Religion, Philosophy, Religiosophy: Buddhism Between Worlds of Thought

SOAS World Philosophies Lecture 30

Religion, Philosophy, Religiosophy: Buddhism Between Worlds of Thought:

Are concepts such as ‘religion’ and ‘philosophy’ translatable among worlds of thought? In this lecture, I address this question via the transmission, translation, and transformation of ideas between ancient Indian and Chinese Buddhisms, and between the classical Buddhist world and the contemporary West. In so doing, I attempt to unpack the usages to which contemporary English-language scholars typically put the terms ‘religion’ and ‘philosophy’, describe the continuing segregation of Buddhist (and for that matter other non-Western, non-Christian) philosophical and religious traditions from professional Philosophy and Religious Studies, and propose some ways by which the Buddhist ‘religiosophical’ tradition may contribute to, and innovate upon, standard models of thought.

Speaker

Rafal K. Stepien is Distinguished Researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Buddhist Philosophy. Rafal holds degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, and Columbia, and his latest book, Buddhism Between Religion and Philosophy: Nāgārjuna and the Ethics of Emptiness (Oxford), was awarded the American Academy of Religion’s 2025 Book Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion.

Organiser

Centre for Global and Comparative Philosophies

Contact

cgcp@soas.ac.uk

To Attend

The event is hybrid, if you wish to join online please follow the link at the top of the page.

Image credit: Eunsong-jo via Unsplash