Buddhist environmentalism through philosophy of language

A conversation with Nan Kathy Lin, visiting assistant professor at Oberlin College in religious ethics and critical thought. Her work focuses on East Asian Buddhism, environmentalism, and moral philosophy as informed by ordinary language philosophy. In this conversation with Frances Garrett, part of a Footnotes series on posthumanist approaches to the study of Buddhism, Nan Kathy Lin talks about her work on developing a theory of religious change as seen through Buddhist environmentalism, drawing on philosophy of language and theoretical biology. She discusses the use of the concept of "interdependence" by 20th-century environmentalists, and she traces how the word interdependence as a translation of the Buddhist term paticca-samuppada should be seen as a response to moral concepts, such as growth or progress, embedded in 20th-century industrial political economy. This episode of Buddhist Studies Footnotes was created, produced and edited by Frances Garrett, with support from the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Studies at the University of Toronto. This project aims to make Buddhist Studies research freely accessible to students and the public.