Hello, I'm JJ Joaquin and welcome to Philosophy and What Matters, where we discuss things that matter from a philosophical point of view. Our topic for this episode is Asian philosophy. Or better yet, philosophy is found in Asia. Now in philosophy, we study metaphysics, the nature of reality, semology, the nature and limits of human knowledge, and ethics, the nature of morality. Now we learn what the great philosophers have said about these matters. Through the works of Plato and Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, Thoms Aquinas, the modern philosophers, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Barthé, Eumann, Kant, and everyone who came after Hegel. But the canon of philosophy is dominated by philosophers from the West. What are the Taoists? What are the works of the Confessions and the Buddhists? What could these philosophies found in Asia offer us, and would they even matter? Now joining us to discuss these philosophies of these, we have Graham Priest, the distinguished professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. So hello Graham, welcome to Philosophy and What Matters. Hi JJ, thanks for joining us. Yeah, so before we get into the main topic, let's first discuss your philosophical background. So how did you get started in philosophy? Well, I was trained as a mathematician. My doctorate is in mathematics, actually in mathematical logic. And mathematical logic is closely connected with many issues in philosophy. By the time I finished my doctorate, I realized two things. The first that I was never going to be a very good mathematician. And the second was that philosophy was a lot more fun. So I tried to get a job in a philosophy department until I was surprised I was successful. And I've never got back since then. It's been an enormous amount of fun. I mean, since I had very little knowledge of philosophy, I spent my whole philosophical life educating myself. It's been a blast. Okay, so you were born in the UK, but you moved to Australia. So what was that move about? Yeah, correct. So I finished my doctorate. That was at the LSE. And of course I applied for lots of jobs. And I was offered two temporary jobs. One was in the Math Department of City University. One was in the Philosophy Department at St Andrews. And for me, it was a no brainer. I went to St Andrews. And of course that was a temporary job. And I carried on applying for jobs in the UK and elsewhere. And no one seemed to want to offer me a job. The first permanent job I was offered was at the University of Western Australia in Perth in Australia. And since it was the only permanent job I was offered, I took it. I moved with my family to Australia. And we thought we'd be back in the UK for a few years. In a few years. That turned out not to be the case. We'd actually emigrated, although I didn't realize that for a number of years. So most of my working life I've lived in Australia. I was offered a job here in the US about 11 years ago. And I moved here, but I'm not an American. When I hang my philosophical boots up, as it were, I intend to go back to Australia. Australia is a country I love very much. It's got problems like most countries. But I like Australian people. They're very friendly and no nonsense. And philosophically moving to Australia was a really good move for me. It turned out in retrospect. Because Australian philosophy has two great... Well, the way Australians do philosophy has two virtues. First of all, it's very open-minded. The attitude is, well, tell us something interesting. Let's think about it. The second is that it's pretty hard-nosed.  So if you think what you're saying won't fly, they're criticising it. So this combination of open-mindedness and hard-nosedness actually is a great breeding ground for philosophy. Bad ideas with a very fast. Good ideas get developed. So in retrospect, the move to us was serendipitous. Okay. So you've been moving around in many universities. But who or what influenced you to pursue a career in academic philosophy? What is easy? As I said, I discovered that philosophy was fun. I mean, it seems to be actually engaging. It's challenging. I enjoy thinking about philosophical issues. That's what made me want to be a philosopher, not a mathematician. Who is a bit harder? You know, I've been fortunate to know many very good philosophers and of course to read many great philosophers as well. And I think the impetus of all these things, both the people I know and the people I've read, have motivated me to go on in philosophy. Okay. So you work mostly in philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics and logic, the latter of which you have contributed immensely. So how did you get into Asian philosophy? Okay. So coming from my mathematical background, my first interest was the philosophy of mathematics. And that's closely connected with issues in philosophical logic in many ways. And that's closely connected with issues in metaphysics in many ways. So, you know, when you do philosophy as you probably discover, the topics are kind of entangled. If you're interested in one thing, it's connected with issues in other areas. And so you get interested in those. So over my life, my interests have drifted. I've never lost an interest, but I've gained lots as the kind of network of connections has spread out in my thinking. So nowadays, there are actually very few bits of philosophy that I don't engage with one way or another. The current book manuscript I have is actually on political philosophy, which is a sort of a new development for me. But that was in turn interesting. That was in turn engendered by my interest in Buddhist ethics. Okay, which brings me to your question of how I got involved in Buddhist ethics, or Buddhism generally. So, I've been in the profession for about 20 years, and I was starting to think that I had some sense of the area of philosophy. When I met someone who is now a very old friend and we've written a great deal together at Jay Garfield. So Jay Garfield is an American philosopher, although he had the chair in Tasmania in Australia at that time. We met at a conference and we started talking. I'd just finished Beyond the Limits of Thought, which you're showing on the screen. He'd just finished his translation of Nagarjuna's Malamudamika Karaka. And as I talked to him, I realised that there was so much interesting stuff in what he was doing in Buddhist philosophy. And I was kind of shocked because it made me realise that there was half the world's philosophy that I knew nothing about. So, you know, Western philosophy stemming from sort of the Middle East, Greece is one thing that Western philosophy is not about. But of course there's Chinese philosophy and Indian philosophy, and those of course go into many other cultures as well. But India and China have great philosophical traditions and I was just shocked to discover that they weren't discussed in the West. So I made a point of trying to educate myself. So I've studied in India and Japan, and I've taught in China and Japan. So that started about 25 years ago and I've been slowly educating myself in the Asian traditions. I haven't lost interest in the West, but philosophical problems are so much more rich and more exciting when you have a multicultural perspective on these things. You know, in many problems, many philosophical problems are universal. They crop up in all philosophical traditions. What's the nature of the world? How should one live? Is there a God? How do you know these things? You find those in all philosophical traditions I'm aware of. Sometimes philosophizing different, thinking enormously. So, you know, that's how I got into Asian philosophy and what it's done to help me in my philosophical thinking. Okay, so you might say that J. Garfield ushered you in Asian philosophy. Now let's turn to this topic. It was another bit of serendipity, okay? Life is full of these things which influence your life in a way that you might never have imagined. Okay, so here in the Philippines and in Asia for the longest time, we have learned about Indian philosophy, Chinese philosophy, and all the rest of these Asian philosophies. But there's always one objection against these things. They're saying, are these even philosophies or just schools of thought? So what can you say about that objection? Okay, there are several things here. First of all, a lot of Asian philosophy is connected with Asian religions. That's obviously true of Buddhism, Hinduism.  That does not make it non-philosophical. And you only have to think about medieval Western philosophy, which is closely connected with Christianity. So the fact that you have religious connections does not mean it's not philosophy. Secondly, that religions themselves are multifaceted things. They have canonical texts. They usually have a priesthood. They have sacred rites, practices, places and so on. But all the great world religions have philosophies. So these are people who engage in the sorts of philosophical problems that are generated by their religions. Now, the fact that the problems are generated by the religions does not mean that they're specific to those religions because many of these problems are fundamental problems about metaphysics and ethics, which transcend narrow religious boundaries. So what's always engaged me in the Asian philosophical religions is the philosophical parts of these religions, not the other things. Although they're kind of interesting for me on a lay basis, but there's the philosophical stuff which interests me. Final comment. The view that you're describing was kind of orthodox in Western circles up till about, I guess, 50 years ago. I mean, there have been very well-known Western philosophers who took the Indian traditions and the Chinese traditions seriously, such as Hegel and Chopinow. But quite enlarged, the dominant view was that these are not philosophy, that these are religion, irracula, pronouncements, wise men's sayings, et cetera, et cetera. Now, that view, it must be said, can only be held in ignorance of the texts. Because once you start reading the texts, you see that people are engaged in philosophical issues. They're arguing with each other. Philosophical arguments are going backwards and forwards. So that view that is not philosophy, at least in the West, is now lapsing, I think. And very few Western philosophers are prepared to endorse this. But there's still a view that these things are kind of marginal to philosophy. There are some things which are central to philosophy, like Western history of philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind. And the other stuff is just frills. I think that this is still a very common view in the West, and it's completely wrong, because all the great things in philosophy are discussed in the Asian traditions and argued about in the Asian traditions. Of course, if a Western philosophy picks up an Asian philosophical text, you hit the fact that it's coming from a different culture. It's written in a different language. Different assumptions are being made about what can be taken for granted. There are different ways of writing philosophy. And that's a hurdle that a Western philosopher has to jump. But even in the West, philosophy is written in many ways, in many languages, in many styles. And you get used to reading philosophy coming from different backgrounds, like Ancient Greece on medieval Europe, or 19th century Germany. So if you're interested in philosophy, you should want to jump those cultural linguistic backgrounds just to explore what's going on the other side. If you don't speak the language, you're going to be limited in a certain sense. But philosophy is written in so many languages, even just in Western philosophy. It's written in