This volume is the product of an important recent conference, convened by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, focusing on the intellectual legacy of the Tibetan philosopher, yogi, and saint Tsongkhapa (1357-1419). Entitled "Jé Tsongkhapa: Life, Thought, and Legacy," the conference commemorated the sixth hundredth anniversary of Tsongkhapa's passing and was held on December 21-23, 2019, at Ganden Monastery in Mundgod, India. Part 1 concerns Madhyamaka, a natural reflection of the very important and well-known contributions Tsongkhapa made to the study of (...) Indian philosophical thought. The first essay, Guy Newland's "Start Making Sense: Finding Tsongkhapa's Middle Way," provides a straightforward and clear introduction to Tsongkhapa's interpretation of Madhyamaka philosophy, showing how Tsongkhapa played an essential role in clarifying Candrakīrti's contributions to Madhyamaka thought. The second essay, "Celebrating Jé Tsongkhapa: The Twofold Object of the Identity View" by Dr. Dechen Rochard explores Tsongkhapa's understanding of Candrakīrti's negation of individual identity. The essay neatly demonstrates the centrality of the practitioner's view of self to the path to spiritual awakening. In the third chapter, "Thinking Beyond Thought: Tsongkhapa and Mipham on the Conceptualized Ultimate," Jay L. Garfield explores Tsongkhapa's views on the nature of ultimate reality, specifically Tsongkhapa's argument that this entails a movement from inferential to direct awareness of emptiness. The essay explores the need for accurate philosophical analysis in the context of meditation practice so as to directly realize the truths about the nature of self and reality that are the objects of the practice. It thus nicely points to the integration of Buddhist theory and practice. The second section of this volume is dedicated to Tsongkhapa's writings on the tantras. In the first chapter in this section, "Tsongkhapa's Masterful Exegesis of Cakrasaṃvara Tantra," I elucidate Tsongkhapa's approach to the study of tantric literature with a focus on his commentary on the Cakrasaṃvara Tantra. Chapter 6 is Gavin Kilty's contribution, "A Lamp to Illuminate the Five Stages: Tsongkhapa's Reformatory Work on Guhyasamāja Tantra." Kilty first surveys the Guhyasamāja tradition and its transmission to Tibet and the two main Indian exegetical traditions, the Ārya and J.ānapāda schools. Outlining Tsongkhapa's approach to the Guhyasamāja Tantra, he then focuses on how the tradition conceptualizes the generation-stage and completion-stage practices. Chapter 7, "The Shadow of Heshang: Tsongkhapa on Chan, Dzokchen, and Mahāmudrā" by Roger R. Jackson. Jackson explores the claim that Tsongkhapa received and secretly transmitted esoteric instructions on advanced meditation practices to realize the nature of mind and awakening. The volume concludes with a section entitled "Moving Minds," which explores Tsongkhapa's legacy and impact both in Tibet and beyond. It opens with "Jé Tsongkhapa's Contribution to Buddhist Hermeneutics" by Geshé Ngawang Samten. Buddhist hermeneutics, as understood here, is a response to the challenge posed by scriptures that appear to contradict one another. Chapter 9, "Tsongkhapa's Hermeneutics and the Perfection of Wisdom," contributed by Gareth Sparham, takes a more focused look at the interpretation of the Perfection of Wisdom literature in both India and Tibet. The tenth chapter is "Jé Tsongkhapa's Teachings and Translations in Mongolian" by Bataa Mishig-Ish, who surveys the dissemination of Tsongkhapa's oeuvre to Mongolia. The final chapter is BhikṣuṇīThubten Chodron's "Learning, Living, and Teaching Bodhicitta: Jé Tsongkhapa's Contribution to Spreading Compassion in the World." Venerable Chodron argues that Tsongkhapa's approach to teaching compassion is particularly suited for the modern, Western context. While this volume does not come close to exhausting the limits of what might be said concerning the impact of Tsongkhapa's work in Tibet and beyond, it does reunite contributions to this study that briefly converged in Preface xi Mundgod, India, just before the global pandemic ushered in a new awareness of our profound human interdependence. Hopefully these essays will advance the appreciation of Tsongkhapa's intellectual legacy in the wider English-speaking world, where he remains a little understood figure of Asian religious history, unlike in the Tibetan-speaking world, where his impact is justly celebrated. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's early biography of Rahel Varnhagen, an eighteenth-century German-Jew, provides a revolutionary feminist component to her political theory. In it, Arendt grapples with the theoretical constitution of a female subject and relates Jewish alterity, identity, and history to feminist politics. Because she understood the "female condition" of difference as belonging to the political subject rather than an autonomous self, her theory entails a "politics of alterity" with applications for feminist practice.

