Can one speak of theology without partaking a given faith and belonging to a given community of believers? Religious texts can be read as historical or literary documents, but can they also be read as theological ones outside a community of believers?
Category Archives: Philosophy
Philosophers’ Carnival No. 167
The 167th edition of the Philosophers’ Carnival can be found here! It includes also a post by Eric Schwitzgebel on the unavoidability of studying Chinese philosophy and a post by Amod Lele on the “double standard” we adopt while looking at re-readings of the tradition by contemporary or ancient authors. I am grateful to the compiler of this edition of the Carnival (D. Papineau) and to the readers who signalled these posts. May the discussion of philosophical blogs always be broad enough to reach beyond traditional geographical and disciplinary boundaries!
You can signal your favorite posts of September for the October’s Philosophers’ Carnival here. Don’t forget to include some non-mainstream philosophy in your recommandations!
In the Indian tradition, by and large, people have tried to emphasize continuity and underplay the change or novelty except in some fields of arts. […] On the contrary, what happens in the west is that because novelty is valued very much, so, every new thing is claimed as novel, So, what the historians do there is to tell us that it is not really so new and they find the seeds of it or the sources of it in the past. In the Indian context therefore we should try to find out where the difference is occurring or where the change is occurring.
CfP: Language as a tools for acquiring Knowledge (Atiner conference)
If you have been following this blog or my previous one you will know that I have been looking for chances for cross-cultural philosophy since many years. You will also know that I have been thinking at the Atiner Conference as a good chance to discuss about Indian themes as part of Philosophy tout court and not within the small ghetto of Indian Philosophy for Indologists.
This year, Malcolm C. Keating (University of Texas, Austin) and I will be hosting a panel at the next Atiner conference in Athens, 25–28 May 2015. If you are interested to join, read the following CfP and drop a line either in the comments or at my personal address. (more…)
Is bhakti a philosophy? Daya Krishna 2000
I am grateful to Elise Coquereau for bringing me back to one of my past interests, namely Daya Krishna‘s philosophy. Daya Krishna was a polyedric genius, who wrote on economics, sociology, history of Western and Indian Philosophy, aesthetics, etc., always with a revolutionary and unconventional spirit.
Comparison and Comparative Method —The sixth Coffee Break Conference: CfP
The Coffee Break Conference began as an attempt to encourage the kind of critical and open-ended discussions that have unfortunately been confined to short coffee breaks at most academic conferences. Coffee Break Conferences give scholars the opportunity to critically discuss their work, especially new work, in an interdisciplinary setting. Discussions at these conferences have tended to focus on scholarly methodology and all types of comparisons: between areas of study, between the approaches of different disciplines, between the concepts and vocabulary of different traditions of scholarship.
The next Coffee Break Conference, to be held in Venice on September 10-12 2015, will directly take up the theme of comparison. In a series of panels, including a conference-wide roundtable session, we will discuss the form that comparison takes in scholarly work, what its advantages and liabilities are, and the philosophical and political issues that comparison raises. Scholars are invited to submit papers to one of the proposed panels, listed below, or to propose a panel on the theme of comparison. Younger scholars are encouraged to participate.
The current plan of the conference, subject to modification, is as follows:
1) Linguistic Selves: Language and Identity in the Premodern World (contact person: Andrew Ollett, andrew.ollett@gmail.com)
2) 1) From cross-cultural comparison to shared epistemic spaces: educating desire in the “medieval” epistemic space (contact person: Marco Lauri, marco.f.lauri@gmail.com)
3) The “Religion” Challenge: Comparative Religious Studies and the Trouble to Transfer Conceptional Terms from Europe to Asia (contact person: Ann-Kathrin Wolff, ann-kathrin.wolf@rub.de; Madlen Krüger, madlen.krueger@rub.de)
4) Is Theology comparable? Comparison applied to “Theology” and “God” (contact person: Elisa Freschi, elisa.freschi@gmail.com)
5) Knowing the unknown: extra-ordinary cognitions in a comparative perspective (contact person: Marco Ferrante, marco.ferrante@oeaw.ac.at)
6) The trans-cultural reshaping of psychoanalysis, or the perks of comparative psychodynamics (contact person: Daniele Cuneo, danielecuneo@hotmail.it)
Further infos on the CBCs in general and on the 2015 edition in particular can be found here: http://asiaticacoffeebreak.wordpress.com/
and here:
http://asiatica.wikispaces.com/2015+on+comparison
(The conference will most probably take place in Rome, September the 17th to 19th 2015.)
Chief of the Organizing Committee: E. Freschi, A. Ollett
What was Dignaga’s theory of apoha? On PS 5.41–42 SECOND UPDATE
The main point of departure for any inquiry into Dignāga’s theory of apoha is his Pramāṇasamuccaya, chapter 5. Unluckily enough, this text is only available as a reconstruction from the two (divergent) Tibetan translations and from Jinendrabuddhi’s commentary.
(Third day at the IABS:) Franco on the datation of Dharmakīrti and some further thoughts on Dharmakīrti, Dignāga, Kumārila
The datation of Dharmakīrti is a topic I am not competent enough to speak about, but I will nonetheless try to summarise other people’s arguments.
The departing point is the traditionally accepted date of Dharmakīrti, namely 600–660, settled by Erich Frauwallner mainly on the basis of the reports of Chinese pilgrims,
K. Yoshimizu on valid inferences in Kumārila (and on the chronology of Kumārila and Dharmakīrti)
All nice things come to an end, and so did the IABS conference. Now, many among you will be heading to Heidelberg for the Dharmakīrti Conference. Although I will not be able to attend, I received from K. Yoshimizu his paper for it, with the assent to discuss it here.
Fifth day at the IABS: “Buddhism and Philosophy of Mind” panel, Siderits and Coseru
Today, I went to the panel on Buddhism and Philosophy of Mind, which was announced as involving Christian Coseru, Mark Siderits and Jonardon Ganeri. In fact, Ganeri could not make it (“obviously he did not feel fit for the match” commented Coseru at the beginning, among general laughter), but this had the beneficial consequence that there was a whole slot free for discussion.