Panel V: Ethics


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Meditation appears to be able to provide analytic and therapeutic tools for individuals to understand and develop their own minds. However, according to Indo-Tibetan Buddhist and other traditions, development of one's own capacities is simply a preliminary to ethical engagement with others. Similarly, certain philosophers within the European phenomenological tradition, such as Emmanuel Levinas and his interlocutors, have highlighted the interface between epistemological questions and ethical ones.

This session builds on earlier panel discussions to explore the intersection of theories of knowledge about the mind, meditational and other practical modalities for engaging with the mind, and ethical questions about how conscious individuals can or should relate to each other. With target essay from philosopher Jay Garfield, this final panel considers both the cognitive and ethical implications of the relational dimension of reality. Panelists include scholars of science and ethics such as biologist Robert Pollack, Buddhologist Gareth Sparham, and philosopher Edith Wyschogrod.

Target Essay: Jay Garfiled
Professor of Philosophy, Smith College


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Jay Garfield teaches and pursues research in the philosophy of mind, foundations of cognitive science, logic, philosophy of language, Buddhist philosophy, cross-cultural hermeneutics, theoretical and applied ethics and epistemology. He is director of the logic program and teaches at Smith College.

Jay is also director of the Five College Logic Program and the Five College Tibetan Studies in India Program, an exchange program between the Five Colleges and the Tibetan universities in India and so most Januaries takes groups of students to study Buddhist philosophy at the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies in India. Jay is also a member of the Graduate Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne.

Jay's most recent book is Empty Words: Buddhist Philosophy and Cross-Cultural Interpretation (Oxford University Press 2002). He and Geshe Ngawang Samten have translated Tsong Khapa's commentary on Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika (Ocean of Reasoning). Jay is currently working on projects on the development of the theory of mind in children with particular attention to the role of pretence in that process; the impact of teaching philosophy in primary schools on the development of citizenship values; the law of noncontradiction; and the history of Buddhist idealism in India and Tibet (especially the impact of Sthiramati)
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Response: Edith Wyschogrod
Professor of Philosophy, Rice University


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Edith Wyschogrod has been the Croghan Visiting Professor of Religion at Williams College, a guest Professor of Philosophy at Villanova, and is currently the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. Her current interests include: genetic, social, cultural and philosophical interpretations of altruism. She teaches a full range of courses in both Philosophy and Religious Studies departments. Her published works include: The Ethical: Blackwell Readings in Continental Philosophy (London: Blackwell, 2002), co-edited with Gerald McKenny; The Enigma of Gift and Sacrifice (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), Introduction and co-editor with Jean-Joseph Goux and Eric Boynton; An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology and the Nameless Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); and Crossover Quests: Tarrying with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy’s Others (Fordham University Press, 2006).
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Response: Gareth Sparham
Translator, University of Michigan


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Gareth Sparham was a Buddhist monk from 1973 to 2001 and now teaches Tibetan Language at the University of Michigan. He received a Ph D. in Asian Studies from the University of British Columbia in 1989 for his dissertation on the 8th century Indian Buddhist writer Haribhadra. He is the author and translator of a number of works, most recently Tsong kha pa's explanation of Tantric morality published as Tantric Ethics: An Explanation of the Precepts for Buddhist Vajrayana Practice (Wisdom Publications 2005), the morality chapter in volume three of The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment (Snow Lion 2004), and Abhisamayalamkara with Vritti and Aloka by Arya Vimuktisena by Haribhadra (Jain Publishing, 2005).
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Response: Robert E. Pollack
Professor of Biological Sciences, Columbia University


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Robert E. Pollack is professor of biological sciences, lecturer in psychiatry at the Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, adjunct professor of science and religion at Union Theological Seminary, adjunct professor of religion at Columbia University, and Director of the Center for the Study of Science and Religion at Columbia University. Dr. Pollack graduated from Columbia University with a B.A. in physics and received a Ph.D. in biology from Brandeis University.

He has been a professor of biological sciences at Columbia since 1978 and was dean of Columbia College from 1982-1989. He received the Alexander Hamilton Medal from Columbia University and has held a Guggenheim Fellowship. He currently is on the advisory boards of Columbia/Barnard Hillel, the Fred Friendly Seminars, the Program in Religion and Ecology of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University, and a Senior Consultant for the Director, Program of Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is a Fellow of the AAAS and the World Economic forum in Davos; a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association; director and chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of Tapestry Pharmaceuticals Inc.; and a director of Nutrition 21, Inc. He is the author of Signs of Life: The Languages and Meanings of DNA (Houghton Mifflin/Viking Penguin, 1994), The Missing Moment: How the Unconscious Shapes Modern Science (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), and The Faith of Biology and the Biology of Faith: Meaning, Order and Free Will in Modern Medical Science (Columbia University Press, 2000). Signs of Life received the Lionel Trilling Award and has been translated into six languages.
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Group Discussion
Panel V: Ethics


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