we can keep learning and cherishing what they are to us, and in doing so we make and maintain a place for the dead. HOWARD, Veena (California State University, Fresno) “Queen Gāndhārī’s Mapping the Battlefield: Reversing the Gaze from Detached Dispassion to Dynamic Interplay of Emotions” Within the epic poem Mahābhārata, the “Book of the Women,” Queen Gāndhārī laments the “Great War,” in which all of her heroic sons and allies are killed and their wives remain widowed. The Queen surveys the battlefield, showing Lord Kṛṣṇa decapitated bodies and scattered limbs of the warriors while describing their heroic traits and the glorious lives they once lived. Gāndhārī’s mapping of the post-war battlefield of loss and lamentation is in stark contrast to Krishna’s pre-war mapping of the battlefield arrayed with warriors seeking glory of Kṣatriya dharma. Her graphic tale, recounting the loss experienced by women as the result of this war, invokes strong feelings of grief, disgust, and compassion on the part of listeners. Set on the field of Kurukṣetra, the “Book of Women” acts as a cautionary tale questioning the virtues of impervious machismo and stoic asceticism. The religious value of the transcendence of emotions — “detached quietism” —is challenged through display of raw emotions. Making powerful use of bodily metaphor, severed heads show mind and body are literally at a disconnect. The supposedly heroic male form, now shattered throughout the battlefield, is juxtaposed with the open vulnerability, empathy and compassion as articulated in the bodies of the grieving widows— revealing true strength and resilience. Finally, the lament incites a dispelling of grief, and thus, as a form of catharsis marks the beginning of a healing process. This paper examines the power of dynamic interplay of emotions, extolled in the “Book of the Women,” in opposition with the lauded detachment from emotions championed in numerous Indian philosophical texts, including the Bhagavad-Gītā. Through this investigation, it explores the transformative and liberating power of emotions, specifically of sorrow and compassion (karuṇa), through literary and philosophical approaches to aesthetic concept of rasa (“aesthetic delight”). HUANG, Yong (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) “Environmental Virtue Ethics: Contributions from the Confucian Tradition” Environmental ethics has been dominated by utilitarianism and deontology. However, in recent years, dissatisfied with these two approaches, a number of scholars, such as Thomas Hill, Bill Shaw, Ronald Sandler, Philip Cafaro, and Louke van Wensveen, have developed the virtue ethics approach to the issue of environment. As impressive as their works are, this approach also has its own problem. In his influential essay, “Environmental Virtue Ethics: Half Truth but Dangerous as a Whole,” Holmes Rolston III points out that environmental virtue ethics, based in the Aristotelian tradition, is focused on the eudaimonia of the virtuous agents, thus rendering our care for the environment as merely instrumental to our own well-being and unable to recognize the inherent value of the environment itself. In this paper, I shall offer a Confucian version of environmental virtue ethics, which can avoid this problem. I shall develop this Confucian version of environment virtue ethics primarily along the lines suggested by neo-Confucian Cheng Hao and Wang Yangming with their central idea of being on one body with ten thousand things. In their view, a person of ren, the most important Confucian virtue, is one who can feel the itches and pains of everything in the world and thus is naturally inclined to help them get rid of these pain and itches. In this process, the virtuous agents gradually feel that they are in one body with ten thousand things. This version of environmental virtue ethics, just like any other versions of environmental virtue ethics, indeed just like any version of virtue ethics, is also focused on the virtuous person. However, since this virtuous person considers everything in the universe to be part of his/her own body, his/her care for the environment is also for the sake of the environment itself. Indeed, the very distinction between the virtuous agent and the environment no long exists. HUFF, Benjamin (Randolph-Macon College) “Servants of Heaven: The Confucian Gentleman’s Place Within the Cosmos” The nature of the cosmos and humanity’s role within it are fundamental concerns of early Confucian thought. Confucian standards and aspirations are rooted in both an understanding of Tian or Heaven as the place in which human life unfolds, and also of the place of humanity within the cosmic system. Heaven’s mandate or ming both governs events outside of human control and provides a normative standard for human behavior. Hence understanding Tian and ming is essential to the Confucian ethos: “One who does not understand fate (ming) lacks the means to become a gentleman.”
