The London Lecture Series

The classical Greeks give us a concept of substance that guarantees a permanent and unchanging subject as the substratum for the human experience. Roger Ames argues that in the Yijing or "Book of Changes" we find a stark alternative to this ontology which reflects a holistic, organic, and ecological worldview. This cosmology begins from “living” itself as the motive force behind change, and gives us a world of boundless “becomings:” not “things” that are, but “events” that are happening, a contrast between an ontological conception of human “beings” and a process conception of what Ames calls human “becomings.” Roger Ames is the Humanities Chair Professor at Peking University in Beijing and also Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. He's the author and co-author of many books including his study of ancient Chinese political thought, "The Art of Rulership" and "Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary".

Lewis Gordon examines what it means for philosophy to be ‘colonised’ and the challenges involved in ‘decolonising’ it in philosophical and political terms. Lewis Gordon is professor of philosophy and head of the department of philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He works in a number of areas of philosophy including Africana philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, social and political thought, post-colonial thought and on the work of thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois and Franz Fanon. His most recent books are "Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization" and "Fear of Black Consciousness".

In his famous 1897 essay, “The Conservation of Races”, Du Bois advocated that African Americans hold on to their distinctiveness as members of the black race because this enables them to participate in a cosmopolitan process of cultural exchange in which different races collectively advance human civilization by means of different contributions. Philosophers like Kwame Anthony Appiah and Tommie Shelby have criticised the position that Du Bois expresses in that essay as a problematic form of racial essentialism. Chike Jeffers explores how Du Bois' 1924 book "The Gift of Black Folk" escapes or fails to escape that criticism. He argues that recognising the cultivation of historical memory as a form of cultural activity is key to understanding the concept's unity. Chike Jeffers is associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Dalhousie university. He is the co-presenter of the Africana philosophy editions of the "History of Philosophy without Any Gaps" podcast and two forthcoming books based on it. He is also the co-author of "What is Race? Four Philosophical Views", and editor of "Listening to Ourselves: A Multilingual Anthology of African Philosophy". 

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"