Atman in Advaita Vedanta: Variations on a theme from the Principal Upanishads”
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- SPONSEL, Les (University of Hawai’i) and Poranee NATADECHA-SPONSEL (Chaminade University) “Sacred Places: What Can a Philosopher Say”
- STALNAKER, Aaron (Indiana University) “An Early Confucian Theory of Shared Practice”
- STERNER, Gregory ( West Chester University of Pennsylvania) “Placing One’s Self in the World: A Moral Duty to Resonate”
- STOLL, Joshua (University of Hawai’i) “Where is My Mind On the Implacement of Self”
- STOREY, David (Boston College) “Wisdom at Work: Philosophy in the Agora ”
- STRUHL, Karsten J. (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY) “Buddhism and Marxism: Points of Intersection”
- SUHRUD, Tridip (Gandhi Ashram, India) “Walking to Truth”
- SULLIVAN, Ian M. (University of Hawai’i) “The Sage in Silicon Valley: A Confucian Sense of Place in the Age of the Internet”
- SUNDSTROM, Ronald R. (University of San Francisco) “Yi Fu-Tuan, The Lived Experience of Place and the Disruptions of Gentrification”
- TABATA, Taketo (Miyagi University of Education, Japan) “The Phenomenology of the Group Dialogue: The Description of the Intellectually Safe Place of p4c Sendai in Japan”
| Particularist Bioethics”
Principlist ethical justification pervades American bioethics, from the Belmont Report to Tom Beauchamp and James Childress’ Principles of Biomedical Ethics. Yet how useful are these principles in resolving difficult cases that arise in research and clinical settings in diverse places and within different cultures? There are strong indications that the answer to this question is “no.” As Renee Fox quoted William LaFleur in her acceptance of the Henry Knowles Beecher award at the 2015 American Society of Bioethics and Humanities meeting, “bioethics has become more international without becoming internationalized.” Fox herself had already observed in 1984 that principlist methodology in bioethics “contribute(s) to its inadvertent propensity to reflect and systematically support conventional, relatively conservative American concepts, values, and beliefs.” In this presentation, I describe an alternative method of assessing and evaluating ethical arguments in bioethics. This method, which I term “particularist bioethics,” approaches bioethical issues from the ground-up, rather than from the top-down. Drawing from metaethical defenses of moral particularism, I show how evaluating the ethical justification of a given biomedical practice entails providing a critical picture of the practice on multiple dimensions: institutional standards, relevant concepts, social expectations, empirical data, and so on. The practice is not measured against an ideal or principle, but is judged in terms of its specific purposes, meanings, and expectations. I suggest how particularist bioethics can be used to analyze two different practices: stem cell research in Japan and stem cell research in the U.S. I propose that different ethical issues arise in these two practices because each is located in a particular place, within particular institutions, and based on particular assumptions. These examples give a clear picture of what a particularist analysis might look like and how it can contribute to ethical justification in bioethics. SPONSEL, Les (University of Hawai’i) and Poranee NATADECHA-SPONSEL (Chaminade University) “Sacred Places: What Can a Philosopher Say?” Sacred places are particular sites, areas, and/or landscapes possessing one or more attributes that distinguish them as somehow quite extraordinary, usually in a religious or spiritual sense. Individuals may experience a sacred place in different ways as a site of awe, mystery, power, fascination, attraction, connectedness, oneness, danger, ordeal, healing, ritual, meaning, identity, revelation, and/or transformation. Sacred places are an integral part of the human condition and experience as an ancient cross-cultural universal. Billions of people throughout the world variously recognize and appreciate the special meanings and significances of certain sacred places in their own habitats and elsewhere. Many of these sites attract pilgrims and tourists, some sites with thousands or even millions of visitors annually, as for example Lourdes in France or Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Moreover, it is more than simply curious that individuals from many different ecological, cultural, religious, and national backgrounds may quite independently view the same site as sacred. For example, Mount Kailas in Tibet is sacred to adherents of the indigenous Bon religion, Buddhists, Hindus, and Jains as well as some Westerners. How might a philosopher explain the existence, meaning, and significance of sacred places in general? Moreover, might there be something inherent in the place that attracts attention as sacred from people of diverse backgrounds? These and other questions will be explored from a philosophical perspective with an emphasis on the theories of environmental ethics. In looking at sacred places from some philosophical perspectives we