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Hello friends interested in Buddhist Studies,
 
We hope you can join us later this week for the next instalment in our Posthumanism and Buddhism series with Geoff Barstow! Also, the recording from our first event with Leah Stokes is now available on YouTube. 
 
Please stay well and keep in touch,

Warmly,
Sarah Aoife Richardson
Interim Director
Buddhism and Posthumanism
 

Geoff Barstow: Rethinking Buddhist Notions of Human Superiority


Thursday, December 2, 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm EST

For the second event in our series Buddhism and Posthumanism: Questioning the Place of Humans in Multispecies Environments, Geoff Barstow will present his talk “Rethinking Buddhist Notions of Human Superiority.”

Buddhist thinkers have often claimed that human life is superior to animal life by virtue of our superior intellect and capabilities, an understanding that has strongly informed how Buddhists engage with non-human animals. Many of the claims about human superiority in Buddhist texts, however, are made with the rhetorical aim of motivating humans to use their lives wisely.  If we take this context into consideration, the Buddhist textual tradition can be fairly interpreted as more open to animal intelligence than it sometimes seems. Further, contemporary scientific evidence of animal intellectual and emotional abilities means that humans and animals may not be as far apart as the Buddhist tradition often assumes.  For both of these reasons, Geoffrey Barstow argues that the tradition should reconsider its assumptions about the human / animal distinction, moving firmly towards a post-human understanding of our world.

Lectures in the series on Zoom begin at 3:00 pm Eastern Time; registration is required. Register here.

The event will also be live-streamed to our YouTube channel

Click here for the recording from our first event in our Posthumanism series with Leah Stokes. She talks with Rory Lindsay about her research and advocacy work. 
The University of Toronto operates on the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit River, and it is still home to many Indigenous people. We are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land.
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