THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY
Welcomes:
JAKE DAVIS (CUNY Graduate Center)
With responses from:
CHARLES GOODMAN (SUNY Binghamton)
Please join at Columbia University's Religion Department on FRIDAY, OCTOBER 24 at 5:30PM for his lecture entitled:
“‘The scope for Wisdom’: Early Buddhism on Reasons and Persons"
The idea that meditation leads to the realization that there is no self, and that this realization motivates selfless action for the welfare of all beings, is widely understood to be a central feature of Buddhist doctrine. Goodman's (2009) recent interpretation of Buddhist ethics moves in this way from a reductionist metaphysical stance regarding persons to a consequentialist theory of ethics. Goodman draws from Derek Parfit's influential arguments in Reasons and Persons (1984) in support of such a move; Parfit in turn explicitly claims that “Buddha would have agreed” with his reductionist view about persons. One strand of early Buddhist thought, however, suggests that meditation could not in principle show that there is no self, and that ethical evaluation should focus on emotional motivations for action rather than on consequences of action. This approach addresses ethical disputes over how to be, as well as metaphysical disputes over what there is, by appealing to the judgments that we ourselves would make if we were aware of the changing flow of experience in an alert and unbiased way. I develop this early Buddhist line of thought to bring out the novel contributions it has to make to contemporary philosophical discussions in ethics and metaphysics.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 24
5:30-7:30 pm
Rm. 101, 80 Claremont Ave, Columbia University
http://goo.gl/maps/zfUKH
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