Greek, Latin, French, German, English. Very few people, very few Western philosophers speak all those languages. So if you can't speak the original language, you have to depend heavily on translators and scholars who can. That's fine. As long as you are aware of your limitations, you can work in the traditions. Okay, so I'm sensing a pattern here. So what you're saying is that in Asian philosophy, in Indian philosophy, Chinese philosophy and so on, they're still doing philosophy, but they're engaging in a metaphysical dispute, or questions about ethics or questions about epistemology. So these are philosophical in nature. Is that what you're saying? Absolutely. So you open the texts of philosophical texts in India or China, you will find people discussing the nature of reality, whether there's a God, how one should live, how one should run the state, how you know all these things. And there are robust debates going on in the... I don't know when you want to say that these traditions start probably around the same time that Greek philosophy kicks off. That's about 2,500 years ago. I think there are two things to note about Asian philosophy. There was a radical change in Western philosophy because of the scientific revolution. And Asian philosophy never made that break. So there was a change in Western philosophy around the 17th century, and that change never happened in the East. But that doesn't make what happened in the East obsolete. I mean, obviously we still now talk about philosophical writers in the West. Before the scientific revolution. Western philosophy is full of Plato, Aristotle, and so on. The second thing is that because of Western cultural imperialism, Eastern philosophers have had to come to terms with the influence of Western philosophy has had on their traditions. So the British Raj brought the British traditions to India. Probably the best known Japanese philosophy of the 20th century initiative was highly influenced by Western philosophy. And of course the influence on Marxism on China hardly needs to be... So because of Western imperialism, Asian philosophers over the last couple of hundred years have had to come to terms with Western philosophy, and many have sort of brought the Western and Asian in a way that Western philosophers have not done yet. Okay, now the economic and political center of gravity of the world is moving to the East. Clearly the 21st century will be dominated by China in a way that the 20th century was dominated by the United States. That's a bold claim. That's a bold claim, Graham. I might sound right. I'm going to talk about this if you want, but it will take us off with something of a tangent, but I stand by it. Okay. And so for many reasons, both intellectual and sort of cultural Western philosophers will engage with Asian traditions. I think we're in a kind of exciting time in philosophy because whatever you might think about, economic globalism, we're entering a phase of global philosophy where the world's traditions are going to become entangled with each other. And that is a very fruitful time because when philosophical traditions entangle, all kinds of things happen. So when Buddhism moves into... from India into China, for example, you get the sort of genesis of Chinese Buddhism, which is a fantastic development, or when Judaic thought meets Greek thought in Christian philosophy, you get this sudden flourishing of Christian philosophy. I mean, you know, these are always really, really exciting times. New ideas emerge from that. I think we're moving into that kind of area now. So you're seeing Western universities offering more Asian philosophy courses in the future? Absolutely. I mean, 30 or 40 years ago when I started teaching, there were virtually no courses in Asian philosophy in Western universities. Many Western universities have courses now. I think really every university in Australia does. My own university teaches them occasionally. There are still some old and more traditional departments which don't reach teach courses in Asian philosophy, but more and more courses are being taught. Now, of course, not many philosophers know much about it. So they're kind of limited in what can be taught, but you have a chicken and egg problem. If you don't know about it, you can't teach it. If you can't teach it, people don't know about it, and so the cycle propagates itself. But slowly as people learn more, more will be pulled, people will know more, and more people will want to do research on it, publish on it. This is a movement that's slowly underway, and it's gaining momentum. Okay, so let's have a bird's-eye view first of Asian philosophy. So how should we understand these philosophies in terms of their overall themes, methods, and ways of philosophizing? Yeah. Look, that's sort of an impossible question to answer. Just think about the corresponding question for Western philosophy. Now, tell me about Western philosophy. What makes it tick? What's essential to it? Look, there are many, many Western philosophers. Plato is not Nietzsche. Wittgenstein is not Heidegger. Kant is not Kripke. Look, in the same way, there are many, many different Asian philosophical traditions. So you can't say, well, there's one thing that holds the whole lot together. Okay. Yeah, that's fair enough. Let's get into one of your areas of research. You have done a ton of research in Buddhist philosophy. And what's interesting about your work is that you're comparing and contrasting some salient Buddhist idea with ideas found in Western philosophy. So let's do some comparative philosophy, shall we? Okay. So let's start with the Buddhist idea of sunyata or emptiness. I think that you explored this in your works, in particular this latest, one of your latest works, one. So can you spell out this idea for us? Sunyata. Okay. So sunyata means empty. Sunyata, emptiness. And I think often this is misunderstood. Let's do a little bit of historical backtracking. A major topic in Buddhist philosophy is the nature of reality. And Buddhism developed in an early form, if by about 500 years, in India. And what emerges are called the Abhidharma tradition of philosophy. And they have very distinctive metaphysics. According to them, there are two sorts of reality. There's a conventional reality, which is the world we're familiar with, the Laban's world. And there's kind of an ultimate reality that is what really is there in reality. Now in the Abhidharma tradition, ultimate reality is composed of things called dharmas. You can think of those as metaphysical atoms. And conventional reality is the kind of conceptual construction out of these. In a way that you might think that, well, a chariot is a conceptual construction out of its parts, its axles, its wheels, and so on. That's a standard analogy. But ultimate reality is composed by these dharmas. These things are metaphysical atoms and they are what they are in and of themselves. The Sanskrit word is, self-being. So it's like a substance in Greek philosophy? Pretty much, pretty much, yeah. Now there's a sort of revolution in Buddhist thinking, which arises around the turn of the common era. When a slightly later form of Buddhism emerges, not the older form disappears, you know, still there, but in the new form is called Mahayana. Mahayana has differences from the older tradition, both ethical and metaphysical. But let's concentrate on the metaphysical stuff. The most important early Mahayana writer was a philosopher called Nagarjuna, who influenced all Mahayana philosophy thereafter, both Indian and Chinese and Japanese. And he, in his text, the Milamudhyamaka Karaka, which is one of the great works of philosophy, he launches a swinging attack on the older metaphysical view. So what he argues is that there are no such things as these dharmas, these things which have self-being. So everything is empty, shunya. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. What it means is, if something is empty, it's empty of something, like glass is empty of beer, right? To be empty is to be empty of something. And what things are empty of is self-being. There's nothing which has self-being. And what this means roughly is that there's nothing which is what it is in and of itself. Everything is what it is in virtue of its relations to other things. So this is a highly relational ontology, if you want to call it that. So that's the view, that's Nogajuna's view of reality. Everything is empty.  It gets kind of complicated after that, because you might have think, I mean Nogajuna operates with this distinction between conventional and ultimate reality. It's everywhere in Buddhism. And you might think that having disposed of the Dhammas, these things with Svalpalva, he had given up the notion of ultimate reality and he doesn't. He's quite explicit about that. So conventional reality is what it is. We've always been. Many are labors built.  Okay, that's where it gets murky. This has caused great debates in Buddhist philosophy ever since Nogajuna. But he used this as word shunyata, emptiness for what he takes to be ultimate reality. And then there's a big question about what shunyata as opposed to shunyata is. And many many of the traditions that's been of Nogajuna, and I think Nogajuna himself, but that's contentious, takes it to be something which is ineffable. And so following Nogajuna, you get discussions of an ineffable ultimate reality in Buddhist philosophy. When Buddhism goes into China, this kind of morphs into Buddha nature, which plays an enormous role in Chinese philosophy, especially Zen, or Buddhist Chinese name, Chan. Okay, so I'm trying to wrap my head around the concept here. So you have the Abhidharma Buddhism which has this kind of substance ontology. So you have the Dharma as the foundation of ultimate reality, as opposed to the Nogajuna type of thinking or ontology that you don't have that Dharma, but you have Sunya. So things are empty because they have to be related to each other. So I'm trying to figure it out because in one of your interviews and in one of your papers, you actually put an analogy or you use the analogy of Leibniz and Newton to explain the difference here. Can you tell us something about that? Yeah, so if you're meeting the notion of Sunya for the first time, it might be kind of hard to get your head around if you're coming from a Western tradition of Western philosophy.  Now, what does it mean to have a relational existence? Well, there's one thing that's well-known in Western philosophy and that's debates about the philosophy of time. And the debate between Newton or the Newtonians and Leibniz on the philosophy of time is interesting because Newton held that space and time is a thing even of itself. It doesn't depend on the events that happen in it. It will be there if there were nothing. Space and time are kind of locusts in which things happen but they are what they are independently of any events that happen. So space and time or moments in space and time, places in space and time have this kind of self-being. Leibniz rejected this picture. He wasn't an absolutist about time. He was a relationalist. So if you take an event in time, let's say I don't know the election of Donald Trump. So 2016, on November 2016, if you're Newton, that designation, November 2016, refers to a point in space and time. Which is what it is, independent of anything that happens. Leibniz says no. 2016 is just a marker for a set of relations between the things that happened in 2016, the things that happened before 2016, things that happened after 2016. So 2016 doesn't mean anything in and of itself.  