Book event

By The Light of the Moon | In Conversation with Jay L. Garfield & Sonam Thakchöe

The 7th-century Buddhist philosopher Candrakirti was a proponent of the doctrine of ‘emptiness’, which holds that all phenomena are empty of intrinsic existence. Does this make him a radical nihilist who denies the possibility of any knowledge and the reality of both the external world and of the mind?

The book argues that Candrakirti is not a nihilist. The authors show instead that Candrakirti develops a sophisticated understanding of knowledge in the context of massive delusion, of reality in the world of conventional truth, and of ethics in the domain of human life. This analysis reconciles the claim that all phenomena are empty-that they lack any intrinsic existence or identity-with a moderate realism about the conventional world.

Jay L. Garfield is Doris Silbert Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy and Buddhist Studies at Smith College, Visiting Professor of Buddhist philosophy at Harvard Divinity School, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne.

Sonam Thakchöe is a Senior Philosophy Lecturer at the University of Tasmania.

Jay and Sonam will be in conversation with Dirk Baltzly. Dirk is emeritus professor of Philosophy in the School of Humanities at the University of Tasmania. His area of specialisation is Ancient Greek Philosophy.

Join Jay, Sonam and Dirk at the Afterword cafe.