Speaker: Dr Rafal K. Stepien (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Organiser: Professor Todd Hall (University of Oxford)
Is it ethical to believe? Does believing necessarily entail ethically suspect metaphysical commitments? And if so, can one suspend all one’s beliefs? This talk explores these and related questions by reconstructing what is a hitherto largely unstudied yet highly original philosophical conception of how belief relates to ethical action. Substantively, it focuses on the foundationally important Sanlun 三論 or Three Treatises school of Chinese Buddhist philosophy. Sanlun is the Chinese development of Indian Madhyamaka ‒ the hugely influential school of Buddhist philosophy founded around the turn of the third century by Nāgārjuna (c. 150-250) ‒ and is most closely associated with two figures, Sengzhao 僧肇 (374-414) and Jizang 吉藏 (549-623). On the basis that Sanlun thinkers take belief formation, maintenance, and relinquishment as ethically consequential actions, Dr Stepien argues that the ethics of belief provides a generative means of perceiving ‒ and untangling ‒ the various interwoven strands of their thought.
More broadly, this talk introduces ongoing research into Sanlun Buddhist philosophy. While research on Madhyamaka philosophy has recently been intense, work in this field has largely sought to elucidate the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical positions of Nāgārjuna and his Mādhyamika heirs in India and Tibet, leaving the philosophical study of related Chinese Buddhist texts and ideas still relatively untouched. This talk outlines the ‘ChinBuddhPhil’ project, designed as this is to contribute to the historical and systematic study of Chinese Buddhist philosophy through specialist research on the Sanlun school in conversation with its Indian antecedents, later elaborations in Chinese Buddhism, and analogues in contemporary Western philosophy.
Rafal K. Stepien is Distinguished Researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Buddhist Philosophy. He holds degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, Columbia, and the University of Western Australia, and has completed further studies at Harvard, Bologna, Damascus, Tehran, Esfehan, Peking, and Fo Guang Universities, among others. Rafal was the inaugural Cihui Foundation Faculty Fellow in Chinese Buddhism at Columbia, the inaugural Berggruen Research Fellow in Indian Philosophy at Oxford, a Humboldt Research Fellow in Buddhist Studies at Heidelberg, and the Soudavar Memorial Research Scholar in Persian Studies at Cambridge. His books include Buddhist Literature as Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy as Literature (SUNY, 2020) and Buddhism Between Religion and Philosophy: Nāgārjuna and the Ethics of Emptiness (Oxford, 2024), winner of the American Academy of Religion’s 2025 Book Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion.