need to discuss the relationships between sacred places as objects and human beings as subjects. How do humans view sacred places in terms of their own virtues either as intrinsic values or as the instrumental values these places render to the benefit of the wellbeing of humankind. Will John Stuart Mill’s utilitarian approach be the best explanation? William James’s the will to belief can help to understand why sacredness is attached to such places. Arthur Schopenhauer’s attempt to explain our experiences as the objectification of the will should lead us to see the distinction between reality and appearance, and also how we might see the universalistic and individualistic views in these sacred places. Being-in-itself and being-for-itself as Jean Paul Sartre explains how we know our world can further differentiate the perceptions of sacred places. Buddhist teachings represent an Eastern world view of sacred places from the basic Four Noble Truths and the practical ethics of the Noble Eightfold Path. Right thoughts and right livelihood are the focal points of do no harm to others which in turn reduce suffering and increase happiness. For Buddhists sacred places can represent a sanctuary from greed and anger where loving kindness and compassion dwell. The Buddhist concept of interconnectedness helps to explain how sacred places are relevant to Buddhists. The environmental ethical theories will be discussed within the scope of the existence and function of sacred places. The anthropocentric and ecocentric approaches will explore the moral consideration of sacred places. STALNAKER, Aaron (Indiana University) “An Early Confucian Theory of Shared Practice” Several analysts have argued that the dào or “way” of the early Rú or “Confucians” is practical in the sense that it concerns human life and its proper organization. I think the early Confucians should be seen as practical because they are very concerned with the actual practices people engage in, and view the dào as consisting of repeated activities that shape human relationships, character, and embodied skills. This approach builds on long-standing scholarly fascination with Confucian “self-cultivation,” but extends it to focus on the formative and expressive practices the early Rú advocated, as well as their richly elaborated views of human relationships, roles, and how individual development relies on and fits into the web of human relationships. According to early Rú sources, following the Way requires teachers and students to engage in long-term relationships of practical training in crucial arts such as ritual and music, together with textual study and a communal life in the study group. Mastery of these arts and practices, when properly integrated together, constitute mastery of the dào as a whole. And Confucian analysis of the transmission of traditions of practice suggests that while some practices, such as ritual, are crucial to the cultivation of virtuous skill mastery (dé 德), a greater variety of practices, such as archery, have the potential to be practiced so that they contribute to real mastery, even if they are more vulnerable to failure and deformation. Thus the early Rú see a spectrum of practices from the most humanly essential and generally valuable, on the one hand, to the most narrow and inessential, on the other, with important consequences for thinking about how best to approach and understand a variety of human activities that many already perform. My approach to these issues is to interpret the early Rú as “practice theorists” in their own right, rather than as exemplifying some contemporary theory such as that of Pierre Bourdieu. STERNER, Gregory (West Chester University of Pennsylvania) “Placing One’s Self in the World: A Moral Duty to Resonate” In this study, I will argue the position that resonation with the myriad things (every aspect of society from one’s self, to nature, to one’s fellow human beings) is a moral duty, following from the Confucian notion of social propriety and fulfilling one’s role in the larger world. One of the five social relationships Confucius highlighted in the Analects, which must be honored as a matter of duty, was Master and Servant. He spoke of the Master and Servant relationship (as well as Parents/Children, Husband/Wife, Elder Sibling/Younger Sibling, and Friend/Friend) in the context of filial piety (honoring one’s parents and ancestors in deference and their name in action), but also within a larger vision of social propriety. Confucius regarded the family as a microcosm of the overarching structure of society over the individual. I will examine how the Master/Servant relationship can be extended to encompass the master (society) and the servant (one’s self) and what honoring one’s duty in this context looks like. I will also compare and contrast the Eastern Confucian idea of social propriety with the Western Platonic concept of Justice as well as the Eastern Confucian notion of following yi (right moral action) in the context of li (propriety) with the Western Aristotelian idea of “right reason.” I will examine the function of resonation itself