In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

This paper challenges the common assumption that modernity has entirely rejected the idea of a scala naturae, or Great Chain of Being. Instead, I argue that this hierarchical concept, particularly in its Aristotelian form, remains deeply embedded in two major strands of modern thought: Darwinian evolution and phenomenology/philosophical anthropology. While a dominant interpretation of Darwinism historicizes the scala naturae, twentieth-century European thinkers retrieve aspects of the ancient Greek framework to affirm both evolution and human distinctiveness.

Despite concerns that such a hierarchy among species reinforces anthropocentrism, I propose that the scala naturae can instead foster an ethical vision grounded in continuity and kinship among living beings. Rejecting hierarchy altogether risks moral arbitrariness and a functional Cartesianism that ends up alienating humanity from nature. By reconsidering the scala naturae, we may find a constructive framework for mediating the longstanding tension between human exceptionalism and ecological belonging.

The mendicant controversy at the 13th-century University of Paris provides the backdrop for understanding how two mendicant metaphysicians, Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas, interpret how ecclesiastical, angelic, and cosmological “chains of being” function. Faced with the seculars’ criticism that mendicants have no right to intervene in Paris’s sacramental economy and that their academic aspirations are incompatible with apostolic poverty, Aquinas and Bonaventure offer different responses. Aquinas assigns the pope the sovereign power to institute a “state of exception” and circumvent a local bishop’s authority, just like how God can suspend the natural law in soteriological emergencies. Bonaventure uses speculative Christology to argue that wisdom, which the mendicants instantiate through their pursuit of virtue, is metaphysically co-constitutive of the scientific knowledge the university aims at. These defenses of the mendicants’ presence in medieval academic life determine how these two thinkers frame the relationship between cosmology and soteriology. 

It has been argued that as an ‘objective,’ systematic account of natura, John Scotus Eriugena’s (b. 815) Periphyseon lacks an ‘interior’ aspect. Borrowing much from his fellow Platonic predecessor, Maximus the Confessor, I aim to show, rather, that the Periphyseon develops a ‘personal’ program regarding the soul’s itinerary. I will focus on one component of a broader program running throughout the Periphyseon — mainly, Eriugena's understanding of the salvific function of natura. I will show how natura, for Eriugena, is a symbol of the Divine Logos. It is not simply a ‘stepping stone,’ but rather, constituted within the Divine Logos Itself. Eriugena’s concept of natura necessitates that any outflowing of the Divine into difference does not destroy its unity, but rather, is an articulation of Itself in a concretized form. Thus, all invisible and visible creatures are endowed with symbolic significance: they orchestrate the final return of all things into God.

Michel Foucault’s Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire (1971) is often cast as the moment Nietzschean genealogy truly became as a critical historical method. But that story is too clean. It erases a messier, more dynamic intellectual landscape—one where genealogy wasn’t just a Nietzschean discovery or a Foucauldian recovery but the product of fierce mid-century debates. This paper reconstructs that forgotten conversation, tracing how thinkers like Gilles Deleuze, Michel Serres, Michel Henry, Jacques Derrida, and Sarah Kofman, alongside other structuralists and Marxists, were already grappling with genealogy before Foucault’s essay. At the same time, historiographical movements—Annales history, historical epistemology, surrealism—reshaped what genealogy could even mean. It wasn’t a singular rupture. It was a field of collisions, reworkings, and provocations. By placing Foucault back into that shifting terrain, this study unsettles the dominant narrative and opens new directions for genealogical inquiry in religious studies and beyond.

This paper critically reinterprets Michel Foucault’s engagement with the Iranian Revolution, challenging Janet Afary’s claim that he naively romanticized political spirituality and overlooked the rise of authoritarianism. Instead, it argues that Foucault’s interest in Iran stemmed from his broader critique of Western modernity, particularly its disciplinary power and capitalist alienation, rather than an endorsement of theocracy. The revolution was not a monolithic Islamist project but a diverse coalition that included Marxists, secular nationalists, and liberals, a complexity Afary underemphasizes. Without subscribing to pro-Western narratives that equate democracy with liberalism or demonize the revolution as religious fanaticism, this paper situates Foucault’s reflections within their historical context. By exploring his writings as part of his larger intellectual trajectory—examining resistance, alternative political subjectivities, and the role of spirituality in revolutionary movements—the paper offers a more nuanced understanding of both Foucault’s intervention and the revolution itself.

