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MYTHOS AND LOGOS: RELIGION AND RATIONALITY IN THE HUMANITIES
Jay Garfield: Buddhist Logic and Analytic Philosophy
Wednesday May 09, 2012 | 05:00 -07:00 PM | Humanities Center Baker Room

Professor Jay Garfield will be joining us to discuss his paper-in-progress titled “I am a Brain in a Vat (Or Perhaps a Pile of Sticks by the Side of the Road)” (contact rjfelbur@stanford.edu for a copy).

Jay Garfield is Doris Silbert Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Logic Program and of the Five College Tibetan Studies in India Program at Smith College; Professor in the graduate faculty of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts; Professor of Philosophy at Melbourne University; and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies. He teaches and pursues research in the philosophy of mind, foundations of cognitive science, logic, philosophy of language, Buddhist philosophy, cross-cultural hermeneutics, theoretical and applied ethics and epistemology.

In the paper Garfield develops an original take on the “Brain in a Vat” thought experiment using resources from the cognitive-scientific, analytic-philosophical, as well as Indian Buddhist logical traditions. Many approaches to this experiment, he argues, suffer from “profound presupposition failure”: they begin by presupposing a referent for the first person pronoun and then ask about its status. Garfield investigates how we deceive ourselves about the nature of our subjectivity, and hence about the world we inhabit.

The meeting will be held on Wednesday, 5/09 from 5-7pm in the Baker Room of the Stanford Humanities Center. Snacks and refreshments will be served.

This session is sponsored by the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford.