South Asian Philosophical Debates and the Intervention of Jain Many-Sidedness

Lecture by Anil Mundra
February 28, 3–4 pm
Environmental Education Building, Room 110

The Jain Studies Program and the Department of Philosophy and Religion present a lecture by Anil Mundra, the Bhagvan Vimalnath Endowed Chair in Jain Studies and South Asian Religions at UC Santa Barbara.
Friday's lecture kicks off a weekend of fun programming that continues on Saturday at our Jain Cultural Fair. We hope you'll join us!

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South Asian Philosophical Debates and the Intervention of Jain Many-Sidedness
In South Asia’s distinctive history of religious diversity, the Jains stand out as a perpetual but prominent minority that has always been especially attentive to the range of other doctrinal options surrounding them. This presentation will delineate some classical Jain philosophical efforts to conceptualize differences, navigate disagreements, and seek agreement with others as exemplified in the pivotal figure of Haribhadrasūri. He is famous for initiating a doxographical tradition of cataloguing the landscape of doctrinal diversity, and his greatest philosophical contribution was to set the terms for the famously enigmatic Jain theory of many-sidedness (anekāntavāda). I argue that Haribhadra’s doxographical and metaphysical projects suggest how to unify various senses of the term “identity” that seem unrelated in philosophical discourse: 1) numerical identity, the bare ontological persistence that identifies anything as what it is over time in contradistinction to other things; and 2) qualitative identity, the sense in which an individual may be grouped with other individuals according to shared qualities. In my reading, Haribhadra's arguments trade on very basic phenomena of intentional action and awareness that should be recognizable to anyone, Jain and non-Jain alike.

This event is free and open to the public. Light catering provided.

Jain Studies at UNT is housed in the Department of Philosophy and Religion. Our programming is made possible by the Jain Education and Research Foundation and the Jain Society of North Texas.