Islam has been a key feature in the history of Malaysia, and Muslims have been considered a majority community. The spread of Islam in transforming the population has been narrated as a process of Islamisation. Since the 1970s to recent times, this Islamisation narrative has gained further dominance in influencing the youths and civil society movements, educational institutions, government policies, and also legal and political decisions in the country. However, critics have perceived the Islamisation narrative as to be over-simplifying the complex inter-relations between Islam and the Malay-Muslims population. Thus, this paper aims for a critical examination, by using the Episteme as a key concept. This paper shall demonstrate how Islam is related to three different epistemic phases; under the Malay Sultanates, British Colonial rule, and the nation-state in the history of Malaysia, and its relation to knowledge and power in shaping the Muslim population in Malaysia.

In the 2014 tour de force “God’s Not Dead,” Michel Foucault is the first figure listed by the film’s antagonist—the rancorous philosophy professor—as having already accepted that God is dead.  Fourteen other alleged “atheists” are written on the board, but Foucault is emphatically at the top.  This paper simply asks, why? 

What follows does serve to answer that basic, albeit searching question, but in understanding the scorn and vitriol levied against Foucault will also contextualize the film and make sense of the culture in which it came.  Necessarily, this cannot be done with film criticism alone, so key insights from Foucault’s own works will need to be juxtaposed with/against his most audible detractors.  This combative pairing uncovers that as much as Foucault symbolizes the worst excesses of postmodernism (ostensibly, that which killed God), his mere and continued existence necessitates that "[God] must be defended."

This presentation begins with a brief analysis of three distinct constructions of Vedic mantras: the epistemology of cognition of the Vedic mantras in the Ṛg-Veda Saṃhitā; the cosmogonic function of the Vedic mantras in the Brāhmaṇas’ discourse of sacrifice; and the soteriological function of root mantras such as Om in the Upaniṣads’ discourse of knowledge. I will then turn to a consideration of Purāṇic traditions and will focus more specifically on constructions of mantra and nāman in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, the consummate textual monument to Kṛṣṇa bhakti. Finally, I will discuss the ontology of the divine name and the practice of nāma-saṃkīrtana within the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava discourse of bhakti, and in the associated regimen of sādhana-bhakti that defines the distinctive tradition of the Gauḍīya community of devotees inspired by the Bengali leader Caitanya in the sixteenth century.

This presentation examines the concept of nāda, or divine sound, in Sanskrit sources, specifically focusing on the literature of the early Śaiva Tantras and systematic works on music (saṅgītaśāstra), noting how this semantically “resonant” term is indexed to discussions of metaphysics, linguistics, cosmogony, and yogic practice. Adopting the methodological approach of conceptual and intellectual history, I chart the usages of nāda, or Resonance, as it is deployed across Śaiva metaphysics and music theory, focusing particularly on its role as a value-laden concept in the cosmogonies and metaphysical frameworks of both disciplines. This will lead to a consideration of how this term illuminates certain “adjacencies” and cross-pollinations between religious speculation and classical Indian performing arts in pre-modern India.  

This presentation examines the liminal space between music, vibration, and Naad Yog, an ancient yogic practice of using the entire body as a vibratory soundboard. Naad Yog begins with the audible, external sound followed by discerning and familiarizing oneself with internal sounds. The rationale is that the mind rules the senses, and the breath is in charge of the mind. Concentration rules the breath, and concentration, in turn, depends on the sound. Thus, Naad Yog uses breath, concentration, and sound-based exercises to prepare the mind to enter a state conducive to meditation. The discussion will unfold in three parts, beginning with Indian sound concepts that relate to and elucidate the practice of Naad Yog, followed by a detailed description of the practices and exercises within the Naad Yog tradition.

Gurani Anjali (1935-2001) arrived in the United States in the 1950s before the major influx of immigration from India that would follow in the 1960s. She eventually established Yoga Anand Ashram in Amityville on Long Island, New York, where she taught Sāṃkhya-Yoga philosophy within the context of the United States’ countercultural and post-countercultural periods. Central to Anjali's repertoire of yoga techniques were music and mantra practices. This presentation shows how Anjali's universal ideas about Sāṃkhya-Yoga became entangled in this new sonic environment as her yogic lyrics merged with her students’ acoustic folk ensemble, but also how Anjali intended for her music and lyrics to lead students toward a transcendent experience of yoga’s higher Self, puruṣa, thus transcending their social environment altogether.