A recent report from the UN makes the case for “global data literacy” in order to realise the opportunities afforded by the “data revolution”. Here and in many other contexts, data literacy is characterised in terms of a combination of numerical, statistical and technical capacities. In this article, we argue for an expansion of the concept to include not just competencies in reading and working with datasets but also the ability to account for, intervene around and participate in the wider (...) socio-technical infrastructures through which data is created, stored and analysed – which we call “data infrastructure literacy”. We illustrate this notion with examples of “inventive data practice” from previous and ongoing research on open data, online platforms, data journalism and data activism. Drawing on these perspectives, we argue that data literacy initiatives might cultivate sensibilities not only for data science but also for data sociology, data politics as well as wider public engagement with digital data infrastructures. The proposed notion of data infrastructure literacy is intended to make space for collective inquiry, experimentation, imagination and intervention around data in educational programmes and beyond, including how data infrastructures can be challenged, contested, reshaped and repurposed to align with interests and publics other than those originally intended. (shrink)

In Sisyphus's Boulder, Eric Dietrich and Valerie Hardcastle argue that we will never get such a theory because consciousness has an essential property that..

Developmental systems theory (DST) is a general theoretical perspective on development, heredity and evolution. It is intended to facilitate the study of interactions between the many factors that influence development without reviving `dichotomous' debates over nature or nurture, gene or environment, biology or culture. Several recent papers have addressed the relationship between DST and the thriving new discipline of evolutionary developmental biology (EDB). The contributions to this literature by evolutionary developmental biologists contain three important misunderstandings of DST.

Interpretation of Hetvābhāsasāmānyanirukti of Gaṅgeśa, 13th cent., treatise on Nyaya philosophy; based on other classical commentaries.

There is a bias in neuroscience toward localizing and modularizing brain functions. Single cell recording, imaging studies, and the study of neurological deficits all feed into the Gallian view that different brain areas do different things and the things being done are confined to particular processing streams. At the same time, there is a growing sentiment that brains probably don’t work like that after all; it is better to conceive of them as fundamentally distributed units, multi‐tasking at every level. This (...) sentiment, however, is much less congenial to the tried‐and‐true experimental protocols available today and to theorizing about the brain in general. This essay examines the tension between current experimental methods and large-scale views of the brain. We argue that this disconnection between experiment and what really are guiding theoretical metaphors seriously impedes progress in neuroscience. (shrink)

A great deal of interest and excitement surround the interface between the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of psychology, yet the area is neither well defined nor well represented in mainstream philosophical publications. This book is perhaps the first to open a dialogue between the two disciplines. Its aim is to broaden the traditional subject matter of the philosophy of biology while informing the philosophy of psychology of relevant biological constraints and insights.The book is organized around six themes: functions (...) and teleology, evolutionary psychology, innateness, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and parallels between philosophy of biology and philosophy of mind. Throughout, one finds overlapping areas of study, larger philosophical implications, and even larger conceptual ties. Woven through these connections are shared concerns about the status of semantics, scientific law, evolution and adaptation, and cognition in general. Contributors André Ariew, Mark A. Bedau, David J. Buller, Paul Sheldon Davies, Stephen M. Downes, Charbel Niño El-Hani, Owen Flanagan, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Todd Grantham, Valerie Gray Hardcastle, Gary Hatfield, Daniel W. McShea, Karen Neander, Shaun Nichols, Antonio Marcos Pereira, Tom Polger, Lawrence A. Shapiro, Kim Sterelny, Robert A. Wilson, William C. Wimsatt. (shrink)

CHAPTER I The Spirit and Method of Logic Natural Logic There is a natural logic as well as a rational one, just as there is both a mother tongue and a ...

We welcome Norenzayan et al.’s claim that the prosocial effects of beliefs in supernatural agents extend beyond Big Gods. To date, however, supporting evidence has focused on the Abrahamic Big God, making generalisations difficult. We discuss a recent study that highlights the need for clarity about the causal path by which supernatural beliefs affect the evolution of big societies.

Does responsible conduct of research (RCR) training improve levels of trust between researchers? Using data gathered as part of a survey on the attitudes of master's and doctoral-level students toward RCR, we found that RCR training correlated with a weakened beliefs of students toward their supervisors' ethicality but a stronger belief in the ethicality of their peers. We believe that these findings point to new avenues of research on trust in the academic setting and to needs for curriculum changes in (...) RCR training. (shrink)