Slingerland takes the somewhat milder view that the gentleman should feel “indifference” toward ming. In this paper I argue, however, that the early Confucian conceptions of Tian and ming are quite consistent and unified, and that the Confucian view of how one should relate to them is similarly unified. The gentleman consistently regards Tian as a beneficent, ordering force. Moreover, he strives to harmonize with ming as manifested in outward events as well as in the moral standard it sets. Far from something distant, he regards ming as something deeply personal, the basis and content of many of his most important actions. That is to say, his relationship with Heaven is not passive but active, not distant but intimate. Kongzi and Mengzi, I argue, fundamentally understand themselves as servants of Heaven. Heaven has assigned them a task, which they regard as their ming, both in the sense of a command they have received and a mandate they bear. This task is essentially continuous with the task, or mandate, of King Wen and the Duke of Zhou. Kongzi and Mengzi endeavor to carry it out despite its loftiness and difficulty. They regard Heaven not merely with respect, but with loyalty and affection. Further, as bearers of its charge, they trust that Heaven will sustain them and open a path for them to succeed, even though they are far from certain just how this path will unfold. Finally, they urge all human beings to join them in serving Heaven by nurturing its gift of human nature (xing) and living by the virtues that are its fruits. HUNG, Ruyu (National Chiayi University, Taiwan) “Critical Trilogy of Place: A Heideggerian Reflection on the Conflict over Land Development in a Taiwanese Village” This paper explores the meaning of dwelling in terms of critical trilogy of place. The critical trilogy is a transformative framework adapted from Gruenewald’s critical pedagogy of place and Heidegger’s philosophical work on dwelling: a critical trilogy of place. The critical trilogy of place, which is composed of decentralisation, reinhabitation, and regermination, reveals the profound meaning of the relationship between human beings and place when applied to a case of land ab/use in Dapu in Taiwan. Through the lens of the critical trilogy, the deep sense of interconnectedness and multi-dimensional relationships between people and place in relation to Heidegger’s notion of dwelling is to be enfolded. This exploration concludes that to dwell in place is an unbeatable longing which sustains living and learning on earth. HUNTINGTON, Patricia (Arizona State University) “Exploring the Place of Karma in Colonial Displacements: Basho, The Western Apache, and Yocagara” The Western Apache hold that place constitutes a greater self of the people because, to borrow Keith Basso’s phrase, “memory sits in places.” In hope of balancing a compassionate attitude toward colonial displacement with the Buddhist path to renunciation of attachment, I will explore the Apache sense of collective memory as located in places through a karmic lens. Places arguably hold karma and karmic streams define our sense of place at both individual and collective levels. I aim to demonstrate that a concrete and lived sense of place resides at the intersection of karma and dharma. Drawing upon Basho’s poetry and Yogacara, I first advance the claim that overcoming karmic conditioning entails a radical renunciation of the desire to inhabit a particular kind of place. The felt need for specific conditions – and by extension a sense of implacement (in Ed Casey’s sense) in a particular geography, land, people, or cultural setting – impedes awakening from attachment to the self. For the enlightened mind the quest for place must give way to journey. Nevertheless, the second claim I wish to advance reflects the paradoxical experience that spiritual renunciation of place, manifest and symbolized in Basho’s life as wandering, allows each place to grant its peculiar implacement for the temporal duration it can have and the lessons it can impart. I will link karma to longings old and new, and to the alaya-vijnana or store consciousness. Karma, I suggest, is tied distinctly to past loss or failure and this eon-long sense of loss provides a background horizon for feeling present losses, failings, atrocities and prospects of loss or tragedy. Dharma, by contrast, I will link to the boundless spatiality of mind (and Great Mirror Cognition) that exceeds time and space and thus avails people of healing and transformation but without obliterating the realities of unrecoverable loss. To the contrary, dharmic living, I hope to show, supports, rather than impedes, rejuvenated engagement with place both by enabling us to grasp the depth of loss and by accounting for how displaced peoples, as American tribes have stated in their own words, survive. Complexities arise when comparing cases of colonial displacement. In the case of Drochu-la pass in Bhutan, where a yearly festival commemorates the death of the Assan, a stolid sense of place can threaten to effectuate a second, post-conflict displacement by covering over the atrocity of massacre and reifying memory. In the case of Western Apache we witness the longstanding effects of displacement in simple erosion of memory. Yet when practices of memorialization and efforts to recover lost heritage reify memory (or objectify the alaya-vijnana), they can displace victims and perpetrators alike from their living karmic inheritance as peoples historically intertwined. Enacted instead as explorations of karmic streams and lamentable acts, festivals of memoralization can recover a genuine sense of implacement as a lived reality with collective acceptance of moral debt. Longing for a complacent, sedentary sense of peace cannot capture Buddhist dharma. Basho's mature poetics provide a lens through which to reveal the interconnected nature of karma and dharma as what grants a lived and changing sense of place. His wandering poetry avails people of a restored sense of karmic inheritance that, precisely because it resists reification, upsets an easy and comfortable home placement. By this jolt, his poetics send people to wander within their histories and traditions to recover painful memories and spark change. Rest and healing arrive, arguably, through journey and by bringing karmic lines forth toward possible ripening and exhaustion. Implacement or being at home in place cannot be lived, I suggest, outside dharmic transformation. Realizing place involves loss and labored renewal, recovery of unhappy memories equally as acceptance of unnameable losses, and accountability for crimes that cannot be undone but which, when released from appropriation, can be let to work their ripening power of effect. 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. 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