This week I'm excited to travel to Kraków, Poland to attend the 2018 Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy (SACP) Annual Conference. You can find more details on the conference website and on the Indian Philosophy Blog.
I'm excited to visit Eastern/Central Europe for the first time. A couple friends and I are also planning to visit Budapest, Hungary after the conference.
The conference will take place at three venues. My talk will be at the oldest building at Jagiellonian University, whose esteemed alumni include Copernicus, Pope John Paul II, and Stanislaw Lem.
I hope to write another post after the trip with a report about how it went, along with some photos! Cześć!
Here's the abstract for my talk:
"Śrī Harṣa and the Limits of
Philosophy"
In his Khaṇḍanakhaṇḍakhādya (Buffet
of Destruction), the Advaita Vedānta skeptic Śrī Harṣa (c. 12th
century CE) offers extensive critiques of various schools of classical Indian
philosophy. Concentrating on his
trenchant criticisms of Nyāya metaphysics, I argue that Śrī Harṣa is attempting
to demonstrate the limits of philosophy.
The Buffet of Destruction is
intended to leave its readers – appropriately enough – having lost their
appetite for constructive philosophical activity. In light of his awareness of the minefield of
incoherencies involved in asserting any view of non-dualism, Śrī Harṣa is not
giving positive arguments in favor of any view; rather, he is attempting to
remove impediments to the possibility of
non-dual experience. This can be seen as
a sophisticated development of the type of mystical skepticism found in several
Upaniṣads. Śrī Harṣa prompts contemporary philosophers
to consider the limits on the power of philosophy to answer ultimate questions
and could inspire creative new uses for philosophy. Śrī Harṣa offers a
blueprint for philosophy beyond its typical dogmatic pretensions as a source of
truth: philosophy might instead be a transformative activity that can make us
both intellectually humble and profoundly open-minded.
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