The (Middle) Way Ahead: Conversations on the Past, Present, and Future of an Indian Buddhist Tradition

Scholars of Madhyamaka, or the tradition of the Middle Way (Madhyamaka) engage in conversation with practitioners of global philosophy at Yale, reflecting on the past, present, and future of this influential and controversial Buddhist Philosophical tradition in English.
Among the topics up for discussion are the nature and salience of paradox in philosophy; truth; the role of commentary in philosophy (and the question of genres of thought more broadly); new and familiar iterations of the mind/body problem; skepticism in a global context; and the intelligibility of poetry and meditation as philosophical practices.
The conversations are oriented by selections of translations from seminal texts in the history of Madhyamaka from Dan Arnold’s A Madhyamaka Reader, soon to be published as part of the Columbia University Press Historical Sourcebooks of Classical Indian Thought.