The Philosophy Department of UAE University cordially invites you to the

1st UAEU Global Philosophy Symposium

A Meeting of Traditions

Sunday 8th and Monday 9th April 2018 Business Center (D3-0028A, Crescent Building)

UAE University, Al Ain City

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Website: https://chss.uaeu.ac.ae/en/symposium/

For registration and information, contact Dr. Max Cappuccio: m.lorenzo@uaeu.ac.ae

Overview Supported by the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and organized by the Philosophy Department of United Arab Emirates University in collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Beijing), the first UAEU Global Philosophy Symposium represents a meeting of Western (ancient Greek, Analytic, Continental), Middle-Eastern (Arabic, Islamic, Persian), and Eastern (Indian, Chinese, Japanese) philosophical traditions. The symposium thematises a historical process effectively described by Prof. Jonardon Ganeri: “the world of academic philosophy is now entering a new age”, characterized by the “appreciation of the value of world philosophies”, and “the philosophical pluralism”. As a result, philosophy is leaving “behind a centre-periphery mode of production” and is “becoming again polycentric: the philosophical world is returning to a plural and diverse network of productive sites”. In an age of migration of peoples of traditions, globalization of ideas, and de-colonization of the intellectual discourse, having already developed awareness, but not fear, of the challenges posed by cultural relativism and the collapse of historical grand narratives, philosophy must embrace its rich diversity. Our meeting aims to begin an exploration of this new polycentric scenario, to cartography the methodological and speculative options offered by different comparative and cosmopolitan approaches, emphasizing their autonomy and specific mode of authenticity. The symposium will offer two panel discussions about: 1) Multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism in the Arab world. The global mission of the UAE and the role of philosophy. 2) Happiness and the good life in Western, Middle-eastern, and Eastern philosophical traditions.

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Program of the Symposium

Sunday 8th April Opening session 3.30pm - 6.30pm 3.30pm-3.40pm William McDonald (UAE University) Welcome message and introductory remarks 3.40pm-4.40pm Jonardon Ganeri (NYU Abu Dhabi) Beyond the East-West Dichotomy. The Future of Philosophy 4.40pm-4.50pm Break 4.50pm-5.50pm Yihong Liu (CASS Beijing) The Comparative Philosophical Perspective and Cultural Coexistence: Chinese Islamic Thought and Chinese Islamic Art Studies 5.50pm-6.30pm Open discussion: Multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism in the Arab world. The global mission of the UAE and the role of philosophy * * * * * * * Monday 9th April Morning session 10.00am - 1.20pm 10.00am-11.00am Chen Xia (CASS Beijing) A Daoist View of Ecology: Dao and Beings, Nature and People 11.00am-11.10am Break

11.10am-12.10pm Marco Di Branco (Università degli Studi di Padova) The Greeks and their Philosophers in the Arabic Historical Sources 12.10pm-12.20pm Break 12.20pm-1.20pm Phillip Meadows (UAE University) Absences, many absences, and causation 1.20pm-2.30pm Lunch break Afternoon session 2.30pm - 6.00pm 2.30pm-3.30pm Jay Hetrick (University of Sharjah) Gilles Deleuze and Japanese Aesthetics 3.30pm-3.40pm Break 3.40pm-4.40pm William McDonald (UAE University) Nietzsche's Reception of Indian Buddhism 4.40pm-4.50pm Break 4.50pm-5.50pm Roundtable: Happiness in Western, Middle-eastern, and Asian philosophical traditions 5.50pm-6.00pm Conclusive remarks and end of symposium

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Speakers and Abstracts The Greeks and their Philosophers in the Arabic Historical Sources Marco Di Branco (University of Padova) As it is known, the Abbasid scholars were very interested in Greek science and philosophy, but they knew very little about Greek history. In this field, their reflections take often the form of the genealogical inquiry. In my contribution, I would like to discuss, on the one hand the question of the Islamic vision of the Greeks and their accomlishments, on the other hand the issue of the Arabic attitude towards the Greek philosophy, and in particular towards the greatest cultural and social phenomenon taking place in the Abbasid age: the Graeco-Arabic ‘translation movement’ of Greek scientific and philosophic literature into Arabic.