And that view is relatively well known in Western philosophy and it sort of shows the difference between conceptualising something as having something as being really relational. So sometimes I'd use that analogy to try and get over the notion of relational existence in Western philosophy. But is it the same or is it different from Nagarjuna's Sunniya? Well, the major difference is that according to Nagarjuna everything is empty. Everything has really relational existence. And very few people that I know in the West, in fact I don't really think of anybody in the West who's endorsed this view, Leibniz certainly thought there were that not everything had relational existence. I mean, his theory of monads, monads of things with sub-Harva, par excellence. And of course if you believe in a Western God, God is a thing with sub-Harva par excellence. So what's so distinct about Nagarjuna is the view that everything is empty and then this has various consequences which he explores. Okay, so finally about this concept of Sunniyata so you have not really given a description of what Sunniyata is. Well, there's a description, it's an ineffable thing. But what is that? Well, that's a very good question. Look here's one way of looking at Sunniyata. At Leibnizville I convinced reality is at least conceptual construction. So for me what I'm sitting on is a chair but if you put it in the middle of a culture where they didn't have furniture they wouldn't think of it in that way. It wouldn't be a chair or be a strange shaped object. Conceptual construction plays an enormous role in our thinking about the world. Nations have no intrinsic existence. Nations are simply nations because we conceptualise places and people in the certain way. So a Buddhist is going to say that our conceptual world is a conceptual construction. Now think about taking reality and peeling off the conceptual overlay. So take the chair I'm sitting on and remove its conceptual overlay. This blackness, it's full-leggedness, it's charit-ness. Once you've removed the conceptual overlay what remains is ultimate reality. What's it like? Well, obviously you can't say because to say will be to imply concepts and you've stripped all those away. So this is kind of one of the arguments which drives the thought in Mahayana Buddhism that ultimate reality is ineffable. So if you ask what it's like, I can't tell you. That doesn't mean you cannot experience it in the Buddhist tradition. It means you have no knowledge by description. You can have knowledge by acquaintance to use the kind of Rasulian words. I can't tell you what it's like but hey, come down to my temple, do my meditation exercises and you'll experience it. That's the story. So the fact that it's inevitable doesn't mean you can't experience it. That's all fine. What's not so fine is this. Look, I told you that ultimate reality is ineffable. Haven't I just been talking about it? I sure have. And so do all the great Mahayana Buddhist philosophers. So they're in this situation where they're telling you that something is ineffable and describing it at the same time. Now they know there's an issue here. It's a contradiction. Why do you do? Do you accept the contradiction? That's one possibility. Do you try and diffuse it in some way? You know, paradoxes and contradictions everywhere in philosophy. Western philosophy and Asian philosophy. And often people, when they meet a paradox, try to diffuse it. And there are many standard strategies for this and you find those in Asia and as much as you do in the West. So one of the debates you get in the Asian in the Buddhist tradition after Nagarjuna is exactly how to handle this apparent paradox of ineffability. It looks as though you can talk about ineffability what is one to make of that situation. Okay, so before we get into that let's proceed first to Buddhist ethics which the idea of Karuna or compassion which you explored in your paper Compassion and the Net of Indra which was published in this book. So what is this notion all about? The notion of Karuna. Okay, first of all the word, Karuna. Standard translation is compassion. That's a somewhat problematic translation because compassion sounds a bit passive suffering with, okay. Whereas Karuna is actually a very active thing. It's taking steps to a benevolence and beneficence towards other people. Amber Carpenter suggests it's me that care is a better translation. I think that's probably right. Because to care about things you can't, if you say I care about you and you do above all it just shows you're not speaking the truth. To care you've actually got to do stuff and Karuna is active in this way. However the standard translation of Karuna is compassion. Let's stick with that but just remember my warning. So one of the core ethical principles of Buddhism which goes right back to the original teachings of the Buddha is that life is characterised by, and then there's one of these Sanskrit words which is hard to translate, dukkha Sanskrit or Pali. Usually it's translated suffering and that captures something of it. But it's really, it has many resonances it's certainly suffering of the body and the mind it's sort of frustration, anguish, dissatisfaction, ennui all the negative states. The first principle of Buddhism is hey life is like that, get your head around it. Sometimes people think of Buddhism as a pessimistic view. It's a realistic view and it's not pessimistic because then Buddhism goes on to say hey there's a cause of your suffering understand what it is and let me tell you how you can get rid of it. So it's actually an optimistic philosophy because yeah life has its problems let me tell you how to solve them. So the aim of Buddhism then is to move your life your thinking in such a way as to get rid of dukkha. Now if you left the description there it will be somewhat misleading because that suggests that Buddhism is very selfish. Buddhism is about getting rid of my suffering. Each person wants to get rid of their own suffering and of course you do want to get rid of your own suffering but why that is so misguided is that Buddhism has always insisted upon the fact that the aim is not simply to get rid of your own suffering but to get rid of everyone's suffering so you should be concerned to get rid of the dukkha or other people that is you should have this compassion for them. Now why? Well the virtue of compassion is there from the earliest Buddhist times but pre-mahayana the thought seems to be that karuna is good because it stops you being so self-centred and self-centredness is one of the things which causes your suffering. So karuna has a sort of instrumental value Now what changes with the rise in mahayana is that that ceases to be the case it does not have instrumental value it becomes the prime ethical virtue of mahayana Buddhism and if you become a mahayana Buddhist you take a vow not to but by this time Buddhist thinking enlightenment getting rid of your dukkha comes by degrees and there's a kind of an ultimate stage ultimate enlightenment and if you become a mahayana Buddhist you will take a vow that even when that you won't enter ultimate enlightenment until everybody does so you vow to work for the end of suffering for everybody and you're not going to pull out and leave everybody on their own in a self-extraction you are going to hang in there and help everybody else even though you could pull out as it were so karuna becomes the central ethical virtue of mahayana Buddhism Let me try to grasp what's going on here Mahayana Buddhism karuna is like an instrumental value that is you're using it so that selfishness or self-centredness will be out of the way it's one of the sources of suffering I think that's the way it's looked on in the earlier forms of Buddhism which is not to say that the karuna is unreal on the contrary it motivates people to act very much but I don't think it's thought of as a virtue in and of itself whereas this is certainly the case in mahayana to the extent that anything is thought of in and of itself but we've been through that topic right so I'm just there's another concept in mahayana Buddhism like the bodhisattva is this the person who makes a vow so in earlier Buddhism the thing to be is an ahat, an enlightened person so you strive for your own enlightenment getting rid of your own joka but that is changed when you get to mahayana Buddhism so mahayana literally means greater vehicle and sometimes mahayana Buddhism refer to the early tradition as henayana, the lesser vehicle but the difference is that the greater vehicle is greater precisely because it's concerned with the nivaya enlightenment liberation of all people that's what makes it greater and the bodhisattva is a person who has swan the bodhisattva vow is precisely a person who has swan to aid the enlightenment, divana liberation of all people and as I said by the time you get to this point of Buddhist philosophy nivana comes in stages, there's a path and there's an ultimate nivana which you force swan until everybody goes together but once you've taken the vow, you're on the bodhisattva path and then you gradually make progress until you're capable of entering ultimate nivana but you refrain from doing so traditionally it has 10 stages and by the time you get to stage 8 or 9 you're pretty powerful so there's a sort of religious there's a cosmology that goes with Buddhism and by the time you reach the 8 or 9th stage you live in a celestial, you can live in a celestial realm which is just another planet really, I mean Buddhists and materialists about these things but you're so powerful you can emanate avatars to many places at once and those avatars help people so there's one very advanced bodhisattva called Avalokiteshvara who lives in this celestial realm and hence avatars and the traditional view is that the Dalai Lama is an avatar of Avalokiteshvara this is all religious stuff the cosmology that goes with Buddhism that's religious stuff so we're not talking philosophy here I mean I'm very sympathetic to most Buddhist philosophy, I'm not sympathetic to all this cosmological stuff but anyway, you asked me about what a bodhisattva is in Buddhism that's what it is what's the relationship of Kailuna and the Net of Indra yeah it's a derivative one but let's get the Net of Indra straight first so the Net of Indra is a metaphor that plays an enormous role in Chinese Buddhism especially the school called foiyan but also derivatively in Chan in Zen and the metaphor is this there's this god Indra that's spread out a Net through reality and at every node of the Net Indra has hung a brightly polished jewel so if you look at one jewel you can see another jewel, all the other jewels reflected in it so this jewel reflects this jewel but of course this jewel is reflecting this jewel so this jewel reflects this jewel reflecting this jewel which is reflecting this jewel which is reflecting this jewel and so on so I don't know if you've ever done this but it's like if you get two mirrors and put them face to face and you kind of peek what you can see is reflections of the mirrors in each mirror all the way down and then you can see reflections between infinity that's the picture of the Net of Indra and what this metaphor is meant to demonstrate is that the jewels are a metaphor for the objects in reality and the fact that each is reflecting all the others is a way that each one is meant to show that each one encodes all the others each one sort of is what it is because of what the others are alright so that's the metaphor now come back to Nagarjuna as I said he has an enormous influence on all Mahayana philosophy and these schools of Chinese Buddhism are Mahayana he thinks Nagarjuna thinks that everything is empty, everything is what it is by relating to other things other things mean some other things in Nagarjuna that everything is what it is by relating to all other things some other things now what you get in Huayen