Danica Cao: Freedom beyond Resistance and Autonomy

Posted on by
Reply

Danica Cao

PhD student, UChicago Divinity School

Freedom beyond Resistance and Autonomy: Reading Zhang Taiyan’s Minbao-Period Revolutionary Morality through Kant’s “Ethical Community”

Tuesday, February 25th, 5:00 PM, Swift 207
 
The workshop will consist of a short presentation, followed by discussion and Q&A. We will focus on a pre-circulated paper,  which can be accessed here 
 
Abstract
 
In the tumultuous transition from the late Qing to the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, Chinese thinkers from Liang Qichao to Zhang Taiyan debated the task of “establishing a religion” for modern China, in addition to their better remembered political theories. These understudied theories of religion, similar to their Western counterparts, played pivotal roles in the transition of Chinese and more broadly East Asian moral thought to their modern forms. This paper is an attempt at characterizing Zhang Taiyan’s proposal in the larger arena of modern East Asian philosophical and religious re-workings of premodern ideals of freedom in conversation with the new ones imported from the West. By departing from two later, more developed, and politically opposed models of freedom for East Asian modernity, that of autonomy in the New Confucian Mou Zongsan and that of resistance in the literary critic Takeuchi Yoshimi, I show that Zhang’s position can be said to prefigure both, and that a better characterization of its modernity forces us to ask what philosophical modernity is and how it is related to freedom beyond its orthodox formulations with attention primarily to actors within the Euro-American geographical sphere. With such concerns in mind, I put Kant’s notion of “ethical community” in the Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793) into dialogue with Zhang’s advocation for a revolutionary morality in the Minbao period (1906-08), which have been linked to the French Revolution and the Xinhai Revolution respectively. I abstract from them a potentially productive fourfold modern structure of the political-religious and the private-public, which then serves as a prelude to future work on Zhang’s philosophy of religions and the trans-modern conversations I hope to contribute to.

Hosted by the Philosophy of Religions Workshop at the University of Chicago.

_____________

The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to being a fully accessible and inclusive workshop. Please contact Workshop Coordinators Taryn Sue (tarynsue@uchicago.edu) or Yeti Kang (hkang01@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.

Jed Forman, “Omniphenomenology: What Buddhist Theories of Omniscience Teach Us about Experience”

Posted on by
Reply

Jed Forman

Assistant Professor in Buddhist Studies, Simpson College

Omniphenomenology: What Buddhist Theories of Omniscience Teach Us about Experience

Tuesday, February 18th, 5:00 PM, Swift 207
 
The workshop will consist of a presentation, followed by discussion and Q&A. We will focus on a pre-circulated book chapter, which can be accessed here (password: “omniphenomenology”).
 
Abstract

Husserl’s method of epoché involves a suspension of subject-object dichotomies. This, he argues, addresses a “crisis of European sciences,” recovering our pre-theoretical, direct encounter with the world as a starting point for scientific inquiry. Nevertheless, Husserl’s methodology emphasizes the subjective pole. Indeed, it constitutes a type of idealism. This prioritization of the first-person, I argue, has been a mainstay of phenomenology ever since.

This presentation recruits Buddhist theories of omniscience as an intervention. I explore how Buddhist thinkers from the epistemological (pramāṇa) tradition—including Dharmakīrti, Prajñākaragupta, and Śāntarakṣita—understand omniscience as a return to our most natural, pre-theoretical state, where division between mind and world are elided. Their arguments thus provide a more thorough suspension of subject-object dichotomies, providing useful fodder for contemporary phenomenology. Borrowing from Linda Zagzebski’s notion of omnisubjectivity, I dub this intervention “omniphenomenology.”

Hosted by the Philosophy of Religions Workshop at the University of Chicago.

_____________

The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to being a fully accessible and inclusive workshop. Please contact Workshop Coordinators Taryn Sue (tarynsue@uchicago.edu) or Yeti Kang (hkang01@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.

Yiting Tang: On Being Attuned: A Reading of Zhuangzi II

Posted on by
Reply

Yiting Tang

MA student, UChicago Divinity School

On Being Attuned: A Reading of Zhuangzi II

Thursday, February 13th, 5:00 PM, Swift 207
 
The workshop will consist of a short presentation, followed by discussion and Q&A. We will focus on a pre-circulated paper,  which can be accessed here (password: “Zhuangzi”).
 
