An Introduction to the Philosophy of Space with Sundar Sarukkai

A PERSPECTIVES Webinar

Perspectives Webinar #003
Date: 30th April 2017, 6:00 PM IST

One of our aims at The Story Of is to reveal abstract ideas of the universe — mostly in the realm of science and philosophy — to a more general audience and thereby allow you to construct your own image of reality. In our previous PERSPECTIVES webinar, we invited Sundar Sarukkai, a professor of Philosophy at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore and Founder-Director of the Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities, to talk about the philosophy of space — a brief introduction.

For those who could not be with us, we’ve uploaded and subtitled the talk. It’s 1.5 hours long and incredibly revealing about the nature of space. I was struck and left with the burning desire to ‘Make philosophy great again!

About the Talk

The concept of space has always held a great fascination for philosophers across the ages. There is something obvious and transparent about space, and yet it is that which makes it a great mystery. For example, all attempts to understand motion and change — a theme which was central to philosophy — seemed to invoke a concept of space. Space seems to be obviously present before us but it is not perceptible through our five senses. Or at least that is what many dominant traditions would like to assert. The history of how different cultures conceptualised space is actually a history of their cultures — since beliefs about space affected many other beliefs about life, time, nature and the social. Space as we understand it today is deeply influenced by the scientific theories from Newton to Einstein. But how do these scientific theories account for our experience of space? This talk will explore some of these philosophical issues around the idea of space. About the Speaker Sundar Sarukkai is Professor of Philosophy at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore and was the Founder-Director of the Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities, Manipal University from 2010–2015. He is the author of the following books: Translating the World: Science and Language, Philosophy of Symmetry, Indian Philosophy and Philosophy of Science, What is Science? and The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory (co-authored with Gopal Guru). His attempts to bring philosophical thinking to the public can be seen in the many workshops he conducts and in the newspaper columns he writes such as in The Hindu.

About the Speaker

Sundar Sarukkai is Professor of Philosophy at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore and was the Founder-Director of the Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities, Manipal University from 2010–2015. He is the author of the following books: Translating the World: Science and Language, Philosophy of Symmetry, Indian Philosophy and Philosophy of Science, What is Science? and The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory (co-authored with Gopal Guru). His attempts to bring philosophical thinking to the public can be seen in the many workshops he conducts and in the newspaper columns he writes such as in The Hindu.

Notes

We have already bought into the story of space as being defined through points and locations.

But the idea of space could be one of the biggest fictions we’ve been told.

I can point to a chair. Can you point to space?

The tragedy of pointing to space is you can never point to space.

The chair appears to me as a chair because it has very clear boundaries.

The fact that one object is different from the other is distinguished by this thing called space between them.

If we look inside the chair, there is much more emptiness between each molecule and atom inside the chair than there is matter.

This thing is more empty than it is mattered.

Space makes objects possible.

Space is what allows objects to move.

Space does not seem to have a boundary.

Space does not seem to have parts.

If someone has a psychotic hatred of space and wants to blow it up — impossible! You can’t even destroy it.

Space is just a relation — it’s a way of talking of our world.

Father and daughter are not independent entities that exist. They’re ways of talking about the two relations just like the thing.

To understand the phenomenology of space, go back to the phenomenology of the Buddhist notion of nothingness.

Nothingness is a positive term. Some would say it is an extremely core part of human existence.

I can imagine a world without objects — I can imagine this room with absence of objects now, but I can’t imagine this world without space. It is almost God-like.

Big blessings to Rahul Gudipudi for organizing the talk and much gratitude to Sundar Sarukkai for taking the time out to engage us :) And a shout out thanks to Ana Costiniu for helping subtitle the talk (transcribed to a whole 15,000 words!)