Buddhism is that this gets universalised everything is what it is not by relating just to some other things but by all other things okay and that's what the Net of Indra metaphor is meant to demonstrate that every dual reflects every other dual reflecting every other dual now how the Huayen get there from some to all is kind of interesting but we can go down to that if you'd like but let's leave that aside because your question was about Karuna so this change from Shunya meaning some to all is a metaphysical change of course but at least it's possible to argue I sort of argued this in one that it has ethical ramifications because suppose you and I are jewels in the net then of course I suffer, I do come but you suffer, you're human but your suffering is encoded in my being as it were so if I want to get rid of Duka I have to get rid of your suffering as well as my own so that's the ethical ramifications I might add that I don't think this is orthodox Buddhist philosophy it's something that I argue for in one and it makes sense to me so let's now turn to the main theme of your latest book the fifth corner of four so here's the idea of the four corners I know that you have incorporated a bunch of logical machinery to understand this concept so let's get into the idea of Karuna okay Josh Kotzi means literally four corners, four points and what are the four corners well they're true, false, both neither so consider some questions suppose I ask you a question and you give me a possible answer there are four possibilities what you say is true, what you say is false what you say is both true and false or what you say is neither true nor false well this is a very distinctive view by western standards because what has dominated western logic not completely universally but it's certainly dominated are two principles of metaphysical logic which are the principles of non-contradiction and the principles of exclusive middle exclusive middle says that everything is either true or false non-contradiction says that something can't be both true and false is either true and true only or false every declarative statement is either true and true only or false and false only and the Chaturish Kotzi takes on that view there's truth only, false only, but there are these two other possibilities something can be both true and false and neither true nor false so that's the Chaturish Kotzi and the thought that things can be both true and false predates Buddhism, you find this thought in Vedic scriptures predating Buddhist scriptures so this is not an invention of Buddhism but it certainly seems to be the four possibilities certainly seem to be a well-acknowledged framework when Buddhism appears and we know that because in some of the early Buddhist sutras this framework is deployed explicitly so in one of the sutras someone says, well gee Buddha what happens to enlightened person after they're dead? Do you think they exist? Buddha says, no I'm not going to tell you that so do you think the enlightened person doesn't exist? I'm not going to tell you that do you think they both exist and don't exist? I'm not going to tell you that do you think they neither exist nor not exist? I'm not going to tell you that so the Chaturish Kotzi is presupposed okay now you'll notice that the Buddha refuses to endorse any of them most of the dialogue is left at that point but there's a question of what the hell you make of that and that's something which kicks in big time when you get to Nagarjuna so this is where the ineffable comes in again yeah it does although the connection between that and the Chaturish Kotzi is a bit it's not entirely obvious so in the what you find is lots of arguments the fact that things don't have Svabhava and a lot of the argument is by kind of four-way reductive and absurdum so take something you suppose to have Svabhava like space or time or a person or the Four Noble Truths or whatever and then given that claim you can divide into four cases I mean suppose that this thing has Svabhava okay there are four cases to consider truth, falsity both neither and a lot of the argument in Nagarjuna is run through the four cases showing that all are impossible so it's a kind of four-way reductive and absurdum sorry let me rephrase that it's not a reductive-add-contradictione to contradiction because contradiction is one of the kotzi it's a reductive-add-absurdum and some things are more absurd than contradictions so the thought that you're a frog is more absurd than a lie sentences through our flaws so you've got this hypothesis that something has Svabhava a four-way reductive argument alright so how does an availability come into this well this takes us back to our discussion of Shunyata an ultimate reality because it at least appears that in Nagarjuna he says that none of the four possibilities explicitly applies to the status of the enlightened person after death which is the same as ultimate reality that's you know pretty much word for word so since true false both and either are the four kinds of things you can say about something it seems to suggest that the status of the enlightened person after death that is the nature of ultimate reality is ineffable because you can't say any of these things so that's why it looks as though Nagarjuna is endorsing the claim that there's a fifth possibility namely ineffability okay so I remember reading your work the logic of Katashkoti you mentioned about Jay Garfield's interpretation where he takes the four corners as a kind of first-degree deal with logic but you're arguing that that's not the case because the fifth corner that is, it's ineffable pushes you to a kind of five-valued logic not just a four-valued logic like DFT can you tell us something about that that's right so the Katashkoti has four possibilities if this interpretation Nagarjuna is right, they're actually five so that's not actually in contradiction with the Katashkoti for the following reason if you're talking about truth, false you're both on either, you're talking about the kinds of things which can be true, false both and either call them what you like, statements, propositions, beliefs sentences, okay those are the kinds of things to which the four-valued Katashkoti applies now if you're talking about things that are ineffable, you can't be talking about those because sentences by their own nature are not ineffable they're conventional they're conventional but not only that but obviously a statement is not ineffable because it's bloody well there in your face if something is ineffable it's not a statement, it's a state of affairs so when you're talking about ineffability you're not talking about statements, you're talking about states for fares some states for fares are ineffable now states for fares aren't the kind of things which are true but there's a kind of analog, namely they exist or they don't so you've still got the four corners exists or doesn't exist or better its negation exists but you've got this fifth possibility so the four corner Katashkoti applies to statements the five corner Katashkoti applies to states for fares so there could appear to be a disagreement but there's not because they're really dealing with different things at least that's the line that I run in the fifth corner of the floor okay so it all connects so from the metaphysics down to this logic to the ethics that we have discussed there's a kind of philosophy an overall worldview being offered here yeah well there are many different worldviews because what I've said is interpreted by Buddhist philosophies in many different ways and we haven't gone into the differences so Buddhism is not a single thing anymore there are a lot of disagreements people are gaseous and that's what makes it fun so even within the Mahayana tradition there are serious disagreements but way back when we started to discuss I said that one thing you learn about philosophy is that you get engaged in this issue and it takes you to another issue because it's related and that relates to another issue so in the end you discover that philosophical issues have no Svabhava, they're Shunya because if you can't get your head around them you can't engage in these other things so the metaphysics the logic, the ethics are related to each other in this way and we've only just started because we haven't talked about the epistemology and the political philosophy but they're looking in the wings as well okay so on a more personal note you've been an academic philosopher for most of your life you've seen all there is to see in this career, once being the chair of your department in the university of Melbourne and the other for being the president of the Australasian Association of Philosophy so we might say you've been really out there in the field so to speak so what's your advice to those starting their academic careers in philosophy? yeah good question especially now okay so getting a job as a professional philosopher is not easy because there are a lot more people who do doctorates in philosophy who want professional jobs as professional philosophers and there are jobs and that's particularly true at the moment just because virtually every university in the world that I'm aware of has been hit hard by the pandemic which means that they're financially strapped for cash and so of course they're cutting back on apartments in fact they're sacking people a lot of universities that are laying people off which of course means fewer jobs and this is not going to return anything like it was before if ever but certainly not for the next four or five years so it's going to be harder than ever for people with doctorates in philosophy to find jobs so first thing is if you intend to get a philosophy job you should have a plan B because you may not get a job you've got to be prepared to do something else and it might be being a journalist, it might be being a lawyer it might be going into IT, it might be being a taxi driver if you love that, it could be anything but you should be prepared for this possibility especially because you know by this time in your life it's quite likely you're going to have a family, a partner, kids so that's something that you should bear in mind in your thinking, that's the first thing second thing is this I said be a taxi driver if you want if you love doing that and that wasn't actually a facetious remark because you should do what you love in life well that's not quite true if you love hurting other people you shouldn't do that but you know set that aside you spend every person will spend a lot of their life working it might be being a homemaker it might be being a parent it might be being an academic, it might be being a journalist it might be being a politician, who knows right you're going to spend a lot of your life doing that and if you don't enjoy it you're going to be in serious trouble you're going to spend a lot of your time doing stuff you hate and it's not great so you should do what you love doing in life if there are things that you love doing and most of us have things we love doing professional philosophers are kind of lucky because the thing they love doing gets them a job I can't say that's the worst truth so return to professional philosophers which is where we started when I get you a job if you're lucky and what is going to help you as a professional philosopher is doing the best philosophy you can in the end you will do best what you love doing if you take on something that you find shit boring and just write papers on that they're not going to be very inspired so my advice to young philosophers, in fact any philosophers including myself is to do what you love in philosophy if you find a topic that engages you that you find fascinating that you think you can say