Marco Di Branco is an historian serving as a research fellow at the Università di Roma “La Sapienza”. He is the author of many articles and books whose content spans from Late antiquity to Byzantine and Arabic history. He is author of many books and articles, whose content spans from Late antiquity to Byzantine and Islamic history and archaeology. His current research projects concern Ibn Khaldun's vision of Greek and Roman history, the history and archaeology of the Islamic settlement at the Garigliano River (IX-X century CE), the Arabic translation of the Historiae

adversus paganos by the Latin historian Paulus Orosius. He was a member of the research team of the ERC project “Greek into Arabic” and was involved in a project on the Muslim presence in Southern Italy in the Middle Ages financed by the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rome. Currently, he is Marie Curie fellow with a project concerning the Arabic translation of the Historiae adversus paganos by Paulus Orosius (X century CE). * * * * * * * Beyond the East-West Dichotomy. The Future of Philosophy Jonardon Ganeri (New York University Abu Dhabi) The world of academic philosophy is now entering a new age, one defined neither by colonial need for recognition nor by postcolonial wish to integrate. The indicators of this new era include heightened appreciation of the value of world philosophies, the internationalisation of the student body, the philosophical pluralism which interaction and migration in new global movements make salient, growing concerns about diversity within a still too-white faculty body and curricular canon, and identification of a range of deep structural problems with the contemporary philosophical academy in its discursive, citational, refereeing and ranking practices. We are entering what we might call “the age of re-emergence”, a new period the key features of which are as

follows. First, philosophies from every region of the world, locally grounded in lived experience and reflection upon it, are finding new autonomous and authentic forms of articulation. Second, philosophical industry, leaving behind a centre-periphery mode of production, is becoming again polycentric: the philosophical world is returning to a plural and diverse network of productive sites. Third, Europe and other colonial powers have been provincialised, no longer mandatory conversation partners or points of comparison but rather unprivileged participants in global dialogue. Fourth, philosophers within the largely anglophone international academy are beginining to acknowledge their responsibility so to arrange international institutions as to enable wide and open participation; that is, acknowledge that their control over the academy is a fall-out from colonialism rather than a reflection of intellectual superiority. We may thus look to a future when there will be a vibrant pluralistic realism in departments of academic philosophy around the globe, and a new cartography of philosophy.

Jonardon Ganeri is a philosopher whose work draws on a variety of philosophical traditions to construct new positions in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology. He is the author of Attention, Not Self; The Self; The Concealed Art of the Soul; The Lost Age of Reason; and Semantic Powers, all published by Oxford University Press. He joined the Fellowship of the British Academy in 2015, and won the Infosys Prize in the Humanities the same year. Open Minds magazine named him

of its 50 global “open minds” for 2016, and in 2017 he received “Best Professor of Philosophy” in the Middle East Educational Leadership Awards. * * * * * * * Gilles Deleuze and Japanese Aesthetics Jay Hetrick (University of Sharjah) In a book I recently co-edited and translated, Machinic Eros: Writings on Japan, I highlighted the ways in which the French philosopher Felix Guattari appropriated certain ideas from Japanese philosophy and aesthetics for the formulation of his later thought. In this paper, I would like to discuss in depth some of Gilles Deleuze’s - Guattari’s long-time collaborator - almost passing references to East Asian thought. Even though Deleuze comes to these ideas mostly through the work of other European thinkers - most notably Friedrich Nietzsche, Francois Jullien, Sergei Eisenstein, and Henri Maldiney - I would like to argue that there are ultimately deep resonances between Deleuze’s metaphysical vision, especially in its Bergsonian-Leibnizian articulations, and that of East Asian philosophies. I will begin by cataloging and commenting upon his various references to Chinese and Japanese thought before discussing how Deleuze’s thought may be productively compared to the Kyoto School, particularly the work of Nishida Kitaro, who’s own philosophical lineage is strikingly similar to that of Deleuze. Finally, I will argue that the Japanese ethico-aesthetic notion of kire - as well as a constellation of supporting metaphysical ideas concepts like ma and mu - helps us to further articulate Deleuze’s notions of the machine, of cutting, and of discontinuous flows. In short, I would like to follow up on what was a seemingly simple and naive intuition on Deleuze’s part that East Asian thought could provide

some correctives to the dogmatic Western tradition that has been so colored by Plato, Descartes, and Kant. Deleuze told Kuniichi Uno - his student and the main Japanese translator of his works - that he would have liked to have investigated, in relation to his concept of the fold, Leibniz’s fascination with the Orient. But what could this fascination mean today, that is, what are we to make of it philosophically, especially in the wake of the criticisms against Orientalism and “comparative philosophy.”

Jay Hetrick is Assistant Professor at the College of Fine Arts and Design, University of Sharjah, where he teaches the history and theory of art and design. He has a PhD in the Philosophy of Art and Culture from the University of Amsterdam and has experience – both as a student and as a teacher – at art schools in Europe, America, the United Kingdom, as well as the United Arab Emirates. He specializes in contemporary art theory, but has also published on the history of Western, non-Western, and comparative aesthetics. He is a member of the European Society for Aesthetics and is on the Editorial Board of the journal Evental Aesthetics. His most recent edited book will

be published by Columbia University Press in late 2018 entitled Videophilosophy: The Perception of Time in Post-Fordism. * * * * * * * The Comparative Philosophical Perspective and Cultural Coexistence: Chinese Islamic Thought and Chinese Islamic Art Studies Yihong Liu (Institute of Philosophy, CASS Beijing) In this paper I’ll illustrate how Chinese Muslim thinkers created a brand new systematic theory of Islam through transformation and combination between the core concepts of Islamic thoughts such as the oneness of Allah (al-wahdat), the unity of human and Allah (ittihad in Sufi), the way for this unity (tariqa) and the core values of Chinese traditional thought such as the unity of heaven and humanity, the way of self-cultivation to achieve it. So that the main topics of Chinese Islamic Philosophy can be summarized as three parts: 1. Theory of the Ontology 2. The Main Principles of Ethics 3. Sufi Theory Through the illustration of Chinese Islamic theories I can reach the conclusion as below:

