THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY
Welcomes:
PIERRE-JULIEN HARTER (University of Chicago Divinity School)
With responses from:
CHRISTOPHER GOWANS (Fordham University)
Please join us at Columbia University's Religion Department on FRIDAY, MAY 8 at 5:30PM for his lecture entitled:
“Another way into Buddhist philosophy: the path as a philosophical concept”
In the past few decades, scholarship on Buddhist philosophy has mainly devoted its efforts to investigate issues in ontology, metaphysics, and epistemology, and to a lesser extent ethics, so much so that “doing Buddhist philosophy” often means to talk about Nāgārjuna or Dharmakīrti, about svabhāva, emptiness, perception, universals, or causal efficacy. On the other hand, some concepts never made it to the philosophical table, often because they do not have their correspondence in Western philosophy. The concept of path or way (mārga) has suffered from this philosophical ostracism, being generally left to the care of the “religious specialist”. But Buddhist literature reveals that issues revolving around the path were hotly debated and the objects of rational investigations. This talk intends to make room for a philosophical approach of the concept of path by presenting Indian and Tibetan debates regarding the nature of the passage from the conceptual understanding of reality to a non-conceptual insight. The path is understood as a process of transformation that is not reducible to the concept of ethics. These debates are developed in the exegetical literature of the Ornament of Realizations (Abhisamayālaṃkāra), which will be our primary reference. The purpose of the talk is to illustrate the capacity of non-Western philosophy to produce concepts worthy of the attention of non-Eastern philosophers.
FRIDAY, MAY 8
5:30-7:30 pm
Rm. 101, 80 Claremont Ave, Columbia University