something interesting about do that don't worry so much about whether it's a hot topic in philosophy because hot topics come and go I've been in the pression over 40 years now and I've seen all kinds of crazies come and go to Derridaeanism, to Wittgensteinism to grounding to these things come and they're important and they're interesting and they get kind of worked out so I wouldn't pay too much attention to what is currently hot pay attention to things which you think are really interesting, really challenging which you really enjoy thinking about it is the career worth it is the career worth it the career of being an academic philosopher is it worth it that's a very subjective question so what would you say about your career was it worth it but let me answer it, it's a fair question I became a philosopher because I stopped doing philosophy and I told myself that if I ever ceased to do that I would get out and do something else so you know I could have become a lawyer or a journalist, I could have found jobs but they'd have been jobs that would have interested me of course by the time I was in my 50s it was kind of too late to change horses but as a matter of fact that situation has never arisen I've loved every moment of my philosophical career I've been teaching myself philosophy I've been thinking about new issues all the time and I've loved every moment of it so that's why I've done philosophy and continue to do philosophy I hope my philosophical career ain't over yet there are still many more things I want to write about so other philosophers well if you go into a philosophical career you don't love it, you're choosing the wrong profession if you choose it and you burn out which some do, then hopefully you burn out in time to change career if you burn out and you're too old to find a new career well actually the job situation is changing getting a job in your 50s is hard now everywhere I think but older people are getting into jobs and moving to new areas perhaps more than this was possible 30 years ago, I'm not sure but if you burn out then I wouldn't hang in the pressure you're going to just become a time server you'll hate it, you're probably teaching you'll bother shit out of your students as well so I think you should get out of it give a chat to someone who does love doing what they do find something else you love doing and try and make an income out of doing that okay that's a good piece of advice so thanks again Graham for sharing your time with us and join me again for another episode of Philosophy and What Matters where we discuss things that matter from a philosophical point of view I'll see you next time


That was a very good introduction by Andre and I would strongly encourage anybody listening to this live or recording to go back to the first session that was on tomatoes. In terms of insects that are similarities, especially when you're talking about sting bugs and caterpillars. They also get on aphids and white flies they get on tomatoes they get on on cucumber bits so watch those and some of this information may look repetitive, but it's intentionally done so so make sure you familiarize yourself. And especially take good pictures when you're confused. Take good pictures and send it to David or Andre or me and we try to diagnose insects constantly so, or any problem whatsoever. But I have my information online, you can find me on numerous publications I did post some zoom links. Some aces.edu blog links in the chat. We have the IPM newsletter don't forget to sign up for that you can read more about Andre's research, David's articles and and IPM information through that newsletter. That's a statewide newsletter, as well as subscribing to what David is sending out so that's very critical to stay in touch with the extension office in your county wherever you are. Also, we just before logging in to this session. I was mentioning about the farming basics phone app. We are going to launch on the new version phase two within a month, hopefully, and that will have a lot of resources for producers and gardeners. For example, there will be a, we have added the weeds section in there with pictures, but there's also links to our social media channels online course, everything will be on your fingertips. It's a very nice looking app. So if you have the farming basics phone app, you should get a notification or automatically. I would also like to mention that you know besides these resources just wanted to mention our funding sources. You know we are funded through large number of grants, and those are very critical to our success and our team success, and especially our specialty crops block grants from department for agriculture so just wanted to thank everybody that supports this research and the industry. That helps. Did that change David on your screen. Yes, sir. Okay, so again those are your resources. We are going to start our Alabama virtual farm tours tomorrow and Harley Willis coordinates that project. So you have to subscribe to the extension commercial hot page to see it and then our monthly webinars go on so these this vegetable school in is in addition to the monthly webinars so lots of learning opportunities guys so don't miss out. Watch the recordings on the digital archive. So just wanted to also tell you that if you have the phone app, from a basic phone app you can access these videos. Through the phone app. And these are some of the videos that have one is more recent that talks about the three levels of best management. It's almost a 10 minute overview of all the best management systems, especially from sustainable ag perspective. So just to check out these videos and then there's also a trap crop video. There's actually two of those online those are slightly old but they're still relevant. And make sure you have the 2022 Southeast vegetable handbook if you're watching recordings. Make sure you have the latest years. We haven't used the old handbooks, especially with insecticide listings they change some years. And it could be pretty significant changes. We have also updated the organic vegetable IPM slide chart, which is a very basic tool, but a very critical tool for farmers and gardeners, especially if you're a beginning farmer these tools will be handy for you. If you need these, and we also have the urban farm IPM toolkit, if you need them please email me, and we'll try to mail this out or come to our extension meeting and get them yourself. So multiple ways you can get them but make sure you have the resources. Now jumping into the insect world. This is an introduction that Andre gave so you will see the connection. Of course, I know it's very critical to have healthy plants if you have a sick plant. It's a calling card for insects. So, just wanted to go through some of the common insects you'll see in Alabama the sequence of insects may differ from range from place to place. So, in many parts in Georgia sometimes they have more squash bugs than cucumber beetles and in Alabama we see more cucumber beetles in some years and and then of course squash bugs is kind of a mid season. But cucumber beetles probably are going to be our first past you'll see, and they will jump on to the plants, right when they're young, and they will start feeding on the leaves. There are multiple species, there are only two that you can see on your screen that's the spotted cucumber beetle with those spots on the top right of your screen, and then the striped cucumber beetle.  They will fly as you try to approach them. So you have to kind of approach cautiously but if they will fly out of the canopy and settle down they take very short flights, and they settle down. So, they're easy to spot and they shattered the leaves. Like you see in the picture. They're multiple generations and they all spread the bacteria manually by chewing squash bugs that I think nobody likes. And that is another notorious past, especially because it has, it contributes to the transmission of yellow vine decline disease, and that yellow vine decline disease has increased in Alabama. And it kind of gets producers and gardeners off guard, because it shows up with the insect shows up mid season and then late in the season close to harvest your plants just quit. A tragic end to your the crop. So squash bugs are very effective vectors. I'm not sure how many squash bugs are needed to transmit the that disease I believe that's a bacterial disease, but not very many so you have to be on alert for squash bugs. David I'm still getting notifications on people coming in to the meetings hopefully you're able to see them. So, yeah, so squash bugs are a very common problem and they are very good at hiding.  Trying to get the chemicals or the products to where they're hiding is a challenge. And you can see the immature stage as well so the mature stage of more grace with those wing stubs on the back so two very common insects squash bugs are kind of mid season pests. And then they keep developing through many generations. Now I'm going to get into the borders because there is a border complex and it's very confusing sometimes to tell these apart, but I'll try to go a bit slow here and then speed up squash vine border is the kind of the early season border. The moth will start start flying around this time as soon as it gets warm outside and these day flying moths, you know typically moths fly at night but this is a day flying red color moth that looks like a wasp. So you may think it's very pretty and is dancing, but it's not really dancing it's laying eggs at the bottom of the plants. And it will lay these eggs and it's a very quick maneuver and she'll keep on laying eggs at the plant basis. The larva is kind of a creamish looking fat larva. It goes straight into the into the vine and it stays there throughout its life, except for pupation. So it will come out when it needs to pupate. You will easily see this infestation late in the season when you see the excrete or the feces coming out of the hole on the plant. So very classic old past very established past and people are usually able to tell this one, especially once the plant is infested. But here's the next one that becomes very confusing. This is called a pickle worm. And if you plant, like I do, if I make the mistake as a gardener, I plant late some of my Indian goats and pickle worms gets on them. So if you are planting late, or your succession planting and you have one of those plantings in the hot summer, then pickle worms becomes pretty heavy after a few generations. And these pickle worms they have different kind of greenish coloration, but they may or may not have the spots. So as the larva matures, they lose the spots actually, but they're kind of this greenish looking larva and many of them would be on one flower or in one fruit you may see several and they will extensively tunnel throughout the, throughout the cucumbers. All right. And then the last one that usually gets very confusing for many beginning farmers and experienced ones is this insect which is the melon worm. And the melon worm the easiest way to identify is to look for the caterpillars, there will be several on the leaves or on the fruits, and they have this two longitudinal lines on the back. So they're very visible from top. And the other thing is what if you have a bad infestation, you will see webbing on the leaves or the fruits. So none of the others produce any webbing. So that's a pretty classic indicator that you have melon worms. And again, that's a pest that likes the late planted crop, and they can devastate that crop. So, and again very difficult to control with organic insecticides. You just, it seems like if you plant too late, you have to fight the battle head on with these insects. So we'll talk about this a little