(1) In order to understand Islam, the Chinese Muslim scholars had interpreted the doctrine of Islam by adopting either the cosmological concepts of the ancient Chinese philosophy, or the ideas of geomancy from the Book of Changes, or some philosophic theories from Neo-Confucianism. The philosophical thought of Chinese Islam emerged during the Ming and Qing Dynasties shows the tendency of incorporating Confucianism into Islam and annotating Islam with Confucianism. The concepts of Confucianism were applied in the free translation of Islamic religious books. Confucian thought was applied to justify

the correctness of the theoretical interpretation, such as Liu Zhi’s《Tianfang dianli 》. A thorough understanding of the Islamic doctrine should be gained through mastery of all relevant materials of the Confucian thought in order to elaborate its true meaning and make a new systematic Islamic ideology, such as Liu Zhi’s《Tianfang xingli》.

(2) By making dialectic study of the Islamic and the Chinese philosophy, the Chinese Muslim scholars had attempted to find out the mutual complement within both Islamic philosophy and the Chinese traditional thoughts and shown the particularities of both on one hand and the similarities of both on the other. Yet the main characteristics of the creation of the Chinese Islamic philosophy could be described as follows: “to interpret the doctrine of Islam through Confucianism”, “to make a supplement to Confucianism by Islam” and “to achieve flourished development of both Islam and Confucianism through the integration”.

Yihong Liu has completed her education at Peking University, Cairo University, and Columbia University (NYC) in the field of Arabic, Islamic studies and Comparative studies. She is currently Professor at the Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, where she is also Director of the Arabic and Islamic Studies Project, and Vice Director of the Center of Oriental Cultures Studies. She is also a Member of the Chinese Religious Council, an Assessment Expert of the Evaluation Committee of State Social Science Foundation

and Chinese Scientific Foundation for Post-doctoral Studies, Asian Expert of the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy (SAGP) with the Society for the Study of Islamic Philosophy and Science (SSIPS), USA, an Asian Scholar of Alliance of Civilizations (UN, AOC), an Official member of the Columbia Society of Comparative Philosophy, a member of the Seminar of Neo-Confucian Studies of Columbia University. She is also Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Chinese, Indian, and Islamic Cultural Relations (2004-2008)(Global Scholarly Publications, NYC). She has published English and Chinese books and papers on Islamic thoughts, Chinese Islamic Art and the Dialogue between Islamic and Chinese traditional thoughts, as well as English articles on China Daily and Kuwait Times: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2015-01/21/content_19363535.htm * * * * * * * Nietzsche’s Reception of Indian Buddhism William McDonald (UAE University) This paper traces Nietzsche’s reception of Indian Buddhism through all his known sources as well as through references and allusions to Buddhism in his writings. The sources reveal that Nietzsche was exposed to scholarly work on Buddhism that is quite at odds with his central interpretation of Buddhism as nihilistic, which he seems to have derived from Schopenhauer’s assimilation of Buddhism to pessimism and Schopenhauer’s mistaken conflation of Buddhism and Brahmanism. Yet, despite his

subsequent wholesale repudiation of Schopenhauer and his failure to offer critiques of the contemporary scholarly work on Buddhism, Nietzsche retains his view of Buddhism as nihilistic. This paper explains Nietzsche’s adherence to the mistake in terms of his appropriation of key ideas from English anthropology, for use as a framework for interpreting religion in general. This framework enabled Nietzsche to pursue an anti-religious agenda, which in turn gave him a distorted view of Buddhism. Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s otherwise sympathetic reception of Buddhism demonstrates close affinities with his own philosophy. This affinity coupled with his charge of nihilism makes Nietzsche’s reception of Buddhism distinctly ambivalent.