in the process of connecting societal relationships to the end of moral correctness and social justice. Furthermore, I will explore the idea of resonation as practice, relating specifically to looking inward, honestly appraising one’s abilities and strengths, recognizing one’s weaknesses (and in addition, what position or polarity one occupies in location among the other myriad things) and pursuing a vocation (role) appropriate to both and in conjunction with the needs of the larger world. STOLL, Joshua (University of Hawai’i) “Where is My Mind? On the Implacement of Self” As we go about our lives we are, of necessity, tied to others in some manner. But those others are still very much other no matter how close to oneself they are. Though you are here with me at some place, you can never be here, in my place. As suggested in Abhinavagupta’s Parātrīśikāvivaraṇa, the world itself, the place where we meet, comes about through the space that grows out of and through what occurs between us. As social creatures perpetually in each other’s presence, perhaps even in solitude, we are intimately, albeit subtly, involved in the development of everybody else, indeed of the world itself. But despite this multiplicitous occurrence of people in the world, things seem to only ever be present to me – whoever that is. In light of this of this paradoxical juxtaposition of myself and others which opens up a world, this talk will investigate the question of not just who I am – i.e. who is the one to whom things are present – but where the events that constitute my mind, my experience, occur. It will ask and analyze the question “Where is my mind?” To this end, I will look at Jonardon Ganeri’s recent ‘ownership view’ of selfhood, the idea that a self is the necessarily embodied endorsement of and claim to clusters of intentions and preferences, conscious or not, regulated by normative emotional responses to the environment. Although Ganeri, following Peter Strawson, takes it that such a self is necessarily social, he doesn’t delve much into sociality itself. To make more explicit the social ‘location’ of human persons, I will explore Abhinavagupta’s discussion of the world coming about through the questioning of Śiva by Śakti. Next I will emphasize Emmanuel Levinas’ claim in Alterity and Transcendence that ethics is a matter of an immediate fear, in the face of the other, of literally taking their place, that is, of eliminating them from the world. Finally I will discuss the sort of multiplicitous and relational conceptions being emphasized by feminist thinkers. These points will culminate in the idea that the self is in an embodied mind’s being prompted by another. Thus, if for Ganeri the self is the place (ādhāra) – irreducible to the body though necessarily grounded in it – where the mind occurs and is thus owned, then this can only be because of the way we are perpetually already implaced (to use a term of Edwin Casey’s) in the yawning gap that opens up between us in social engagement. In order for there to be a ‘first person stance,’ to use Ganeri’s phrase, one must always already be seconded by the other, that is to say placed, by others, among the array of social possibilities. STOREY, David (Boston College) “Wisdom at Work: Philosophy in the Agora” We take for granted that the proper place of philosophy is in the academy, yet the academy is not where philosophy was born. When students leave the university, they are told they are entering the “real world.” This signals that philosophy has no place or use in their professional and personal lives. It seems odd that people are generally only exposed to what are arguably the richest resources humanity has developed to help them live wisely and well for four years in their youth. This is even stranger when we consider that Western philosophy’s birthplace was the marketplace, and was only later institutionalized in an academy. In this presentation, I argue that we are in the midst of a renaissance of what Pierre Hadot called “philosophy as a way of life” and explore its implications for the future of philosophy within and beyond the academy. This renaissance is unsurprising given that we now live in an informational economy based more on the exchange of information and ideas than an industrial economy in which philosophy was confined to the academy. The signs of philosophy’s return to the marketplace are ubiquitous: a bevy of popular books and blogs by philosophers and about philosophy in everyday work and life; the explosion of interest in mindfulness meditation; the emergence of “in-house philosophers” at companies like Google; the growth of ethics consulting companies and corporate social responsibility; the rise of philosophical counseling and consulting, Philosophy For Children, and the growth of Stoic-inspired cognitive-behavioral-therapy in psychotherapy. I see these as anomalies pointing to a tectonic shift already in motion, a change in the role and place of philosophy in contemporary life. These trends are emerging at a time when the academic job market is hemorrhaging, the future and purpose of higher