Shows
Philiminality14. Brooh Asmare - The Authenticity of the Hatata from the Perspective of the Cultural History of EthiopiaSince the publication of Conti Rossini’s notes on Tekle Haymanot, an Ethiopian Catholic priest and Rossini’s testimony that made the Hatatas are of Giusto d’Urbino, in 1916, the controversy of authorship over the Hatatas remained hot debate among the Ethiopian as well as the Western scholars. These scholars present their argument from different perspectives, such as Testimony (Rossini 1916, 1920), Calendar (Getachew Haile 2014), Philology (Alemayehu Moges 1969) and Colonial Thesis (Daniel Kibret 2018 and Fasil Merawi 2020). The findings of their research, however, went to diametrically opposite directions. While the perspectives of Testimony and Colonial Thesis favor Giusto d’Urbino as the authenti...
2022-11-2319 minPhiliminality13. Teshome Abera - Zara Yacob's Hatata: Its Historical and Social RealityThe seventeenth century philosophical work of Zara Yacob, the Hatata, is the result of both internal and external issues that led to controversies. Zara Yacob as a philosopher exercised the use of logic over the immediate environment and developed an all rounded philosophy arising from his own life and the life of the society he was living in. The contribution of Sumner in introducing the works of Zara Yacob is immense. His huge publications are permanent evidence of his contribution to Ethiopian philosophy. It is he who for the first time translated the works of Zara Yacob into English...
2022-11-2337 minPhiliminality12. Henry Straughan & Michael O'Connor - Grace and Reason in the Hatata Zera YacobIn this talk, Henry Straughan and Michael O'Connor seek to illuminate the philosophical method of the Ḥatäta Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob. In particular, they trace the interaction between reason and grace, and the role of discursive argumentation versus immediate intuition. They draw out Yacob’s method by explicating and examining his discussion of the epistemic significance of disagreement and his distrust of testimony; his argument for the existence of God; his theodical response to the problem of evil; and his practical ethics. In doing so, they suggest that Yacob’s central method of argument is abductive, resting on something...
2022-11-2330 minPhiliminality11. John Marenbon - Does it Matter Who Wrote it? Zera Yacob, Forgery and Pseudonymity in the History of PhilosophyPhilosophers often talk as if it does not make much difference who wrote a piece of philosophy, when, and where, but only whether the arguments it contains are sound. Historians of philosophy should always treat that attitude with suspicion. Philosophical texts about which questions of pseudonymity arise (are they really by the person who claims to have written them?) help to show why, because how they are to be understood is bound up essentially with the question about their authorship and, if they are in fact pseudonymous, what is the purpose behind the apparent deception? The case of the...
2022-11-1134 minPhiliminality10. Justin E.H Smith - Assessing the Evidence for Zera Yacob's Authenticity from the Point of View of the History of PhilosophyThere are several ways by which to approach the question of the authenticity of Zera Yacub's work. One is philological, by careful attention to the linguistic hints in the manuscripts that the work is not by a native writer of Ge'ez, or that otherwise suggest a later invention or conscious fabrication. Another is so to speak psychobiographical, by close attention to the character of Giusto d'Urbino, particularly as revealed in his correspondence from Ethiopia with the Parisian manuscript collector Antoine d'Abbadie. In a series of articles, Anaïs Wion has compellingly adopted both of these approaches. Less developed in h...
2022-11-1135 minPhiliminality9. Anke Graness - Of Forgeries and MisinterpretationsThis paper discusses the authenticity debate on the Ḥatäta of Zera Yacob and Walda Heywat from the perspective of a historian of philosophy. From this perspective, the case of the Ḥatäta and the discourses that developed around the manuscripts raise a number of interesting questions and problems. The most important point is undoubtedly that we are witnessing here a process of canonization. To a large extent, philosophical work relies on inherited philosophical-historical narratives, which are deepened and legitimized by each individual work within the framework of these narratives. The broad European discourse on ancient Greek philosophy is a striking il...
