Date: December 18th, 2021
Scheduled Speakers
Welcome by Dr. Arvind-Pal S. Mandair: 10:00 a.m. to 10:05 a.m. EST
Speaker 1
Time: 10:05 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. EST
Speaker: Nathaniel Gallant
Title: Undisciplined Religious Experience: Towards the Buddhist Diaspora
Abstract: A central issue in staging conversation between Buddhism and Eurocentric critical theory/philosophy is the apparent incommensurability of the “self” as a problem of spiritual practice and the politics of the modern “subject.” In this presentation, I will offer a genealogy of this disjuncture in discourses on “experience,” particularly in the study of religion in the Anglophone academy. I will then move towards a conceptual exchange between Nishida Kitarō, William James, and Sara Ahmed as an initial step towards envisioning a more capacious political imaginary for religious experience, with the ultimate aim of investing in “diaspora” as a site of geophilosophical inquiry.
Speaker 2
Time: 10:30 a.m. to 10:55 a.m.
Speaker: Dr. David Liu
Title: Thinking Without Borders
Abstract: A lone gray wolf wanders 2000 miles from Oregon to California – then gets shot. Is this how it must go with thinkers and thought that wonder far out of fixed fields? “Nothing human I consider alien,” says Terence’s Chremes, yet septa of thought remain all too forbidding. The curation of curiosity is the most curious thing. In the age of supply chain global capital, traditions of thought and philosophy remain largely either Euro-American or “ethnophilosophy” – like “ethnic food.” The latter does not even make it into the former’s value chain, much less inflect it. This odd imbalance is partly a function of the (post)colonial lag, partly a simple malpractice of philosophy as scholarly expertise rather than creative thinking and theorizing. Against these strictures, I propose a nascent exercise of “geophilosophies” not rest with merely creating multiple gravitational zones but risk and embrace miscegenation and porosity, for which the nomadic and diasporic become the effective vehicle and mode.
Speaker 3
Time: 10:55 a.m. to 11:20 a.m.
Speaker: Dr. Arvind-Pal S. Mandair
Title: Diasporising Philosophy: Exploring Deleuze’s Potential for the World Philosophies Project
Abstract: TBD
Break
Time: 11:50 a.m. to 11:55 a.m.
Discussion: Taking the Geo-Philosophies Project Forward
Time: 12:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.