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.