2022-11-1129 minPhiliminality8. Fasil Merawi - Examining the Hatetas as a Foundation of Ethiopian PhilosophyIn this talk Fasil Merawi argues that Ethiopian philosophy is grounded in an illusory foundation that takes the Hatatas as a foundation of philosophical criticism. It is an intellectual exercise that is born from a Eurocentric discourse that is involved in the search for an Other that can think like the European man. The picture of Ethiopian philosophy as being founded on the Hatatas is part of a larger effort to introduce an Ethiopian philosophical tradition that is made up of written philosophy, adapted philosophical wisdom, and societal wisdom and proverbs. Such an understanding of Ethiopian philosophy has not...
2022-11-1150 minPhiliminality7. Anaïs Wion - The Place of the Hatata in African Philosophy since the 1960sAs initially planned in the series of articles I dedicated to the Hatata (HZY and HWH) in 2013, I would like to examine the roles that these texts have played in the birth of the philosophical discipline, as an academic milieu and an intellectual trend, in Africa and then in the diasporas and black communities worldwide. From the early enthusiasm largely supported by Claude Sumner, who co-founded the philosophy department at AAU, to the current debates, how had those texts been received by African and Western scholars? What does this tell us about the possible tensions between the need to...
2022-11-1141 minPhiliminality6. Neelam Srivastava - Italian Colonialism and Orientalism in EthiopiaThis talk examines some aspects of Italy’s colonial relationship with Ethiopia in the 20th century, and how it can be brought to bear to the debate around the authorship of the Ḥatäta Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob, with especial reference to Carlo Conti Rossini, the Italian Ethiopianist who wrote an influential refutation of its attribution to the seventeenth-century Ethiopian thinker Zera Yacoub. The history of the text’s reception by Conti Rossini, a prominent 20th century Orientalist and Ethiopianist, can be traced back to the origins of the Italian colonial enterprise in the Horn of Africa and its discursiv...
2022-11-1137 minPhiliminality5. Eyasu Berento - Zera Yacob and Walda Heywat - 17th C Ethiopia Freethinkers: Exceptionality and Situated-ness of the ‘Hateta’ in the Ethiopian Intellectual TraditionThis paper will assess the nature of the Ethiopian written intellectual tradition (mainly history of ideas), and its relation to the controversy on the authenticity of the texts, and their philosophical significance for Ethiopian and/or African philosophy studies in particular and history of ideas in human civilization in general. An examination of external sources related to religious, historical documents and the literature from scholarly research, and in-depth content analysis of the original Hatatas (the Ge’ez, Amharic and English versions) reveal both the exceptionality and situated-ness of the Hatatas in the Ethiopian intellectual tradition from which they originated. In...
2022-11-1136 minPhiliminality4. Mauricio Lapchik Minski - The Mäqśäftä hassätat or Against the Libel of the Ethiopians–A 17th Century Catholic Response [and Request] to the Christological Position of the Ethiopian Orthodox ChurchThe Jesuit missionaries’ encounter with Ethiopian Christians at the outset of the 17th century was an unparalleled period of cultural and religious interchange. During this period, European Jesuit missionaries attempted to ‘clean out’ the ‘flawed’ elements in order to proselytize the Catholic faith among the Ethiopian Orthodox believers. Their main goal was to convert those local religious expressions into a uniform faith that subscribes to European Catholicism.
With this aim in mind, an extensive set of European Catholic literature was translated into Ge’ez during that period. While some of these works were originally written in the context of the Catholic Ref...
2022-11-1120 minPhiliminality3. Binyam Mekonnen - Critique and Emancipation in the Religious Sphere: the Däqiqä Ǝsṭifanos as a Foundation of Ethiopian Critical TheoryThe Däqiqä Ǝsṭifanos is one of the medieval Ethiopian texts which predates the Hatatas of Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob and his disciple, containing profound ideas regarding the relationship between the public and private spheres, the critical role of religion as a redemptive form of discourse and a utopian imagination that radically interrogates existing human relations. The text shows the remarkable effort of individuals that revolted against the dogmatic emphasis in the religious thoughts and practices of fifteenth century Ethiopia, and thus, it can be read as a revolutionary document which problematized the way Orthodox Christianity has been perceiv...
