Category Archives: Indian Philosophy

New Series: Critical Overviews in Comparative Philosophy

From the description at the Rowman and Littlefield International website: http://www.rowmaninternational.com/news/critical-overviews-in-comparative-philosophy

The Critical Overviews in Comparative Philosophy series aims to present detailed and inclusive surveys of contemporary research in multiple areas of Asian and Comparative Philosophy. Each volume will outline and engage with the current research within comparative philosophy through the lenses of traditional philosophical areas such as ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and language/logic, offering those outside the fields in question (both scholars and students) an up-to-date picture of the work being done in these areas. This series will cover topics in East Asian and South Asian philosophy, primarily in a comparative context.

Each volume will be a single-authored work presenting, synthesizing, and analyzing recent developments in particular areas within a field of comparative research, as well as offering promising directions for future research, outlining possible objections and solutions, and considering ways the area might be further developed. Continue reading →

New Group Blog of Indian Philosophy Launched

Friend of the blog, Amod Lele, and a group of Indian Philosophy scholars have launched The Indian Philosophy Blog. We welcome it to the comparative philosophy blogosphere!

The list of contributors includes: Douglas Berger, Jason Birch, Daniele Cuneo, Matthew Dasti, Aleix Ruiz Falqués, Elisa Freschi, Elon Goldstein, Stephen Harris, Amod Lele, Ethan Mills, Andrew Ollett, Shyam Ranganathan, Agnieszka Rostalska, Justin Whitaker, and Mike Williams.

New Book Series

Sor-hoon Tan has asked me to share information about the new Bloomsbury Research Handbooks in Asian Philosophy.

Bringing together established academics and rising stars, Bloomsbury Research Handbooks in Asian Philosophy survey philosophical topics across all the main schools of Asian thought. Each volume focuses on the history and development of a core subject in a single tradition, asking how the field has changed, highlighting current disputes, anticipating new directions of study, illustrating the Western philosophical significance of a subject and demonstrating why a topic is important for understanding Asian thought.

The first set of titles includes:

  • The Bloomsbury Research Handbook to Chinese Philosophy and Gender, Edited by Ann A. Pang-White, University of Scranton, USA
  • The Bloomsbury Research Handbook to Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, Edited by Arindam Chakrabarti, University of Hawaii, Manoa, USA
  • The Bloomsbury Research Handbook to Indian Epistemology and Metaphysics, Edited by Joerg Tuske, Salisbury University, USA

Forthcoming volumes include: Chinese Aesthetics; Chinese Moral Psychology; Chinese Philosophy and Methodology; Indian Ethics; Indian Philosophy and Gender

More information is available here.

Panels at the 2013 AAR Meeting

There will be a number of panels focusing on Chinese and comparative philosophy at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in Baltimore, MD, beginning this weekend, Saturday, November 23rd, and running through Tuesday, November 26th.  For more information on specifics, see the AAR meeting website: http://www.aarweb.org/annual-meeting/general-information

The following are panels that I thought might be of interest to readers of this blog (these are just the ones I know of- if any of you know of others that may be of interest, feel free to add them in the comments line): Continue reading →

Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy lecture on Free Will in Indian Philosophy TOMORROW April 26 @5:30pm

THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes JOERG TUSKE,  Department of Philosophy, Salisbury University

With responses from David Nowakowski , Department of Philosophy, Princeton University

Please join us at Columbia University Department of Religion on March 22, 2013 at 5:30pm for his lecture entitled

Free Will in Indian Philosophy

ABSTRACT: Recent discussions of free will in Indian Philosophy have mainly focused on the problem in the context of Buddhist Philosophy. Buddhist philosophers reject the existence of the self and the question is whether they also reject the existence of free will. The answers to this question vary from philosophers who claim that Buddhists have to be determinists to philosophers who argue for some form of compatibilism with regards to Buddhist Philosophy. In my talk I will focus on free will in at least one of the non-Buddhist schools of Indian philosophy, the Navya-Nyāya school. I will argue that while the philosophers of this school believed in the existence of a self, it would not be accurate to label them with one of the Western positions on free will. In fact the whole concept of free will is problematic in the context of Indian philosophy. This also has consequences for the Buddhist positions and how we classify them. Continue reading →

Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy lecture on the Bhagavad Gita TODAY March 1 @5:30pm

THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes SANDEEP SREEKUMAR (The City University of New York, Baruch College)

With responses from Gary Ostertag, Director of the Saul Kripke Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Please join us at Columbia University Department of Religion today (March 1, 2013) at 5:30pm for his lecture entitled

The Elimination of Moral Agency: The Trajectory of Krishna’s Argument in the Gita Continue reading →

AAR “Religions in Chinese and Indian Cultures” Group CFP: Emotions

Dear colleagues,

AAR CFP deadline (March 1) is fast approaching. Here is the CFP of our group:

“This Group wishes to explore the various representations of emotions
within the Chinese and Indian religious traditions — particularly
engaging textually with both Chinese and Indian materials. We
especially encourage presentations by a specialist in one tradition to
engage a text from the other tradition….

