A lecture to honor Professor Jay Garfield on the occasion of his upcoming retirement from Smith College
Challenging essentialist metaphysical perspectives East and West, Madhyamaka or the ‘Middle Way’ is best known for the claim that the true nature of reality is to be found not in stable, permanent entities but in the dynamic and contingent relationships between all things. And yet, while articulating a conception of reality that looks beyond the everyday world of appearances, Madhyamaka, at least as framed by Nagarjuna and his Indian interpreters, lacks commitment to revising and reforming our conventional ways of seeing things. It thus falls short of allowing for sophisticated theoretical ideas and explanations of a scientific nature. In taking stock of its unique insights and oversights, in this lecture Coseru will argue that contemporary defenders of Madhyamaka have sometimes oversimplified or idealized its scope, raising questions about its theoretical viability.
Christian Coseru is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the College of Charleston and a Numata Visiting Professor in Buddhist Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He works in the fields of philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and cross-cultural philosophy, especially Indian and Buddhist philosophy in dialogue with Western (classical and contemporary) philosophy and cognitive science. Some of his most recent work focuses on questions about the persistence of subjectivity in non-ordinary and pathological states of consciousness, mental causation, and classical and contemporary accounts of the nature and scope of self-knowledge. He is the author of Perceiving Reality: Consciousness, Intentionality, and Cognition in Buddhist Philosophy (OUP 2012), and editor of Reasons and Empty Persons: Mind, Metaphysics, and Morality (Springer 2023) and Is Subjective Consciousness Possible (2024). He is now completing work on a book entitled Moments of Consciousness (under contract with OUP). His research has been supported by grants from the Australian Research Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Sponsored by the Smith College Philosophy Department and Lecture Committee. Open to the public.