education as we know it seem unclear, and accelerating automation makes the future of work itself look frighteningly uncertain. My argument is not against academic philosophy, but against the idea, embraced explicitly or tacitly by many academics and many lay people, that the academy is the proper—that is, exclusive and best--place for philosophy. I argue that our mission has changed. We do not need “research,” but “outreach”: the use of skillful means to midwife wisdom in sundry sectors. The operative symbol should be not the philosopher escaping the cave/marketplace to seize wisdom, but returning to the cave to awaken others; not the stone Buddha sitting on the mountaintop, but the merry monk entering the marketplace with bliss-bestowing hands. As Plato warns in the Republic, we must not allow the people who escape the cave to dwell in the “Isles of the Blessed.” And to adapt his adage, the world will know no end to suffering until businessmen become Bodhisattvas or Bodhisattvas become businessmen. To this end, I offer several proposals for the future of graduate education in philosophy. First, graduate programs should aim to change their culture, so that successful placement is not defined as obtaining a tenure-track job. Second, the role of the placement officer should be given pride of place within departments, expanded to include non-academic careers, and integrated with the universities career services. Third, departments should keep meticulous data on alumni so that students can connect with those who charted a path out of the academy. Fourth, given that we live in the age of the internship, departments should broker graduate student internships at think tanks, non-profits, and businesses, along the lines of service-learning programs. Fifth, as a profession we should be taking seriously the philosophy of work and leisure, especially as it pertains to the mission of a university in the 21st century. Our schools today are hardly places of true schole—leisure—and the future of automation is likely to dramatically change the meaning and relationship of work and leisure. The animating goal of these initiatives is to better adapt academic training in philosophy to the needs of a warping world in a way that does not water down the reservoirs of its ancient traditions. STRUHL, Karsten J. (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY) “Buddhism and Marxism: Points of Intersection” In this essay, I will focus first on the general concern which informs both perspectives – their respective analyses of the causes of suffering. For Buddhism, suffering (dukkha) has a fundamental ontological cause – the illusion of self and its attendant desires, cravings, and attachments. For Marxism, suffering is caused by the division of labor, class exploitation, alienation, and the illusion that these are necessary. Second, I will discuss their respective understanding of the overcoming of suffering. For Buddhism, this requires extinguishing the illusion of self and its attendant desires, cravings, and attachments. For Marxism, this requires the construction of a classless society which would ultimately overcome all divisions of labor and forms of domination and their attendant ideological illusions. Third, I will focus on their respective practices to achieve the overcoming of suffering. This will include attention to engaged Buddhism as a revolutionary social practice. Finally, I will consider what each perspective can contribute to our confronting the fundamental existential crisis of the 21st century – climate change and the ecological crisis. I hope to demonstrate that Marxism and Buddhism can, in each of these areas, mutually enrich and support each other, offer constructive criticisms of each other, and intersect in ways that can help to change human consciousness and the world. As regards this last, I will argue that the historical creation of a society in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Marx) will require a human agency liberated from the illusion of self (Buddhism). SUHRUD, Tridip (Gandhi Ashram, India) “Walking to Truth” The Bhagvad Gita asks a question: How does a sthitpragna (one whose intellect is secure) move, sit, speak and Walk? M K Gandhi pursued a life-long quest to attain the ideal state as described in the Gita. We know of his direct speech and his practice of silence, his economy of prose which saw use of extra words as a practice akin to accumulation, his posture developed for hours of incessant spinning. And his walk? The images of a reed thin man, walking with long, impatient, rapid strides are etched in our minds. The staff (or stick) he carried grew longer with each passing year, till it grew longer than him. He walked daily, ritually to prison gates and back from his Ashram in Ahmedabad. He walked in South Africa with miners, and in Noakhali to wipe tears from every eye. He walked for Swaraj to Dandi from his Ashram in Ahmedabad. The essay seeks to understand Gandhi's practice of walking, trace its path from London, South Africa, Dandi, Noakhali, to his final walk to meet the assassin's bullets and find his Truth." 