Continue reading →

Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy lecture on the Bhagavad Gita March 1 @5:30pm

THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes SANDEEP SREEKUMAR (The City University of New York, Baruch College)

With responses from Gary Ostertag, Director of the Saul Kripke Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Please join us at Columbia University Department of Religion on February 15, 2013 at 5:30 for his lecture entitled

The Elimination of Moral Agency: The Trajectory of Krishna’s Argument in the Gita

ABSTRACT: I argue here that, seen as a whole (which it rarely is), what appears to be the normative-ethical argument in the Gita is either nothing of the kind or a very odd specimen of the kind, inasmuch as what happens in it is that human moral agency, in the standard sense, is progressively undercut and finally eliminated. Krishna
  • (a) starts off with the usual description of human action oriented towards a particular consequence,
  • (b) moves to the elimination of that consequence and the substitution of other higher-level consequences,
  • (c) analyses those higher-level consequences and strips them of all individual human implications,
  • (d) proceeds to transform human actions themselves into impersonal events, and
  • (e) finally, dissolves the human agent himself into a matrix of causal determinations.
This line of argument, once isolated, must yield certain results: it must say that it is not normativity but strict necessity that governs what we take to be human actions, and it must say that, once this is recognized, moral duties cease to have normative force. And behold, this is exactly what Krishna does say in the end. What we have, as a result, is the elimination of ethics from the world properly grasped and the installation of a form of determinism.
What I now argue is that this manoeuvre is not merely an eliminative metaethical one; it swivels back and re-enters the domain of everyday human moral action and there plays a motivating role. After all, what all this has been in aid of is getting Arjuna to do his duty. There seems to be something like a psychological paradox that this presents: at least so far as the Gita is concerned, the view seems to be that we are likelier to perform our moral duties well not merely if we detach ourselves from the self-regarding consequences of such performance but also if we think that those duties are not really duties in the way that we generally understand them and, moreover, that it is not we who are performing them (or, indeed, any actions) at all.

Time: 5:30-7:30 pm
Place: Rm. 101 in the Department of Religion 80 Claremont Avenue
http://goo.gl/maps/zfUKH

PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE:
http://www.cbs.columbia.edu/cscp/

Columbia Lecture on Buddhist Metaphysics and Ethics

UPDATE: Today’s Columbia Seminar on Comparative Philosophy meeting, with Jonathan C. Gold and Robert Wright, is CANCELLED due to blizzard forecasts in New York City.  We are planning to reschedule for NEXT Friday, February 15.  Full details to follow.

THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes, JONATHAN C. GOLD (Princeton University)

Please join us at Columbia University’ Department of Religion on February 8, 2013 at 5:30 for his lecture entitled,

Accepting the Conditions: “The Ethical Implications of Vasubandhu’s Buddhist Causal Theory”

Continue reading →

Call for Papers: Bhagavad Gita and Chinese Philosophy

As a forum for comparative studies between Chinese philosophy and other philosophical traditions in the world, Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy is soliciting contributions that make creative and fruitful use of the vast conceptual resources in the Chinese philosophical traditions to approach central issues and ideas in the Bhagavad Gita for a special issue, with the theme “Bhagavad Gita and Chinese Philosophy,” guest edited by Professor Tao Jiang. The Bhagavad Gita, or simply the Gita, is the best-known Indian religious scripture, and one of the most translated texts in the world along with the Bible and the Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching). Due to its prominence and influence within India and beyond, the Gita has been the subject of constant scholarly studies in the West, quite often in the context of fruitful comparisons with Western religious and philosophical texts. However, there has been little, if any, effort in the scholarly community to engage the Gita from perspectives arising out of Chinese philosophical texts. In order to facilitate philosophical engagement between Chinese and Indian traditions, we are soliciting papers that draw meaningful and fruitful connections between the ideas presented in the Gita and those in Chinese philosophical texts. The submissions need to be explicitly comparative involving the Gita and some Chinese text/thinker. Please send an electronic copy of your paper by January 31, 2012 to the editor-in-chief, Yong Huang (yhuang@kutztown.edu). If you have any question, please feel free to contact either Yong Huang or the guest editor of the issue, Tao Jiang (tjiang@rci.rutgers.edu).