2022-11-1134 minPhiliminality2. Peter Adamson -The Place of Ethiopian Philosophy in the History of PhilosophyIn this talk Peter Adamson will attempt to set a context for the other contributions in the volume, by discussing the whole phenomenon of philosophy in Ethiopia and, more specifically, how it fits into the broader landscape of philosophy in the late ancient, medieval, and early modern periods. In particular, he compares this tradition to philosophical developments in other Christian communities outside Latin Christendom, e.g. philosophy written in Arabic and Syriac. He will conclude by suggesting that contact with Islamic culture could explain certain features of Zera Yacob's own thought.
2022-11-1139 minPhiliminality1. Ralph Lee - Reflections on Translating the Hatata into EnglishIn making a new translation into English of the Hatata I have developed some reflections on the work, its authorship, and its context. In particular I will focus on the writers use of the bible in the works, and what this tells us about the author(s).
2022-11-1139 minPhiliminality0. In Search of Zera Yacob Conference - Jonathan Egid, Lea Cantor, Justin Holder; Introductory RemarksIntroductory remarks for the In Search of Zera Yacob Conference, contextualising the aims and intentions of the conference, the texts of the Ḥatäta Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob and the Ḥatäta Walda Heywat themselves and their historical context. These texts have fascinated and puzzled alike on account of their philosophical depth, beauty and apparent historical singularity. They have been called the ‘jewel of Ethiopian literature’, and served to demonstrate, in the words of Claude Sumner, that “modern philosophy, in the sense of a personal rationalistic critical investigation, began in Ethiopia with Zera Yacob at the same time as in England and...
2022-11-1122 min
PhiliminalityEllie RobsonThe history of philosophy is a history of men talking to men, about other men. Our answer to the question ‘What is philosophy for?’ has been shaped by this historical narrative. My talk explores an answer to this question posed by the woman philosopher Mary Midgley. Midgley argued that philosophy is a necessity, not a luxury. She described it as ‘something we are doing all the time, a continuous, necessary background activity which is likely to go badly if we don’t attend to it’ (2018:81). These insights of Midgley’s have been systematically underappreciated and overlooked within the academic discipline o...
2021-12-2032 minPhiliminalitySharon Stein, "The Challenges and Possibilities of Decolonizing Higher Education in VUCA Times"Discussions about the decolonization of philosophy take place within the wider context of efforts to interrupt inherited hierarchies of knowledge and reimagine higher education as we know it. In this presentation I offer some insights from recent research and pedagogical experiments that engage the challenges and complexities of undertaking decolonizing work in a contemporary educational context characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA). Rather than prescribe a single pathway forward, I invite people to develop the capacities and the stamina to walk toward as-yet-unimaginable futures with more honesty, humility, and hyper-self-reflexivity. In particular, drawing on my work with...
2021-12-2039 minPhiliminalityTAN Sor-Hoon, “Confucian Democracy and the Analects”There has been a lively debate over the relationship of Confucianism to democracy. Samuel Huntington’s dismissal of Confucian democracy as an oxymoron has been overtaken by a variety of different proposals on whether or not the Confucian political ideal could be democratic. Disagreements among the participants in this debate include issues to do with interpretation of Confucian canonical texts, the most important of which is arguably the Analects. This talk will discuss some of the key passages in the Analects for understanding the political thought of Confucius and its implications for constructing a Confucian democracy today.
2021-05-3139 minPhiliminalityLi Chenyang, "Li as Cultural Grammar: On the Relation between Li and Ren in Confucius' Analects"A major controversy in the study of the Analects has been over the relation between the two central concepts of li (rites, rituals of propriety) and ren (humanity, human excellence). Confucius seems to have said inconsistent things about this relation. Some passages appear to suggest that ren is more fundamental than li, while others seem to imply the contrary, and it is therefore not surprising that there have been different interpretations and characterizations. In this presentation, I will present an interpretation that I believe best characterizes the relation between li and ren. Using the analogy of language grammar and...
2021-05-1745 minPhiliminalityStephen C. Angle, “The Analects and Modern Moral Philosophy”This talk explores the advantages and disadvantages of viewing the Analects through the lens of contemporary moral theory. It looks in particular at Kantian deontology, which Sinophone scholarship on the text has tended to stress; virtue ethics, which is more prominent in Anglophone secondary literature; and role ethics, which has emerged as a potential alternative to both deontology and virtue ethics. These discussions reveal that Sinophone and Anglophone philosophers are starting to engage one another, which is helping to spur the related (though not identical) process of dialogue between Western and Chinese philosophical traditions. Concern about an unhealthy hegemony...