SULLIVAN, Ian M. (University of Hawai’i) “The Sage in Silicon Valley: A Confucian Sense of Place in the Age of the Internet” In Confucian role ethics, a priority is given to one’s vital familial relations. Tied up in these emotionally and socially close relations is an element of spatial proximity as well, a physical closeness. Presumably, the historical need for such spatial proximity was part economic and part communicative. Economically, the establishment and maintenance of the family and home required labor that itself required physical presence. Communicatively, these narrative Confucian relations required communication and a constant co-creation of the relations, a reinvestment of them with meaning through shared and sharing experiences. When looking for ways in which classical Confucian values can be adapted to contemporary society, it is tempting to see the demand for spatial proximity as anachronistic. The economic well-being of the family no longer requires spatial proximity in terms of either labor or cash currency. Not only can I work far from my family—and sometimes must work far from my family thanks to corporate culture—but with the swipe of a finger across my smartphone I can transfer money back to parents or dependents and thereby contribute to the “home account.” Communicatively, the need for spatial proximity seems to have diminished as well. Social media allows me to share photos, videos, voice, and text messages from the opposite side of the world with little expense or effort. Experiences can be shared more readily and more effectively over great distances then ever before. Despite all of this, I will argue that spatial proximity, when fleshed out as a thick sense of place, remains a compelling reason to follow some version of the classical Confucian teachings on remaining spatially proximate and physically present. A shared physical environment imbued with personalized and shared meaning, namely a place, in which one shares a bodily proximity and thus the ability for bodily communication through touch, remains a paramount requirement for the growth, if not the very maintenance, of our vital relations. SUNDSTROM, Ronald R. (University of San Francisco) “Yi Fu-Tuan, The Lived Experience of Place and the Disruptions of Gentrification” There is a rich literature on the lived experience of place driven by research in phenomenology and cultural geography. The connections of these phenomenological approaches to issues of justice in cities and communities (e.g., concerns about housing inequality, gentrification, and displacement) have been largely evocative rather than robustly connected through the mechanics of theories of justice. In this paper, drawing on the work of Yi Fu-Tuan, I map out a series of connections between these two camps. I discuss how important but hidden normative features appear in competing definitions of gentrification provided by social scientists, developers, local government agencies, and community groups. Their competing conceptions of gentrification are value laden and partial, and incompletely deal with the normative concerns at the heart of anxieties over gentrification. I argue that analyzes of gentrification should learn from the anxious perspectives of poor communities, and not succumb to the temptation of allowing market-based reasoning to displace moral and political concerns about the rights of individuals and communities. Accounts of the lived experience of place are a valuable tool for considering those perspectives, and such analyses could be paired with the technical mechanisms of democratic egalitarian arguments about the needs of individuals and communities for capacity and community building. The result of this pairing is a critique of housing inequality based not just in distributive justice, but also in the appreciation of community capability, and the recognition of urban residents as equal democratic citizens. TABATA, Taketo (Miyagi University of Education, Japan) “The Phenomenology of the Group Dialogue: The Description of the Intellectually Safe Place of p4c Sendai in Japan” The purpose of this presentation is to give a phenomenological description of the group dialogue of philosophy for children Sendai (p4cS). P4cS comes from p4c Hawai‘i (p4cHI) and shares its ideas, tools and methods. In p4cS, a unique freedom emerges in the classroom. (1) At first, I distinguish p4cS group dialogue from standardized Japanese class teaching. Some features of the p4cSI/HI are shown; (a) the arrangement of desks in a circle without desks and not in rows behind desks, (b) the new lighthearted tool to communicate called the “Community Ball”, (c) the full articulation of the new rules of the dialogue, e.g., intellectual safety and only one who holds the community ball can speak and others should listen to him/her, (d) the new orientation not to answer but to listen to the questions from children, and (e) the change of the teacher’s leadership from the tyrannical to the democratic. These elements make a drastic change of the classroom, the teacher and children. This change is so radical that any unexpected good or bad events occurring in the class provide opportunities for the teacher to more deeply understand the children and for the children to develop themselves. (2) Second, I focus on the change of the teacher in the p4cS and describe his/her lived experience in terms of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. In p4cS the teacher should change his/her attitude as a “teacher” to a “facilitator”. The essential attitude of a teacher is teaching and leading, suggesting and guiding. In contrast, the teacher as a facilitator of p4cS stops to teach. The teacher “suspends” reflectively to teach and lead children. In addition he/she should “bracket” the rightness and various beliefs in his/her opinion, ideas and life-view, and open him/herself to the children’s rightness and beliefs. It’s like “ἐποχή (epokhe)”. However the “reduction” of the teacher isn’t as radical as that of a phenomenologist and remains partial. The teacher’s interest turns to serve the intellectually safe place and to let children speak and listen. The teacher doesn’t withdraw into the inner subjectivity but appears as a servant leader, a spectator and a participant in the outer intersubjectve world of the dialogue. (3) Third, the intellectually safe place of the p4cS dialogue is described as the place of the “appearance”―something that is being seen and heard by participants in terms of Hannah Arendt. Nevertheless, the speech and action in public that Arendt points out are not the same as those in the p4cS; speaking and listening after throwing and receiving the community ball in p4cS are kinds of “action” Arendt says. Speech and action reveal human unique distinctness. And to act means to take an initiative, to begin, to set something into motion. In this phenomenological point of view we can understand the reason why so many unexpected amazing events happen in p4cS/HI. 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