Abstract
 
It is well-known that, in classical Chinese philosophy, qing 情 does not always and primarily mean emotions. At the same time, many studies still approach the discourse on qing 情 in the Zhuangzi under the rubric of something like the philosophy of emotion. The aim of this paper is not so much to criticize that approach to the Zhuangzi but to explore the aspects of qing 情 in the Zhuangzi that don’t neatly fit into the categories of emotions, moods, and affects. My attempt will be to illustrate the discourse on qing 情 in the Zhuangzi through the concepts of being and attunement. My main questions are: What if to be is to be attuned? What is the relationship between attunement and rhythm, frequency, intensity, and valence? And what kind of philosophy might result if the opening of Zhuangzi II is read as a phenomenological account of being as various and varying modes of attunement?

Hosted by the Philosophy of Religions Workshop at the University of Chicago.

_____________

The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to being a fully accessible and inclusive workshop. Please contact Workshop Coordinators Taryn Sue (tarynsue@uchicago.edu) or Yeti Kang (hkang01@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.

Alla Alaghbri: Waḥdat al-Wujūd in Epistemological light: Rationalism, Mysticism, the Problem of the Stage Beyond Reason in Al-Bukhārī’s Faḍīḥat al-mulḥidīn.

Posted on by
Reply

Alla Allagbhri

PhD Student, Divinity School

Waḥdat al-Wujūd in Epistemological light: Rationalism, Mysticism, the Problem of the Stage Beyond Reason in Al-Bukhārī’s Faḍīḥat al-mulḥidīn. 

TUESDAY, February 4th, 5 PM, Swift 207

The workshop will consist of a presentation followed by discussion and Q&A. The paper to be read in advance can be accessed here (password: “being”). We hope to see you there!

Abstract:

The problem of Being (Wujūd) particularly God’s Being and its relationship with the existence of everything other Him has a central place in Islamic philosophical theology. The problem generated a range of rich discussions concerning issues of ontology and metaphysics more generally. What is interesting is that the problem of Being was also a sight in which problems of epistemology were investigated. This was especially the case between mystics of a philosophical bent (otherwise called philosophical Sufis) and rational theologians. In this paper, I investigate some of these epistemological problems through an analysis of a treatise written by the rational theologian, ʿAlāʾ Al-Dīn Al-Bukhāri (d.1438). My focus will be on the philosophical Sufi’s idea of a stage beyond reason, that is, an epistemological terrain in which the basic propositions of reason, such as the law of non-contradiction, are witheld in light of direct mystical experience. I will explore the idea’s conceptual history and al-Bukhārī’s deep suspicion of it. Along the way, I will draw some conclusions about the epistemic commitments of rational theology and the sources of the philosophical Sufi’s dissatisfaction with it. Hosted by the Philosophy of Religions Workshop at the University of Chicago.

_____________

The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to being a fully accessible and inclusive workshop. Please contact Workshop Coordinators Taryn Sue (tarynsue@uchicago.edu) and Yeti Kang (hkang01@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.

Nathan Mulder Bunce: Specters and the Image

Posted on by
Reply

Nathan Mulder Bunce

Ph.D. Candidate, University College Dublin

Specters and the Image: Ethical Injunction as Apparition of the Inapparent

TUESDAY, December 3, 5:00 PM, Swift 207
 
The workshop will consist of a short presentation, followed by discussion and Q&A. We will focus on a pre-circulated paper,  which can be accessed here (password: “Specters”).
 
Abstract
 
By now, which is to say since Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, denunciations of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ are widespread. This context demands a radical rethinking of the image or appearance for a conception which does not rely on the value of presence to support its meaning. How should the image be understood in the wake of the disappearance of this grounding support? Does the significance of this uprooting of the image transform the image into the simulacrum? Drawing on Derrida’s Specters of Marx, I suggest the logic of the ghost—a hauntology—offers a conception of the image adequate to the demands of the post-metaphysical situation without falling into the nihilism of simulacra. Images, and more generally phenomena, as specters reverse the process of total depletion through the ethical injunction, calling us to reinvest the significance of images without certain knowledge. To be sure, this reinvestment requires interpretation, but an interpretation deprived of its end and without hope for itself. This unassured end would constitute the chance, which is the risk and promise, of justice.

Hosted by the Philosophy of Religions Workshop at the University of Chicago.

_____________

The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to being a fully accessible and inclusive workshop. Please contact Workshop Coordinators Taryn Sue (tarynsue@uchicago.edu) or Yeti Kang (hkang01@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.