2021-05-1345 minPhiliminalityBarbara Jikai Gabrys, “Zen and Science: The Search for Meaning”There is an apparent contradiction between Zen way of life and scientific studies of nature. However, on the fundamental level they have in common search for reality: through critical examination of facts, acceptance of impermanence of things and phenomena, and non-reliance on scriptures. Implementing and understanding common ground in both outlooks can lead to finding the meaning of human existence, personal flourishing and happiness.
2019-11-1015 minPhiliminalityLivia Kohn, “The Daoist Dimensions of Tai Chi”Tai Chi is a popular method of self-cultivation and health enhancement that goes back to a 17th-century combination of martial arts and healing exercises (daoyin). The latter are first documented in the 3rd century BCE and today activated, under biomedical auspices, in the practice of qigong. To facilitate the smooth movements of Tai Chi, teachers emphasize certain key ideals, such as overall freedom from tension or relaxation, an upright posture, natural breathing, a sense of centrality, weight separation, mental focus, and an awareness of the body (and nature) as one unity. These concepts relate directly to certain core Daoist va...
2019-11-1039 minPhiliminalityAdrian Kreutz, "The Soteriology of Contradiction"Contradictions (and, arguably, the acceptance thereof) pervade Buddhist Philosophy. What is the point of those contradictions? In this talk, I shall argue that contradictions are an important soteriological instrument (upāya) for the practitioner. The enigmatic catuṣkoṭi, a statement to the effect that every proposition holds, does not hold, both holds and does not holds, and neither holds nor does not hold, is noteworthy in this context. In Western research, the catuṣkoṭi has been responsible for plenty furore. Recently, Graham Priest (2010, 2018) has put forward an interpretation of the catuṣkoṭi in non-classical logic. With resource to this te...
2019-11-1020 minPhiliminalityGraham Parkes, “Being-Here: There’s No App for That”The purpose of many computer products in the area of information and communications technology is to capture the user’s attention, distract it from the actual place where the user is situated, and export it to some virtual space where advertisers practise their persuasion. The enterprise has been enormously successful, though the effects on users aren’t always benign (anxiety, depression, etc). Philosophically, the more insidious effects are on how we think and who we think we are, encouraging calculative thinking and a post-Cartesian self-image of ourselves as disembodied minds only contingently situated in physical places. The implications for education dese...
2019-11-1043 minPhiliminalityElisabeth Huh, "Unifying The Eating-Disordered Soul: Treating Anorexia Nervosa Through Ancient Greek Ethics and Psychoanalysis."A growing number of philosophers are recognizing the value of psychoanalysis in enriching our understanding of rational psychic integration—a central task within the Platonic-Aristotelian ethical tradition. Here, I join their ranks by proposing that ancient Greek ethical concepts and Freudian psychoanalytic insights may be jointly applied to conceptualize the psychiatric illness anorexia nervosa as an ethical disorder, and to suggest a means of treating it as such.
Drawing from the Stoic theory of the emotions, as well as Aristotelian virtue ethics, I identify the anorexic’s characteristic fear of gaining weight and pleasure at losing weight as symptoms...
2019-11-1022 minPhiliminalityChristopher Gill: “Stoic therapy of emotions and modern cognitive psychotherapy”It is well-known that Stoic ideas about ethical guidance and the therapy of emotion influenced the formation of modern cognitive therapy. This paper outlines those links and also explores how far the two practices are parallel in their aims and methods with special reference to Epictetus’ ‘Discourses’ and ACT therapy. Bearing in mind the broader theme of the conference, on the intellectual challenge of philosophy (and its significance for practice), I ask how far the distinctive theoretical commitments of Stoic ‘therapy’ render it different in its objectives and procedure from modern cognitive psychotherapy.
