The Body, Breath and the World We Live In
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
2:00 pm
- Venue
- Online
- Event type
- Lecture
About this event
About this event
SOAS World Philosophies Lecture 20
The Body, Breath and the World We Live In
Before I think, I must breathe. According to an old and disproved pair of stereotypes, European thinking starting from the Pre-Socratic to Daniel Dennett, has been predominantly worldly and outward, whereas Indian thinking has been predominantly world-denying and inward. The earliest Indian Upanishads, however, have been based on elaborate ontologies of the food-body, breath-body and the sense-organs which are neither entirely objective nor entirely subjective. This lecture will develop a phenomenology of the ‘subtle body’ and breathing based on the work of the 11th century Kashmiri epistemologist-aesthete Abhinavagupta and the work of Maurice Merleau Ponty. Through this comparative hermeneutic exercise, I would like to reconceptualize the central Upanishadic-Yogic concept of “prAn.a”—which is deeply connected but not reducible to the concept of vital breath.
Speaker
Arindam Chakrabarti, Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Ashoka University, India, earned a D.Phil from Oxford University, in 1982, under the supervision of Sir Peter Strawson and Sir Michael Dummett. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Edinburgh, UK, the Sanskrit University in Tirupati, India, Trinity College Cambridge, the National Institute of Advanced Study, Bangalore, India, and the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. He has taught at the University of Calcutta, The Asiatic Society of Bengal, University College London, UK, University of Washington Seattle, USA, Delhi University and for 26 years at the University of Hawaii Manoa. With over 100 papers in refereed journals and anthologies, his major books include Knowing from Words: Western and Indian Philosophical Analysis of Understanding and Testimony (Springer 1994, with B.K. Matilal), Universals, Concepts and Qualities New Essays on the Meaning of Predicates (Routledge 2006, with P.F. Strawson), and the large monograph, Realisms Interlinked: Objects, Subjects and Other Subjects (Bloomsbury 2019).
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The Body, Breath and World We Live In online lecture
