Department Spotlight

Associate Professor of Philosophy Christian Coseru has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute Grant to stage an institute on “Investigating Consciousness: Buddhist and Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives” on campus in Summer 2012. Professors Jay Garfield of Smith College and Evan Thompson of the University of Toronto will co-direct the institute, which will also involve contributions by 14 distinguished faculty from major universities in the United States, Europe, and Australia.

The Institute will attract 18 faculty and two advanced graduate students from institutions across the country in order to expand their knowledge of a complex and rapidly evolving discourse: the convergence of analytic, phenomenological, and Buddhist perspectives in the investigation of consciousness. The explosion of interest in and rigorous study of consciousness in contemporary philosophy, psychology and cognitive neuroscience is relatively recent, and follows an extensive tradition of phenomenology in philosophy and psychology beginning around the turn of the 20th Century in Europe. The Indian and Tibetan Buddhist traditions have attended to this topic for many centuries, and have produced a vast technical literature on this topic, in a research program that remains active today. 

Analytic philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists have developed promising accounts on states of belief, perception, action, intentionality, new approaches to the mind-body problem, and a range of accounts of various types of consciousness, typically from a “third-person,” or “objectivist” perspective. This perspective, though clearly valuable, needs to be supplemented by a systematic exploration of the dimensions of our subjective and intersubjective experience. The phenomenological tradition provides one descriptive framework for such systematic exploration. The Institute will also introduce participants to a much older, equally systematic, and rigorous framework for the analysis of consciousness developed by Buddhist philosophers and practitioners. Like their Western counterparts, Buddhist philosophers have also engaged central topics in the study of consciousness and have produced impressive results. The range of theoretical models proposed by Buddhist philosophers—some akin to those developed in the West, and others that have no discernible parallels in Western philosophy—exhibits a progressive program of the study of consciousness. This NEH Institute is designed to enable interested participants to draw these three often parallel research programs together for mutual benefit.

For details about the project, directors and faculty profiles, and the application guidelines, please check the Institute website: http://coseruc.people.cofc.edu/investigating consciousness/