William McDonald is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the United Arab Emirates University. He obtained his PhD from the University of Sydney and wrote his dissertation at the University of Copenhagen. He is an internationally recognised Kierkegaard scholar and has expertise in the history of philosophy, comparative philosophy of religion, philosophical psychology and aesthetics. He has been awarded research fellowships at the University of Copenhagen, the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Monash University, the University of Hertfordshire and St. Olaf College, Minnesota. He has worked at the University of Sydney, the University of New England, the American

University of Central Asia and the United Arab Emirates University. * * * * * * * Absences, many absences, and causation Phillip Meadows (UAE University) In this paper I offer a partial defense of absence causation in response to two related issues: (i) the problem of many absences, and (ii) Beebee’s claim that there is no metaphysically respectable, principled criterion that the friend of absence causation can appeal to in response to (i). I argue that holes provide a counterexample to Beebee’s claim, and I articulate the response to the many absences problem suggested by this case. In the final section I suggest ways this response can be developed to account for common-sense judgments about the causal relevance of other cases of absences.

Phillip Meadows is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at UAE University, and have taught previously at Manchester, Keele and UWE, Bristol. His research covers topics in metaphysics and the philosophy of perception, having published on direct realism, spatial perception, audition, and holes. His present research project is to provide a coherent account of the nature of sound, silence and auditory perceptual experience.

* * * * * * * A Daoist View of Ecology: Dao and Beings, Nature and People Chen Xia (Institute of Philosophy, CASS Beijing) As the oldest indigenous philosophic-spiritual tradition in China with a history over 2000 years, Daoism has had a great influence on various facets of the traditional Chinese culture and has been an inseparable part of it. Daoism contains, in its creeds, tenets, and practices, many ideas compatible with the concept of environmental conservation. They help the ancient Chinese to cultívate the interrelationship between human beings and the natural world, i.e., the largest wu. This paper tries to bridge the theoretical and practical, aesthetic and technical aspects, ancient ideas and modern relevance of Daoism and ecology. It is divided into two parts. Firstly, it will introduce the philosophical understanding of humans and the natural world from Daoist perspective. The author will illustrate the philosophical foundation for protecting the environment and respect all life through an argument for the co-existence between Dao and wu. Secondly, she will show how, humans, as a special type of wu, keep interrelatedness with other wu, involve in the natural world as the observer and dweller, non-actional follower and appreciator, balance keeper and contemplator who return to simplicity and authenticity. Daoist scholarship for the most part concentrates on terms as Dao (the Way，道), de (virtue, power, potency,德), ziran (spontaneity and naturalness，自然), wuwei (effortless action，无为), etc...Beyond the explicit categories, I am invested in looking at Dao in relation to another concept, “wu”, a term which has not yet sufficiently discussed to the standard array of the above Daoist terms. wu (things, matters, creatures, 物) or wanwu (myriad things，萬物) have been mentioned repeatedly in the Laozi and hundreds of times in the Zhuangzi. When talking about Daoism and ecology, wu should be treated as an important concept. Considering the relationship between Dao and wu, may provide inspirations to ecological problems. Daoism has a deep reverence for ecology, cosmic equilibrium and natural dynamic harmony. This paper will demonstrate the co-existence between Dao andwu (matter, things, creatures, 物) as the philosophical foundation for the interrelatedness between humans and Nature. The Daoist, holding such view, presents a microcosm of the universe as the macrocosm and highlight human involvement in the transformation of this universe as an observer and a friendly dweller, follower and appreciator, balance keeper and contemplator. If we appreciate, value and practice such ideas in our dealings with the environment, we will live in harmony with, rather than against the natural world, avoid any unnecessary tampering, act to benefit humans, other wu and the environment.

Chen Xia is a research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), Beijing, China. She received her Ph.D in Religious Studies from Sichuan University. After graduation, she taught at Sichuan University for 10 years. Then she conducted a post-doctoral research in Chinese philosophy at CASS and moved to this research academy in 2003. During these years, she has been a visiting scholar at Harvard-Yenching Institute, and SOAS of the University of London. Currently, she is a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Brown University. Her specialty is Religions in

China and Chinese Philosophy, concentrating on Daoism. She is the co-chief editor of Principles in the Study of Religions. This book is used widely as a text book for students in their studies of theories and methods in the Study of Religions. Her book Studies of Daoist Moral Tracts is a book focusing on Daoist ethics and moralities from Song dynasty (960-1279) till Qing (1636-1911). In recent years, she pays attention to ecology, and is the chief editor and contributor of Studies of Daoist Ecological Thoughts. Besides doing research, she also spend some translating books from Chinese to English and from English to Chinese. She is one of the translators for books like Daoism and Traditional Chinese Culture (Chinese to English). From English to Chinese, she helped in translating Martin Luther’s Theological Thoughts, Man’s Religions and Daoism and Ecology. Her current projects include Daoist views on the body/mind, and an outline of Daoist philosophy.

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1st UAEU Global Philosophy Symposium

A Meeting of Traditions

Sunday 8th and Monday 9th April 2018 Business Center (D3-0028A, Crescent Building)

UAE University, Al Ain City

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For registration and information, contact Dr. Max Cappuccio:

m.lorenzo@uaeu.ac.ae

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