Join us for an upcoming symposium on Buddhism and Contemporary Philosophy hosted by Evan Thompson and Jessica Main. We are pleased to welcome Bronwyn Finnigan, Tom Tillimans, and Koji Tanaka through the support of UBC’s Department of Philosophy, the Tung Lin Kok Yuen Canada Foundation, and The Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhism and Contemporary Society at UBC.
Lectures are free and open to the public. 5 minutes prior to start, any extra seating will be made available.
Buddhists assume that mental states can be both reportable events in phenomenal consciousness and have a ‘background’ causal influence on our experience and behavior of which we are not immediately aware but need meditation and reflection to uncover. This paper will investigate what the nature of mental states must be like to admit these possibilities and will examine whether Buddhist philosophies of mind are adequate to the task.
One can clearly do analytic metaphysics with some of the great Buddhist philosophers. Other Buddhists – especially some Madhyamikas, i.e., the followers of Nagarjuna and the Middle Way School – are quite out of step with our current metaphysical debates and orientations. They represent a kind of minority approach, a type of quietism whose interest would lie in what it offers to metaontology rather than to substantive debates in metaphysics. Two Buddhisms and two quite different connections to Philosophy: we’ll look at the prospects for both.
School of Philosophy, Australian National University
“Prasanga and the Norms of Logic”