BASC70101 - Philosophy in the Buddhist World

Course Description

“The Buddhist world” is more than just a span of dates on the timeline and places on the map: it is the world, or even any world, as seen through Buddhist eyes. This course will ask what philosophy and the practices of philosophizing look like when undertaken by thinkers who orient their thinking in Buddhist ways. Such thinkers have developed some of history’s most distinctive and fascinating theories about existence, language, knowledge, psychology, and ethics. With the help of an anthology of contemporary translations from Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan, and other languages (Edelglass and Garfield, Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings), we will explore and analyze more than two thousand years’ worth of challenging philosophical work—and will see how far we can extend its ideas in our present global setting.