What the Buddha Can Teach Us About the Mind-Body Problem | Zizek, Chadha, Faggin, Nida-Rümelin

Slavoj Žižek, Monima Chadha, Martine Nida-Rümelin and Federico Faggin discuss whether the mind and body could be viewed as part of a single substance which makes up the universe.

Should we adopt a Buddhist stance of abandoning all categories in favour of flux and process?

Modern Western thought is often seen as beginning with Descartes, and the notion that the thinking self and the physical body are fundamentally distinct substances. But this makes a mystery of how one affects the other, and many have sought to get rid of the two substances in favour of a single underlying stuff of the universe. The Western scientific tradition has favoured the physical, often denying the self altogether, while idealists and some Eastern traditions have focused on consciousness, sometimes denying the physical. But in a world with a single sort of 'stuff', be it physical or mental, human experience becomes inexplicable since it requires both a subject that has experience and something other that is experienced.

Do we have to accept that a single substance, both in its materialist Western form, or in its Eastern idealist form, is mistaken? Should we return to dualism or adopt a Buddhist stance of abandoning all categories in favour of flux and process? Or must the world consist of one substance, and materialism capable of explaining thought, or idealism capable of accounting for the physical?

Slavoj Žižek is a Senior Researcher at the University of Ljubljana and the author of more than fifty books applying Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian philosophy to politics, film, and culture.

Monima Chadha is Professor of Indian Philosophy at the University of Oxford. A leading figure in cross-cultural philosophy, her work brings classical Indian traditions into dialogue with contemporary epistemology and the philosophy of mind.

Martine Nida-Rümelin is a German philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Her work develops and defends what she calls subject-body dualism.

Federico Faggin is an Italian-American physicist and engineer who led the design of the world's first commercial microprocessor at Intel in the 1970s, earning him the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.