A Conversation with Prof. Sonam Kachru (University of Virginia) on his New Intellectual History, Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhism (Columbia University Press, 2021)

Hist_031221
03 Dec 2021 09.00 AM - 10.30 AM Alumni, Current Students, Industry/Academic Partners, Prospective Students, Public
Organised by:
Nicholas Witkowski
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Human experience is not confined to waking life. Do experiences in dreams matter? Humans are not the only living beings who have experiences. Does nonhuman experience matter? The Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu, writing during the late fourth and early fifth centuries C.E., argues in his workThe Twenty Versesthat these alternative contexts ought to inform our understanding of mind and world.In Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhism, Sonam Kachru takes up Vasubandhu's views. Here, in conversation with Nicholas Witkowski about Vasubandhu's work and his own, Sonam Kachru discusses Vasubandhu's views on alternating contexts of experience and the importance of cosmology as a tool of thought, among other topics involved in the study of premodern Indian Buddhist philosophy.

About the Speaker:

Sonam Kachru is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies. He works on the history of philosophy, centering on the history of Buddhist philosophy and literature in premodern South Asia. Topics of particular interest to him include the philosophy of mind (consciousness, attention, imagination), metaphysics, and philosophical anthropology, particularly having to do with the epistemic, existential and moral fragility of persons. Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhismis his first book.

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