Quint Hubbard

The not-self teaching is one of the defining doctrines of Buddhist philosophical thought. It states that no phenomenon is an abiding self. The not-self doctrine is central to discussions in contemporary Buddhist philosophy and to how Buddhism understood itself in relation to its Brahmanical opponents in classical Indian philosophy. In the Pāli suttas, the Buddha is presented as making statements that seem to entail that there is no self. At the same time, in these texts, the Buddha is never presented as saying explicitly that there is no self. Indeed, in the one discourse in which he is asked point blank whether there is a self, he refuses to answer. Thus, the suttas present us with a fundamental philosophical and interpretive problem: if the Buddha denies the existence of the self, why does he not state this denial explicitly? This paper resolves the problem by explaining why and how the Buddha can argue in a way that entails metaphysical anti-realism about the self while also refusing to state explicitly that there is no self.

This paper explores the connection between caring for the land and caring for ourselves, specifically as a response to, and within the context of, adverse mental health among Hawaiian farmers. After providing a brief, empirically informed overview of the farmer mental health crisis, we turn our attention to the native Hawaiians’ rich and sophisticated tradition of environmental philosophy, which is underpinned by the land-care ethic of mālama ‘āina. We show that the Hawaiian environmental ontology is relational, in that nature and people are intimately and metaphysically interconnected, and we argue that because of this metaphysical embeddedness of people within the land, in the Hawaiian worldview there is no clear distinction between land-care, community-care, and self-care. Moreover, we posit that traditional Hawaiian thought frames agricultural economics, ecology, and wellbeing as complementary concepts, rather than mutually exclusive modalities. We aim to illustrate that this holistic approach to land and community care means that Hawai‘i is perhaps uniquely positioned to address the present farmer mental health crisis and, consequently, we conclude that the reintegration of native Hawaiian philosophy into contemporary Hawaiian society would be likely to precipitate improvements in the mental health outcomes of (native and non-native) Hawaiian agricultural workers, and Hawaiian society at-large.

When machine learning, data and AI are reshaping the human experience, Peter Hershock gives us a new way to think about attention, presence and ethics in our changing lives by balancing Western technology with Asian philosophy. He explains how Confucian and Socratic ethics can make visible what a history of choices about remaking ourselves has rendered invisible, and applies Buddhist ideas to give us an understanding about the self and consciousness. Seamlessly blending ancient Chinese, Indian and Greek philosophy, Hershock responds to the challenge of staying present during the age of technology.