These seminars explore different topics in philosophy through Indian material: there will be discussion of two short presentations on a question, source or idea/argument in Indian Philosophy. All are welcome.
Week 3 (Friday, 10 May) 4.30pm-6.00pm
Kassandra Dugi: Do Mādhyamikas Believe in Free Will? Śāntideva on Intention, Agency and Causation My talk will focus on Bodhicaryāvatāra 6.22-32 and argue that rather than providing a potential Madhyamaka response to the question of whether we have free will, as is commonly assumed, these verses much more radically seek to challenge our notions about the nature and causes of action altogether, thus rendering any discussion about the existence of free will fundamentally untenable.
Shruthi Mathews: Vasubandhu’s Metaphors This talk places figurative language in Vasubandhu’s Viṃśikā under the lens of conceptual metaphor theory. I argue that figurative expressions here are more than just examples. Rather, the imagery of dreams and hells are ‘new metaphors’, where Vasubandhu reconfigures old imagery to create new similarities. Through counter-intuitive comparisons, he shifts the locus of experienced reality from the external object to the mind. Attentiveness to the modes of metaphor at play in the text point us, then, to Vasubandhu’s own innovations in argument and doctrine.
Week 7 (Wednesday, 5 June) 4.30pm-6.00pm
Jacob Mortimer: The Time-Lag Argument in Buddhist Theories of Perception
This talk looks at an argument against naïve realism developed in the Sautrāntika school of early Buddhism. The argument rests on three significant commitments: momentariness, presentism, and the diachronic nature of causation. Its conclusion is that perceptual experience is causally dependent upon, but not constitutively related to, mind-independent particulars. The Sautrāntika view that perceptual experience is instead constituted by ākāra-s (‘appearances’), which represent the world as being certain ways, can be understood as a response to this argument. This paper aims to show how this view of perception lends itself to external-world scepticism and is later used to support the Yogācāra doctrine of vijñaptimātra (‘mere representation’).
Rembert Lutjeharms: “A Slight Error”? Vedānta, Mādhyamaka, and the eternality of consciousness In his Tattva-saṅgraha (330), the Buddhist thinker Śāntarakṣita evaluates Vedānta views, and writes that he find these ideas rather reasonable, except that they make the “slight error” in asserting that consciousness is eternal. This session will examine this claim, to see whether the difference between Vedānta and Mādhyamaka thought really is only so slight.