bit more. And this is by the way on the blog article that I have linked to so hopefully you can click the link and see. There are several a fit species that can also get on the cucumber bits, especially the melon effort, which is on the bottom of the picture, bottom of the slide here in front of you. This is one of those that produces a late or winged adults. So the adults fly to their host. And once they settle down, they will lose those wings, and they start reading. And essentially if it's our cloning cloning machines they clone themselves. So they're very effective in generating large number of large numbers in a very short time. And they love it. Not too hot but mild weather. So mild cool summers with lots of rain is very good for a fits. So just kind of be on the watch out. I also have a picture of the if it mummies on your screen. That's on the right of your screen if you see them. Those are if it's infested with parasitoid. Leave them alone. Those are dead if it's their bodies are so swollen so that they're called mummies. But again, there are so many species and if it's get very confusing to identify. Try to take good pictures if you suspect it safe it take good steady pictures with your iPhone or whatever device you have and send send them. And some of the other past try to take multiple pictures from different angles, especially sting bugs or squash bugs. It gets tricky to tell them apart from some other other species. I know Andre mentioned about white flies. I'm no expert on white flies I usually don't get as much white flies we have a very low population in our research plots. So in Southeast part of the state where Andre has started some research. There is a heavy population of white flies and Georgia has these. I believe in six side resistance resistance white fly species that get really bad. And it's a constant battle for those farmers down there so be on the lookout.  They almost look like dust particles when I, if you go through an infested field and walk through it. It seems like the dust particles go up this like a cloud of white dust, and then they settle back on the crop. You may have also seen them on ornamentals. It's a different species though but you if you have any experience you can tell what flies the worst part of what white flies is they transmit a number of viruses which once the plan gets a virus there's no going back. So insert control is your option to control the virus or shift to tolerant or resistant varieties if there any. So it's a it's a constant research in progress. And you have to be very cautious not to induce them with pesticides.  Then they're really difficult to control. So, but there are these two species that look slightly different. You can tell the silver leaf white fly which is on the right of the screen that's a major one that has that kind of holds its wings in V shape or like a roof of a house. And then the other one the greenhouse white flies more flattened, but they're both tiny insects, especially on the underside of leaves they will, they will survive on the side of leaves and lay eggs and those will hatch into nymphs. So be on the lookout of these and if you don't know about viruses, make sure you submit a sample they are very difficult to tell from just pictures. So make sure you send samples to your extension office or extension agent. And just because there are so many gardeners on this call. I thought I would show you what I do I'm a constant gardener for goats I go, I grow about eight different varieties of goats from India, and you can see some of them on here. It's a very complicated picture but I have a very basic trellis and one of the worst thing I've done is, and I'm telling you intentionally the mistakes you make is putting too many things at one spot and then you're choking the plant, because now you have hot spots where insects will just will flourish. There are lots of hiding spaces. So one of the things you need to look at is how you're growing it, how you're trellising and I love trellises, but this is not the best one I've built. So be on the, just know that it's very important to when you're a home gardener how you're cultivating and producing the crop. And even small farmers are doing it now and selling it to special markets. So there's a good bunch of stuff you can do. And interestingly, these insects we went through will also attack these exotic vegetables so they don't see any difference. And so here is pickle worm damage on ridge gourd. And you can see the ridge gourd on the picture on the top left. It's a wonderful fruit but it can be completely infested with pickle worms very frustrating. And here's Indian cucumber it's a very prolific variety that I grow. And, but it's, you can as you can tell it's eaten up with pickle worm damage that extensive tunneling. So it's really frustrating at times. So you have to learn to manage it. I know Andre mentioned about weather or the weather systems. I wanted to kind of tell you based on our monitoring and monitoring project for last 10 years. We have seen and recorded ups and down in in our weather patterns and seems like it's always shifting between drought and flood. So I'm not sure what's going to happen in 2022 but remember the flash drought and the and these the prolonged droughts so there's two types of drought. These are very damaging to our crops. The plants get stressed and the insects just attack. Insects also take advantage of the extra heat so they develop faster. And if you're a high tunnel producer with one of those covered areas. You have another challenge because you have longer crops and faster generation of insects that can breed inside the high tunnel. So just pay attention to the weather systems and plan your IPM strategy accordingly. Okay, so that's the point I'm trying to make and especially the flash drought did a major damage to my crop in 2019 on my tomatoes. So be on a lookout and monitor the weather and keep good records. None of this can happen if you're not taking good records. So again IPM integrated pest management you may have heard this 100 times, but all it is is it's a decision management system. It has many different steps, as you can see starts from the basic insect detection and monitoring, and then ends in making a treatment decision. Now doing nothing is also a decision. So it's okay not to do not to spray. And I always caution gardeners and farmers that be very very cautious of how you're spraying because you don't want to destroy your natural enemies. So I keep meticulous record for my research projects as well as my garden I have a journal that's almost 11 years of gardening in Alabama so you need to have good records and make a good decision based on your experience. You may read a lot of literature. Again go back to your experience on on what how much insects you can tolerate. And when we talk about control, again going back to that slide chart, I can see the slide chart on the right. But this is how I kind of want you to think about insect control or IPM, and I use this slide again and again and keep reminding people to think logically when you see insect problems. For example, the first level of the three levels of pest management. The first is called systems based practices, and I'll take you a little bit deeper into it. The second level is pest exclusion or manual removal. And then third, if needed, are insecticides, and depends on what is your choice, conventional or bi-rational insecticide which is the environment friendly versions. And I do research on both so I kind of enjoy the conversation on both sides. Again, be very careful about natural enemies, don't spray them directly, count them in, look at their activity and then make a decision. Also try to rotate insecticides, organic or conventional doesn't matter to prevent insecticide resistance. Another thing I will mention is those level one and level two are your pest prevention strategies, and those are what I'm going to emphasize today. And level three the insecticide is of course the therapeutic version so when everything else fails, you have to use insecticides as your last tool. So prevention versus therapeutic just remember and think through these very carefully as you do your gardening or production. And again, I always say that you know not everything is meant for everybody. So I kind of divided these three levels of pest management that you saw into these smaller packages, depending on who you are if you are an open field producer. And you want to be sustainable organic natural type person, then you can use trap crops and insecticides. If you're a high tunnel producer, we're doing a number of studies on the permanent pest exclusion system. And I have a picture on your screen, hopefully you can see it.  And again, there's a lot of good literature now that you can read online. But please check back with me or an agent to when you are designing these systems because some of these systems like the pest exclusion system, they're wonderful but they can also backfire, and you can lose crop, especially under our hot humid conditions in Alabama. So pay close attention. That's why we do the research to tell you what not to do. So I have a list of not to do a long list of not to do so. Anyway, just kind of think through this. Again, you can, you know, in the archive you can look back at the video and go through it again. And I think Harley is going to post it in smaller segments so you'll be able to revise this slide. Just quickly talking about the trap cropping, which is a level one control method. And I have some good publication in Southern chair. That's the sustainable agriculture research and education program by USDA. It's a wonderful program for organic small farmers sustainable ag. So you can go to the library the National Library and dig up these articles in multiple languages. And also our blog articles that I have linked to, you can click on the top and change the language. So you can read these publications in many different languages. And if you have any problem just reach back out to us and we'll try to help you. But these publications are online, which is great. This is a very kind of a basic talk on trap cropping. And last week in the tomato session I talked about trap cropping in tomatoes, and that's the most advanced system that we have, because it has moved from student research to more demonstration as well. This is what you're going to watch now is more of a research phase with trap crime still trying to learn and understand and analyze data to tell you what's going on but we have been, we have tested many different crops as alternative hosts or attractive cropped beetles and squash bugs. And the one that we have found most effective that still stands out are these Hubbard squash, which is a winter squash with these gigantic fruits. So the fruits are almost the size of soccer ball. And the great thing is that's actually an edible squash. So, I tell farmers that you can actually sell this and recover your cost of trap cropping. A crop basically is a sacrificial crop, and you plant them on minimum number of rows so here you see them on the outside rows. And they're planted there, about two to three weeks ahead of the main crop. And the two varieties were found very effective as the baby blue and new England. And I'll show you some more other seed sources have changed. You see the seed sources on your screen. Those have changed over the years. So, again, try trying to find CD sometimes difficult also, as I have found out, you doing this for a long time now. And then you have the crops, the sorry, if I go back you have the yellow squash, which is your main crop in the middle so again, this is kind of our early beginning research into the system. And as I said, we have been trying to