Thursday, 30th November 2023, 14.00-15.30: “Confronting the Obstacles to a Buddhist Physicalism”
While some claim that the Buddhism is one of the few religious traditions that could be
‘naturalized’ or made consistent with the findings of the natural sciences, others dismiss this
claim as the result of a variety of confusions about the Buddhist tradition. One frequently
cited roadblock is that naturalizing Buddhism would require adopting a physicalist
metaphysics, something allegedly incompatible with key elements of Buddhist thought and
practice. I explore several of the purported obstacles and examine what might be lost, and
perhaps gained, by trying to develop a physicalist Buddhism