2019-11-1037 minPhiliminalityMaria Victoria Salazar: "Recalibrating the Demos: Unknowing through Zen Kōans and Platonic Dialogues"Zen kōans serve a didactic function within the institution of Buddhist schools, with teachers using them to help their pupils reach enlightenment. In this paper, I suggest that Platonic dialogues function similarly to Zen kōans in their inducement of aporia. Thus, reading and understanding the role Zen kōans are intended to play within Buddhist schools illuminates the role of aporia in Western philosophy. Using Plato’s Seventh Letter as a guide for reading Platonic dialogues, I analyze the form of Platonic dialogues generally and highlight how the commentarial traditions engage dialectically with the original texts. Second, I compare a...
2019-11-1021 minPhiliminalityAmber Carpenter, “Ideals and Ethical Formation, or Confessions of a Buddhist Platonist”Buddhist ethics shares with Plato a rationalist orientation in the weak but crucial sense that a correct view of reality is the final goal, and that seeking and attaining this goal is transformative. This implies a further similarity, namely that the focus of ethical concern is on transformation of view, from which transformation of character (or experience) follows. Choice, deliberation, action, reason happen too far downstream, and too much simply as the result of transformation of view and character, for them to be of much theoretical interest in their own right. Buddhist ethics further shares with Plato a sublime indiffere...
2019-11-1041 minPhiliminalityDerek van Zoonen, "Plato's Therapy of Pleasure"It is well-known that modern strands of psychotherapy—like Beck’s cognitive-behavioural therapy or Ellis’ rational emotive therapy—have been influenced by the Stoics and their take on the nature of emotions. It is not the world which causes our emotional upheaval, the Stoics and therapists propose, but how we construe the world through our mediating beliefs. What is rarely appreciated, though, is the fact that a precursor of this cognitivist theory of human emotion can already be found in Plato’s Philebus. Here Socrates offers a famous yet puzzling argument (between 36c3 and 41a4) according to which our anticipatory plea...
2019-11-1020 minPhiliminalityKatja Vogt, “No More This Than That”In the Theaetetus, Plato ascribes a metaphysics to relativism according to which there are no stable objects or properties. In effect, the world dissolves and there is nothing we can refer to in speech. En route to this revisionist picture, Plato toys with expressions that might be suitable to talk about a world in flux: something is no more tall than not tall, no more cold than not cold, etc. The Greek expression used in these formulations, ou mallon, becomes a stock element of Pyrrhonian skepticism. My paper makes a novel proposal by arguing that the Stoics too find a place f...
2019-11-1040 minPhiliminalityGraham Priest, “Buddhism, Philosophy, Therapy”Buddhist philosophy starts life, in the shape of the “Four Noble Truths” (Catvāri Āryasatyāni), with an analysis of the somewhat unhappy human condition, its ground, and what to do about it. Over the next two millennia, as Buddhism spreads through Asia, and especially into China, different schools of Buddhism develop and add to these fundamental insights in different ways. In this talk, I will discuss the Four Noble Truths, and then, to the extent that time permits, some of the later developments.
2019-11-1038 minPhiliminalityAna Laura Funes, "Joy as Medicine? Yogavāsiṣṭha on the Affective Sources of Disease"According to the psychosomatic model found in the Yogavāsiṣtha, it is through the cultivation of joy—understood as the blissful tranquility of the mind (ānanda) that results from emotional purification— that we can heal from disease. In this paper I present Vasiṣṭha’s psychosomatic medical theory and analyze it in light of the main philosophical problem that arises: How much control do we have upon our own mental agitations and thus, upon our own healing? I will show that Vāsiṣṭha’s typology of disease offers a useful distinction for a phenomenology of illness that can accommodate the subje...
2019-11-1029 minPhiliminalityJessica Frazier, “You are What you Know: Becoming the Cosmos in Ancient India”Some of India's earliest philosophy in the Upanisads relied on an implicit theory of knowledge that saw the mind as a malleable material that 'becomes' what it knows. We look at how this theory, when it meets the beginnings of metaphysics, sets the scene for speculative philosophy as a therapy of self-expansion, self-deepening, and self-remaking. Here, rather than a quietist or stoic purpose for philosophy - as Pierre Hadot has suggested - we see philosophy as the mind's capacity to recreate itself in the likeness of the cosmos.
2019-11-1041 min