tell farmers to grow it. They can actually grow it and some have and you can cut open the fruit and show the nice yellow flash inside and a lot of the pop, you know, the ethnic population they love to see this because it resembles pumpkins in other countries so it's a very edible trap crop. And this is what the the insects do to the trap crops so on the left of your screen. So both all these pictures are the same day. And when you have a very bad outbreak of cucumber beetles as we saw in 2015, you can see the leaf feeding on the left. And of course, along with leaf feeding comes the material world, the disease that is transmitted. So the Hubbard really takes on establishes really quickly. And if it's not too wet it does really well. And if you provide a drip irrigation it really jumps out and starts growing it's a very fast growing plant. And these were planted on the outside rows, and it's protecting the yellow squash, the destiny yellow squash so you can see the same day pictures and the quality of those crops from the pictures that tells you what's going on. So, again, it's amazing to see Hubbard take on with be so attractive and will keep growing. If you want to see that squash bug female in action, you have to go to my YouTube video, and you'll be able to actually see that female laying eggs. And it's really remarkable she would not fly away she they stay on and lay eggs. And then they hatch into these names, which is on the second picture on the right so again tremendous numbers will build up on these Hubbard trap crop and they will not migrate into the main crop. And the whole point is, we're trying to reduce our spraying of the main crop and grow a crop that's as insecticide free as it can be. So and I'll show you some pictures of what we have done. Now this is not truly organic production system, because we do use some of the conventional fertilizers. In some years, like last year we had too much disease, we had to use fungicides to keep the plants alive, but we exclude the insecticide which is which can be very expensive. And this is what the squash bugs can do to Hubbard. You saw the good picture of the Hubbard here said deflated fruits, fruit of the Hubbard trap crop even after the vines are gone. It's still attractive and hundreds of these squash bugs will hover over and under these fruits. So, again, it's really remarkable to see this. And in the meantime, your yellow squash is still protected. And the idea is to get out of production and harvested timely, so that you don't have to kill use too much insecticide on your main crop. So that's the whole idea. This is long term savings. So just to show you some pretty complicated research here but what we're trying to do is we're trying to reduce the area in trap crop because the Hubbard takes up a lot of space. So our goal is to reduce the area and get maximum benefit. So what we have done is we've tried to shrink the Hubbard squash area to the minimum we can, and this is again after many, many years of observations we have developed this, and then putting the trap in both sides of the yellow squash. So this is a pretty sizable experiment on a big egg almost takes up a total of about one acre or a little bit more than that. But again, this is kind of a work in progress. And you can see the crops are two different types of varieties of trap crops. So it looks in reality. So you're looking at the yellow squash in the middle, and then look at that Hubbard beautiful crop of Hubbard. Again, if you stand there for too long.  They're amazing if you have a good year, and they function really well as a trap crop, and you can see how close they are in even with that. The closeness is important to the main crop. You go too far out. You lose the, the effectiveness. And this is what happened. I know this is a lot of data here but what I'm not trying to show is, if you have noticed the numbers of eggs on the Hubbard, the baby blue and New England, as long as you have good trap crop. They take on the abuse, and they have majority of the eggs and the adults. Go to the right of your screen. Those are the plants, especially the top one where the plants are right close to the trap crop, and that has much less egg load compared to the others. Now, as you go further away from the trap crop, your numbers go up again. So that's what I'm trying to tell you here is you the challenge with trap cropping is, you got to need space, you have to plant early and close to your to the crop that you're trying to protect, because it's so it's, it doesn't have a height differences of visual the insects are attracted to it visually. So you have to make the plants obvious. And then we did not do any insect treatment. This is 2020 but we use dinodiferon which is scorpion, one of the most expensive chemistry you can buy for squash bugs, and you can kill you can wipe out squash bugs like crazy. So very timely applications can help tremendously on farming scale. This is from 2018. So I have these slides mixed up but same thing, the further away you go from the main from the trap crop, you have more squash bugs. So the trap crop, a good functioning trap crop has tremendous benefits. And this time we use, if you look at the middle of the screen bottom and the red letters, it mentions by organic and interest. Those are your organic products. Again, we don't get a very good kill with organic products because squash bugs are very difficult to kill. You have to target the names to kill them. So with organic treatments, it's, it's difficult to kill them, but the trap crops still holds them in place. So you can, if you're organic you can get your harvest done and move on. So overall, just to show you, it seems like in, I don't have a recommendation on just one trap crop. For example, just like plan New England, I would say, try to plan both New England and baby blue, because some years we have stand issues. And so we try to use both the varieties of Hubbard together and get a good result. And then there's some other things I've mentioned, for example, in our trap cropping is like a, it's a pest prevention strategy, and it can also be used as a trap and kill strategy. So you can use organic products or chemicals, but target the names. And when the insects are small, low in numbers, if you have an outbreak, it's going to be very difficult. And weather has a huge influence on these insects. So remember, every year it seems to be different. So watch out for the populations and make your decision. Moving on. So just to show you some pictures now, going after the data, here's the pictures. So that's the wonderful inside flesh of the Hubbard squash. But, oh, that's my experience. But the Hubbard squash is a is a marketable trap crop. And you can see the insecticide free yellow squash. Last year, I actually tried watermelons. So I've tried different designs. And we grew watermelons alongside yellow squash and then you can see the trap crop. So I think the baby blue did not do well last year. I cannot explain why, but they did bear fruit, just different sizes. But you're looking at the insecticide free main crop there on your screen. So it's pretty impressive. What's going on and you can see some Facebook videos I've posted on the IPM channel. Just quickly about pest exclusion systems. Sorry, I'm going up, going a little bit faster so that I can finish on time but I will take questions. I'm talking about pest exclusion systems. I have some publications on high tunnel pest exclusion system. I'll show you a few slides very quickly, but exclusion systems I think offer a very good strategy to our farmers, especially if you are a small producer market gardener, trying to sell at the farmers markets. And this is worth trying. Depending on how much you want to invest, you can have good returns on investment and use this as a prevention strategy. So pest exclusion is again a pest prevention strategy. It's not essentially a control strategy. And the idea is very simple that you're trying to separate the insect from the plant and you stop giving access to the plant. And you can do it for short term, or you can do it for the entire season. Most of what I'm focusing on in some of the open field research I'm doing, it's the short term benefits. But again, careful design is very important. Like I said, some of these techniques, if you don't plan them right, they can backfire and become a problem. So planning and experience is very important. And just to show you some examples, this is the temporary pest exclusion system. I do have a blog article on it and I forgot to link it. I'll try to do it on on Facebook here in short while. But there is the two systems, the temporary system is the low cost cheaper version that you can do this many different designs and materials you can use the ones that I have tested. Most are the ones on your screen, it says under examples so super light insect barrier, agro fabric pro. There's also a covert and pro 19 and protect net protect net is perhaps the most expensive net I have tested. So that may not be very if it's very good product, but expensive so if you're a commercial farmer. Think about these as your investments, not as your next as your expense, because you're going to get a good, good product at the end of the good crop. And I know Andre has done some research on using exclusion systems for white flies using one of the fabric. But here's one that we tried on a small scale. In Central Alabama with you shaped hoops, just PVC pipes, and these were covered in the almost immediately after transplant. So we do not wait for the insect, because once the inside comes in, it's like really difficult. The other drawback of this system is, if you are growing, if you have been growing cucumbers for a long time in an area. You may actually trap the insects like squash wine bowlers I can think that live in the soil, and you if you put the netting on and seal it you can perhaps cause more problem. So that's something you have to decide, depending on your location. But then remove the netting. So once the blooming starts because you need the pollinators, and you don't want it to be hot because fruits can be bored. It's too hot. So remove the netting. Once the flowering starts, or as soon as the plants start to touch the netting. The idea is by then you will probably deflect a lot of your wine bowlers and not the other insects like aphids away from the crop. So, again, this is not a foolproof system. It's a work in progress, but I'm giving you some ideas to think of. We have done more research on this on the with tomatoes. I have much more research data on exclusion in tomatoes and copies or beans. One of the advantages of these is besides insect control is they can also raise the temperature. So if you are trying to plant early, like I know some tomato producers go early by covering it up with these. So if you have a lot of flowers but past exclusion material, you can raise the temperature and block the wind so there are some side benefits to it. Of course it's more work. And then you can also use beneficial insects and let them feed inside the netting so there's lots of benefits this is something we're doing with our high tunnel producers now that are trying exclusion systems. It's a permanent system. Now in the temporary system is called temporary because it's a short season, you do it for some time it's low cost, most of the fabric is low cost contrast with that this system this is the permanent system where you are using a shade cloth because it's cheapest, but there are other things you can use but the cheapest is shade cloth and using that to keep the bugs out of your high tunnels, because high tunnels already provide a structure, it's much easier to work with height in the temporary system, and you're looking at