This meeting is part of a research project funded by the Templeton Foundation. The research team will work together and meet three times over the next two years, in New York, Singapore, and Kyoto. Most of the sessions are closed to the public, but at each place there will be one public meeting, where the researchers explain issues and ideas, and receive feedback from the general public. This is the public New York meeting, and it is on Daoism, one of the great philosophical traditions of China.

The general project concerns the fact that, in reading East Asian philosophical texts, it is not uncommon to find writers endorsing paradoxical views. Indeed, some Western philosophers have used this fact to write these texts off as mystical and irrational.

However, paradoxes are to be found in Western philosophy too, especially as concerns self-reference. Thus, suppose someone says ‘The very thing I am now saying is false’. If it is true, it is false; and if it is false, it is true. This is usually called the Liar Paradox. In the West, the reaction has typically been to try to diagnose and explain what is wrong with the paradox-producing arguments. But recent work in logic has made it possible to adopt a quite different attitude. The paradoxical conclusions are to be accepted as true. Reality itself is, so to speak, paradoxical.

This suggests a whole new perspective from which to examine and interpret the Eastern texts and their paradoxes. The paradoxes are by no means a sign of the irrational; rather, the texts frame a distinctive understanding of the paradoxical nature of reality. This can give us a new understanding of both the texts themselves, and of the pictures of the world they contain. The research project aims to develop, understand, and analyze, these matters.

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