The London Lecture Series

Some of our emotions are bad – unpleasant to experience, reflective of dissatisfactions or even heartbreak – but nonetheless quite important to express and, more basically, to feel. Grief is like this, for example. So, too, is disappointment. Amy Olberding explores how our current social practices may fail to support expressions of disappointment and thus suppress our ability to feel it well. She draws on early Confucian philosophy and its remarkable attention to everyday social interactions and their power to steer our emotional lives. She makes the case that although there are losses to our moral lives where we are socially encouraged to emotions such as anger, outrage, or cynical resignation, we must struggle to find a place for disappointment.Amy Olberding is the Presidential Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma Her research is largely concentrated on the ethical aspects of ordinary life, especially as these feature as prominent concerns in early Confucianism. Her most recent book, The Wrong of Rudeness, considers just what might tempt us to rudeness and incivility, and reflects on the moral, social, and political reasons we shouldn’t be easy and free with rudeness and incivility.

While Heidegger and Derrida both contributed groundbreaking reflections on hospitality (and “hostipitality”), they failed to recognize that the host-guest relationship can only succeed if it is correlated with the notion of mutual guardianship. The lecture will describe historic guardian civilizations and then turn to Ricoeur’s linguistic hospitality as a possible blueprint for future cultural hospitality. However, the latter scenario will have no need for a third party, i.e., a “translator” who mediates between host and guest. The challenge consists of designing a host-guest relationship in which both parties become each other’s translators - and guardians.Tamara Albertini is a professor and department chair at the university of Hawai‘i at Manoa. Professor Albertini’s research in Renaissance philosophy focuses on Nicholas of Cusa (mathematics, cosmology), Marsilio Ficino (metaphysics, aesthetics) and Charles de Bovelles. Within Islamic philosophy, Professor Tamara Albertini’s publications aim at reintroducing the vigor and vision of Muslim intellectual contributions from the classical period.

We live in an age of anger and shameless disregard for what is true and good. What can we learn from other cultures about better ways to do anger and shame? How can we develop better norms for being angry at the right things, in the right way, at the right times? How can we inculcate norms for proper shame at callous disregard for what is true and good? Flanagan argues that attention to how other cultures do anger and shame provides tools to enlarge our moral imagination.Owen Flanagan is the James B Duke University Professor Philosophy and Professor of Neurobiology at Duke University. Owen is the author of numerous books on a range of subjects in the philosophy of mind, piths and moral psychology, such as The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalised (2011), The Geography Of Morals (2016), and most recently How To Do Things with Emotions: Anger and Shame Across Cultures (2021). 

Aesthetic theories in the Western tradition, like most philosophical theories, do not set out to have only local application, as they try to articulate generally relevant and illuminating theoretical concepts and values. But can and should philosophical aesthetics have global significance? Can aesthetic theories find fruitful general application while also respecting the locality and variability of aesthetic sensitivity? What kinds of theoretical ambition and humility are called for in philosophical aesthetics? Eileen John is associate professor of philosophy at the university of Warwick and director of the Warwick Centre for research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts. She has a specific interest in literature and its philosophical and ethical roles and she tries to show the relevance of literary works to contemporary debates concerning, for example, personhood ethical disagreement and value formation.

In classical South Asian philosophy, as in common sense, most thought that the first-person pronoun “I” stands for the self, something that persists through time, undergoes conscious thoughts and experiences, and exercises control over actions. The Buddhists accepted the “no-self” thesis: they denied that such a self is substantially real. This gave rise to a puzzle for these Buddhists. If there is nothing substantially real that “I” stands for, what are we talking about when we speak of ourselves? Nilanjan Das presents one Buddhist answer to this question, an answer that emerges from the work of the 4th-5th century CE Abhidharma thinker, Vasubandhu.Nilanjan Das is a lecturer philosophy at University College London. He works on the connections between self-knowledge and irrationality and also debates between buddhist and brahmanical thinkers about the nature of the self, knowledge and self-knowledge. He's also currently writing a book on the 12th century Indian philosopher and poet Śrīharṣa.

Plato has been one of the most important philosophers in the West and is now read all over the world. He has undergone a lot of research in academia, but Noburu Notomi suspects that modern readers have missed some essential factors in analyzing Plato’s texts and thoughts. In order to correctly understand his central theory of Ideas and reconsider the potential of Plato’s philosophy in the modern world, Notomi discusses the reactions of four Japanese philosophers of the twentieth century to Plato’s Ideas, showing how a Japanese perspective can shed light on how to read Plato today.Noburu Notomi is a professor at the graduate school of humanities and sociology at the university of Tokyo. He specializes in western ancient philosophy and in his career he’s been in many different universities including Cambridge, where he completed his PhD in classics. He is the author of many published works in Japanese and in English his most notable work is The Unity of Plato’s Sophist (1999)

The methods of philosophy may be associated with practices such as rational dialogue, logical analysis, argumentation, and intellectual inquiry. However, many philosophical traditions in Asia, as well as in the ancient Greek world, consider an array of embodied contemplative practices as central to the work of philosophy and as philosophical methods in themselves. Leah Kalmanson surveys a few such practices, including those of the ancient Greeks as well as examples from Jain, Buddhist, and Confucian traditions. She argues that revisiting the contemplative practices of philosophy can help us to rethink the boundaries of the discipline, the nature and scope of scholarly methods, and the role of philosophy in everyday life.Leah Kalmanson is an Associate Professor and the Bhagwan Adinath Professor of Jain Studies at the University of North Texas. She works at the intersection of comparative philosophy and postcolonial theory, with special interests in the liberational philosophies of China's Song dynasty and related discourses on issues of cultivation and transformation in philosophy more broadly, both personal and socio-political. She is the author of Cross-Cultural Existentialism (2020) and co-author of A Practical Guide to World Philosophies (2021).Part of the London Lecture Series 2021-22 | “Expanding Horizons"

Philosophers enjoy telling stories. Sometimes the stories are very short, but they can be long and detailed as well, for example in the form of utopian narratives by More, Cavendish and others. Why do philosophers invent such stories, and what do they want to accomplish with them? Helen de Cruz argues that existing accounts of thought experiments cannot easily explain the range and variety of thought experiments. In her view, philosophical thought experiments are not merely prettily dressed up arguments. Neither are they only mental models or intuition pumps. Rather, thought experiments help us through a variety of tools that fictions employ to get rid of certain biases and preconceptions, and thus to look at a philosophical idea with a fresh perspective.Helen de Cruz holds the Danforth Chair in the Humanities at Saint Louis University. Her main areas of specialization are philosophy of cognitive science and philosophy of religion and she also works in general philosophy of science, epistemology, aesthetics, and metaphilosophy. She is the co-editor of Philosophy and science fiction stories (2021) and author of Philosophy Illustrated (2021)

Self-described ‘hippie eco-philosopher’ Joanna Burch-Brown takes us on a deep dive into the philosophy of green finance and a step closer to addressing climate change, by way of a lively tale of philosophy going banking. Joining the discussion is Sean Edwards, chairman of the International Trade and Forfaiting Association Annual Conference. Joanna Burch-Brown is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at University of Bristol. Her work has focused on issues of contested heritage and public memory. She is a founding member of the University of Bristol's Centre for Black Humanities, academic director for the Fulbright Summer Institute on ‘Arts, Activism and Social Justice’ and served on the Bristol History Commission.