one of my earliest studies in 2014 on this hyperponic lettuce, and we were trying to stop. I know we're talking about you could bits but I just want to tell you the story. This was a bad army worm infestation in the high tunnel, and we were able to block 90% of the pests, the army worms using the netting around the high tunnel, so that was the humble beginning of of pest extrusion system and now we have a number of farmers almost 17 locations. Majority of them in Alabama but also Georgia and Florida, where farmers are doing this and we're doing demonstrations, and you're looking at some very fine producers. What we're looking at in the picture is using the 50% shade cloth, and we use these insect monitoring traps, and the ones you see on the ground are the one side that looks very dirty. Those are the ones that are from the open field. And the ones that were that are clean. Those are the traps that were inside the net tunnel so you can see the visual difference that how these traps are able to help us to quantify what we're stopping. But it's a significant drop in insect population, especially the large ones it will not work for aphids and some of the other white flies. But if you're trying to grow any cucurbits inside a high tunnel, you can give it a shot. This is a picture couple of years back. Yeah, 2020 army worms again last year was also a bad army worm year, but this picture was actually sent by one of the farmer who is participating in the exclusion study and and she was just horrified. When she saw these army worms trying to get in and they could not get in to the crop, and they're coming out of that grass, and she's surrounded by hand pasture she has livestock. So, again, tremendous lots of success stories on this technology and we still are working. We're working with Andre to look at some of the horticultural economic aspects of the pest exclusion system. We're also doing an economic analysis with Jesse Boswell to figure out the actual economics of this but the 17 locations we have none of the farmers have taken it down, because they see tremendous benefit of of start using the exclusion system. Again, this is not so much home gardeners. And now you're looking at an aggregate of last four years from 17 to 2020. Again, a tremendous drop in number of insects with with using exclusion system and it will slow down squash wine borders, and we have also seen it slow down squash bugs. It just takes them time to colonize because that fabric stops them or delays the infestation. So, again, giving some ideas as I close out. So overall again, this is a system very good for beginning farmers, and we are kind of learning from farmers directly by doing these studies on farm. Before COVID, they were cost effective. The cost of material has gone up recently post COVID so that's that's something we're dealing with the supply shortage issues. And again, this is not foolproof.  But with these producers with the exclusion system. Now it has opened the door for using biologicals. You can use natural enemies biologicals to to help you further. Overall, I know this is a bit busy slide but hopefully you can come back to it later, but I have tried to think through some of the some of the most common IPM recommendations for these insects, for example, you call Beatles level one and level two, you know those are the best prevention tactics. So using trap crops using cover crops cover crops seemingly confuse the Beatles weed control very important sanitation and weed control is very important in keeping with production. You have too much weeds you can have more of these white flies a feds and Beatles on those on those weeds and they will move on to your crop. I have a column on vine bowlers and melon worms. And again you're seeing sanitation is a very important cultural practice. And then I have a question mark on trap crop because I don't have consistent data. So bio insecticides very difficult to use bio insecticides for these vine bowlers melon worms. You may use some of the chemicals to like some of the synthetic party towards if you're conventional and use it like a lay by treatment so you have to spray ahead of the insect. And as the insect starts to come out and lay eggs and the female touches the plant and picks up the toxin she dies from it. So that's a lay by treatment, sort of, but very difficult to control these borders, you have to use varieties, look at varieties, manage your planting time, don't plant too late into the summer, because then you get eaten up with these wine borders and different products. And then give it give your best exclusion or try if you're going if you want to try these are fairly easy to get from Amazon.com article organics different websites. With that I'm going to close out I think I have maybe four, five minutes to take questions and look at the chat I see the chat moving here. I have coffee in my hand so I can still answer the questions, but I've written some of the highlights that you should remember, especially there's no shortcut to scouting. You have to scout the crops. There's nothing automatic about this. It's hard work and free work and protect natural enemies and try to integrate these different strategies. I did not talk about the insecticide part. And insecticides give me a call or look at the tomato session and we went into more details in that. So I didn't want didn't want to repeat myself, keep my own time. But with that, I am going to perhaps stop this.


BismillahirRahmanirRaheem and As-Salaamu Alaykum everyone, well we are proceeding along with the Board of Directors, Executive Directors, Non-Executive Directors, Chairman, Chief Executive Officers and there are different viewpoints as you have seen, there are different models, there are different recommendations, there are different way forward. There is one basic area of consensus and that is that the Board of Directors should be made more effective, should be made more responsible, should be more transparent, should ensure accountability and should be held accountable and then most importantly is that how it interfaces with not only the different stakeholders but also how it interfaces with the different important positions within the organization and then defining the roles and responsibilities of the director. Now, another viewpoint which we have seen emerging is the OECD view on Board of Directors. OECD basically stands for the organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. This body of 30 developed nations basically combining together their expertise, their research, their knowledge, their wisdom and ensuring that there is a better more transparent world not only in the private sector but also the public sector and also the social sector you know. So, now when we look at the viewpoint of OECD then the corporate governance framework should ensure the strategic guidance of the company, the effective monitoring of management by the board and the board's accountability to the company and the shareholder. So, basically three things. Now, first of all strategic guidance of the company not tactical but strategic. Number two effective monitoring of management by the board and then number three boards accountability to the company and shareholder. So, the role of strategic guidance, the responsibility is effective monitoring of management and the transparency is the board's accountability to the company and its shareholders. So, the OECD condense these three points together as the principles of corporate governance. So, these are defining principles and they are very important. The board members should act on fully informed basis in good faith with due diligence and care and in the best interest of the company and the shareholder. So, that has been said by the other models also where board decisions may affect different stakeholder groups differently the board should treat all shareholders fairly. The board should apply high ethical standards it should take into account the interest of the stakeholder. So, again watching the interest of the shareholders and acting fairly that could be small could be medium could be large and then also taking into account the different stakeholders and that is very important. The board should fulfill certain key functions including reviewing and guiding corporate strategy major plans of action risk policy annual budgets and business plans and setting performance objectives. So, these are its primary function and these are extremely important. Watching the effectiveness of the company's governance practices and making changes as needed selecting compensating monitoring and when necessary replacing key executives and overseeing succession planning. So, the OECD talked about succession planning that it should not be haphazard process it should actually be a structured process a process oriented approach towards replacing senior executives or senior employees and that would ensure that there is continuity there is sustainability and there is better performance at the end of the day. Aligning key and board remuneration with the longer term interest of the company and its shareholders very important rather than just looking at the individual and ensuring the following functions ensuring a formal and transparent board nomination and election process as earlier mentioned monitoring and managing potential conflicts of the interest of the management the board and the shareholders including the misuse of corporate assets and abuse and related transactions. So, all are very important and what we see is that the board members and shareholders including the misuse of corporate assets and abuse and related transactions. So, this becomes very very important to ensure more transparency accountability integrity diligence and better performance of the organization. So, these were all of the points which were given by OECD and that would result in ensuring the integrity of the corporation's accounting and financial reporting systems overseeing the process of disclosure and communication. So, that was very important the board should be able to exercise objective independent judgment on corporate affairs the board should consider assigning enough non executive board members capable of exercising independent judgment to task where there is a potential for conflict of interest. So, basically what we see is is that the board acts as a conflict resolution platform and also they should have enough technically astute non executive board members which they can place in different overarching roles and committees of that particular organization and that would ensure better performance at the end of the day. When the committees of the board are established their mandate, composition and working procedures should be well defined and disclosed by the board. So, again that is a major function of the board the board members should be able to commit themselves effectively to their responsibilities and that is extremely important. So, what we see ladies and gentlemen is that the organization for economic cooperation and development basically redefined the role rights and responsibilities of the board of directors and in that they gave more structure they gave a more enabling role and most importantly what they did is is that they ensured that they would be a multi sectoral and multi segmental multi level accountability and cross accountability between the main stakeholders and shareholders and also would ensure that all of the major positions of the organization would be looking up to the board for guidance for strategic vision and also for compliance of various mandates which have been defined by law and by various committees around the world to ensure that there can be good corporate governance in any organization. Thank you so much.